The Social Imaginary, Unspoken in Verbal Art

How do ideas about the social world spread? I discuss the construction of the social imaginary in Southern Peruvian Quechua narratives and songs as both a tacit folk sociology of everyday life and a critique of forms of domination in modern Peruvian society, in which Southern Peruvian Quechua speakers are oppressed linguistically, culturally, and economically. Although these narratives and songs often deal in explicit fantasy, including supernatural beings, anthropomorphic animals, fantastic events, and exaggerated sorrow and loss, the social imaginary is constructed tacitly, in the background of these art forms. I discuss three linguistic and literary mechanisms by which the social imaginary is shaped: (1) presupposition, in which tacit assumptions can be calculated from what is said; (2) implicature, in which the social imaginary is calculated from the way it is said; (3) and pragmatic lamination, in which imaginary is constructed interactionally, through ambiguities in the way in which one speech event is embedded within another.