Guilherme Orlandini Heurich is an anthropologist and software engineer whose work sits at the intersection of Amazonian anthropology and computer programming. He held a British Academy Newton International Fellowship (2016–2019) and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2020–2023) in the Department of Anthropology at UCL.
Heurich's research examines language, translation, and voice in Eastern Amazonia, based on extensive fieldwork with the Araweté people of the Brazilian Amazon, and has more recently extended into a multi-disciplinary investigation of the relationship between anthropology, language, and computer programming — treating code and programming culture as objects of ethnographic inquiry in their own right. He is currently developing collaborative software applications for remote access to digital collections, including an audio streaming application built together with Araweté interlocutors to provide long-term, sustainable access to a collection of field recordings.
Selected publications
Coderspeak: The Language of Computer Programmers. UCL Press (2024).
"Computer programming as a method for the study of digital cultures." In DeGruyter Handbook on Digital Cultures, eds. G. Bollmer, K. Guinness & Y. Soncul. DeGruyter (2025).
"The Shaman and the Flash Drive." In From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans, ed. R. Pace. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press (2018).
"Broken words, displaced relationships, and the translation of songs in Eastern Amazonia." Journal de la Société des Américanistes 106(1): 105–126 (2020).
(with J.D. Hauck) "Language in the Amerindian Imagination: An Inquiry into Linguistic Natures." Language & Communication 63: 1–8 (2018).
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