0:03
Thanks for tuning into this virtual seminar. I very much look forward to the conversations that we'll have in December around these topics. I'm Christina Moya, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California Davis and today, I'll be taking on the task of discussing cultural boundaries--specifically ethnolinguistic boundaries--using a bit more of a functionalist framework to tackle some of the seminar series goals.

0:33
So to remind us--of at least the goals as I received them in an email from Andrew Buskell--we're meant to be discussing, for example, how should cultural groups be distinguished from one another? How can cultural groups be identified from various kinds of datasets that we might have? And then how should cultural barriers and borders be understood?

0:56
And a very preliminary answer to this question is clearly that it depends on the question itself. So that's a very first pass and kind of a lazy attempt. But I would say that, furthermore, the way that I make most sense of parsing these questions, and figuring out which questions we should be asking, is a functionalist one, which means that it depends on the function of the associated behaviour, either the behaviour that produces the boundary, or that is a response to the boundary.

1:35
So for example, just a couple of examples of different functions that boundaries may promote, or functional behaviours that may produce boundaries.

1:48
Boundaries may reflect skills of cooperative action. So this is a case from the Peruvian Altiplano, where I do most of my fieldwork. So I'll use them as examples even though I don't work on the rural islands. The Uros are people who have produced these... these floating islands. And these are in fact, islands that are human made, from reeds called totora. And if these various families that live on the island don't cooperate with each other--don't engage in some sort of altruistic action that might be paid back in terms of reciprocity, or might be facilitated by kin selection to some extent, and perhaps by cultural norms--if they don't do that they can't really make a living, right. Worst case scenario, the islands sinks. These days, these are also tourist attractions. So the cooperation extends to various economic activities as well.

2:45
That's quite a different task that may produce a certain kind of cultural boundary, compared to an activity that is based on a coordination game, where you might want to interact with others who have similar norms. In this case, in a barter market, knowing how hard you should bargain, what the expected haggling rituals are, means that you might want to interact with others and how certain--well, you might want to interact with others who have similar norms. And that would produce a different scale of organisation--a different kind of boundary--for a cultural trade associated with a coordination norm.

3:25
And just another example--there are other functions--but a third one that we might think about in terms of how cultural traits spread or where information is shared, is who should individuals learn from: what is the scale at which you might consider learning from somebody else. If somebody is coming from the high altitude 5000 metres above sea level and at llama pasturing area, you might not want to learn much from them about how to grow maize because they don't know how to grow maize. And you might be foregoing some opportunities to grow maize at a lower altitude, right? So one possible way that boundaries might be shaped--this route--or cultural boundaries might be informed or shaped, might be by people's motivations to learn from others who have who are facing similar adaptive problems and have locally adaptive knowledge.

4:24
But a lot of questions that social... that might face social scientists or that various kinds of social scientists, for example, archaeologists (who we have in our series presenting as well) might face will be questions that focus on the cultural trait, rather than the behaviour as a unit of analysis. And these provide interesting questions, but they have their limits in terms of the types of questions that we can ask of those data.

4:51
So the previous three questions--and the way that I tried to parse questions--were framed in terms of adaptive problems that humans might be trying to solve with behaviours. But when we're focusing on trying to explain trait distributions, these reflect different kinds of behaviours, and perhaps diverse motivations as well. And, of course, you know, behaviours of various kinds will shape trait distributions. And then trait distributions themselves will shape behaviours, which means that there's a lot of endogeneity here and coevolution, making things much more complicated to analyse.

5:33
But this kind of causal process where multiple behaviours or motivations might produce a similar kind of boundary or a similar kind of cultural trait distribution, likely will lead us into problems with equifinality, right? Where one pattern, one kind of boundary might reflect different kinds of processes. And it might be really difficult to identify which processes are involved.

6:01
And then something that I will just tag here because it's going to potentially be a problem in the data set that I'll be showing you, is a problem for all cultural evolutionary scholars... is the problem of cultural evolutionary lag: where distributions of traits may persist for reasons that are divorced from either their current adaptive value or current behavioural repertoires of people.

6:26
So for the rest of the talk, I'll focus on an ethnographic case study that I think serves as a bit of a cautionary tale but also, hopefully, food for thought. And it's just one ethnographic context. But it focuses on a type of boundary that we will see throughout the world, which is a language boundary.

