Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Pursuing a voice with poetic-economic freedom in a hemispheric indigenous marketplace : exploring Otavalan Runa linguistic and visual creations in a global economy

by Quichi Patlan

Based on 17 months of fieldwork in the Kichwa-speaking and Runa-populated town of Otavalo located in the northern Andes of Ecuador, this dissertation ethnographically considers the linguistic and visually mediated strategies some Otavalan Runa tourism hosts rely on in their pursuit for a kind of poetic-economic freedom to develop their voices in a global ethnic art and tourism economy. Runa pursuits for freedom of self-representation in cultural commodification are embedded in their histories of inter-ethnic and trans-indigenous interactions within the context of tourism. During their dialogues and exchanges with these three broadly defined market participations: tourists, anthropologists, and other indigenous people, Runa merchant and creative voices have institutionally and historically dealt with unequal narrative (Hymes 1996) and economic (Cattelino 2008) representation that impinge on their rights to speak on their own political and cultural terms (Kroskrity and Webster 2015). I contend that we, as visitors and allies to Runa and other indigenous merchant-creatives like them, can adopt lessons learned in "critical" (Smalls and Davis 2023; Alim, Reyes, and Kroskrity 2020) and "discourse-centered" approaches (Sherzer 1987; Urban 1991; Hill 2008) for examining indigeneity and ethnic discrimination to help free their voices from linguistic and economic inequalities characterized in large part by double-standards for the performing and manufacturing of Runa-made "American Indian" visual and verbal art. These complicated expectations from foreigners for Runa linguistic and visual authenticity can also lead to inter-ethnic misconceptions of Runa and "American Indian" identities in Otavalo and especially abroad as migrant workers. This ethnographic study, then, presents a poetic and economic window into the unique and adaptive ways some indigenous entrepreneurs and narrators of culture strategically deploy Runa practices of cultural borrowing, poetic language, marketplace etiquette, migration, intimacy, and dialogue to generate Runa narrative agency and culturally meaningful claims to indigenous belonging in the Americas.