From “Ugh” to Babble (or Babel)

Abstract

This essay reveals the play of fiction and reality in cinematic depictions of Native Amazonian language and speech in films from the 1980s to the present. It considers these linguistic representations, linguistic simulacra, to be tokens of “primitivist linguistic imagery,” part of a broader semiotics of primitivism that invokes a set of assumptions about modernity and primitivity as well as understandings of Native (Amazonian) Peoples as primitive. Analysis reveals techniques and semiotic processes that entangle illusion with realism in the construction of cinematic fictions of Native Amazonian language and speech. Specific linguistic ideologies and assumptions support the strategies of linguistic manipulation involved in these constructions and enable “sound-blind” audiences to take linguistic simulacra as the sound of primitivity and believable expressions of Native Amazonian radical alterity. The essay demonstrates that linguistic imagery plays a major role in the cinematic construction of Native Amazonian primitivity and audiences’ sensory—especially acoustic—experience of it. By enriching appreciation of the role of language—and, more broadly, the acoustic modality—within primitivist imagery and aesthetics, the analysis contributes to the decentering of (Euro-American) anthropological ocularcentrism and to a critical anthropology of primitivism.

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