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Georgia C. Ennis, "Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network hello
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C
and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Georgia Ennis about her book titled Rainforest Radio, Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2025. Now this, I mean, the subtitle tells us a lot of the things we're going to be talking about, which is fascinating, right? We're going deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon to examine what's going on with a bunch of things. What's going on with community, what's going on with radio media, what's going on with language, how are all of these things kind of developing and also intertwined with each other as well, obviously in terms of kind of big picture structures and institutions and policy and also in people's everyday lives, in relationships within families, all sorts of different layers here. So clearly a lot for us to discuss. Georgia, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
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B
Well, thank you so much for having me.
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C
Miranda, could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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B
Yeah, well, so I'm a linguistic and environmental anthropologist. I've been doing research in Ecuador for more than 15 years now. I started working there when I was an undergraduate and I've always been really interested in how language reflects social life and social relationships in Ecuador and more broadly. And so when I wrote this book, I wanted to share more about three topics that were really important to me after my time in Ecuador. And the first was how environmental change and destruction have really affected language and culture in the Amazon there. And the second is how local communities are using grassroots media to respond to various kinds of oppression and then how well meaning approaches to language revitalization, especially things like language standardization, have sometimes unintended consequences for the communities they're meant to serve. So those were some of the things that really motivated me in writing this
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C
book and give us a whole bunch of things to talk about. So thank you for that introduction. I think the other thing that we want to talk about at the beginning of our conversation is the title of the book, Rainforest Radio. There's all sorts of alliteration going on there, but obviously there are more reasons than just that for why you chose the title. So can you take us through that thinking?
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B
Yeah. So, you know, I have to say thank you to a mentor of mine, Eric Hayet, who is at Penn State University, where I was a postdoc right after I finished my PhD in 2019 at center for Humanities and Information there, who suggested this title. And I found it to be so evocative of a lot of the issues that I wanted to explore in the book, especially around the Amazon rainforest and people's relationships to it, and as well, the kind of ideas or imaginaries we have of the rainforest, which often don't include things like radio or other forms of media, which are so important in the daily lives of the indigenous Kichwa people who I do my research with. So, yeah, Rainforest Radio, trying to bring together two things that we don't often think of in sort of the same sphere to understand both of them more deeply.
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C
Well, I always love a book that brings together things that we may not think goes together and then goes well, actually, hang on, they really do. So, great title. And I think it's also something we want to cover early on in our discussion is kind of where you're doing this ethnographic work and why there. As you said, you've been there for quite a number of years. So can you give us a bit more context to kind of about the place we're talking about and why you chose it?
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B
Yeah. So I do my research in the province of Napo, Ecuador, which is on the western edge of the Amazon. And it's just an incredibly interesting region. Ecuador is a small but mighty country with coast, Andean mountains and then Amazonian rainforest. So it's very linguistically and culturally and environmentally diverse. And I chose the Amazon as kind of the site of my research because of all of that diversity and also the complexity that it presented for language revitalization projects. So Ecuador has numerous indigenous languages, and Quechua is the language I work on. It's related to Quechua if people are familiar with Peru and the language of the Inka, but it actually arrives in. In the Amazon in Ecuador, most likely as a colonial language with Spanish missionaries. And that really has some significant impacts on the dialectal diversity of Ecuadorian Quechua. So that the languages spoken in the highlands are pretty different from what's spoken in the lowlands. But a lot of the language revitalization projects in Ecuador are really based around highland varieties of Quechua. So I wanted to understand what some of the consequences were and especially how people reacted to these kinds of revitalization projects that were led both by indigenous social movements and bilingual educators, as well as the Ecuadorian state, which chose this variety called Unified Quichua, as the language to, for example, translate the constitution of Ecuador into. And so I was really interested in trying to understand the politics and dynamics of language standardization and language revitalization and how people were responding to it. So I decided to look at media and radio media in particular, as a place where people were debating all of these different questions about language and other things going on with them. For example, cultural change and environmental change and kind of the broader life ways in the Amazon. And so I did research at radio stations with radio hosts. I also worked with cultural activists, performers. I interviewed bilingual teachers. And I also lived in a community and worked really closely with an extended household to try and understand how they received media and their perspectives on linguistic and cultural change. So, yeah, I had a very complex, multi sided ethnographic experience for the couple of years that I was living in Ecuador. And I continue to go back and explore a lot of these questions today as well.
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C
That's very helpful to understand kind of the wider context and the linguistic diversity as well. If we're thinking then about kind of why these sorts of radio efforts are starting around things like language revitalization, can you tell us more about the sort of key colonial and other historical reasons that sort of made that become a thing?
