Metacultural positioning in language socialization: Inhabiting authority in informal teaching among Peruvian Aymara siblings

•Older Aymara siblings teach their younger siblings through “correction”.•“Correction” is a kind of metacultural positioning unique to older siblings.•The discursive task of metacultural positioning is central to socialization.

In this article, I give an account of informal teaching among siblings as a caretaking practice among Peruvian, Aymara speaking children. To do so, I draw upon a notion of “metaculture” (Urban, 2001) or a “theory of the cultural” to account for the sense in which informal teaching practices imply a form of authoritative, reflexive positioning toward the normativities qua normativities (“culture”) of everyday social life. Drawing on an analysis of interview data, I give an account of an Aymara “folk pedagogy” in which identities like oldest, older, and younger sibling are interpretable as forms of metacultural social positioning. An analysis of a series of video-recordings shows the way in which – that is, through acts of “correction” – older siblings deploy a theory of the cultural as they informally instruct their younger siblings.