A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology) [1 ed.] 1119780659, 9781119780656

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A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology offers a series of comprehensive syntheses of the ­traditional subdisciplines, primary subjects, and geographic areas of inquiry for the field. Taken together, the series represents both a contemporary survey of anthropology and a cutting edge guide to the emerging research and intellectual trends in the field as a whole. 1. A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti 2. A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, edited by David Nugent and Joan Vincent 3. A Companion to the Anthropology of American Indians, edited by Thomas Biolsi 4. A Companion to Psychological Anthropology, edited by Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton 5. A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan, edited by Jennifer Robertson 6. A Companion to Latin American Anthropology, edited by Deborah Poole 7. A Companion to Biological Anthropology, edited by Clark Larsen 8. A Companion to the Anthropology of India, edited by Isabelle Clark-Decès 9. A Companion to Medical Anthropology, Second Edition edited by Merrill Singer, Pamela I. Erickson, and César E. Abadía-Barrero 10.  A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology, edited by David B. Kronenfeld, Giovanni Bennardo, Victor C. de Munck, and Michael D. Fischer 11. A Companion to Cultural Resource Management, edited by Thomas King 12. A Companion to the Anthropology of Education, edited by Bradley A. Levinson and Mica Pollock 13.  A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees 14. A Companion to Paleopathology, edited by Anne L. Grauer 15. A Companion to Folklore, edited by Regina F. Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem 16. A Companion to Forensic Anthropology, edited by Dennis Dirkmaat 17.  A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe, edited by Ullrich Kockel, Máiréad Nic Craith, and Jonas Frykman 18. A Companion to Border Studies, edited by Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan 19. A Companion to Rock Art, edited by Jo McDonald and Peter Veth 20. A Companion to Moral Anthropology, edited by Didier Fassin 21. A Companion to Gender Prehistory, edited by Diane Bolger 22.  A Companion to Organizational Anthropology, edited by D. Douglas Caulkins and Ann T. Jordan 23. A Companion to Paleoanthropology, edited by David R. Begun 24. A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, edited by Anne P. Underhill 25. A Companion to the Anthropology of Religion, edited by Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek 26. A Companion to Urban Anthropology, edited by Donald M. Nonini 27. A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altorki 28.  A Companion to Heritage Studies, edited by William Logan, Máiréad Nic Craith and Ullrich Kockel 29. A Companion to Dental Anthropology, edited by Joel D. Irish and G. Richard Scott 30. A Companion to Anthropology of Environmental Health, edited by Merrill Singer 31. A Companion to South Asia in the Past, edited by Gwen Robbins Schug and Subhash R. Walimbe 32.  A Companion to Anthropology of Africa, edited by Roy Richard Grinker, Stephen C. Lubkemann, Christopher B. Steiner, and Euclides Goncalves 33. A Companion to Anthropological Genetics, edited by Dennis H. O’Rourke 34.  A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner

Forthcoming A Companion to Biological Anthropology, Second Edition, edited by Clark Larsen A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology, edited by Cecilia Van Hollen and Nayantara Appleton

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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology

Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner

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A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Duranti, Alessandro, editor. | George, Rachel, editor. | Conley Riner, Robin, editor. Title: A new companion to linguistic anthropology / edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, Robin Conley Riner. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2023. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to anthropology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022042611 (print) | LCCN 2022042612 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119780656 (hardback) ISBN 9781119780823 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119780816 (epub) | ISBN 9781119780830 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Anthropological linguistics. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P35 .N49 2023 (print) | LCC P35 (ebook) | DDC 306.44--dc23/ eng/20221107 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042611 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042612 Cover images: A young musician playing in the Conga de los Hoyos during Carnival © Kristina Wirtz; Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock; Dr. Bobby Rodriguez conducting at Catalina Bar & Grill, Los Angeles © Alessandro Duranti Cover design by Wiley Set in 10/12.5pt GalliardStd by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India

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This edition first published in 2023 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Robin Conley Riner and Rachel George

Part I: Speech Communities and Their Contested Boundaries

viii xvii 1

13

1 On the Social Lives of Indigenous North American Languages Paul V. Kroskrity and Barbra A. Meek

15

2 Creolization: Its Context, Power, and Meaning Christine Jourdan

33

3 Language Endangerment and Renewal Sean O’Neill

49

4 Narrating Transborder Communities  Elizabeth Falconi

66

5 Mixing, Switching, and Languaging in Interaction Jan David Hauck and Teruko Vida Mitsuhara

86

6 Postcolonial Semiotics Angela Reyes

107

7 Deaf Communities: Constellations, Entanglements, and Defying Classifications 122 Erin Moriarty and Lynn Hou 8 Global Hip Hop: Style, Language, and Globalization H. Samy Alim

Part II: Literacies and Textualities Across Time and Space 9 Ancient Literacy Practices and Script Communities Alice Mandell

139

157 159

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Contents

10 Rethinking Translation and Transduction Susan Gal

178

11 Social Dramas: A Semiotic Approach Kristina Wirtz

194

12 Digital Literacies Rachel Flamenbaum and Rachel George

214

13 Digital Religious Discourse Ayala Fader

235

14 Linguistic Anthropology of the Visual Jennifer F. Reynolds

253

15 Technobodily Literacy in Video Interaction273 Samira Ibnelkaïd 16 Ethics and Language Steven P. Black

Part III: Speaking, Sensing, and Sounding

299

315

17 Contested Intentions Alessandro Duranti

317

18 Entanglements of Language and Experience in Everyday Life Elinor Ochs

334

19 Affect, Emotion, and Linguistic Shift Kathryn E. Graber

354

20 Using the Senses in Animal Communication Erica A. Cartmill

369

21 Human Touch Asta Cekaite and Marjorie Harness Goodwin

391

22 Socialization of Attention Lourdes de León

410

23 Sound, Voice, and the Felt Body Patrick Eisenlohr

428

24 Multimodality Keith M. Murphy

443

25 Language and Food Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Kathleen C. Riley

461

Part IV: Language, Power, and Justice

477

26 Language Policy and Ethnic Conflict Christina P. Davis

479

27 Secrecy Erin Debenport

494

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vi  contents

28 Legal Language and Its Ideologies509 Robin Conley Riner 29 Language, Gender, Race, and Sexuality: Intersectional Perspectives Lal Zimman

525

30 Engaged Linguistic Anthropology542 Netta Avineri and Jocelyn Ahlers 31 Language and Racism560 Krystal A. Smalls and Jenny L. Davis 32 Communicative Justice and Health Charles L. Briggs

577

33 The Force of Indexicality Alessandro Duranti

596

Index

614

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contents  vii

Jocelyn Ahlers is Professor of Linguistics in the Liberal Studies Department at California State University, San Marcos. Her publications include “Unexpected benefits of a documentation project focused on interactional language use,” “Sawmill at Paiute Mountain” (with Laura Grant), and “Native California languages as semiotic resources in the performance of identity.” Her research interests encompass language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation, as well as the role of contemplative pedagogy in supporting student success in social justice-oriented classes. H. Samy Alim is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. He is Associate Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and serves as Faculty Director of the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative. He has written extensively about language, race, and Hip Hop Culture in Street Conscious Rap (1999, with James G. Spady and Charles G. Lee), Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture (2006), Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language (with Awad Ibrahim and Alastair Pennycook), and Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism, and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa (with Adam Haupt, Quentin Williams, and Emile Jansen). His most recent book is Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures (with Jeff Chang and Casey Wong). Netta Avineri is Language Teacher Education Associate Professor and Intercultural Competence Committee Chair at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She is also a Critical Service-Learning and Teacher Education Lecturer at California State University, Monterey Bay. She is author of Research Methods for Language Teaching Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis, co-editor of Language and Social Justice in Practice (with Laura R. Graham, Eric J. Johnson, Robin Conley Riner, and Jonathan Rosa), and co-editor of Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language (with Jesse Harasta). She is Series Editor for Critical Approaches in Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include language and social justice, interculturality, and heritage language socialization.

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Notes on Contributors

Steven P. Black is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University. He has conducted research on global health discourses since 2008 with a focus on topics such as ethics and performance, and previously served as the chair of the Committee on Ethics of the American Anthropological Association. He is the author of Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health: Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa, is coeditor of a special issue of Medical Anthropology titled, “Communicating Care,” and has published pieces at the intersection of linguistic and medical anthropology in edited volumes and in journals including American Anthropologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Ethos, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society. He is also the PI on a National Geographic-funded collaborative multimedia ethnography focused on indigenous knowledge, planetary health, and cultural sustainability in Boruca Indigenous Territory, Costa Rica. Charles L. Briggs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (with Richard Bauman), Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life (with Daniel Hallin), and Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge. His work bridges linguistic, medical, and media anthropology and Latin American Social Medicine. He has conducted ethnographic research primarily in Latin America, especially Venezuela, and the United States, including among Latinx populations. His current work includes a large ethnographic study of knowledge production, care, and narratives in the COVID-19 pandemic and a book project that seeks to decolonize perspectives in linguistic and medical anthropology by focusing on health/communicative inequity and justice. Erica A. Cartmill is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the evolution of language and cognition through research with human children and great apes. Her work highlights gesture and multimodal communication across species, as well as the role of early development in learning about the minds of others. Her collaborative studies span many species, from parrots to cetaceans. She has published in a wide range of journals, including the Annual Review of Anthropology; PNAS; Phil Trans B; Current Biology; Biology Letters; Language, Interaction and Acquisition; Developmental Psychology; Cognition; and Animal Cognition. She aims to connect ethological, anthropological, and psychological theory, and to promote interdisciplinary perspectives in scholarship. She co-directs the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which brings together scholars interested in the study of mind, cognition, and intelligence for several weeks of interdisciplinary exploration. Jillian R. Cavanaugh is Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College CUNY and the Anthropology Program at the Graduate Center CUNY. Her publications include Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town and Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Perspectives (co-edited with Shalini Shankar). Her research interests include language and food, linguistic labor, language ideologies, language materiality, and language and gender. Asta Cekaite is Professor of Child Studies, Thematic Research Unit, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and social