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B
Yeah, that's. I mean, such a great question. And one of my favorite things to share with my students as well. So I love talking about the history of this region. You know, Napo was more marginal to the colonial project than some other parts of the Amazon. Historically, of course, things like the rubber boom and missionization did have an impact there. But the most intense period of colonization, as I understand it, has been really beginning since the 1920s. You had several things happening at that time. A group of Italian Josephine Catholic missionaries arrived and set up a missionary boarding school and day schools in the region, which has had a pretty significant impact on people's access to education and then learning Spanish and often being forced to learn Spanish in those settings. You also had oil companies coming in with the missionaries. Often, and very often different missionary groups are linked to the oil companies. And then later the Ecuadorian government actually developed what they called the National Institute for Colonization, very aptly named, which was meant to settle parts of the Amazon and relieve landlessness for peasants in the highlands of Ecuador. So you had a lot of different factors and things going on. Up until the 70s, there were very accessible roads. Those came in. People still really remember the arrival of roads in the region. As a time of great social change. And then More recently, since the 2010s, there has been a major expansion of the oil infrastructure in the region. And the roadways as well. And now today, gold mining, both legal and illegal, and narco, illegal drug activity. Have become major drivers of violence and conflict. So there are a lot of different kind of environmental factors, social and political factors that people are confronting. And all of these also impact language as well. So people don't have access to the rainforest in the way that they did in the past. It's changed a great deal because of extraction and settlement and all of these roads being built. So there just aren't animals and there are not access to plants and trees in the ways that people might have had in the past. So that knowledge from experience is something that people don't have the same sort of experience with as well. Institutionally, spaces like schools and the boarding schools and work and public settings are also really directed towards Spanish. So these are all things that have created a setting where language shift is occurring. And more and more you find that young people and young children don't understand Kichwa very well. Or are unable to respond in Kichwa when their parents or grandparents speak to them. And obviously that's a real rupture in the intergenerational transmission of language, but also knowledge and those relationships. So these are some of the kind of expected forms of colonization people are confronting. But people in Napo also feel some oppression or some domination from this standardized form called unified Kichwa as well, which was originally intended to be a written standard. And provide a common language for social movements and in bilingual education. But has more recently or sort of unexpectedly become an oral standard, especially in beauty pageants and kind of public oratory, connected to bilingual education. And so people feel very closely connected to their regional dialects. And so they're not just losing regional dialects to Spanish. But also to this other kind of Quichua that they see as mandated by the government. That the government, the Spanish speaking, mestizo government. Has actually commanded them to learn this other kind. And that creates all sorts of conflicts and anxieties. And even leads some people to not want to speak Quichua. Or use Kichwa because they're worried that they will make a mistake or use the wrong kind of. So, yeah, these are some of the things that people are responding to. And radio media emerged as one of the key ways that they were able to talk back to both the Spanish social world, as well as more standardized forms of speech in bilingual education and social movement politics.
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C
Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of things there that I think we're going to talk more about, including beauty pageants and other sort of public communication. And of course, obviously radio is part of that, as other media is too. So radio is not the only thing going on.
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B
Right.
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C
Like, what's the sort of media ecosystem, social interaction world in which all of this is being discussed?
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B
Yeah, so people, you know, often assume that indigenous Amazonians are not very media savvy and they just have so much access to media. Kichwa people in the Amazon have a very complex and active media industry, or what I think of as a media ecology, to sort of think about these relationships and interact relationships between people, activists, ideologies, technologies, platforms. So radio is a really central node in this, but it is linked to other kinds of media as well. So you have social media and, you know, Facebook is still one of the most, you know, popular platforms for people. And radio would be transmitted over Facebook and also people would comment and then get. Get responses on air for their Facebook comments. But also things like pageantry. Sometimes the hosts from the radio programs would be also the hosts for pageants or transmit the pageants live on air or interview the beauty pageant contestants as well. And the local music scene also connected really closely with radio. So media and this kind of media ecology in Napo was really densely interconnected and circulated news and music and different kind of genres of verbal artistry, things like laments that I write about quite a bit, as well as jokes, kind of these sites of social meaning that really emerged from radio and other forms of media. Though I will say, you know, radio has. Was so important during my research between 2015 and 2017, I've been doing some more recent research with young folks and I think that radio media is perhaps less popular now than it was during my research, but still in rural communities where things like cell phones and Internet are not as accessible, radio is still a very widely available technology that allows people to communicate with each other and to also share more of their music and social world more widely. So it remains an important medium in the Amazon, though its place is shifting in kind of the more recent period.
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C
Yeah, fair enough. But still kind of the idea that radio is still important and also it's amongst all these other things is helpful to keep in mind. Now, shifting to some of the content of what is discussed on the radio, obviously your pronunciation understanding is significantly better than mine, which is why you are here to be our expert. But you talk about a particular ritual idea moment. Why yousa upena is going to be my guess of how it's pronounced. But can you tell us what this is and why this is so important and central in this media work?