6:49
So I started working in the Peruvian Altiplano to focus on the questions of how did language boundaries shape human behaviour or structure human behaviour. (And we might ask the further question of how people's behaviours then can help us make sense of why the language boundary takes the shape that it does. But frankly, that was a secondary goal originally.) And because I was interested in language boundary--the effects of language boundaries themselves divorced from other correlates of ethnic difference--I focused on finding a strong test case for hypotheses about linguistic boundaries per se, and ended up starting to work in the Peruvian Altiplano here on the north side of Lake Titicaca in the province of Puno.

7:41
So Puno is a trilingual department in Peru (kind of.. a department is something like a state in the United States) And it's divided into districts that are majority Quechua speaking, which will be denoted in red for the remainder of the talk. And districts that are majority Aymara speaking, which will be denoted in blue for the remainder of the talk.

8:04
And I went to work in this small little blob here, which is pink, meaning that it is a majority Quechua speaking area, but it is actually quite mixed between Quechua and Aymara speakers. And you'll see there are other kind of intermediate colour districts over here, over here and over here. But those reflect either urban zones or zones of migration. So this really reflects a language boundary that's deeper.

8:38
And speaking of historical time depth, Quechua and Aymara are two languages that are mutually unintelligible from each other. But a lot of people who are above age 50 in this particular area, are Aymara/Quechua bilingual. And most people under age 50 speak Spanish. So there is a lingua franca that everybody... meaning that everybody can easily communicate with one another. But if they only spoke Quechua or only spoke Aymara, they would not be able to communicate with each other and probably this reflect migrations from further north in Peru and pre-colonial times.

9:22
So the stars will represent places where I did my research where I spoke with participants (and, yes, in this case, it reflects Huatasani).

9:34
So, despite the fact that Quechua and Aymara are mutually unintelligible languages, an important feature of this language boundary is that it does not particularly reflect a genetically structured one, okay, suggesting that there has been migration across this language boundary in more recent times, and the language boundary has persisted despite that.

9:57
So this is work not from Huatasani itself but done in the Puna region, and also in parts of Bolivia, and further down south in Puna, as well, by Chiara Barbieri and her colleagues. And what I just want you to focus on here is that spatial distance matters more to genetic similarity in the region, then does the language that you speak. So for example, Aymara speakers in Puno are more genetically related to Quechua speakers in Puno than they are to Aymara speakers from Bolivia or from Aymara speakers from this particular community, which is an interesting migration.

10:39
And not just do population geneticists know this, people in the region don't really think about the Aymara and Quechua boundary as one that is important in terms of racial differences, or morphological differences. And in fact, the language groups are not sartorially marked, meaning that there aren't really clothing or other kind of ethnic visual markers that are particularly prominent for differentiating Aymara speakers here on the left, and Quechua speakers here on the right.

11:12
People will tell you that Aymara-speaking women specifically do wear brighter clothing--so there might be some way that these distributions are not 100% overlapping--and Quechua-speaking women wear a slightly darker colours perhaps.. And this would not really help you with determining the language group membership of men.

11:37
What makes this case even more compelling for studying the role of language boundaries and structuring human behaviour is that at least locally at the border itself, where there's quite a lot of mixture, the language groups do not reflect economic specialisation, both Quechua and Ayamara speakers are agropastoralists. If you're closer to Lake Titicaca, there are Quechua and Aymara speakers that engage in more fishing, right, so ecology kind of determines economic specialisation, not language boundary,at least locally.

12:11
There isn't a huge status or power difference between them. There isn't a large religious difference between them. They're all nominally Catholic with a smattering of evangelicalism.

12:22
And they don't really reflect recent migration events. And in fact, people there don't think of Aymara or Quechua speakers as being hosts in migrant communities. They're both considered local from (kind of) time immemorial.

12:43
So more on the ground. This is what the community level differences look like. So we see that there are several language boundaries around Lake Titicaca here, we'll get to this boundary later in the talk. There's a very sharp divide between communities that are Aymara speaking in blue, and Quechua, speaking in red, and there's a river that runs through here that is connected by a bridge, but apparently has not really resulted in the kind of mixture that you see here in Huatasani or some communities are actually pastel colour, so not homogenously Quechua or Aymara, including the district capital, and where the Aymara communities kind of bleed over to the other side of the boundary. There are a couple here as well and in neighbouring districts. So on the ground, there is actually a border that is reflected in this river, separating the Quechua majority part of this landscape from the Aymara majority district of Huancane. But the closest rural communities to this town are, in fact, Ancomarca, and Sustia, which are overwhelmingly Aymara speaking.

