Language and the Frontiers of the Human

8/13/2019 Language and the Frontiers of the Human

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BENJAMIN SMITH

University of Chicago

Language and the frontiers of the

human:

Aymara animal-oriented interjections and the mediation of

mind

A B S T R A C TIn this article, I offer an analysis of Peruvian

Aymara speech directed toward sheep and alpacas,children, and marbles (specifically, the use of

animal-oriented interjections). The use of these

forms positions addressees as reduced (quasi)

agents and thereby mediates Aymara ideologies

about the scaled or graduated character of those

enminded beings that regularly act as addressees.

Ultimately, the analysis reveals an Aymara

humannonhuman frontier that requires attention

to both the interactional encounters sustained

across perceived ontological divides (divides

understood to turn on species and

ethnodevelopmental difference, etc.) and the

(scaled) character of the ideologies that renders

these divides ontological. [humans, animals,

childhood, materiality, semiotics, mind, Andes]

In the Peruvian, Aymara-speaking village of Anatiri,1 dusk is the time

when people bring their animals back home after grazing. Herders

many of them children but also adultsdrive their sheep, alpacas,and pigs from far-flung dormant fields or agriculturally unsuitable

land and take them back to each familys stone corral. As they return

from distant places, these throngs of children, adults, and animals clog the

paths and roads that lead back to the two strings of homes that form the

residential nucleus of the village. This is one of the few moments in every-

day life when the village air is full of sounds.

Among the sounds are those of people talking to their animals. When a

burro falters along the path, the herder yells out, Urro urro! along with a

distinctive series of snorts.2 When a hungry alpaca rushes toward a neigh-

bors pile of potatoes, the herder yells, Shhk shhk shhk!3 When a sheep,

up to its own devices, beelines toward another herders group of sheep, its

herder too yells, Shhk shhk shhk! When animals do not do what they are

supposed to do, whether by acts, if you will, of omission (faltering along

the path) or commission (running to potatoes), they become, briefly, the

addressees of human speech.4

The utterances spoken in these instances are composed of a kind

of interjectionrecently called an animal-oriented interjection (Enfield

2007:314)that has been frequently cited in connection with animal ad-

dressees. In his grammar of Takelma, for example, Edward Sapir cites a

form used to urge on deer to corral (1922:279). Waldemar Bogoras, writ-

ing on Chukchi, notes two forms used with reindeer: One is used for driv-

ing the herd, and the other is used to call broken reindeer (1922:887).

Although these kinds of forms have rarely received much sustained atten-

tion,5 they have been frequently enough observed to suggest that they con-

stitute a durable locus of cultural and linguistic meaning.The use of these interjections creates a paradox. On the one hand, they

treat animals as addressees of language, as agents within human projects,

andas agents capable of regulating their behavior (e.g.,stopping, going for-

ward). On the other hand, they seek to articulate animals with respect to a

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 313324, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01366.x


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American Ethnologist Volume 39 Number 2 May 2012

world of practice in relation to which they are not con-

sidered to be fully fledged agents (e.g., a sheep does not

know that it must keep to its owners flock; an alpaca does

not know whose potatoes are whose; neither sheep nor al-

paca is punishable for its misdeeds). This is a paradox about

agency: Although the animals are not held to be fully knowl-

edgeable or responsible agents in a given context, they are

nonetheless made to act within it. This is a purgatory of

agency. It is a quasi agency.

These moments are ones in which an actors

(in)capacities are thought to be interactionally at stake.

Sapirs deer must be urged into the coral. Bogorass reindeer

must be driven onward. Their perceived, if momen-

tary, inabilities with respect to participation in human

projectshesitance to get into a corral, reluctance to move

onwardare specific to particular social practices and

understandings of species difference. Moreover, it is the

meaning and use of the animal-oriented interjection (Go

onward!) that helps to create these personae of inability.6

Put more broadly, these are contexts in which ideologies

about mindednessthat is, ideologies about charac-

terological traits thought to underlie incapacity within

human projectscome to be mediated and sustained: In

these cases, again, a deers hesitance and a reindeers

reluctance qua features of mind become salient in

social interaction.

Animals are not the only addressees of animal-oriented

interjections in Aymara. Among Aymara speakers, one

interjectionthe one primarily used with alpacas and

sheepgets used with a fuller range of nonhuman (or not

yet fully human) addressees: for example, a child about to

burn his or her hand in a stove (spoken by a parent) andan orange teetering near the edge of a table of fruit (spo-

ken by the fruit vendor). In such contexts, one encounters

a complex of facts similar to the one found with animal ad-

dressees: In the two cases cited above, both addressees get

positioned as being blind to the issue of real importance

(in the first case, a burned hand) and, through such posi-

tioning, evoke (and mediate) Aymara ideologies about the

unsocialized character of children and the intractability of

material (or motile) things. In these cases, again, it is the

linguistic mediation of personae of incapability (unsocial-

izability, intractability) that is at stake.

The variability of possible addressees (child, animal,

material) for these forms means that the study of Aymaraanimal-oriented interjections can speak to a range of ques-

tions about the cultural organization of enminded beings.

Up to this point, I have only presented examples of mature

adults directing animal-oriented interjections to children,

animals, and material things. Who, however, has the right

to use animal-oriented interjections, and with whom may

they be used (i.e., in technical terms, what are their stereo-

typed participation frameworks)? Can children, for exam-

ple, use them with addressees for whom the implication of

quasi agency would seem, on the face of it, inappropriate

(e.g., their parents)? Do these frameworks take on the guise

of a graduated series in which each class of actor can be

scaled according to whether its members can legitimately

deploy these forms with other classes of actors (i.e., may

adults legitimately use these forms with children but not

vice versa, etc.)? What might these relationships ultimately

imply about an Aymara ideology of higher andloweren-

minded beings?

This line of questioning bears a deep and ulti-

mately transformative relationship to a classic anthropo-

logical question. The well-known work of theorists such as

Edmund Leach (1964), Mary Douglas (1972), Ralph Bulmer

(1967), and S. J. Tambiah (1969) argues for the relatively sys-

tematic, categorial, or conceptual character of local, cul-

tural understandings of humans and animals. In his clas-

sicwork on northern Thailand,for example,Tambiah (1969)

argues that there are three hierarchically organized series of

cultural domains (categories of humans, categories of placerelative to the central part of a house, and categories of an-

imals) across which a number of similarities or homologies

hold. The significance of Tambiahs work in this context is

the way in which itconsidered as an exemplary piece

takes up Thai understandings of humans and animals as

highly complex categorial constellations.

