Anne Marie Creighton

ANNE MARIE CREIGHTON, then a graduate student at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Linguistic Diversity in Colca, Peru, Present and Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” supervised by Dr. Bruce Mannheim. During eighteen months of on-site fieldwork (2019’2023), the grantee studied the history and present of the indigenous languages spoken in Colca, Peru, focusing on past patterns of indigenous multilingualism and their afterlives in Colca today. In sites including Tuti, Arequipa, Peru; Arequipa, Peru; and Seville, Spain, evidence was gathered about language(s) in Colca during the past 500 years through archival and ethnographic methods. More than 150 hours of audio/video recordings and more than 1,000 scanned folios of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century documents allow analysis Colca’s multilingual past and residents’ ideologies about local varieties today. In particular, the evidence collected also pointed to the necessity of analyzing places, persons, and Christianity as those structures have related to language(s) in Colca over the past five hundred years. This research will contribute to conversations about ideologies, power, and language; about the nature of social and linguistic variation; and about language, linguistic shift, and racialization in Peru.