14:09
And as evidence that this doesn't really pose a huge barrier to interaction; there's a high school in town--there's also a clinic in town--but the high school hosts children, teenagers, who are about 50%... 50% of whom are from Aymara speaking families, and 50% of whom are from Quechua speaking families. So there's quite a lot of interaction in the zone despite this relatively small river (and from I don't know if you can translate this from the previous map there are Aymara speaking communities over here as well).

14:45
So in this context, despite my initial intuitions that language is going to be an important structure of human behaviour of various kinds, we find no evidence that in Huatasani language boundary reflects the scale of cooperation, or the scale of information sharing, or the scale of coordinated action.

15:06
Just to preview some of those results. So one of the ways that we test whether language boundary organises cooperative endeavours is by asking participants in Huatasani--who are Quechua speaking--to make assessments about other members of their same village that are both a village and language in-group member, and compare how they respond to those people to how they would respond to strangers from other villages that are either Quechua speaking like them, or Aymara speaking, not like them.

15:41
And then task after task, we find that what matters is the fact that these groups represent strangers. And it doesn't matter which language these strangers speak. So for example, I asked various participants how they... what they would do to a thief who came from different contexts. So I coded whether they would engage in corporal punishment, or calling authorities to punish a thief.

16:10
And fewer than half of adult participants were said that they would punish in these manner... in this manner. Somebody who was a thief, but from the village--that.. they would resort to other action to deal with the problem. They would not resort to authorities, they would not resort to corporal punishment. But if it was a stranger, even if it was from another Quechua speaking village, they would be about 70% likely to say that they would punish them.

16:40
And that's about the same rate at which they would punish strangers from an Aymara speaking village, right. So Quechua and Aymara thieves are punished equally, so long as they were from another village. Whereas they did reserve this more kind of cooperative or perhaps pro-social action and lesser punishment for members of the same village.

17:05
Similarly, we played dictator games. With participants... were able to allocate resources between some anonymous member of their own village versus an anonymous member of another village. And they allocated more than half of the resource. This is for real money--for real stakes. They allocated more than half of the resources to somebody else from their same village, not surprisingly. And they allocated less than half to strangers from a Quechua speaking village, but allocated similar amounts to strangers from an Aymara speaking village, right. So as long as you were a stranger, it didn't matter which language we spoke in terms of how generous they were going to be to you.

17:48
I already mentioned this. So here's another... here's a kind of empirical illustration of how language boundary does not prevent coordinated action. Not just does it not prevent cooperation, but it also does not really interfere with people engaging in large scale coordinated activities as depicted in this photograph of a festival that they celebrate in the middle of March.

18:14
And yes, there is cooperation going on here as well. There are leaders that hosts the feast for each community. And that's on a rotating basis each year. But here, what you're seeing is members of different communities coordinating with each other on the time that they... the way that these festivities are going to be carried out. Right. So they generally share similar cultural belief systems, similar religious beliefs and traditions, which kind of make coordination relatively easy across this language boundary.

18:50
And as far as we can tell, the language boundary does not really prevent the spread of cultural traits today. So another illustration of this is the... cropping up a new religious ritual site just a couple years ago. So Jesus Christ's face appeared on the side of the mountain on the Aymara speaking side of the border near here. (So here you might be able to see Jesus's moustache). And people here are lining up in the middle of August or the beginning of August to offer confetti, wine, flowers to this visage as part of a new religious ritual. And we've done interviews at the site and also regionally that show that both Aymara and Quechua speakers from the region are seemingly equally willing to adopt this new religious practice.

19:53
So I use this as an example because it's a new trait. But it is also the case that adults in our sample were reluctant to make predictions about cultural similarity of two fictional characters on the basis of their sharing a language: on the basis that they're both being Quechua speakers, or on the basis of, they're both speaking Quechua depending on which study we're talking about.

20:20
So here you can just focus on the dark grey bars which reflect adults in the population. The others are younger children and teenagers, which I studied. We can ignore for now. And what you're seeing here is that fewer than half of adults make a prediction about cultural similarity of people on the basis of shared language labels over here, or shared language use over here, when the language is in question are Quechua and Aymara.