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B
Yeah, no, great pronunciation. You did excellent. Guayusa upina. So the guayusa upina guayusa is a kind of tea, if your audience has had it or if not, it's somewhat similar to yerba mate. So it's fairly caffeinated. People drink it hot as an infusion and it is just one of the kind of central products for Amazonian Quichua people. And it is, you know, sort of your morning cup of coffee or tea, but it's also medicinal in a lot of ways. And so whyusa upina is more broadly the time of day when you drink wayusa. So upina means to drink. So why you say upina drinking Wayusa. And this is the early morning hours. And by early morning I mean early morning, like three or four in the morning. People get up before the sun has come up and drink wayusa tea together. Traditionally, younger women in the household would brew wayusa and then go around to everyone that was sleeping and wake them with wayusa as singing and serving them wayusa. And this would be the time of day when people would get together, share stories, prepare for their day. And then around 6am, when the sun has come up, they would head out to work in the forest and then kind of wrap things up before it gets too hot. People always wonder why, why so early? And it's just, it's hot and difficult, you know, doing agricultural labor or hunting. So a lot of things happen earlier in the day. So the wayusa upena was this really central time for people when they would get up and spend time with their families. People lived in intergenerational households, so you would be with your grandparents and your parents and your cousins together at this time of day. And in more recent times, people have lived in more nucleated houses, more kind of single family style homes, or children go to school or parents go to work. And so the guayusupina in a lot of households is less significant because of the structure of people's lives. And in the family where I Did a lot of my research. You know, it was the elder people who were really maintained that practice. And as they have passed, that practice has also become less prominent in those households. So people are really committed to the Wayusa Upena as a site of daily pedagogy. This is a place where people really learned how to become members of Napo Kichwa or Napo Runa culture and society. You learned your family history, you learned the history of your people. You learned about spirituality and the forest and how to weave and to make baskets, and all of these different skills that you would need. And so this time of day is then reflected on the radio both as a frame for the programs where everyone is sort of part of this big family. Getting up to drink wayusa together at 4am, listening to Kichwa music, being part of this broader imagined community, and also a site of live performance and broadcast on the radio. One of the programs I worked at was called Mushuk Nyambi, which means A New Path. And they engaged in these really elaborate two hour long radio plays that were live performances of the Yusu Opina once a month that attempted to recreate it and reanimate it for the people participating in it, as well as the people listening at home. So the Wayu Supina was really central to a lot of Kichwa media production, radio production, and even showed up in places like the beauty pageants as well as a site of performance. So Bayousuapina just really central to Kichwa daily life and language revitalization practices more broadly and clearly.
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C
So are beauty pageants, because they've already come up a few times. So can you tell us more about these beauty pageants and why these were also important sites for these sorts of questions around language, identity and culture?
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B
So, yeah, beauty pageants are this incredibly important social and political genre of performance in Napo, as they are in a lot of other settings. They're not just about looks. You could really think of these as cultural pageants where people are presenting cultural skills and knowledge as well as engaging in broader kind of aesthetic practice. But they're really also a site of political action and training for young women as a place where they learn skills and oratory and public speaking. And so part of that development is deciding what voice or what dialect is going to be appropriate to use more recently or kind of. In the research that I did, I found that people were really oriented towards using regional dialects both on the radio and in the pageants for the township that sponsored that radio program. But historically, the pageants have been really connected to the bilingual education system and have been a place where young women were actually trained to use unified kichwa. So pageants, speakers and unified kichwa were really closely associated. Associated in the minds of a lot of people. So these alternative pageants that encouraged young people to use local Napo dialect were pretty radical in some senses because they were also encouraging young people to return to speak with their elders and to use those practices in public. Right. Things that were seen as quote, unquote, informal or incorrect because they were not that standardized, authorized form. So, yeah, beauty pageants are places where people think about gender, they think about aesthetics, they think about culture, and they also think about dialect and what kind of language is appropriate for public use. So they are incredibly important cultural genres of practice.
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C
That's definitely interesting to hear about kind of those sites and the ways in which people sort of perceive them. So, in fact, sort of speaking of that, how does listening to these radio programs, you know, if they're broadcasting a pageant or they're talking about talking to your elders, I mean, what sort of impact does listening to those radio programs have when people talk to each other not through Facebook or through the radio, but, like, encounter each other on the street?