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notes on contributors  ix

interaction. Specific foci include social perspectives on bilingualism, embodiment, touch, emotion, and moral socialization. Empirical fields cover adult-child and children’s peer group interactions in educational settings, and family in various cultural contexts. With M. Goodwin she has co-authored Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care and Mundane Creativity. She has co-edited (with L. Mondada) Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language and Body. Christina P. Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Western Illinois University. She is the author of The Struggle for a Multilingual Future: Youth and Education in Sri Lanka and co-editor (with Chaise LaDousa) of Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia. She is the author of a number of articles including “Speaking Conflict: Ideological Barriers to Bilingual Policy Implementation in Civil War Sri Lanka,” “Trilingual Blunders: Signboards, Social Media, and Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Publics,” “Memes, Emojis, and Text: The Semiotics of Differentiation in Sri Lankan Tamil Social Media Groups,” and “South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media” (with Chaise LaDousa). Her research interests concern language and digital media practices, language policy, multilingual education, and ethnic conflict, with a geographical focus on Sri Lanka and India. Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her research areas include Indigenous language revitalization; language, gender, and sexuality; creative writing; and research methods and ethics (Indigenous, collaborative, and speculative). She is the author of Trickster Academy and Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance and co-editor of Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Lal Zimman and Joshua Raclaw). Erin Debenport is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Associate Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. Her published work focuses on secrecy, revelation, and literacy, and she contributes to ongoing language reclamation projects with several Pueblo Nations. She is the author of Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibility, and has published articles in The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, American Anthropologist, The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, Language and Communication, and The Annual Review of Anthropology. Alessandro Duranti is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published extensively on political discourse in Samoa and in the US, improvisation in language and music, intentionality, and agency. His books include The Samoan Fono: A Sociolinguistic Study; From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village; Linguistic Anthropology; and The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others. His most recent book project is the edited volume Rethinking Politeness with Henri Bergson. Patrick Eisenlohr is Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Society and Culture in Modern India at the University of Göttingen. He previously held positions at Utrecht University, Washington University in St. Louis, and New York University. In 2010 he received a fiveyear VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). He is

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x  notes on contributors

the author of Little India: Diaspora, Time and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius, and Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World. Ayala Fader is Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age. Fader was elected fellow at the American Academy for Jewish Research and will be a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder and director of the Wenner-Gren supported Demystifying Language Project, which uses linguistic anthropology to address inequalities in NYC public high schools. Elizabeth Falconi is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of West Georgia. Her research investigates the relationship between language, migration and belonging amid language shift in a Zapotec transborder community. She is the co-editor of Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell, and several articles and book chapters including “Storytelling, Language Shift and Revitalization in a Transborder Community: ‘Tell it in Zapotec,’” and (with Steven Black) “Linguistic Anthropology and Ethnolinguistics.” Rachel Flamenbaum is Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Sacramento. Their research interests include digital literacies, language socialization, silence, and ideologies of codeswitching. Her most recent publication is “‘Am I Your Co-Equal?!’: Memes and changing meanings in the digital subversion of Ghanaian hierarchies.” Susan Gal is Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social life (with Judith T. Irvine), winner of the 2021 Sapir Prize. Earlier she co-authored The Politics of Gender After Socialism (with Gail Kligman), and co-edited Languages and Publics (with Kathryn Woolard). Gal’s research investigates the connections between language as social action, the values that regiment it, and the ways it makes and remakes identities, hierarchies and political economies. Her many articles analyze European social relations, as well as the history of linguistics. She has written about language and gender, the semiotics of nationalism and ideologies of translation. Rachel George is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Whitman College. Her research interests include language socialization after regime change, ambivalent discourse, language and bureaucracy, and the semiotics of writing on social media. Her work on changing linguistic, political, and ethnic identities in Belgrade, Serbia has been published in Language in Society and Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Marjorie Harness Goodwin is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 2014. She is the author of He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children, The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status and Exclusion, and co-author with Asta Cekaite of Embodied Family Choreography: Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity. Her interests include video analysis of talk-in-interaction, talk in the workplace, touch and embodiment as interactively organized social practices, and language through the life cycle.

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notes on contributors  xi

Kathryn E. Graber is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia and co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Falconi) of Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell. Her research interests include minority language politics, multilingualism, mass media, materiality, embodiment, and intellectual property in Russia and Mongolia. Jan David Hauck is British Academy Newton International Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Geography of Philosophy Project at UCLA. In his decade-long research with the Indigenous Aché communities in Paraguay, he has carried out a language documentation project as well as a socialization study of children, documenting the emergence of a new mixed language. He is the author of Language Under Construction and has published in Language & Communication and American Ethnologist, among other journals. His research focuses on the perception of language and linguistic difference, the ontological underpinnings of conceptions of language, language ideologies, grammaticalization, the narrative construction of self, ethics and morality, and human–environment relations. Lynn Hou (she/they) is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of interest encompass documentation and description of sign languages with a focus on social justice, linguistic ethnography, usage-based linguistics, and child language acquisition. Samira Ibnelkaïd is Associate Researcher at the ICAR Laboratory in Lyon, France, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research mainly focuses on complex and renewed intersubjective practices of embodied and (digitally) artifacted interactions (in mundane, artistic and workplace settings). She is co-editor of the book “Fabrique de l’interaction parmi les Écrans: Formes de Présences en Recherche et en Formation” [Enacting Interaction Among Screens: Forms of Presence in Research and Teaching]. Christine Jourdan is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. She received a PhD in Anthropology/Linguistics from the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. Her work focuses on theories of cultural and social change, on the pidginization and creolization of cultures and languages, on the development of urban cultural worlds in Melanesia, on language ideology and on changing food ideologies and practices in Québec and in the Pacific. She is currently researching the transformations of bridewealth in urban Solomon Islands, and carrying out a historical ethnography of Labastide-Murat, in South-West France. Paul V. Kroskrity is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research examines a variety of topics including language ideologies, language contact, language and identity, linguistic racism, and language revitalization. Based on long-term collaborative research in the Village of Tewa (Arizona) and in The Northfork Rancheria of Mono Indians (California), he examines the dynamics of language change within multilingual Indigenous communities. His books include Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa; Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities; Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (co-edited with Bambi B. Schieffelin and Kathryn Woolard); Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country (co-edited with Margaret Field); Telling Stories in the Face of

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xii  notes on contributors

Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities; The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Ethnopoetics, Narrative Inequality, and Voice (co-edited with Anthony Webster); Engaging Native American Publics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Collaborative Key (co-edited with Barbra Meek); and The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (coedited with H. Samy Alim and Angela Reyes). Lourdes de León is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at CIESAS (Mexico). She has conducted linguistic and anthropological research among the Tzotzil Mayan in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico for nearly four decades, as well as in other parts of indigenous regions of Mexico. Her research investigates community learning, language socialization, and acquisition of Tzotzil Mayan throughout the life span. She is the author La Llegada del Alma: Lenguaje, Infancia y Socialización Entre los Mayas De Zinacantán and other edited books and articles including “The Emergent Participant: Interactional Patterns in the Socialization of Mayan Children,” “Texting Amor: Emerging Intimacies in New Courtship Practices among Tzotzil Mayan Youth,” “Mayan Children’s Creation of Learning Ecologies by Initiative and Cooperative Action,” and “Playing at Being Bilingual: Bilingual Performances, Stance, and Language Scaling in Tzotzil Mayan Siblings Play.” Alice Mandell is the Albright Chair of Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is a specialist in the literatures, religions, and history of the ancient Levant. Her research includes publications that examine literacy practices in the ancient Levant with a focus on the use of cuneiform and the linear, alphabetic scripts of the second and first millennium bce. She also researches the use of writing in contexts of ritual and performance in the ancient southern Levant. Barbra A. Meek is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics and the director of Native American Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community, and co-editor of Engaging Native American Publics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Collaborative Key (with Paul Kroskrity). Her research interests include race, ethnicity, and Indigenous language variation. Teruko Vida Mitsuhara is a linguistic anthropologist whose research focuses on empirical utopias and world-building movements. She completed her dissertation Moving Toward Utopia at the University of California, Los Angeles, based on two years of ethnographic field research in a religious community in Mayapur, West Bengal, northern India, and has started a project on a Black utopia in Georgia, US. Both projects center on women and children’s migration to intentional and utopian communities in response to violence and perceptions of apocalypse. Her research interests include migration, multilingualism, linguistic empathy, new religious movements, Afrofuturism, race, gender, narrative, and conceptions of time and space. She has published in Civilisations and Cultural Anthropology. She is a staff user experience researcher at Adobe where she investigates the future of digital creativity and is a freelance consultant for entertainment market research on issues of race and inclusion. Erin Moriarty is Assistant Professor and program director for the Graduate Program in Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC and an honorary research fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Her research interests include linguistic ethnography, translanguaging, language ideologies, deaf mobilities, the deaf ecosystem, affect and