20:57
What they're doing instead is, you know, approximately 70% of the time is making predictions about cultural similarity on the basis of characters having similar economic specialisations or occupations. So they are willing to stereotype--they are willing to make predictions--about cultural similarity. They just don't rely on language boundary to make those assessments, again, suggesting that the cultural, the spread of cultural traits seems to not depend on language spoken.

21:34
And this is also consistent with qualitative interviews with lots of people. People like this woman (this is actually not the one who's recorded here in the transcript) but... a middle aged Quechua speaking and Spanish speaking bilingual woman from Huatasani. Where I was trying to almost at this point in time, like pull teeth to get people to confirm that they had heard of Quechua, and Aymara stereotypes.

22:03
Like I myself as an ethnographer, travelling in more urban centres had heard stereotypes about Aymara speakers, as for example, being more rebellious, more aggressive and more organised than Quechua speaking areas that were characterised as more lazy. Now, this is coming from primarily Spanish speaking urban city dwellers who had these stereotypes. So I started prompting participants in Huatasani at the language boundary themselves to to see you they would confirm these stereotypes, because before that, they would basically just resort to answers such as this, "Oh, yes, obviously, the speech is different. They speak Aymara and here we speak Quechua." Not really making any further assessment beyond the language as being different.

22:51
And so when I prompted them in this very interactive way, some of them--not all--but some of them would be even willing to admit that, yes, maybe the Aymara were more united. And it was interesting that they would almost always--even Quechua speakers themselves--change this framing, which was kind of negative of being rebellious and more aggressive, to one that was a bit more positive in terms of the Aymara in this case; that individuals being more united and organised and themselves as being more disorganised.

23:26
So there was some possibility that cultural norms differ in these two regions. But it was not very salient to people in Huatasani themselves. And it was kind of difficult to get them to admit or express this.

23:46
So, hopefully, I've shown you some lines of evidence I have others that suggests that at the language boundary itself--this language difference--motivated relatively few behaviours, if any. It's based from the emic perspective: from insider's perspective. It wasn't particularly important, and it did not really shape how they interacted with others, although they did interact in a more cooperative and pro-social way with others that were members of the same village.

24:19
So then this obviously leaves us with a really important question of why does the boundary persist? If they're not differentially interacting with members of their own language group--if cultural traits spread across this language boundary, why is there a language boundary at all?

24:44
So I think this really changes the question to one of about process--rather than about emic perceptions or inside perceptions of this language boundary. But to ones rather about how is it that cultural traits, including language as a cultural trait (but other cultural norms perhaps as well) may be distributed in a broader landscape. So it is possible that perhaps cultural norms do map onto language boundaries, or to language differences, but don't do so at the boundary itself.

25:20
So, we might have thought, there are signalling models. And we might have thought that the boundary was going to be much more clear cut like this. So add the Quechua Aymara boundary, some other cultural trait or the language itself was going to be very crisply used as a signal of other cultural norms that divided people. And there are models showing that when there's a coordination game that people are playing, and it's important that you don't play with somebody else who has a different norm from yourself--for example, you are an organised individual, and you want to interact with another organised individual, rather than a disorganised one who comes late to meetings and so forth--it may behove you to signal strongly what type of person you are, and what your cultural group identity is. And in that situation, being close to those people in a landscape, that might not share the same norms as you do means that signalling is really strongly favoured at this boundary. But further away from the boundary, it might not be that important to signal.

26:34
And we don't really see evidence of that, in Huatasani--right--we don't see language being used to predict a lot of other traits. And instead, we see something like perhaps the diffusion model where, yes, the language itself is crisply either Quechua or Aymara. But at the boundary, you get people with cultural norms that are kind of mixed between both of them. And the further away you get from this boundary, you make cultural norms that are more distinct from each other. Right.

27:08
And this is more this is relevant more to the question of kind of how information spreads or how cultural norms or traits spread. But we may also think about processes that would give rise to different distributions of cooperation instead, so we might have add this language boundary, kind of non-overlapping social networks may so you might have social networks that are tightly clustered within Quechua speaking areas, and within Aymara speaking areas, or you might have alternate... alternatively, social networks that kind of cross-cut this language boundary, and isolation. So social isolation or network isolation by distance.

