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The rich-smelling Peruvian coffee in your mug is the distillate of a frantically expanding Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenka, state agents, and transplanted Andean highlanders are carving forests into farms. At the edge of the coffee frontier, in the trilingual Matsigenka village of Yokiri, Nick Emlen witnesses the building of an agrarian lifeway among a society of novices. From the agronomy workshop to the mythology of sentient cascades, life is made by talking-talking in and across three languages. Emlen offers a subtle, flexible, linguistically sparkling rendering of the improvisations that are making the forest world into something unforeseen. -Frank Salomon, author of At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community Too often the Andes and the Amazon are understood as worlds apart. On the eastern slopes of the Amazon, Nicholas Emlen shows how these regions have been interconnected through the centuries and continue to be today, through the work and words of YokiriNos. Emlen brings together ethnography, history, and linguistics in a rich portrait of inter-indigenous relations between highland Quechua colonos and lowland Matsigenkas. Emlen's use of archival materials is sophisticated, rigorous, and illuminating. Setting ethnographic accounts and archival material alongside the linguistic analysis of toponyms in the region contributes to a rich picture of the complex, shifting nature of the linguistic ecology of the region. -Karl Swinehart, University of Louisville

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Nicholas Q. Emlen is a linguistic anthropologist who studies multilingualism and language contact in western South America, both today and in the past. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of TÜbingen, Germany.

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