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notes on contributors  xiii

the senses, and moral orientations. Her recent articles include “Deaf cosmopolitanism: calibrating as a moral process” (with Annelies Kusters), “Filmmaking in a Linguistic Ethnography of Deaf Tourist Encounters”, and “‘Sign to me, not the children’: Ideologies of language contamination at a deaf tourist site in Bali”, as well as an ethnographic film, #DeafTravel: Deaf Tourism in Bali. Keith M. Murphy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Swedish Design: An Ethnography, and co-editor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (with C. Jason Throop) and Designs and Anthropologies: Frictions and Affinities (with Eitan Wilf). His research interests include language and embodiment, design, writing systems, and ethnographic methods. Elinor Ochs is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research considers how talk mobilizes received and innovative ways of thinking, feeling and acting and how informal communication throughout the life span is intertwined with the political economy. Ochs co-pioneered the field of language socialization, which examines how novices become socio-culturally competent as they acquire language. She has (co)authored/edited 12 books and led 18 major research projects, including the UCLA Sloan Center on Everyday Lives of Families (2001–2010). Selected honors include MacArthur Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and Honorary Doctorate Linkoping University. Sean O’Neill is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, where he specializes in the expression of oral literature in multicultural and multilingual settings. He is particularly interested in the intersection of language and music, an area of research that holds tremendous interest today as indigenous languages undergo revitalization, with emphasis on oral narrative and song. He is the author and editor of numerous books and papers on the languages of the Americas, including The Collected Works of Edward Sapir (14): Northwest California Linguistics; Cultural Contact and linguistic Relativity among the Indians of Northwestern California; and Native American Placenames of the Southwest; and Dictionary of the Ponca People. His musical background includes making stringed instruments (guitars, ouds, and violins) as well as writing and performing in multiple musical genres. Angela Reyes is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) and Doctoral Faculty in the Program in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Reyes works on theories of semiotics, racialization, and coloniality. Her research examines historical and contemporary formations of language and personhood in the US and the Philippines. Her books include The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (co-edited with H. Samy Alim and Paul Kroskrity), Discourse Analysis Beyond the Speech Event (co-authored with Stanton Wortham), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America (co-edited with Adrienne Lo), and Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian. Jennifer F. Reynolds is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. Her work engenders the critical turn that language socialization studies have taken to address children and youth’s emerging linguistic repertoires and

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xiv  notes on contributors

translinguistic discourse practices within the context of transnational migration. Articles she authored include “Shaming the Shift Generation: Intersecting Ideologies of Family and Linguistic Revitalization in Guatemala,” “Translanguaging within Enactments of Quotidian Interpreter-Mediated Interactions” (with Marjorie Faulstich Orellana) and “(Be)laboring childhoods in Postville, Iowa.” Recently, she directed and produced A Day of 5K at Saluda Primary School and Un Día de Preprimaria en Toj Con Grande, which were ethnographic films for a transborder study of kindergarten classrooms serving Mayan Mam children which were then used to generate data featured in the article “A Multivocal Method Modeling Cross-Cultural Research in Multilingual Educational Settings Connected Through a Transborder Migratory Circuit.” Kathleen C. Riley is Assistant Teaching Professor of Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology at Rutgers University. She has researched multilingualism and language ideologies, foodand-language socialization, and food (inter)activism in French Polynesia, France, Montreal, Vermont, and New York City. She has co-authored with Amy Paugh the teaching text Food and Language: Discourses and Foodways across Cultures; co-edited with Christine Jourdan a special issue of Anthropologie et Sociétés on food and globalization; co-edited with Jillian Cavanaugh a special issue of Semiotic Review on food and language; and published articles on related topics in Language and Communication, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, and Signs and Society. Robin Conley Riner is Professor of Anthropology at Marshall University. Her work in linguistic and legal anthropology investigates how people use language to navigate morally complex experiences surrounding institutional death and killing. She is the author of Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases and coeditor of Language and Social Justice in Practice. Krystal A. Smalls is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, African American Studies, and African Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of the forthcoming Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora (Oxford University Press). Her research focuses on semiotics, race, gender, diaspora, youth, and digital sociality. Kristina Wirtz is Professor of Spanish at Western Michigan University. A linguistic and cultural anthropologist, she examines the role of ritual, performance, and chronotope in religious practice, racialization, and the contexts of linguistic diversity in Cuba and the broader African Diaspora and in bilingual educational settings in the US. Her publications include Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería and Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History, which won the 2015 Edward Sapir Prize from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology. Lal Zimman is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he leads the Trans Research in Linguistics Lab. His academic and advocacy work are focused on transgender communities, addressing topics related to language, identity, embodiment, and power. Zimman’s research uses mixed methods to address topics such as trans people’s linguistic agency (in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language), the contestation of normative constructions of “biological sex” (in Queer Excursions); trans-inclusive language activism and reform (Journal of Language &

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notes on contributors  xv

Discrimination); and the ways trans voices unsettle assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the voice (in Journal of Language & Sexuality, and Language in Society). He is coeditor of Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, which received the Association for Queer Anthropology’s Ruth Benedict Prize. Zimman’s current work includes projects on singular they, real-time change in trans identity terminology online, trans college students’ experiences with language, and the race-gender nexus in media portrayals of drag.

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xvi  notes on contributors

We thank the contributors to this volume for participating in this collective enterprise and accepting to revise their earlier drafts to make them accessible to a wider range of readers. We are also grateful to the reviewers of our original book proposal for their feedback and encouragement and to Charlie Hamlyn and the rest of the Wiley Blackwell production team for their assistance and guidance throughout the process of conceiving and realizing this book. We thank Nicco La Mattina for carefully compiling the index.

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Acknowledgments

Robin Conley Riner and Rachel George A New Volume The original Companion to Linguistic Anthropology was published in 2004. The New Companion, whose all-new chapters aim to capture the state of the discipline in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, illustrates the many exciting new directions in linguistic anthropology as well as the persistence, elaboration, and transformation of some of the foundational concepts discussed in the 2004 volume. The major sections in the new volume showcase how the subfield has reworked classic linguistic anthropological concepts and methods and developed new ones in response to political, social, and technological developments over the last several decades, including (1) renewing commitments to engaged linguistic anthropology in a time of ongoing political and environmental crises; (2) continuing to both critique and assert the relevance of “community” and its multiple variants as a unit of analysis; (3) tracing the temporal and spatial contours of interaction in a globalized, mediatized world; and (4) emphasizing the role of the senses and experience in language. In the introduction, we explore each of these developments in turn, revealing ways they influence each other and how they have shaped thematic developments in the field, including the rise to prominence of topics such as chronotope and scale, materiality, language and experience, decolonization, and posthumanism. The discussion focuses on the ways in which: ●

●

●

Linguistic anthropologists have recommitted themselves to social justice issues and responded directly to political and historical events and crises of the first two decades of the twenty-first century; The resulting new thematic directions in linguistic anthropology have both transformed and reaffirmed the field’s classic topics of study, methods, and theoretical underpinnings; Such developments enable new forms of interdisciplinarity both within and beyond anthropology and allow us to (re)consider both the place of language and the takenfor-granted centrality of humans in our research.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Introduction

The chapters in the New Companion—whose authors range from burgeoning to seasoned scholars—take these topics head-on, using ethnographically-grounded research to reflect explicitly on what it means to do linguistic anthropology in the twenty-first century. The developments discussed in this introduction are not remaking linguistic anthropology; they more often represent a continuation of the efforts of the early founders of the field, who strived to ground the study of language in human interaction, including its political and ethical entanglements. While remaining rooted in the origins of the field, the approaches exhibited in this volume collectively constitute a re-envisioning of research on language and/as culture. This includes, as discussed in our conclusion, how language itself has been reimagined within linguistic anthropology and the ways in which this reimagining is carrying us into the future.

Engaged Linguistic Anthropology during Ongoing Crisis Linguistic anthropologists have long been engaged (though not always unproblematically), oriented to social justice, and influenced by the political moment in which they exist (Avineri et al. 2019; Bauman and Briggs 2003). So, while a politically-sensitive, socially-engaged linguistic anthropology is certainly not new, as outlined in Netta Avineri and Jocelyn Ahlers’ chapter (Chapter 30), we suggest that there has been an increased sense of urgency to respond—and respond quickly—to events as they unfold. Thus, what has changed in the start of the twenty-first century is not our engagement, but our explicit commitment to an event-responsive linguistic anthropology. Janet McIntosh (2020), for instance, referred to Trump’s presidency as a linguistic emergency, indicating the urgency for scholars of language and interaction to address ongoing political events and crises. This sense of urgency is in part facilitated by and also encourages changes in how we disseminate linguistic anthropology research. Efforts to establish an event-responsive linguistic anthropology have included, for example, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Language and Social Justice (LSJ) Task Group, which was formed in 2008 when linguistic anthropologists dedicated to social justice issues joined forces with the American Anthropological Association’s Committee on Human Rights (Avineri et al. 2019, p. 3). The LSJ Task group has since spearheaded a number of initiatives aimed at using linguistic anthropological research to facilitate social and policy change, including efforts to end the use of American Indian names as sports mascots and to change the language categories and labels used on the US Census.1 This urgent, responsive approach is also reflected in the American Association of Anthropology’s recent decision to add a slate of “late-breaking panels”—panels that form quickly in response to unexpected events that arise after the deadline for submitting panel and presentation proposals—to their annual meeting schedule. A renewed commitment to engaged linguistic anthropology has not just meant using our work to solve problems. It has also transformed the subfield’s theoretical and methodological core, leading to the rise of major thematic areas—such as materiality, chronotope, and scale, discussed below—over the past twenty years. It is worth considering how such developments are tied to specific events and movements in the early 2000s and 2010s. In some cases, political forces indirectly influence scholarly preoccupations over a fairly long period; in others, authors respond quickly and directly to specific events. 1