The exclusive focus of such classic work on the catego-

rial or symbolic character of such understandings, how-

ever, has led to the neglect of an important social fact that

I attempt to address in a satisfying way: that is, the way in

which these kinds of categories are sustained and medi-

ated through social practice with nonhuman actors them-

selves (see Kirksey and Helmreich 2010:554 for a similarcriticism). An account of Aymara animal-oriented interjec-

tions is uniquely able to make this case: I begin my analy-

sis with moments of encounter between humans and non-

humans and make claims about the categorial character of

Aymara understandings of humans and nonhumans (i.e.,

their scalar or graduated character) only insofar as it is im-

manent to those moments of encounter. In doing so, I sub-

ject the ontological categories of human and nonhuman

beings to the complexities of their mediatedness in social

practice: for example, their contingency (on language use,

at least), inherent temporality (and, therefore, their histor-

ical specificity), and, ultimately, even, their mutability (i.e.,

their susceptibility to political intervention).In this article, I give an extended account of how the

pragmatic deployment of one Aymara animal-oriented in-

terjection (the one used with alpacas andsheep) reveals and

mediates a scale of enminded beings. Doing this requires

analyses of the meaning and usage of the interjection itself

and its relation to Aymara ideologies of alpaca and sheep

personae. I then give an account of how its meaning and

usage help to make intelligible a wider field of nonhuman

actors. Two socialactors within this wider field are central to

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Language and the frontiers of the human American Ethnologist

the analysis: the not-yet-fully-human (children, in relation-

ship to adult social practices) and the slightly-more-than-

material (marbles, as understood in boyhood game play).

The Aymara language and culture is an especially

appropriate linguistic and cultural context in which to

take up this project.7 Animal herding is a central part of

Aymara economic life that has considerable further con-

sequences for the Aymara social and religious imagination

(see Arnold and Yapita 1998). Aymara adults hold strong

feelings of responsibility and affection toward their animals

(see Dransart 2002). A number of (undescribed) animal-

oriented interjections in the language are frequently used

in the herding context. My concern with the Aymara con-

text is ultimately narrow, however. My central concern is a

theoretical one about the linguistically mediated construc-

tion of an Aymara humannonhuman frontier.

Speaking to nonhumans

When one interrogates language use with nonhumans, one

is firmly on the terrain of questions about semiotically me-

diated social interaction. This is the traditional domain

of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropol-

ogy (see Silverstein 2004 and Agha 2007 for recent pro-

grammatic accounts): The question is, how do interactional

participants, through the deployment of signs, invoke con-

ceptualizations of themselves and of their discursive envi-

ronment to mutually build up a socially recognizable event

of some sort (e.g., a greeting, an act of flirting, etc.)? The

question can be asked of nonhumans in interaction with

humanshow do nonhumans (inter)act in ways that get

understood as signs? How do they interpret human signs?How do they act as discursive participants?

An example is in order: Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Rebecca

Treiman (1982) describe how, in the United States, the reg-

ister of motherese gets used with dogs (they call it dog-

gerel). They note that speech to dogs has many of the same

characteristics as motherese: the use of short sentences, the

imitation of interlocutors sounds (of dogs noises [Hirsh-

Pasek and Treiman 1982:233]), and the use of diminutives

(e.g., cutie). Although they do not develop the analysis,

they note that doggerel functions to promote reciprocity

between dog and owner. It depends on a dogs social re-

sponsiveness (Hirsh-Pasek and Treiman 1982:236)that

is, on its discursive participation. One might further ask,what kinds of dog signs get taken up as responses? How

do dogs attend to doggerel? What kinds of socially recog-

nizable forms of interaction are thereby produced (play

or roughhousing, perhaps)?

Scholars across the human sciences have been increas-

ingly attentive to the kinds of genuine responsiveness that

nonhumans (or the-less-than-fully-human) inhabit in rela-

tion to human social activity. This turn is evident in litera-

tures as diverse as those on infancy (Gottlieb 2004), multi-

modality (Goodwin 2000, 2006), religious language (Keane

1997), animals (Haraway 2008), actor-network theory

(Latour 1992), and the linguistic anthropological critique of

speech act theory (Dubois 1993).8 One of these literatures is

of special interest for the current project: the animal studies

literature, in which one uniquely finds an emerging concern

with issues of semiotic mediation alongside a broader con-

cern with the sociocultural and sociopolitical consequences

of the categories human and nonhuman (albeit with a

focus on the animal more particularly).

A growing concern in this literature is with interac-

tional encounters between humans and nonhumans. Most

prominently, Jacques Derrida writes about encountering

his cat (not the cat or the animal) while he is in the nude

as she scurries in (and quickly out) of his bathroom. In this

instance, Derridas (2008:13) cat is a subject who appears to

respond to or genuinely address him in some way. Donna

Haraway pushes Derridas insight further: His cats address

is an invitation to the risky project of what this cat on thismorningcared about,what these bodilypostures and visual

entanglements might mean and might invite (2008:22). To

put it in interactional terms, Derridas cat here is a discur-

sive participant whose act bears some meaningful relation

to Derridas own.

Animalhuman interaction (cathuman, in this case)

drives or depends on, Haraway notes, those develop-

ing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human behavioral

semiotics (2008:22). Although Haraway here intends to flag

certain kinds of biological knowledge, her insight can be

couched in a more comparative or anthropological query:

How do different folk understandings of animals, deployed

in different kinds of humananimal social practices, pro-duce interactional sequences that are understood by partic-

ipants to be relatively predictable? What is interactionally

at stake whenin Chicagoa cat crawls purringly into an

owners lap? What is at stake when a catin the Andes

triumphantly pulls a dead mouse from a familys pile of

bagged agricultural produce, to the familys delight?