27:50
And I think this would also get.. make you predict different things about how, how likely it is to get cooperation among individuals that are near each other in the boundary versus far away from each other. Right. So you probably expect people in Hua.. that this is not really what's happening and Huatasani that people here are, in fact, socially connected across the language boundary. And that that might be part of the reason why the boundary itself doesn't kind of trigger higher rates of cooperation.

28:30
On the other hand, this boundary does something. Like this boundary with relatively less overlapping social networks does seem to map onto something like village structure, and might help explain why they're more cooperative with other members of the same village, or less likely to punish them. So in order to really start assessing these different processes for the spread and distribution of traits, we really start, or we really need to start taking a more regional scale analysis of these questions. And I've just barely started doing this.

29:08
So I've generally worked here since 2007, but a couple years ago, I collected data from these new four stars, these different districts--two of which are Ayamara speaking, and two of which are Quechua speaking,--so that we can start teasing apart the relative effects of geographic distance, social network distance, and the language boundary. Additionally, this will get us a new kind of language boundary like the one seen here, that is much more discreet in terms of each community being pretty homogenous, either Quechua or Aymara speaking.

29:49
And just some very preliminary analysis of this data suggests that we are seeing different patterns here. So for example, participants in Huancane are equally close to communities in Taraco and communities in Vilque Chico. But when we asked them how happy or comfortable they feel with people from each of these different districts, they definitely feel most comfortable with other members of their same district.

30:15
But the next closest, or the next happiest that they feel is with other individuals from the Vilque Chico which is this district. Right. And which is Aymara speaking like them. And that's despite the fact that you know Taraco is actually closer, or as close to Huancane as Vilque Chico is to one Huancane.

30:40
So I haven't divided this up... the participants data up by exact location, but we might even get places in one day that are closer to Quechua speakers than they are to speakers in Vilque Chico. But we have somewhat of a case like that with people from Putina, up here, who have expressed a clear preference for individuals who share the same language as they do down here in Taraco. So, I mean, they prefer other members of their same district of Putina. But the next highest rated are individuals who are from Taraco, despite their being further away from them than individuals from Huancane.

31:27
So we're getting some interesting differences in the ways that people think about language differences at different distances from the boundary, and I haven't yet analysed any data on cultural trait distributions. But this might tell us something about the way that this border, this language... structure.. language boundaries structures, social networks.

31:53
So I think that given the data in Huatasani, we have to entertain, that, there's something like isolation by distance going on in terms of social networks, about 70% of people in Huatasani have either married across the language boundary or have godparents across the language boundary. But people from Putina over here are going to be relatively more socially distantly connected to people from kind of Aymara speaking areas, and so farther away from that boundary.

32:32
But there's also some possibility and some suggestion of shared norms even by members of the same language communities, even if they're living farther away from each other. So for example, we have people from Putina here and Taraco, here, expressing more pro-social sentiments. Anyway, I mean, whether that reflects norms is not quite clear yet, despite being further apart from each other, and this might reflect something like cultural lag that I alluded to earlier, and that they might reflect an ancestral population that... from which they evolved, and where they originally shared some similar norms. But that was a bit speculative.

33:18
So if we return to our main goals for the series, and for our future conversations, I'll just make a couple concluding thoughts based on some insights from this case study.

33:29
One is that you take approaches where we as outsiders kind of want to make sense of patterns in the world should probably focus more on process than taxonomies. It's going to be really hard for us, in some cases, to know whether whether cultural boundaries were useful to members of those groups, or important to members of those groups, if we're working with datasets where we don't have access to individuals. And ethnogenesis--so the process through which ethnic groups that are either useful for cooperation or useful for learning from each other, or useful for coordination--the process through which those kinds of boundaries emerge is a process, right, that's just like speciation. If we don't think that species are natural kinds, it's very little reason to think that cultural groups are natural kinds.

34:23
On the other hand, I do think that we can continue investigating the nature of cultural group taxonomies and boundaries. But this is more useful and so far as we're working with emic taxonomies, so taxonomies from individual people's perspectives, that actually do organise behaviour. And here again, I would just say we should be very careful to think about which kinds of behaviours they're organising and which kind of games people are playing. So I look forward to carrying on this conversation a couple weeks from now.

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