  For more information on LSJ initiatives, see https://www.linguisticanthropology.org/socialjustice/initiatives

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2  robin conley riner and rachel george

The 9/11 attack and ensuing “Global War on Terror”2 undoubtedly represented a sea change in American domestic and international politics. The fear-based rhetoric of the era seemed to call for an anthropological response. Although some of the most notable responses arguably came from other subfields in anthropology—see, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod’s (2002) “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?”—linguistic anthropology found itself well-placed to critique War on Terror discourse (Hodges 2011), anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment across the globe (Garcia-Sanchez 2014; Klein 2009), linguistically-mediated notions of citizenship and nationalism (Suleiman 2003), and even the distinctive linguistic style of thenPresident George W. Bush (Silverstein 2003). Michael Silverstein’s book, Talking Politics, was the first of three books in linguistic anthropology to examine the language use of three consecutive presidents, the other two being Articulate While Black (Alim and Smitherman 2012), focusing on Barack Obama’s distinctive linguistic abilities and the public’s response to them, and the edited volume Language in the Trump Era (McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020). Other political events and movements have influenced the direction of linguistic anthropology in the twenty-first century. Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the accompanying move toward more class-consciousness in American politics (Hickel 2012), for example, coincide to some extent with sharper critiques of neoliberalism and a renewed focus in linguistic anthropology on materiality and the commodification of language (Heller 2003, 2010). Our subfield’s focus on linguistic ideologies and capital, often tied to a kind of symbolic marketplace (Bourdieu 1991; Jaffe 1993), is now also explicitly linked to literal, material market value (e.g., Blommaert 2009; Park and Wee 2012; Rahman 2009; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). The election of President Donald Trump and the accompanying resurgence of and visibility of white supremacist movements, the Black Lives Matter movement, Indigenous movements such as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (DAPL)3 and institutions of land acknowledgments,4 and ongoing efforts to remove or recontextualize statues and monuments to missionaries, colonizers, other invaders, and Confederate generals,5 all go hand-in-hand with the development and rise of the raciolinguistics research agenda (Alim et al. 2016), a growing interest in building on the efforts of scholars such as Mary Bucholtz (2011) and Jane Hill (2008) to theorize and problematize whiteness, and broader calls to decolonize linguistic anthropology (Rosa and Bonilla 2017). Additional global upheavals continue to shape the trajectory of linguistic anthropology. Migrant crises across the globe—together with the rise of nativist politics—sharpen our subfield’s focus on migration, movement, and borders, spurring scholars in this area to continually problematize and retheorize notions of community, identity, and the supposed boundaries between so-called languages. The ongoing climate crisis opens up new areas of research (de Wit et al. 2018), evidenced by, for instance, a panel on ecolinguistics at the 2022 conference for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. These approaches attempt to (re)situate the study of language and culture in the “fertile terrain of human activity, saturated by language, interactivity and coexistence,” paying particular attention to the ecological terrain of human interaction (Steffensen and Fill 2014, p. 7). Finally, as we write this, the COVID-19 pandemic is in its third year. Emerging connections between linguistic anthropologists and both medical/psychological anthropologists

2

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/22/514988040/ key-moments-in-the-dakota-access-pipeline-fight 4  https://nativeamericancouncil.org.uiowa.edu/acknowledgement-land-and-sovereignty#:~:text=ALandAckno wledgementisa,Peoplesandtheirtraditionalterritories. 5  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html 3

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introduction  3

and media scholars are relevant to understanding the lived experience of the virus and efforts to fight and prevent it (Briggs, Chapter 32). Living in crisis mode in response to the pandemic has awakened researchers and everyday people to lives that were dominated by crisis well before the pandemic and those that will continue to be long after it has passed. Linguistic anthropologists’ more recent focus on the ways in which language mediates experience— whether of crisis, violence, oppression, or death (e.g., Pillen 2016)—reflects this development. In addition to a marked urgency in responding to global events, linguistic anthropologists have exhibited a commitment to producing work that can make real-world impact. As Alejandro Paz wrote presciently in 2019 of linguistic anthropologists, “as we search for ways to respond to our uncertain times … we are faced with the task of parlaying our expertise into political agency” (2020, p. 280). Practitioners are increasingly demanding that the field locate the starting point for research in the material, critical, unjust conditions of life affecting the majority of the world’s population. This follows a trend within anthropology in general in which what used to be considered “applied” or “engaged” anthropology is now becoming integral to how anthropological theory and methods are conceptualized, taught, and carried out. There has been an increased push to marry theory and practice, with new emphasis on the ways in which material, historical events shape and constrain our theoretical tenets. This has included efforts to merge theorizations of ethics and morality with ethical models for research (Black and Riner 2021) and raciolinguists’ urge to locate colonial structures within both linguistic theory and methods of analysis (Rosa and Flores 2017). Redefining engagement is part of a move to decolonize institutions—including anthropology—in the United States.6 For linguistic anthropology, this can mean focusing our work on how “various structures of power come to be understood and contested” and promoting structural change, rather than merely modifying individual practices and/or policies (Rosa and Flores 2021, p. 1163). Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores urge us, as part of these efforts, to “interrogate how numerous normative concepts and logics” within the study of language and culture “reenact dominant power structures” (ibid). They argue, specifically, that approaches that only focus on the inclusion of marginalized populations and practices remain rooted in “normative assumptions about the nature of societal problems and solutions” that fail to capture the injustices that are integral to the founding and maintenance of many nations, including the US. Linguistic injustices, they remind us, are in fact normative across the globe. Decolonizing linguistic anthropology, therefore, requires redirecting focus away from marginalized people’s linguistic practices toward “the systemic historical and institutional processes that overdetermine these practices as deficient” (ibid, p. 1164). They envision this shift as a methodological one, in which the object of study transitions from language use to institutional power structures. It also means adjusting notions of anthropological expertise by ceding academic authority and foregrounding previously-marginalized voices.

Emerging Themes: Communities across Time/Space, Sensorial Experience, and the Material World Communities Across Time and Space

Over 25 years ago, Arjun Appadurai (1996) identified media and migration as key drivers of globalization and the imagination. Linguistic anthropologists, among others, have been rethinking what it means to live in a globalized, mobilized, and often digitized world, 6

  We recognize that many efforts to “decolonize” any academic field continue to replicate colonial hierarchies and structures.

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4  robin conley riner and rachel george

historicizing such changes—which often means questioning their assumed newness (Gershon 2010; Reyes 2014)—and considering their impact on our key theories and methods. Among these efforts is rethinking fundamental notions such as speech community (Gumperz 1968; Morgan 2004; Spitulnik 1996) as groups of speakers spread out across time and space. The notion of “continuity,” for example, while it remains a problematic metric for indigenous speakers (Kroskrity and Meek, Chapter 1), locates what is often reified as a “speech community” in relation to the practices and ideologies that connect across spatio-temporal planes. Groups retain some form of identity, in this conceptualization, via the “interdiscursive connections that render a group legible to itself and to others” (ibid). The notion of “narrated community,” which attempts to capture the experiences of individuals who “live their lives moving across cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or geopolitical boundaries,” is used similarly to conceptualize how speakers form a sense of community via “shared cultural perspectives and experiences … through the telling and circulation of culturally-specific narratives” (Falconi, Chapter 4). “Regimes of Participation,” described by Rachel Flamenbaum and Rachel George (Chapter 12), explains how young people in both Ghana and Serbia (like elsewhere) co-create and contest the meanings and boundaries of the communities to which they claim belonging. Conceptualizations such as translanguaging, as explored by Jan Hauck and Teru Mitsuhara (Chapter 5), are additional examples of this approach, in that they “transcend socially constructed linguistic borders” associated with ideologies that reify homogeneous, naturalized categorizations of language, identity, and nation (Rosa and Flores 2021, p. 1165). A revitalized need to incorporate historical perspectives into our work, along with a desire to better understand how speakers, language practices, and ideologies are connected across the globe, have led linguistic anthropologists to focus on the temporal and spatial dimensions of language. In his outline of key ideas in linguistic anthropology in the context of globalization, Jan Blommaert highlights the concepts of chronotope, which, drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), he defines as “invokable chunks of history” that help organize sign meanings (Blommaert 2015, p. 105), and scale, which he defines as the “scope of communicability” (ibid) of particular utterances. The notions of chronotope and scale— along with an increasing reliance on historical perspectives and data in linguistic anthropology—open up new ways for researchers to use the past to understand the present (Monaghan 2011). This has included studies of how people “use constructions of the past and future to make claims for individual or collective rights, national identity or religious space” (Monaghan 2011, p. 226). Thus, part of creating a field more responsive to present-day events has involved an ironic turning back to the past, including uncovering the history of the field’s own institutions, practices, and theoretical commitments (Monaghan 2011, p. 229). Spatio-temporal connections are made more visible, moreover, by work that centralizes movement, rather than place, as an orienting perspective (Paz 2020; Falconi, Chapter 4), an approach that has been characterized as a “new mobilities paradigm” (Creswell 2010). Studies in chronotope and scale can also reveal how mobility itself has been and continues to be a marker of inequality and control, as the networks across which connections are made are not constructed nor available equally for everyone.