A central contribution of this literature is its concern

with the wider sociocultural significance of speech to non-

humans. Giorgio Agamben, for example, argues that the

central theme of Western culture is struggle between hu-

manity and animality: He states that, in our culture, the

decisive political conflict, which governs every other con-

flict, is that between the animality and the humanity ofman (2004:80). It is a conflict without end: This overcom-

ing [of animality] is not an event that is completed once

and for all, but an occurrence that is always under way

(Agamben 2004:79). Agambens analysis sketches out the

larger stakes of a concern with semiotic mediation: that

is, the sense in which a boundary (i.e., between human-

ity and animality) and a politics of exclusion may be re-

flected and constructed in and through interaction with

nonhumans.9

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Derridas account offers a subtler take on the dis-

tinction between humans and nonhumans, arguing that

however much the Western animalhuman boundary can

appear to be just that (i.e., a boundary)it is surprisingly

unstable and multifaceted. It cannot easily capture, for

example, the multiplicity of relations between organic and

inorganic matter, living and nonliving things; differences

between animal species; differences between humans,

animals, aliens, and angels; and differences between indi-

vidual animals. Derrida (2008:31) argues that, given these

multiplicities,the boundary should best be conceivedan-

alytically as a multiple, shifting, and heterogeneous frontier.

This formulation is one that leads directly to questions of

mediation: What drives the contingency and shiftiness

of this frontier, its contingent realization in interaction?

Derrida and others offer ample warrant for a specif-

ically semiotic and interactional (not to mention anthro-

pological) approach to the relationship between humans

and nonhumans (and the cultural renderings of such re-lationships). The following kinds of questions can now be

profitably asked. How do humans and nonhumans deploy

signs to mutually build up, by degrees, coherent events of

some sort? How do ideologies about human and nonhu-

mans mediate such semiotic activity and get constructed

in and through it? What does this semiotic activity imply

about the potential categoriality of these cultural render-

ings of humans and nonhumans? In this article, I take up

the usage and sociocultural significance of just one kind of

sign, examining the deployment of animal-oriented inter-

jections in Aymara and their mediation of a local, scalar un-

derstanding of enminded entities or beings.

Aymara animal-oriented interjections

There are numerous animal-oriented interjections in

Aymara.10 Speakers use different types of speech when in-

teracting with their pigs, alpacas and sheep, burros, bulls,

and dogs. My primary focus is on the interjection (shhk)

used with alpacas and sheep because it is the only animal-

oriented interjection in Aymara that regularly gets used

with nonanimal addressees. Although shhk, alpacas, and

sheep are my primary foci, I also outline the meaning and

set of understandings that surround the interjection that

gets used with burros (urro). Sketching out the meaning of

these two interjections allows the reader to gain compara-tive leverage on the specificity of the linguistic and social

meanings associated withshhk.

My approach in this section is a semiotic-functional

one (Jakobson 1960; Silverstein 1976).11 In part following

Kockelman 2003 on interjections, I map out three kinds of

facts: (1) the pragmatic function of the forms (i.e., what gets

accomplished through the use of a form, e.g., a request, an

order); (2) the kinds of indexical objects presupposed in the

context of utterance (e.g., a kind of animal moving in a par-

ticular way); and (3) the way that the usage of these forms

allows speakers to position themselves towardor, take a

stance toward (see Kiesling 2009; Kockelman 2004)animal

addressees. Although this framework guides my argument,

I do not highlight the sense in which I am engaging in a spe-

cific kind of linguistic argumentation.

Both urro and shhkare used, pragmatically, to issue

obligations to an addressee. They function conatively, in

Roman Jakobsons (1960) scheme. The obligation thereby

created is, in Michael Silversteins (1976) terminology, in-

dexically created: It is brought into the speech event in

and through the actual token of the interjection. With re-

spect to the semantic function (or propositional content)

of the directives, both interjections have to do with move-

ment:Urrocan be glossed as go further andshhkcan be

glossed as stop. This propositional content, although sim-

ilar, differs in its specific claim about (or obligation with

respect to) movement: One interjection (urro) has to do

with its continuation and the other (shhk)has to do with itscessation.

Bothurroand shhkpresuppose, pragmatically, the in-

dexical copresencein the act of utteranceof an agent for

whom the directive becomes an obligation. The interjec-

tionurropresupposes the copresence of at least one burro.

It also presupposes a more specific spatial arrangement of

speaker and burro: The directive Go further! assumes a

situation in which the burro is in front of the speaker and is

directed to go away from the speaker. The interjection shhk

presupposes the copresence of at least one sheep, alpaca, or

some other nonanimal agent or thing understandable as an

agent.12 Unlike the case withurro,however, the spatial ar-

rangement of speaker and addressee is not constrained inany specific way.

Both interjections regularly presuppose certain facts

about their discursive (if not, strictly speaking, cotextual)

environment: The interjections urro and shhk are regu-

larly used as responses to an agents behavior (unsolicited

responses, in the vocabulary Paul Kockelman draws from

the tradition of conversation analysis). They presuppose, in

other words, a behavior that is understood as an unvalued

act: A burro refuses to move; an alpaca runs off to eat from

a neighbors pile of potatoes; a sheep threatens to scurry

down a steep ravine. In most of these instances, there is a

clear sense that the addressee normally behaves in a way

that conforms to the requirements of some pragmatic con-text (in acts like walking out to the fields to feed or being

driven into the stone corral); these interjections are used in

instances of violation.

The use ofshhkpresupposes a much more specific kind

of discursive environment. It responds prospectively to an

agents misbehavior: Again, a sheep is about to scurry down

a ravine; an alpaca has not yet eaten a neighbors potatoes.

These are cliffhanger moments, if you will.13 Whereas a

speaker ofurro encounters an already unmoving burro, a

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speaker ofshhkmust have a flair for sensing suspense or

contingency. The latter does not catch an agent in the act of

misbehavior buton the cusp of misbehavior. In this way, the

use ofshhkrequires a modal sensibility, understood in the

linguistic sense: In usingshhk, speakers imagine an event (a

hand burned, potatoes eaten) that might or may happen or

almost happens. And, they seek to prevent it.

This is, then, the full clustering of pragmatic and social

facts at stake with the usage of animal-oriented interjec-

tions:14 They create obligations with respect to movement,

they do so for an indexically copresent animal or other

agent or agentlike thing, and they do so in (unsolicited) re-

sponse to that agents misbehavior.15 More pithily, these are

forms that, when used, catch their addressees red-handed

or nearly red-handed for infractions or for courting dangers

of which they are understood to have little or no awareness

(i.e., they are, indeed, unsolicited responses) andattempt to

change or avoid that behavior by redirecting the potentially

offending (if innocent, unaware) agents movement.One dimension of this clustering of semiotic facts is the

way in which ones addressee gets socially positioned. More

specifically, the usage of these interjections regularly posi-

tions speakers with respect to a class of agents (qua add-

ressees) who, through the use of these forms, get figured as

unaware of danger or of their violation of some pragmatic

demand. These addressees know not what they do, to use a

famousline.They actin ignorance(or defiance!) of thefuller

social meaningfulness of their action. For a moment, they

appear only to behave rather than to act. Theirs is a status,

then, that is a reduced form of acting. I refer to it as a status

of quasi agency.