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B
Yeah. So, you know, people. I think there's all sorts of ways to think about this. And that was one of the key things I really wanted to do in this book, was to not just look at production of media or reception of media as sort of isolated events, but to see them as interconnected and to follow media and speech and practice from radio settings out into the real world, into face to face communication. So, yeah, of course, people would share information and news that they had heard on the radio. You know, sharing about seasonal environmental practices or, you know, things that could be harvested, community events, celebrations, as well as more personal things like death announcements, or even just, you know, using them as sort of ways to relay that you were coming to town, coming to visit, you know, on the airplane, if you lived in a really remote region. Right. So local news is a big part of that kind of face to face circulation that people would do. But I also found that they were reinforcing and serving as sites that of learning for young people. So I often find the my God, children from the village where I did research or other young people I know singing along with the radio. But one of the scenes that I write about and I think was most impactful for me during my research was one morning we were listening to the radio and a story came on and the speaker Used a very particular form of speech called an idiophone. It's kind of like onomatopoeia, where you're using sounds to mirror nature, kind of using them as an adverb. But they're a form of speech that's also more subject to language shift because of a lot of reasons, their association with women, the lack of, kind of use of them in Spanish. But they're really central to Kichwa narrative practice and ways of engaging with each other and with the natural world and focusing your attention on the environment. So they're really significant. And as we were listening to the story, the young toddler, one of the grandsons that was listening along with us, started repeating that ideophone that the speaker in the radio story was, was using. And then it became a way of talking about that story and sharing more information about the. The content of the story, which was about snakes and boas. And so it became this really central moment of learning, kind of unexpectedly through the radio. So it was a way of not just reviving, you know, or sharing conversation and news, but also of reviving kind of broader genres of practice. I write as well about things like laments and women's songs of lament and the ways that those are also being remediated into the radio and then how they evoke emotion and even song and crying from the women who receive them. So these become really significant ways of reinforcing practices that might be threatened or undergoing shift and reinforcing people's knowledge of them more broadly. So they become really significant parts of people's daily lives and face to face interactions.
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C
Right. And as you're saying, in terms of language and in terms of behavior, which is significant. So what then are some of the key implications of all of this? This. What are you hoping, for instance, that readers or listeners who have not been to the Ecuadorian Amazon would take away from all of this?
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B
Well, yeah. So I think there are a few things that I hope readers understand at the end of this. Obviously, the book has a few central threads running through it. And one of the things I hope people do take away from this is how deeply interconnected the lives of people in the Amazon are to their own. Through our interlinked extractive economies as well as our media ecologies, our practices really impact the people there immensely. And this is, I think, a simple point, but it's easy to forget. Amazonian people are not living in just these isolated places, but in fact a lot of what enables our global communication, things like local oil and gold are being extracted from. From them and are having really significant impacts on them. And so this is also kind of part of my second point, is that language endangerment is also a social justice issue just as much as oil extraction or gold mining, and their impacts are social justice issues in the Amazon. So the loss of the world's languages is not happening in a vacuum. We know that, or we think that it's very likely that half of the world's languages will no longer be spoken at the end of the century. And those things are happening because of choices, because of policies, because of practices that push people away from their languages and cultures. And so the third point is then that addressing language endangerment, or really what I think of as language oppression, also requires listening to communities, to their needs, to their goals, not assuming that we as outsiders, as academics, as linguists, as anthropologists, have all of the answers to solve them. As we've seen in this setting, things like language standardization were very well intentioned and, you know, supported by a lot of academic research and by linguists, but have had all these unintended consequences that are actually pushing people farther away from language. And instead there are these grassroots forms of revitalization that look not just at language, but at culture, at things like the Guayusa, Opina, at handicrafts, at traditional ecological knowledge, at medicinal practices as all part of reclamation and revitalization that are as significant as language and are also vehicles to reinforce and revitalize language. So those are some of the things I'm really hoping that people will take away, but most broadly, to really understand how closely linked we are to these issues and our role in addressing them in our own lives, wherever we find ourselves.
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C
Well, I think that's a great way to end our discussion about the book. So I only really now have less to ask what you're working on now that it's done. Anything you want to tell us about? Oh, yeah.
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B
Thank you so much. I am continuing to do work in Napo. I have a close relationship with the association of Upper Napo Kichwa Midwives or Alma Pakhin, who I write about quite a bit in the book. And we are continuing to collaborate on different revitalization and media projects. And if our listeners would like to check Amou Pakin out on Instagram or TikTok, they can find them there. We've been collaborating to try and understand how social media can become a site of intergenerational activity and, and encourage linguistic and cultural reclamation. So that's one of the things I'm working on. And then I'm also doing some research on mutual aid and disaster recovery in rural regions where I live in Appalachia.
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C
Well, that certainly sounds like two very interesting projects, so best of luck to you and all your collaborators on both of them. And of course, while you're pursuing those, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Rainforest Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian and Amazon, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2025. Georgia thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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B
Miranda thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and invitation to speak with you today.
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D
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