Sensorial Experience and Materiality

The perspectives outlined in the sections above all focus on the nature of language as a fundamental human experience (Ochs 2012, and Chapter 18), as well as identifying how language experiences are interconnected with nonhuman aspects of our world. This includes

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introduction  5

emphasizing the material, sensory, and affective contours of language use. In line with shifts in anthropology and other social sciences toward the materiality of experience—a departure from approaches that focus mainly on ideology and political economy (Pennycook 2018)— new emphasis has been placed in linguistic anthropology on the senses and the nature and contours of language as experience. This perspective emphasizes that, in addition to encoding and categorizing experience, using language is itself part of experiencing the world (Ochs 2012). We encounter the world, use language, and interact with all of our senses and, because of this, we must include the material world and its sensual qualities in studies of language and culture. Linguistic anthropologists such as Kathryn Graber (Chapter 19), for instance, advocate for emphasis on the personal and emotional—alongside the systemic and political-economic—aspects of language shift. Similar work has highlighted speakers’ emotional attachment to language forms and the experiential contours of language loss (Vann 2010; Wood 2010). Increased focus on the senses also adds to studies on multimodality (Murphy, Chapter 24) by highlighting the multisensory qualities of communication. It connects to indexicality via the study of qualia, or signs that manifest as sensuous or material qualities (e.g., softness). In other words, the notion of qualia (Chumley and Harkness 2013; Harkness 2015) reminds us that signs are mediated not only by mental processes and ideologies, but also by our sensory and bodily experiences in the world. A focus on materiality also manifests in attention to both the stuff of everyday life and to the material conditions of cultural life—that is, to the economic, social, and experiential (e.g., regarding pain and stress) conditions of inequality. As noted above, research in this area is related to a renewed focus on the effects of late capitalism on language use and attitudes and to the literal (not just symbolic) market value of particular languages and varieties. The posthumanist turn in the social sciences, moreover, has been felt in linguistic anthropology; researchers increasingly attend to the interconnections and porousness between humans and their material worlds, questioning underlying conceptions of language, cognition, and subjectivity (Pennycook 2018, p. 446). Developments along these lines include the concept of distributed agency (Enfield and Kockelman 2017). Interdisciplinary at its core, this concept highlights how agency, including the related concepts of intentionality and causality, is distributed across individuals, bodies, minds, and material aspects of the world (cf. Latour 1990). Such an approach impacts our view of signs as something also produced by non-human entities such as trees (Kohn 2013) and involving more than abstract referents. The move to decenter humans, their minds, and their projects in studies of language and interaction is evident in Erica Cartmill’s chapter (Chapter 20), which prompts questions about how the study of animal communication might impact basic linguistic concepts such as reference. In all of these emerging themes, we see evidence for the influence of migration and media, just as Appadurai suggested. The kinds of social imaginings that migration engenders are often multisensory and tied to material goods, e.g., food (Cavanaugh and Riley, Chapter 25). Linguistic anthropology can also participate in a cross-subfield, multispecies (i.e., post humanist) approach to migration, evidenced by Jason De Leon’s (2015) The Land of Open Graves, which integrates a close examination of language (in the would-be migrants’ comedic interactional routines and narratives of their own attempted border crossings and in the rhetoric of immigration policy, for example) into a broader picture of distributed agency, in which animals, plants, and humans all co-create the inhuman conditions for those crossing the Sonoran Desert. The impact of digital media on our theories and methods also comes through in the development of these themes. Affect and the senses are a key part of communicative

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6  robin conley riner and rachel george

competence online, and writing choices often involve a combination and negotiation of practical, aesthetic, and ideological considerations (Flamenbaum and George, Chapter 12). Digital technologies enable the marketing of language as a commodity, as evidenced by the popularity of Duolingo and other language-learning applications. Digital media represents yet another possibility for linguistic anthropologists to contribute to posthuman and/or multispecies anthropology, as the line between humans and machines continues to blur and we consider the “cyborg” (Haraway 2016[1985]) and virtual aspects of both digital and face-to-face interactions (Boellstorff 2008; Johnson and Jones 2020; Whitehead and Wesch 2012). Digital media can both constrain and enable democratizing and decolonizing movements worldwide and can alleviate or worsen physical, ideological, and economic divides, depending on the context (Postill 2012; Jones 2014; Barney et al. 2016; Smalls, Chapter 31). Social media is also, perhaps, tied to the increasing event-responsiveness of linguistic anthropology. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa (2014) discuss the sense of “shared temporality” forged by Twitter hashtags, whereby users can participate in and discuss political events in real time despite physical distance. Carol McGranahan (2022) characterized Trump’s Twitter account as an “ongoing” press conference, to which the public was continuously responding. Linguistic anthropology’s event-responsiveness, then, perhaps reflects the increasing speed of political discourse among citizens.

Not (Just) the Study of Language, Not (Just) the Study of Humans: Language, Interdisciplinarity, and Posthumanism in the Third Paradigm and Beyond The new directions outlined above suggest that linguistic anthropology is undergoing a consolidation of what Alessandro Duranti called the “third paradigm” of linguistic anthropology, characterized by “projects that start from a concern for situating one’s work in the context of larger theoretical issues and an abandonment of the assumption that language should be one’s only or main preoccupation” (Duranti 2003, p. 332). Perhaps the urgency to engage with difficult domestic and global political issues intensified a trend already in progress, which is to see language “no longer as the primary object of inquiry but as an instrument for gaining access to complex social processes” (Duranti 2003, p. 332). That is not to say that Duranti’s first and second paradigms—which viewed language as a window into shared worldviews and which focused on language use among communities and across events, respectively—are absent from twenty-first century linguistic anthropology or from this volume. (In examining translation, Susan Gal’s and Steven Black’s chapters (Chapters 10 and 16) both contain elements of the first paradigm; work on speech communities and mixing are both important topics in the second.) Still, the departure from scholarship that “started from a fascination with linguistic forms and languages…or from their use in concrete and culturally significant social encounters” (Duranti 2003, p. 332) and subsequent move toward a view of language as illuminating larger cultural, political, and/ or historical phenomena has largely held over the past few decades. The expansion of this third paradigm has thus led to a different kind of focus on language, specifically how its ontology—including how we define and delineate languages, the structures and characteristics of particular language varieties, and ideologies about how language works (e.g., as a neutral system of reference with definite grammatical rules)—is constituted by and inextricable from institutionalized forms of oppression and discrimination and the remnants (and persistence) of colonial orders. As raciolinguistic scholars contend,

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introduction  7

the study of race and language (and how they are mutually entailed) encompasses both how race and racism are constituted by language (exemplifying the first and second paradigm) and how language is constituted by race and racism (perspective held by the third paradigm and beyond) (Rosa and Flores 2017). Recent linguistic anthropology—which, as we have outlined, is increasingly event-responsive and socially and politically engaged—has thus shifted its vantage point, questioning the nature of language, unsettling our assumptions about what it is and revealing ways in which our normative views of language are constructed by social events, systems of inequality, globalization, etc. The idea that we have changed our entry point into language studies from the particularities of language practice to the social and political realities of the world would seem to (at least partially) resonate with Constantine Nakassis’s assertion that contemporary linguistic anthropology is “not the study of language” (2016). He argues that language is “caught up in, and ultimately constituted by, indexical processes and modalities beyond itself,” which renders it “paradoxically central to linguistic anthropology, even as it necessarily opens up horizons for linguistic anthropological study beyond ‘language’” (Nakassis 2016, p. 331). When linguistic anthropologists apply their expertise in semiotics to unmask the subtleties of racism, sexism, or homophobia, or use a decolonial perspective to question our most deeply-held assumptions about the definition of language itself, they seem to confirm a position that actually carries across all three paradigms, which is that the study of language can never be just about language. Still, Nakassis’s argument raises the question of what contemporary linguistic anthropologists have to contribute to the detailed study of linguistic patterns. Studies of language and agency, for example, which appeared in the previous volume (Duranti 2004), allowed anthropologists to examine both the real power dynamics and capacity of people to act in particular social situations through their use of syntactic and semantic resources to portray agency, responsibility, and accountability in particular ways (Duranti 1994). Can linguistic anthropologists continue to have something to say about linguistic structure, even as they chip away at taken-for-granted assumptions about language? In any case, the reimagination of language research and shifting of our analytic entry point has broadened linguistic anthropology’s interdisciplinary possibilities. While the field has long drawn from and/or produced work of interest to fields such as sociology, biology, psychology, and literary analysis, to name a few, we focus here instead on new (or reconfigured) possibilities for interdisciplinarity within anthropology itself, as “the third paradigm, dealing with theoretical concerns that came from elsewhere, has a better chance of reconnecting with the rest of anthropology as Hymes proposed in the 1960s” (Duranti 2003, p. 332). Linguistic anthropology’s connections to medical and psychological anthropology have flourished since the first Companion was published in 2004 and are evident across multiple chapters in this volume (e.g., Briggs (Chapter 32), Graber (Chapter 19), and Ochs (Chapter 18)). Erica Cartmill’s chapter on animal communication (Chapter 20) and Alice Mandell’s chapter on ancient script communities (Chapter 9) suggest many new possibilities for strengthening ties between linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology and remind us that language remains a topic of interest across all subfields. Cross-subfield connections—together with the posthuman turn in anthropology and beyond—raise questions about what a newly-imagined, politically-engaged four (or five)field anthropology might look like and how linguistic anthropology might contribute to such a field. One source of inspiration comes from Charles Goodwin’s (2018) Co-operative Action, where we find a vision of human action that is public and achieved jointly through the step-wise and multimodal reuse and modification of prior action. In this view, interaction is essential but ultimately inseparable from other action in the material/natural world;