The status of quasi agency is best considered as oneway in which, as Laura M. Ahearn describes the problem,

language may predispose people to conceptualize agency

and subjecthood in certain ways (2001:120). The use of

animal-oriented interjections is a technique for foisting an

understanding of agency (or an understanding of its relative

lack) on ones addressee: In using animal-oriented interjec-

tions, again, speakers implicitly evaluate an interlocutors

relative lack of awareness or knowledge with respect to the

demands of some pragmatic context (it is a stance toward

alterity, to invoke Christopher Balls [2004] formulation). To

couch the insight in Alessandro Durantis (2001) theoreti-

cal vocabulary, the use of these forms is one of the ways in

which the mitigation of agency gets encoded in naturallanguages.

The discursive contexts in which actors assume the

status of quasi agency are ones in which ideologies about

the incapacities of nonhuman actors are regularly evoked.

Burros(asnu), for instance, are thought to be resistant to

human projects and incapable of understanding animal-

oriented interjections. They must be forced forward (with

words and whips). Alpacas and sheep are thought to be

fickle, unpredictable, and capable of understanding in-

terjections (with training and practice).16 They must be

stopped before getting into trouble. In these cases, it is

the ideologically elaborated incapacity of the animal un-

derstood as a feature of minda burros resistance and an

alpacas or a sheeps inconstancythat is regularly presup-

posed in the use of the relevant interjection (fickle agents

must be stopped [with shhk] and resistant ones must be

started [with urro]).

The ease with which these forms invite and evoke ide-

ologies of enminded incapacity is even more strongly sug-

gested by the following kind of fact: The contexts in which

quasi agency is a salient participant status readily evoke ex-

plicit ideologies about the kind of addressee toward whom

they are most appropriately directed. For instance, my con-

sultants assured me that the use of such forms with elders,

adults, or older children is insulting. They reduce these ad-

dressees. They implicitly attribute to them the occasional

monstrosities of the nonhuman already outlinedthe

fickleness of sheep and alpaca and the incomprehension ofthe burroas well as qualities associated with children and

material things, as I discuss in the next section.

These facts make clear the sense in which these ideolo-

gies imply an understanding of mindedness that is hierar-

chical. Elders, adults, and older children are not the legiti-

mate addressees of animal-oriented interjections.17 Burros,

alpacas, and sheep are. Elders, adults, and children are the

legitimate speakers of animal-oriented interjections. Bur-

ros, alpacas, and sheep are not. In other words, Aymara

understandings of enminded incapacity are scaled in the

sense that certain classes of actor (i.e., humans) exercise the

nonreciprocal privilege of positioning other classes of actor

(domesticated animals, in this case) in terms of personaeof incapability. In these moments, a burros unwillingness

and a sheeps inconstancy stand implicitly and negatively

in contrast tothat is, as lower thantheir respective

human opposites: tractability in the face of human disci-

pline (i.e., not-stubbornness) and commitment to human

projects (i.e., not-fickleness).

This hierarchical understanding of enmindedness is

thoroughly mediated by the usage of animal-oriented inter-

jections. In other words, it is not always presupposable in

humananimal interaction. For example, both burros and

alpacas develop quite astonishing capacities to labor within

human projects.18 Sheep and alpacas will head back to the

familys corral with little direction from a herder. Burros un-complainingly haul loads of cargo. In most cases, the la-

bor activities of a burro or an alpaca do not evoke a hierar-

chical comparison to human enmindedness. Such scaled

comparisons are, then, contingent on a number of factors:

the use of animal-oriented interjections, the effectiveness of

their usage, the interests of the speaker, and so on. Or, more

simply, they are mediated by the full complexity of the us-

age of animal-oriented interjections understood as a social

practice.

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In the remainder of this article, I focus exclusively on

the interjection used with alpacas and sheep(shhk). I do so

for two reasons.One is simply that, as I have noted, whereas

the interjection used with burros is only used with bur-

ros, shhkgets used with a range of nonanimal agents and

agentlike entities. The other reason is more complex: The

specific meaningfulness ofshhkits association with un-

predictability and cliffhanger momentsgets used to make

sensible other forms of nonhuman or not fully human in-

capacities (one can readily imagine, however, a nonhuman

world mostly modeled on burro stubbornness, reluctance

to engagein human projects,and semiotic inability). I begin

with two ethnographic anecdotes about children.

Children

My first anecdote involves a party I had put together for all

of thefamilies who participatedin my study. After theadults

played several rounds of volleyball, we allchildren andadults alikesettled into feasting on a meal of rice, chu no

(freeze-dried potatoes), salad, and chicken. After eating, the

adults and children separated out. The adult men formed a

circle and drank in turns from one-liter bottles of beer. The

adult women drank as well. As is common in the Andes, the

drinking itself was a residually sacred event (see Abercrom-

bie 1998): Each person poured out a small beer offering to

Santa Tira (better known as the Pachamama in the Andean

literature) before taking a swig. Two plastic cartons full of

beer bottlesfour of which had been pulled outsat near

the men.

There were three groups of playing children. One large

group of mostly boys was now using the volleyball as a soc-cer ball. They generally just kicked the ball about and only

occasionally verged on a more formal, rule-driven version

of soccer. A second group included five girls who were chas-

ing each other about in a game of tag, occasionally gawk-

ing and laughing at adult antics. A third, small group of

mixed-gender children huddled near an adobe wall, playing

with the rocks that lined the wall. Other axes of difference

besides gender cross-cut these groups: Toddlers hovered

near their older siblings, oftentimes not directly participat-

ing in the game or activity at hand; closely related siblings

or cousins tendedto dominate the organization of the game

activities.

