Joshua Shapero

JOSHUA SHAPERO, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and writing on “The Ground Beneath Our Words: Speaking and Living with Places in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca Mountains.” During the grant period, the grantee completed a draft of “The Ground beneath our Words: Speaking and Living with Places in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca Mountains,” and began work with a editor on revisions to re-envision the book for greater impact. The book is structured around four chapters. The first is ethnographically focused on the environmental engagements of Ancash Quechua speaking farmers and herders, with particular emphasis on everyday ritual communications with mountains through divination and its broader political implications. The second chapter examines how speakers describe spatial relationships, and the rich common ground of environmental knowledge and experience scaffolding such talk. The third chapter turns to the embodiment of such common ground, using a phenomenological ethnographic approach, interactional analysis, and quantitative corpus analyses to examine the use of demonstrative pronouns like “this” and “that” and their accompanying gestures. The fourth chapter describes an experimental study of spatial memory, showing how individual cognitive tendencies resonate with collective differences in environmental engagement within a single community. The book highlights critical reflection on the process of carrying out experimental linguistic and cognitive research in an ethnographic fieldwork setting, emphasizing the challenges, problems, and felicitous mistakes that characterize such work.