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8  introduction

conversation, tool creation and use, and species evolution, in this view, all proceed via parallel processes. Goodwin’s work is connected to other linguistic anthropologists’ examinations of James Gibson’s (1979) now famous concept of affordances, understood as the ways in which the natural and built environment constrain and enable human interaction in particular ways. Such approaches, which depart from theories of action rooted in intentions (Duranti, Chapter 17) decenter humans and call into question the qualities often attributed to them. This volume’s emphasis on the spatial, material, and sensory aspects of interaction are part of the posthuman turn and suggest new possibilities for cross-subfield integration in anthropology. They are also connected to linguistic anthropology’s ongoing (and oftentroubled) efforts to decolonize, as many Indigenous ways of knowing have long recognized the kinds of non-human agency and sign-making that linguistic anthropologists are only now beginning to address.

Imagining the Future of Linguistic Anthropology A key element to many of the trajectories of linguistic anthropological work we outline here is imagination. “The world we live in today,” Appadurai argued at the turn of the twentyfirst century, “is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life” (1996, p. 29). Imagination does not connote in this case a sense of the unreal; instead, it highlights ways in which concepts traditionally conceived as bounded, such as community and language, are always at some level inchoate, in-process, under construction, shifting, and rooted in, while reaching beyond, people’s experiential and material worlds (including what they are both able and not able to imagine). A focus on the imaginative removes the sense of boundedness and rigidity often attached to these classic linguistic anthropological concepts, features that facilitated the promotion and maintenance of colonial and modernist values, ideologies, and actions. Imagination involves the breaking down of temporal and spatial boundaries discussed above, divisions which allow us to maintain a blind eye to history and to ignore the experiences of those who we keep at geographic and social distance. Imagination arises in different forms in the research presented in this volume. In the case of migrants and diasporic communities, for instance, the spatio-temporal connections facilitated through narrative allow members of these groups to “imagine possible future moments of togetherness” (Falconi, Chapter 4). Focusing on creolization as a process of identity building, Christine Jourdan (Chapter 2) shows how language shift and creation are processes through which new ways of being and living emerge, all as a result of the imaginative work of people facing perilous and inescapable circumstances such as slavery. Imagination is about constructing what could be. The linguistic anthropological work included in this volume illustrates how groundbreaking research in academia and elsewhere may envision and enact new worlds that are more just, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and oriented both within and outside human action. Rosa and Flores contend that language, specifically, is a resource for “contribut[ing] to the collective imagination of decolonial futures and the forms of solidarity required to create them” (2021, p. 1166). Also crucial is our own imaginings of what the field of linguistic anthropology is and should be. A focus on imagination can help us see “the power the current research community has or does not have to imagine how and why it exists, what it values, and the inclusions and exclusions involved” (Globalisation, Societies and Education 2006, p. 161). Appadurai’s notion of imagined worlds relies, on one level, on the French imaginaire as “a constructed landscape of collective aspirations” (Appadurai 1996, p. 31). The work outlined in this introduction and the chapters in this volume provide vivid examples of such an aspirational linguistic anthropology.

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robin conley riner and rachel george  9

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Haraway, D.J. (2016[1985]). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In: Manifestly Haraway (ed. D.J. Haraway and C. Wolfe) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harkness, N. (2015). The pragmatics of qualia in practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 573–589. Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 473–492. Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 101–114. Hickel, J. (2012). Liberalism and the politics of occupy wall street. Anthropology of this Century 4. Hill, J. (2008). The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hodges, A. (2011). When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Jaffe, A. (1993). Pierre Bourdieu, language, and symbolic power. Language in Society 22 (1): 154–157. Johnson, A. and Jones, G. (2020). Language, the internet, and digital communication. In: The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology (ed. J. Stanlaw), 1–13. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Jones, G. (ed.) (2014). Anthropology in and of MooCs. American Anthropologist 116 (4): 829–838. Klein, W. (2009). Turban narratives: Discourses of identification and difference among Punjabi Sikh families. In: Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian America (eds. A. Lo and A. Reyes), 111–130. New York: Oxford University Press. Kohn, E. (2013). How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Oakland: University of California Press. Latour, B. (1990). On actor-network theory. A few clarifications plus more than a few complications. Philosophia 25 (3): 47–64. McGranahan, C. (2022). True lies: Insurrection, imperial narratives, and the denial of racism. Paper given at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Spring Conference April 7–9, 2022. McIntosh, J. (2020). Introduction: The Trump era as a linguistic emergency. In: Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies (ed. J. McIntosh and N. Mendoza-Denton), 1–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McIntosh, J. and Mendoza-Denton, N. (eds.). (2020). Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monaghan, L. (2011). The expanding boundaries of linguistic anthropology: 2010 in perspective. American Anthropologist 113 (2): 222–234. Morgan, M. (2004). Speech Communities. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (ed. A. Duranti), 3–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Nakassis, C. (2016). Linguistic anthropology in 2015: Not the study of language. American Anthropologist 118 (2): 330–345. Ochs, E. (2012). Experiencing language. Anthropological Theory 12 (2): 142–160. Park, J.S.-Y. and Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World. London: Routledge. Paz, A. (2020). Uncertain times: linguistic anthropology in 2019. American Anthropologist 122 (2): 272–283. Pennycook, A. (2018). Applied linguistic as epistemic assemblage. AILA Review 31 (1): 113–134. Pillen, A. (2016). Language, translation, trauma. Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 95–111. Postill, J. (2012). Digital politics and political engagement. In: Digital Anthropology (ed. H. Horst and D. Miller), 165–184. Oxford: Berg. Rahman, T. (2009). Language ideology, identity and the commodification of language in the call centers of Pakistan. Language in Society 38 (2): 233–258. Reyes, A. (2014). Linguistic anthropology in 2013: super‐new‐big. American Anthropologist 116 (2): 366–378. Rosa, J. and Bonilla, Y. (2017). Deprovincializing Trump, decolonizing diversity, and unsettling anthropology. American Ethnologist 44 (2): 201–208.

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Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647. Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2021). Decolonization, language, and race in applied linguistics and social justice. Applied Linguistics 42 (6): 1162–1167. Shankar, S. and Cavanaugh, J.R. (2012). Language and materiality in global capitalism. Annual review of anthropology 41: 355–369. Silverstein, M. (2003). Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to ‘W.’. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Spitulnik, D. (1996). The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6 (2): 161–187. Steffensen, S.V. and Fill, A. (2014). Ecolinguistics: The state of the art and future horizons. Language Sciences 41A: 6–25. Suleiman, Y. (2003). The Arabic Language and National Identity: A Study in Ideology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vann, E. (2010 July 2). Linguistic generations/Linguistic generation. Paper presented at the Wyoming Language, Culture, and History Conference Laramie. Whitehead, N. and Wesch, M. (2012). Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Wood, K. (2010 July 1). “The language ghost”: Linguistic heritage and collective identity among the Monacan Indians of central Virginia. Paper presented at the Wyoming Language, Culture, and History Conference Laramie.

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12  robin conley riner and rachel george

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PART

I

Speech Communities and Their Contested Boundaries

1

On the Social Lives of Indigenous North American Languages

Paul V. Kroskrity and Barbra A. Meek Introduction In contemporary Native American communities of North America, Indigenous heritage languages continue to provide critical resources for many projects that are as various and wide-ranging as the communities themselves. The diversity of Native American cultural adaptations to the varied ecozones of North America has been magnified by vastly different histories of migration, colonization, economic development, religious practice, and language ideologies of those Native American communities. Whether diasporic or living in traditional territory, communities may differ in having few or no traditional speakers, such as those using Indigenous California languages like Wappo or Esselen, to having hundreds of thousands, such as Navajo or Inuktitut, or even millions—like Nahuatl. Some, like the Hopi of Northern Arizona, have lived for more than a millennium in the same location while others, like the Cherokee and Chickasaw, have experienced the dislocation of removal by the settler-colonial society of the United States. While some communities still engage in traditional subsistence activities like farming, all have been economically incorporated into the larger economies of nation states and many derive revenue streams from mining, oil and other fossil fuels, cultural tourism, and gaming. Some tribes thereby enjoy considerable economic wealth, while others experience economic marginalization and poverty. In some communities, the heritage language is openly used and appears on road signs and building signage within the linguistic landscape, while in others it is spoken only in brief traditional greetings if it is spoken at all. Communities, and individuals within them, also differ dramatically in how they approach the maintenance and continuity of their heritage languages. Some support robust programs of language revitalization and commit energy and resources with the goal of creating future generations of speakers, while others cannot prioritize those goals, nor do they view their heritage languages as performing active roles in the