These two eventsdrinking and playingmostly justcoincided. Children played, and adults drank. Twice, how-

ever, there was trouble. Once, two boysAlberto and

Franciscoseparated a bit from their playmates, kicking

thesoccerball toward the cartons of beer. They were staging

a full-tilt charge to recover the ball, apparently not seeing

the cartons or perhaps not thinking them important. Simi-

larly, a group of three girls who had gotten caught up in an

especially exuberant moment of tag veered at one point to-

ward the four bottles of beer that been pulled out of the car-

ton.The response ineachcasewasthe same. Caught a bit by

surprise, Thomas yelled out, Shhk shhk shhk! as the two

boys nearly clipped the carton of beers, and Miguel yelled

the same thing at the running girls just a bit later.

My second anecdote has to do with three young broth-

ers who were playing marbles one afternoon. They were far

away from their home, in a field where their familys al-

pacas and sheep were grazing. The two oldest siblings

Alberto and Francisco againwere actually playing the

game, whereas the youngest, a toddler, just watched. The

two older siblingsespecially the oldestwould occasion-

ally look up at their animals to make sure that nothing was

amiss. This was a typical scene in many ways: Herding is

the primary (but not exclusive) labor task for children in

Anatiri; while herding, children have time for unsupervised

play; and, marbles play(tinka)was far and away the most

popular game for boys during my time there. Alberto and

Francisco were experts at marbles.

The youngest brotherMarcogrew impatient. Heasked Alberto and Francisco to include him in their game

(an impossibility from their point of view). He whined and

whined, finally turned puckish. Using the back of his foot,

he tried to scrape the ground clean of the little holes dug

into it to serve as targets (see Smith 2010 on the rules of

the game). He charged his brothers, trying to bump into

them. All of this was normal enough, relatively harmless

even to the game itself, and did not invite the attention of

hisolder siblings (besides a chuckle).The scene echoeda fa-

miliarpattern:Marco liked to try to tacklehis brothers when

they were least aware, and he typically provided a chorus of

Dirty pigs, dirty pigs as his brothers cleaned up for school

in the morning.On this afternoon, Marcos puckishness was about to

be a problem. When Marco ran over to one of Albertos mar-

bles, both older boys started to pay attention. The marble,

as it happened, was near the venom hole. Had it been

struck into the hole, it would have gotten the power to kill

any marble it came into contact with (i.e., it would have

been venomous). Marco leanedover andwas about to strike

the marble with his foot, surely sending it away from the

venom hole. Seeing what was about to happen, Francisco

ran over to push Marco to the ground. Alberto yelled out,

Shhk shhk shhk! in a last-ditch effort to divert the tod-

dler. Marco giggled, struck the marble, and was thrown to

the ground by Francisco.In these cases,shhkhas the same meaning that it does

when used with alpacas and sheep. It is used to stop ac-

tion. The boys must be kept from running into the cartons

of beer. The girls must be kept from the open bottles.Marco

must be prevented from messing with his brothers marble.

In terms of its discursive context, it occurs as a response

to the possibility of negatively evaluated outcomes. Beer

a commodity that is both residually sacred and always ex-

pensive in this contextmust not be profaned or wasted.

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A marbles game must not be interrupted. The response is,

moreover, unsolicited in each case. The boys andgirls either

do not see the beer or do not understand its importance.

Marcos sense of destructiveness just happens to coincide

with an important feature of the game.

As addressees ofshhk, these children inhabit the sta-

tus of quasi agents: The boys, the girls, and Marco must be

made to act according to fields of meaning that they do not

acknowledge or fully understand. The boys and girls at my

party had to confront a world in which adult drinking and

sociability held sway. Marco confronted (quite literally) a

boyhood world in which marbles play held sway.

The usage of shhk in these contexts creates a very

specific kind of interactional encounter between human

speaker and not yet fully human addressee. The contexts

cited above are, for instance, ones of unpredictability: Will

the boys be made to stop running in time? Will they see the

cartons of beer? Relative to interactionally ongoing worlds

of practice and commitment (i.e., where drinking and itssociability matter and where marbles play matters), chil-

dren are asked, on occasion, to not muck things up. As with

an occasionally fickle sheep or alpaca, the question then

becomes a cliffhangerwill they actually do as they have

been told? More is at stake: Is it possible for the drinking or

marbles playing to go on despite those for whom the event

means nothing?

These interactional moments evoke and mediate a

rich, local ideology of childhood enmindedness. When the

children nearly break the beer bottles, they get understood

as lisu,19 as does Marco when he sets the marbles game

into turmoil. A lisu child is one who, according to Santago,

jani awktaykarus kaskiti [does not pay attention to hisparents]. Lisu children disobey. They do as they please.

Santiago affectionately describes his son Marco as follows:

Uka lisu janiw kasuskiti. Munanapampiki tixnaqaski.

Kuns lurtapiskakiw kuns [That lisu one doesnt pay at-

tention. He runs about doing only what he wants. He

just does whatever]. Lisuness is a kind of cheeky, willful

anticonventionality.

The usage of animal-oriented interjections with chil-

dren, then, implicitly reveals a personathat is, childhood

lisunessthat is understood as part of a more encompass-

ing, hierarchical ordering of enminded beings. It is, first,

a form of mindedness understood (implicitly and by con-

trast) as higher than that of alpacas and sheep: As I havedescribed, children exercise the nonreciprocated privilege

of positioning these animals in terms of a persona of inca-

pability. Childhood lisuness stands in stark contrast, how-

ever, to that of the kind of mindedness that is attributed

(again, implicitly and by contrast) to adult humans: that

is, a level of knowledgeability and respectful compliance

consistent with more mature human social worlds (i.e.,

not-lisuness).

Marbles

The scene, again, is an afternoon game of marbles between

two brothers. Jose had just recently started to play. He was

five and a half years old. Before this time, he had mostly just

watched his brothers play marbles, or had played with them

at games understood to be appropriate for younger chil-dren (e.g., playing with toy cars and figures), or had played

at home. Although he was not a preferred marbles partner,

he would play when there happened to be an opportunity.

In this case, he was playing with his older brother Roberto.

Even though his play was noticeably less skilled, Jose had

nevertheless managed to keep up with Roberto. Both had

advanced a marbleinto onehole andweretryingto advance

their marbles into the next one (out of a series of four).

