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“The rich-smelling Peruvian coffee in your mug is the distillate of a frantically expanding Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenka, state agents, and transplanted Andean highlanders are carving forests into farms. At the edge of the coffee frontier, in the trilingual Matsigenka village of Yokiri, Nick Emlen witnesses the building of an agrarian lifeway among ‘a society of novices.’ From the agronomy workshop to the mythology of sentient cascades, life is made by talking—talking in and across three languages. Emlen offers a subtle, flexible, linguistically sparkling rendering of the improvisations that are making the forest world into something unforeseen.”—Frank Salomon, author of At the Mountains’ Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community “Too often the Andes and the Amazon are understood as worlds apart. On the eastern slopes of the Amazon, Nicholas Emlen shows how these regions have been interconnected through the centuries and continue to be today, through the work and words of YokiriÑos. Emlen brings together ethnography, history, and linguistics in a rich portrait of inter-Indigenous relations between highland Quechua colonos and lowland Matsigenkas. Emlen’s use of archival materials is sophisticated, rigorous, and illuminating. Setting ethnographic accounts and archival material alongside the linguistic analysis of toponyms in the region contributes to a rich picture of the complex, shifting nature of the linguistic ecology of the region.”—Karl Swinehart, University of Louisville ""Overall, Emlen effectively makes the case that centering the interconnections within the Andes-Amazon frontier adds richness and depth to the scholarship that is slowly growing into exploring more the 'in betweenness' without opposing one against the other. At its core, the book encourages the reader—who may or may not have a general sense of the differences between the Andean high‐lands and the lowland Amazonia—to look at the Andean-Amazonian frontier as a continuum.""—Ximena Sevilla, H-Net Environment Reviews ""Emlen argues that etymological discourses about the land are not linked to specific ethnic identities but rather are used for interactional purposes to highlight ancestral, historical, and contemporary concerns. Ultimately, this book provides a rich ethnographic account of multilingual dynamics and socioeconomic change in an Andean-Amazonian frontier community, showing how language and social identity are deeply embedded in both the tensions and intimacies that are constructed through societal transformation.""—Molly Hamm-RodrÍguez, Language in Society ""Accessibly written and rich in ethnographic, historical, and linguistic detail, the book will fit well in undergraduate and graduate courses. It will be of interest to a wide range of audiences within and outside linguistic anthropology—particularly scholars of the Andes and Amazon, environmental anthropologists, socially minded historical linguists, and linguistic anthropologists interested in semiotic approaches to multilingualism, identity, and interaction.""—Georgia Ennis, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Author Information

Nicholas Q. Emlen is a linguistic anthropologist who studies multilingualism and language contact in western South America, both today and in the past. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of TÜbingen, Germany.

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