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

present or future. In this chapter, we explore some of the many and varied social lives of Indigenous languages that are the products of community action and individual agency designed to recruit these languages in tasks of cultural transformation, political resistance, and identity production.1

Three Variations of Colonial Pursuits: Language, Race, and Extinction As our introduction highlights, there is immense diversity within and across the sociolinguistic landscape of Native North America, with one common denominator: settler-­ colonialism. The legacy of settler-colonialism, and settler capitalism (Speed 2019), has impacted all the Indigenous language situations discussed in this chapter and has influenced both research trends and contemporary Indigenous practices. However, as with the diversity inherent in Native America, Indigenous language communities have been differentially affected by this legacy. Well-intentioned anthropologists and linguists in the early days of documentation and Boasian “salvage ethnography” (Gruber 1970) approached their objects of study from a colonial-nationalist perspective, seeking to establish, locate, and demarcate Indigenous polities using language as an emblem of social organization. Alongside physical attributes and material culture, (traditional) narratives and Indigenous languages provided the means for identifying political boundaries as long as one assumed a simple equivalence. Linguistically, this meant that colonial governments and ethnologists alike expected the Indigenous groups they encountered to speak only one language, anticipating what Michael Silverstein (1996a) called a “monoglot standard.” In his own work with the confederated tribes at Warm Springs, and Kiksht speakers in particular, linguistic anthropologist Silverstein worked to interrupt the ideological presupposition of a monolingual standard that pervaded research in and with these tribal communities, recognizing that “[t]here is a long history of plurilingualism in the historically dynamic speech community [of] Kiksht speaking peoples and various surrounding groups and newcomers to the area” (Silverstein 2017, p. 28). This multilingual norm remained peripheral to (most) documentary efforts up until the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. One of the first ethnographies to investigate and describe in detail the linguistic pluralism of a Native American tribe is Paul Kroskrity’s (1993) Language, History and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. Since then, the multilingual repertoires of tribal nations have become a cornerstone of Indigenous anthropological research in the Americas. Joining the Monoglot Standard in providing a distorted form of representation, “scientific” racism’s imagining of cultural evolution provided primitivist tropes that have long stagnated scholarly and popular portrayals of Native American lives and livelihoods despite early interventions by Franz Boas [1858–1942] (who taught his

1

  We are sampling here only a small subset of Indigenous communities, selected, in part, because they are better known to us either through our own ethnographic efforts or those published by other scholars. Readers may be interested in more comprehensive overviews of Native North American languages (Mithun 1999), reviews of more formal language policies (McCarty 2016), or collections of case studies (Kroskrity and Field 2009; Kroskrity and Meek 2017). As so much of the social lives of most Indigenous languages relates to language revitalization and reclamation, our treatment will partially converge with research on those topics (e.g. Chapter 3, O’Neil); Palmer 2015), though our goal here is to recontextualize language revitalization as a form of social transformation.

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16  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

students to fight “against the racism that trammels the minds of men” (Silverstein 2018, p. 147). For Silverstein, Boas articulated a two-pronged scientific approach intended to combat this popular intellectual racism, “comparative calibrationism” and a “psychophysical conception of language” (Silverstein 2018, pp. 157–158). The first unfolds much like linguistic analysis today with some universal assumptions about language, the particular grammatical description of a language, and new instances of language use intended to either support or prompt analytic revision. The second applies to all “ethnological” phenomena and their emergence between the unconscious habits and the conscious articulations of group norms and values/behavior. Though Boas did aim to reform many vicious social projects of his era, Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson has argued that he remained blind to his own socialization, to his own inability to “see or read Indigenous sovereignty and politics in any form other than the reduced, the primitive, the ethnographically classic, a reading that disappears Indigenous political forms” (Simpson 2018, p. 178), producing what Patrick Wolfe has termed “a logic of elimination” (Wolfe 2006, p. 387).

Indigenous Sociolinguistics: Four Case Studies Western Mono

The Western Mono language was traditionally spoken in California’s San Joaquin Valley and adjacent foothill areas though members of the language community trace themselves back to an earlier homeland on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Mono Lake. Their language, like many Great Basin languages in their previous homeland, is from the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family (Mithun 1999, p. 539). Today, Western Mono number about 1800 in North Fork, Auberry, and other Central California communities. This total includes less than twenty fluent speakers, most eighty years of age or older. At various times, community members have offered non-immersion “language and culture” courses designed to make people familiar with cultural vocabulary like kinship terms, plant names, native foods, and placenames. Though the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians has posted a dictionary of Western Mono on its website, the heritage language does not extend into the linguistic landscape outside of the Sierra Mono Museum. Apart from the greeting manahuu, the heritage language is rarely heard in everyday use though cultural leaders will often introduce themselves at public events in their heritage language or use some Mono vocabulary to indigenize their talks. This pattern of a pervasive language shift to English is the result of a more contemporary transformation of the Mono, former hunter-gatherers, and their heritage language. Western Mono linguistic practices transformed from an adaptation involving multilingualism, seasonal movement, and intermarriage to one that featured the aggressive spread of English, forceful suppression of indigenous languages, and later a limited revalorization of Western Mono as a second language (Kroskrity 2009a). Seasonal movements ceased, and hunting and gathering were suppressed as more land in the area was privatized and fenced off denying access for traditional subsistence practices. Regular contact with neighboring Yokuts and Miwok communities became less frequent which undermined their egalitarian multilingual adaptation and pattern of linguistic syncretism with those groups. Early in the twentieth century, compulsory education in English and an outlawing of Mono in educational venues would promote English as an essential

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  17

language for economic purposes and stigmatize Mono for many in the community. Though the gradual attrition of Mono is largely due to the impact of Anglo-Americans and English, indigenous Mono language ideologies, like utilitarianism—a cultural preference for viewing languages as economic tools—did not provide resources for resistance (Kroskrity 2009a). In the early twentieth century, as seasonal migration was replaced by sedentary lifeways imposed by the state, most Monos of the parenting and grandparenting generations encouraged their children to learn and use “the new man’s language” as an economic adaptation since they were becoming kumasa-tika ‘bread-eaters’ and would benefit from knowing languages that would improve their ability to participate in the cash economy. Another language ideology that can be ascribed to the Western Mono communities is variationism (Kroskrity 2009a). Western Monos valorize internal diversity and naturalize it as the expected outcome of family differences. This is traceable, both for the Mono and for the many California and Great Basin Indians, to the comparative lack of stratification in these largely egalitarian communities (Silver and Miller 1997). The absence of a hierarchical social order, onto which linguistic variation could be projected, encouraged a corresponding acceptance and even valorization of it—an ideology of variationism (Kroskrity 2009a). No register of Mono emerges as indexical of political or religious elites or reproduces their power and prestige. But this rejection of a linguistic orthodoxy also provided few semiotic resources to resist language shift to English. Though clearly EuroAmerican policies of linguistic intolerance played a significant role in imposing a language shift, indigenous language ideologies like utilitarianism, variationism, and the absence of an Indigenous discourse of language and identity all contributed to the current status of the Mono language as “critically endangered” (Krauss 2007). Though the language is rarely used, members of the Mono community do recognize their heritage language as an emblem of tribal identity and this recognition accounts for the symbolic uses of the language mentioned above. But rather than deriving from Indigenous ideologies of language and identity, this emblematic use is more the result of what Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (2019) call fractal recursivity —a replication of the pattern one nation: one language for the Indigenous nation and its heritage language.

The Village of Tewa

Like the Western Mono, the ancestors of the Village of Tewa moved from a prior homeland. Vacating their eastern Pueblo homeland in the Galisteo Basin along the Rio Grande River, in what is today Northern New Mexico, in the wake of the Second Pueblo Revolt of 1696 (Dozier 1966; Kroskrity 1993), these erstwhile Southern Tewa (Thanuge’in T’owa) followed invitations by the Hopi to move to their lands and pacify the region. Though they spoke Tewa, a Kiowa-Tanoan language, and the Hopis spoke a Uto-Aztecan language, their cultural adaptations were otherwise quite similar. Like the Hopi, the Tewa were agriculturalists though they would need to learn “dry-farming” technology from their new neighbors since their new home lacked any permanently flowing rivers that could be used for irrigation. Like the Hopi, the Tewa had a stratified society in which those highest in the ceremonial orders also possessed considerable political power in their communities. Though the traditional Southern Tewa social organization featured a so-called moiety system (i.e. a society divided into two complementary groups) that was common to almost all Eastern Pueblo communities, they would quickly adopt a clan organization based on the model of their Hopi neighbors. Though considerable accommodation to the Hopi and their environment was inevitable, the Tewa—unlike almost all of the many Pueblo

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18  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

diasporic groups resulting from Spanish conquest and reconquest (after the Pueblo Revolts of 1680 and 1696)—would never lose their language. Though they would learn Hopi, and later English, the Tewa language often masked new cultural features and erased other evidence of apparent change. The word for ‘clan’—a prominent feature of Hopi society but not Tewa—was a semantic extension of the Tewa word for t’owa ‘­ people.’ Modeled on ceremonial language use, linguistic practices and ideologies like strict ­compartmentalization and indigenous linguistic purism, would provide the Tewa community of around 700 individuals living in the Village of Tewa, Polacca, and Keams Canyon with an effective means of both limiting and masking the influence of prior Spanish colonization and more recent adaptation to the Hopi majority. Illustrating strict compartmentalization, ceremonial ­language circumscribes the settings and participants in and by which various linguistic registers must be properly used. Similarly, ceremonial language exhibits an indigenous linguistic purism in which loanwords or other code-mixing is proscribed. The language also became emblematic of the group as one of the few dramatic differences between these culturally similar Pueblo groups. This rhematization (Gal and Irvine 2019) of the language as an icon of Tewa identity was supported by an array of local metapragmatic discourses. A very productive practice in many Native American and many other language communities, rhematization may be understood here as speakers converting their heritage languages into emblems of their group identity. One of these, and the most succinct, is the Tewa saying Naavi hiili naavi woowatsi na-mu: ‘My language is my life.’ Another is the traditional history and cultural prominence of a “linguistic curse” placed on the Hopi shortly after the arrival of the Tewa. According to the historical narrative that is still an obligatory part of Tewa tribal initiation ceremonies, the Tewa cursed the Hopi as a cultural revenge for the latter’s failure to live up to the agreement about forms of compensation to be given to Tewa in exchange for their pacification of the First Mesa area. This episode is recounted in narratives in which the speech of Tewa leaders to their Hopi counterparts is dramatically reconstructed as in the following translation (Dozier 1954, p. 292): ‘Because you have behaved in a manner unbecoming to human beings, we have sealed knowledge of our language and our way of life from you. You and your descendants will never learn our language and our ceremonies, but we will learn yours. We will ridicule you in both your language and our own.’