Jose finallymade a rather glaring strategicmarbles mis-

take, andhe respondedas he typicallydid. Hehad struck his

marble toward a hole with just a bit too much force. After it

had slipped off a plateaulike lip of earth, it careened down

a slope that threatened to take it some distance from the

hole. As his marble went downward, Jose charged forward

to run alongside it, yelling out a string of shhks. He ulti-

mately got in front of his marble and knelt to the ground,

dramatically bringing his face close to his still-rolling mar-

ble: Shhk! He dodged his now-slowing marble to kneel in

front of it again, again leaning his face toward it: Shhk! His

chorus of shhks had little effect: His marble ended up sev-

eral feet from the hole it should have entered.

On another afternoon, Edmundo and Alberto were

playing marbles. Unlike Jose, they were both practiced play-

ers. At the time of the game, Edmundo was ten and a half

years old and Alberto was about to turn ten. They had

each played for five or so years. As relatively distant kin,

they played together less frequently than they did with their

younger brothers. But they were still very used to playing

with each other and even looked forward to playing to-

gether, as it meant playing with someone of equal skill.

Compared to their younger brothers, they were both much

morelikelyto rememberthe rules of the game and to playin

maximally strategic ways. On this afternoon, they had each

easily advanced a marble into the first hole.

Both Edmundo and Alberto started to have problems

with the second hole. It was located up a slight incline

that sent marbles rolling back where they had come from.

Alberto had tried two times to climb the slope and failed.Edmundo hadfailedhis first time andwas attempting a sec-

ond time. This time, his marble came very close to the hole,

went slightly past it (eliciting an Oy from Edmundo) and

then slowly curled back toward the hole. At this point, the

marble could either have landed right in the hole or slid

again back down the incline. In an effort to keep his marble

near the hole, Edmundo yelled out, Shhk shhk shhk shhk!

As it passed the hole, he let out a disappointed Yeah.

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In these examples, both Jose and Edmundo make their

marble an addressee of an animal-oriented interjection.20

And they treat it the same way that a speaker might treat

an alpaca, a sheep, or a child: When utteringshhk,they at-

tempt to stop the object from moving. The analogy goes

even further. The boys attempt to keep a marble from do-

ing something undesired or strategically harmful (for the

speaker). Both Jose and Edmundo attempt to keep their

marble close to the targeted hole. In doing so, they position

their marbles as quasi agents: They articulate them with re-

spect to a more encompassing field of meaning (i.e., the

speakers evaluation of marbles strategy in light of the rules

of the game of marbles as well as the current state of the

ongoing game).

The differences between the examples are revealing.

Edmundos use ofshhkis a cliffhanger moment. He uses

it during (and only during) a moment of contingency. His

marble might roll down the hill, or it might stick close to

the intended target (or even fall into the hole). Jose, how-ever, uses shhk after his marble has made up its mind,

so to speak. It is already rolling downhill, doing its dam-

age, yet Jose continues to speak to it. What is at stake with

Edmundos examplerather than with Joses usageis a

moment of unpredictability in the face of compulsion and

of potential misfortune.

The difference between Joses and Edmundos ex-

amples is a developmental one (see Smith 2011). Joses

usageat the age of five and a halfis an immature one.

Edmundosat the age of ten and a halfis a mature one.

In the context of this argument, this developmental differ-

ence counts as a unique form of evidence: Examples of ma-

ture usage are the best kind of evidence for the wider cul-tural saliency of a marble qua agent.

When Edmundo usesshhkwith his marble, he makes

the marble into a new kind of thing. It is no mere material

thing. Its moment of up-for-grabs movement makes it ap-

pear agentlike. For a moment, it does not just move. It be-

haves. It becomes something whose behavior appears reg-

ulatable. This happens for just a moment: For a mature

speaker, at least, when a marble has already gone downhill

or when it rattles in ones pocket, it is not worth speaking to.

It goes back to materiality.

These moments of marbles contingency are oftentimes

interpreted with respect to a local, ideological understand-

ing of bad luck, or qhincha. For example, Edmundoseeingthat his marble had just started to roll downward past

the targeted holeyells out, Oy shhk shhk shhk qhin-

cha! In this instance, he attributes the marbles continuing

downward movement to the intervention of bad luck (see

Smith 2010 on bad luck in Aymara marbles play). It is this

cliffhanger momentwill the marble roll past the hole? will

it slide down the slope?that evokes the possible presence

of qhincha in game play. When qhinchathat is, as Gary

Urton puts it, the principal cause of the emergence of

a state of imbalance and disequilibrium (1997:147)

successfully intervenes in marbles play, a marble inevitably

veers from its intended path or landing spot.

As an addressee of mature uses of animal-oriented in-

terjections, a marble, then, evokes and mediates an en-

mindedpersona of sorts: badluck, qhincha. It does so, how-

ever, in a very specific way. A marble actson occasion

only as a vehicle or animator of bad luck or disequilib-

rium. A useful contrast is with children and lisuness. When

children act in ways that evoke the persona of cheeky will-

fulness or lisuness, they inhabit a social orientation that

is thought to characterize children in the Aymara context.

When a marble is treated as an agent of bad luck, however,

itdoes not act ofitsownaccord,if you will. It isa medium. It

is possessed. It takes on a persona that is not its own (even

if it takes on that persona rather regularly).

When marbles are positioned in this way, the realm of

animals, agents, and entities subject to human discipline

briefly expands to include things outside ofor, perhaps,belowthe scaled hierarchy of enminded beings: in this

case, a material (if motile) entity (ironically, this occurs in

a moment when a marble shows itself to not be fully pli-

able to that discipline!). When this encounter is more fully

(and properly) understood as an encounter with a marble

qua animator of bad luck, the extension of human disci-

pline in this case appears even more remarkable: A boy in

these instances confrontsan entity that is not just fully non-

human; he confronts something that is antihuman.He con-

fronts something that undoes human doings: bad luck.

Conclusion

My primary empirical task in this article has been to give

an account of the usage andsignificance of animal-oriented

interjectionsin Aymara,with a special focus on the interjec-

tion used with alpacas and sheep. Doing this has required

me to develop an extensive theoretical machinery: The use

of these forms positions their addressees as reduced agents

(i.e., as quasi agents thought not to acknowledge the more

encompassing significance of their behavior), thereby evok-

ing and mediating ideologies about the scaled or graduated

character of the enminded beings and entities that serve

as addressees (i.e., the incapabilities of animals, children,

and material things when viewed from the perspective of

mature adults). The real payoff of this analysis is the follow-ing insight: Immanent to these language practices and their

encompassing ideological environment is an Aymara un-

derstanding of a frontier between human and nonhumans.

What is the character of this humannonhuman fron-

tier? From one perspective, the analysis implies an under-

standing of nonhumans that is categorial and scalar. Adults

use shhkwith children, alpacas and sheep, and material

(at least, motile) things (and not vice versa, ideally). Chil-

dren useshhkwith alpacas and sheep and material things.

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Material things are not normally engaged as addressees.

These asymmetrical, stereotyped participation frameworks

suggest that the personae associated with these actors are

also understood in hierarchical terms: Accordingly, the will-

ful, cheeky antisociality of children, the fickleness and in-

constancy of alpacas and sheep, and the entropy-inducing

character of bad luck, or qhincha, are thought to be rela-

tivelymore removed from forms of mindedness understood

to be fully mature or disciplined.

The categorial account yields benefits for an analysis of

fully mature, disciplined Aymara sociability. In other words,

as one sketches out the personae of the relatively more

nonhuman, one sketches out, in a negative sense, under-

standings about what it takes to act within a mature so-

cial world. According to an Aymara cultural imaginary, one

should not be qhinchalike (i.e., disorder inducing), a burro

(stubborn), an alpaca or a sheep (fickle), or a lisu child (mis-

chievous and egoistic). This is, then, what full Aymara so-

ciability looks like in part: One should work to create order(be antientropic) and be tractable in the face of social regu-

lation (not stubborn), reliably committed to some socially

recognized project or projects (not fickle), and respectful

and concerned about others (not mischievous and egois-

tic). When incapacities are at stake, so also are capacities.

From another (mediated) perspective, however, my

analysis implies a frontier best conceived as a schema of

differentiation immanent to specific ideologically rendered

language practices. Consider the following facts again:

Animals such as alpacas and burros are cast as quasi agents

only in moments of labor breakdown (in terms of ideolo-

gies of inconstancy and stubbornness, respectively); a child

who, in one moment, might be cast as a quasi agent relativeto some adult practice (understandable as lisu) can, in the

next, cast a younger child as a quasi agent relative to some

other practice (e.g., marbles). One cannot, in other words,

draw a neat border that enduringly divides some set of ac-

tors over against other ones (mature humans vs. children,

animals, and material entities like marbles).21 It is, rather, a

schemaof differentiation always contingently deployable in

communicative practice.

The mediated perspective also makes clear the sense

in which a politics is at stake with the humannonhuman

frontier. To be sure, the actors I consider here are not pow-

erful in any easy sense (i.e., they do not amass wealth or

status; they do not exploit). They are only indirectly a partof a human polis. It is precisely this marginality, however,

that makes them interesting from a political point of view:

Following Agamben (2004), it is their excludability that in

part makes possible a kind of sociability (tractability, com-

mitment, respect) potentially generative of a human polity.

Furthermore, to the extent that this exclusion depends on

practices like the usage of animal-oriented interjections,

the analysis reveals the way in which humannonhuman

distinctions are contingent on other kinds of social facts

(e.g., their performance in communicative practice).

My attempt to trace the mediated character of an

Aymara humannonhuman frontier shares some of the

same theoretical motivations as the efforts of those who

argue for a multispecies ethnography. S. Eben Kirksey

and Stefan Helmreich (2010), for example, advocate for an

ethnographic enterprise sensitive to the multiple linkages

between human social worlds and the worlds of other

(nonhuman) organisms. They argue for the importance

of linkages in which a multiplicity of species (human and

nonhuman) coproduce forms of sociability, species who

thereby register as genuinely political agents. My approach

in this article addresses nonhumans in a similar spirit: I

take them up as addressees of human speech who, in serv-

ing as addressees, mediate a humannonhuman frontier

and, in doing so, help make possible a political life.

Ultimately, however, these perspectivesthe catego-

rial and the mediatedare two sides of the same coin. In amethodological sense, I have made claims about the grad-

uated or scalar character of Aymara understandings of hu-

mans and nonhumans (i.e., their categorial character) only

to the extent that they are evoked (i.e., to the extent that

they are mediated by) the usage of animal-oriented inter-

jections. A larger, theoretical point looms behind this claim,

however: The social life of cultural categories is inevitably

one of dialectical tension with the interests and contingen-

cies at stake in their pragmatic deployment (Agha 2007;

Silverstein 2004).

Central to these analyses is my concern with the specif-

ically discursive mediation of a humannonhuman fron-

tier. With an anchor in a particular semiotic practice, Ihave been able to attend to the connections between an ar-

ray of nonhuman addressees (alpacas and sheep, children,

and marbles) that would be invisible to an analysis exclu-

sively guided by a conceptual tool like species or some

other, broader, biological category. Indeed, as one follows

the primary warp and woof (!) of language on these matters,

one might very well end up asking the following question:

How do ideologically rendered discursive practices figurate

their participants (and referents) as (more or less or differ-

ently) enminded kinds of beings, regardless of ontological

type?22

Notes

Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge the support of a

Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and a Spencer Foun-dation Dissertation Fellowship. Don Kulicks fall 2008 seminar on

Animals and the Species Divide first introduced me to the greatethnographic interest of animals. His pedagogy motivated me to

write this article. I am also thankful for all of the friends and col-leagues who have given me feedback on drafts of this article: Jay

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Ingersoll, Julia Cassaniti, Lara Braff, Pinky Hota, Christine Nutter,

Liz Nickrenz, and Amy Cooper. Special thanks are owed to DonaldDonham and the anonymousAEreviewers for their exceptionally

helpful comments. Of course, all mistakes are my own.1. Names of towns and persons throughout this article are

pseudonyms.

2. This is pronounced as a high back vowel followed by an alve-olar flap and a slightly lowered back vowel. I spell this urroin part

to emphasize thepresumed Spanish originof thelexical item (fromburro).

3. This is pronounced as a postalveolar unvoiced fricative fol-lowed by a typically unreleased and always unvoiced velar or alve-olar stop. More often than not, the unreleased stop is velar.

4. One might refer to this speech, following Eduardo Kohn(2007:14) as a transspecies pidgin. However, the type of linguis-

tic unit at stake in this argument is regularly used with nonanimaladdressees. One might more broadly speak of a transontologicalpidgin.

5. One finds occasional mention of forms that would nowbe considered animal-oriented interjections in two types of

literature: anthropologically minded descriptive grammars (e.g.,Bogoras 1911; Enfield 2007; Sapir 1911) and typological accounts

of interjections (see Ameka 1992a, 1992b). Of special note are twoworks in which these forms are the primary concern of the author:Maurice E. F. Blochs (1998) short anthropological account of Mala-

gasy speech to cows and James Bynons (1976) linguistic account ofdomestic animal calls in a Berber tribe.

6. I draw the termpersonaprimarily from Asif Agha (2007; notethat he also uses the termcharacterological figurefor similar theo-retical ends). More distally, the originof this terminology has much

to do with the influence of a Bakhtinian understanding of voicingin discourse (see Bakhtin 1981).

7. When not referring to the Aymara language, I use the termAymara to refer to the tuber-growing, camelid-herding Aymara-speaking communities of the high Bolivian, Peruvian, and Chilean

Andes. I useAymarain this way for two reasons: First, my claims inthis article are largely sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological

ones, and Aymara is the language of the community under inves-tigation; and, second, such use allows for claims that are neitherexcessively sweeping (pan-Andean) nor particular (community

specific).8. This trend represents a historical shift: Whereas, for example,

Erving Goffman once noted that a pet is not a full fledged recipi-ent (1978:792) of its owners talk, a more contemporary approach

asks, what kinds of recipienthood do animals actually inhabit (notto mention what kinds of response)?

9. Blochs (1998) brief article on Malagasy speech to cows offers

the best evidence for the sociopolitical complexities of the usage ofanimal-oriented interjections. Bloch asks why Malagasy peasants,

in a sociolinguistic context in which Malagasy is the dominant lan-guage, useFrenchwhen orderingtheircowsout forworkingthe ricefields. His answer stems from an account of power in the colonial

context: Just as French is used for communication by the totallypowerful colonials or administrators to the totally powerless peas-

ants, the totally powerful cattle owner addresses his totally pow-erless cattle in French using the analogous model of the colonial

relationship (Bloch 1998:195). Speaking to cattle here uncovers ahierarchy-riven sociopolitical order.

10. I am speaking here of a variety of Aymara that extends from

the city of Puno to the border of Peru and Bolivia. The speechforms of interest appear to vary considerably across Aymara di-

alects (Briggs 1993). Writing of the northern Chilean context, Pene-lope Dransart (2002:65) cites two Aymara animal-oriented interjec-

tions used with llamas (kispa:turn around, andpiska:keep going).

Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita (1998:101) cite a number of

stereotyped utterances used with animals in the Aymara-speakingcontext of the department of Oruro in Bolivia.

11. My linguistic approach in this article is in part motivated by

Kohns (2007) claim that analyses of humannonhuman relation-ships should develop semiotic approaches that do not exclusively

attend to human-specific kinds of semiosis (e.g., the use of sym-bols). Accordingly, my analyses drawfrom a linguisticanthropolog-

ical tradition deeply influencedby the Peircean attempt to theorizesigns in all of their semiotic modalities (regardless of the sign de-ployers perceived ontological status, i.e., species).

12. I would not be surprised if this interjection were also usedfor llamas. Victor Maqque (personalcommunication, August 2008),

referring of Quechua-speaking communities to the east of Puno,claims that this form can also be used for llamas. In Anatiri, how-ever, only one family has a llama, and it is purported to be a llama

alpaca mix.13. I am grateful to Liz Nickrenz for suggesting the cliffhanger

metaphor.14. A clue to the meaningfulness of animal-oriented inter-

jections inheres in the forms themselves. They belong to the

category interjection (see Bloomfield 1984). Although issues of

language form are not central to my argument here, the traditionalstatus of interjections within linguistic inquiry is worth noting.They have been, after all, something like black sheep in linguis-

tic circles, considered to be at the border of the properly linguis-tic. Early accounts, for example, explicitly considered them to bethe natural expression of emotion itself (DAtri 1995). Although in-

terjections have been recuperated as objects of linguistic concern,their liminal statusif in just an ideological sensesuggests the

kind of politics at stake. A slogan helps: Marginal language is formarginal addressees.

15. One reviewer of this article helpfully suggests that these in-

terjections might primarily serve to communicate the speakers af-fective stance of disappointment or anger toward an addressees

misbehavior (and only secondarily implicate that the addresseeshould change his or her behavior). My claim is the reverse: that

is, that the primary meaningfulness of these forms lies in their at-tempt to create an obligation with respect to movement for anaddressee (a discursive act that regularly implicates an affective

stance). Besides theevidence I have cited here, I would point to thesimilarity between my analysis and the analyses of similar forms in

other languages (see N. 5) as supporting this second perspective. Iwould also note that the affective account has difficulty explaininghow these forms implicate specific directions about movement.

16. The need for training, practice, and other forms of socializa-tion is an interesting and relatively undeveloped theme within the

Andean literature. Writing of llamas, Dransart notes that they aretrained to act as a unit and stay together (2002:65). This training

includes how to make them understand the two animal-orientedinterjections mentioned in N. 10. Arnold and Yapita (1998:101)also note that animals must be taught to understand human com-

mands. They describe the socialization process whereby male lla-mas are initiated into the task of carrying cargo over long distances

(Arnold and Yapita 1998:406411).17. I am talking throughout this section about the stereotyped

participation frameworks associated with this form. This is not

to say, of course, that these stereotyped frameworks cannot betroped on (Agha 2007:27) for other interactional effects. Older

boys, for example, when walking behind a group of girls on a roador path, would occasionally (and laughingly) yell out Shhk shhk!

as though herding the girls.18. Arnold and Yapitas (1998) account of Aymara songs sung, in

part, to celebrate animals gives powerful evidence of the respect

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herders have for their animals labor capacities. The songs are no

longer performed in Anatiri.19. This word presumably comes from the Spanish wordliso.

20. Justin L. Barrett and Amanda Hankes Johnson (2003) give anaccount of how English speakers address marbles, albeit in an ex-perimentalcontext.The use of desire language in the English case

stands in contrast to the Aymara patterns.21. This is not to say, however, that there are no actors for whom

the usage of these forms is understood to be more or less appropri-ate, as I note throughout.

22. I make reference here to the Silversteins (1987) classic workon the conceptual domain that underlies the grammatical proper-ties of noun phrases. The hierarchical character of this conceptual

domain bears some resemblance to the hierarchy of enminded be-ings sketched out in the current project.

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