As a metacommentary about language and identity, the curse is multiply meaningful. It is remarkable in the powerful way it emblematizes the Tewa language to group identity but it is also especially noteworthy as a valorization of Tewa asymmetrical bilingualism. Rather than view their need to learn Hopi as a consequence of their status as a displaced minority, the Tewa account views their asymmetrical bilingualism as a willful cultural achievement and as persisting evidence of Tewa moral superiority. Though the Tewa language is nowhere to be seen in the linguistic landscape of the community, the curse is materialized and memorialized in a shrine of petrified wood situated at the boundary of the Village of Tewa and the adjacent, and nearly adjoining, Hopi Village of Sichomovi (Kroskrity 2014). The Tewa language is often heard as a medium of conversation especially between many middle-aged and older residents who will converse in Tewa and, more rarely, Hopi (Kroskrity 1993). It is also heard booming from people’s houses in the form of recorded Tewa songs and local radio, though these sources are in sonic competition with English-language television.

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  19

While these discourses of language and identity combine with the essential role of the Tewa language in Village ceremonies to manifest the importance of the Tewa language, the regulation of ceremonial language provides a template that restricts language revitalization efforts in certain ways. Though the majority of Villagers support documentation efforts to produce a practical dictionary and other teaching resources for their after-school program, they also concede that instruction must be restricted to Tewa youth and denied to Hopi peers—in a contemporary enforcement of the linguistic curse. Written materials in the language are also strictly regulated, and the language has no internet presence. The regulations on use and the existence of debates about the appropriateness of writing are a source of concern for many Tewa youth who do not grow up hearing Tewa as a language of the home. The youth know how important the language is if they are going to engage more deeply in ceremonial life beyond the tribal initiation ceremony they experience as children, or to participate more fully in Tewa cultural life. The after-school classes provide some basic information but are not systematically graded so as to permit individual participation at appropriate levels. Informally there are many activities such as singing social dance songs in which word by word instruction and practice is offered by fluent song composers. In addition, some youth are able to find older relatives who are willing to spend time communicating with them in Tewa with the goal of improving their linguistic fluency. It is not clear how successful these formal and informal teaching efforts will be in maintaining the language. Most adults concede that given its omnipresence and economic importance, English will be the dominant language of Tewa youth and hope that Tewa will still occupy an important place as the second language in their repertoire.

Chickasaw

Unlike the Tewa who voluntarily left their homeland to escape Spanish colonial rule and have enjoyed several centuries in their new land without further upheaval, the Chickasaw, whose heritage language is from the Muskogean family, did experience forced removal, beginning in 1837, from their southeastern homelands and relocation to their present location in south central Oklahoma. The cultural disruption of removal, the further assimilation through boarding schools, and the hegemonic attraction of English all contributed to why a population of about 50 000 Chickasaw includes only about fifty traditional speakers of the heritage language. Though this numerical data might suggest a profound lack of vitality for the language, a closer examination presents a different picture. Beginning in the late twentieth century, Chickasaw economic revitalization centered on their booming gaming industry which initiated a process of de-diasporization, bringing many tribal citizens back into a more localized Native community (Davis 2018, p. 12). Economic revival created new employment opportunities for tribal citizens and more financial support for language and cultural programs. This prompted the revalorization of the Chickasaw language and its speakers. Not only was the language a medium of traditional culture but ethnolinguistic identity has also become an important expression of Chickasaw identity (Davis 2018, p. 12). Tribal support for the language helped to make the language more visible in many ways. Public signage emerged in official venues like the Chickasaw Cultural Center and also in public buildings like hospitals and the private businesses of tribal citizens. Public awards ceremonies acknowledged highly fluent traditional speakers but also those who administered the language programs, taught its courses, and achieved significant progress as learners. Publicly performed naming ceremonies provided tribal citizens with Chickasaw names and displayed the pride in their heritage language that many tribal citizens have (Davis 2018, p. 107).

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20  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

The Chickasaw language has become a valued touchstone of cultural belonging and a highly important metric of tribal identity. Tribal citizens either engage in the language programs as active learners or emphasize their relationship to traditional speakers, new speakers, or those who otherwise supported the language revitalization efforts as what Davis (2018, p. 26) labels language affiliates. Evidence of semiotic support for these programs is also provided by wearing hats and T-shirts with Anompa ‘Language’ or Chikashshanompa’ ‘Chickasaw Language’ emblazoned on them. The Chickasaw Nation has been successful in its institutional support of language revitalization and now more than 1000 tribal members have a passing knowledge of the language and another 4000 could be counted as learners. Jenny Davis, a Chickasaw tribal member and linguistic anthropologist, has suggested that it is time to “count up” and use alternative measures of linguistic vitality rather than merely an enumeration of traditional speakers (Davis 2017).2 It is undeniable that tribal efforts have increased the number of speakers, enhanced Chickasaw’s visibility in the community’s linguistic landscape, and promoted its revalorization as an emblem of tribal membership. It has also propelled the language into mass media (like local television) and new media such as a variety of apps for language learning (Davis 2018, pp. 128–150). Given the popularity of online digital media for youth, tribal investment in these resources seems aimed at garnering the interest of youthful learners as well as those who may need these resources because they are not directly connected to the Chickasaw community. The re-imagination of language and identity relationships is a key element of the recent Chickasaw language reclamation. Language ideological processes have played a significant role in this process on a number of levels. Like other Muskogean languagespeaking nations, the Chickasaw were traditionally a multilingual community that also spoke a regional lingua franca in addition to its tribal language (Silver and Miller 1997, p. 95). Today, English has replaced the Muskogean language Creek in that function and tribal members have reworked language and identity relations to replicate English-based linguistic nationalism in a Chickasaw-based ethnonationalism. A key aspect of making Chickasaw work as an emblem of the Indigenous nation was the familiar process of rhematization of the language to tribal identity (Gal and Irvine 2019). One consequence of this process is the erasure of regional dialect divisions through identification with a single Chickasaw language (Davis 2018, p. 68). Another consequence is the heightened role of ideological differentiation (Irvine and Gal 2000) and the use of linguistic differences b ­ etween other Muskogean languages like Choctaw, and (Mvskoke) Creek and their speakers (Davis 2016, pp. 65–70). These are all closely related languages spoken by communities whose histories of removal and relocation replicate those of the Chickasaw. Linguistic difference has emerged as a diacritic of their distinctive group identity, adding further value to the heritage language.

Kaska

Kaska is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken in First Nations communities in Northern British Columbia and the Southeastern Yukon Territory of Canada by about 240 speakers in a population of 1500. Kaska—like the heritage language community that speaks it—has endured dramatic change over the last 125 years. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 and political economic incorporation into the Canadian nation-state would constrain traditional hunting practices and the norms of seasonal mobility. Residential schools attempted 2

  See also Hill 2002; Meek 2016; Boltokova 2017; Dobrin et al. 2007; and Moore et al. 2010 for more on issues of enumeration.

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  21

to make Kaska people into modern Canadian citizens by convincing youth that their cultures were “savage” and their languages were unfit and irrelevant; they were appropriate only for the “bush” and not for their newly settled lives. Economic disruption and educational institutions promoted a widespread language shift to English that caused significant generational differences in linguistic knowledge and experience of using Kaska. The Kaska language was suppressed or removed from most everyday activities and reemerged as a specialized language of elders (Meek 2010, pp. 38–39). Though assimilationist policy would be reversed later in the twentieth century when more self-determination was restored, and with it more state support for projects of Indigenous language maintenance through Aboriginal Language Services (ALS), the pattern of a pervasive disjuncture would remain and manifest itself even in language revitalization activities and products (Meek 2010). Much more so than for the language communities mentioned previously, the Canadian government and ALS actively promoted language revitalization, honored and certified elder traditional speakers, and worked to create a slogan and organize revitalization for all Indigenous communities in the Yukon. Significantly, the government and the First Nations alike took seriously the need to encourage Indigenous language acquisition among children and youth. The development of child-focused programming for Indigenous students intended to revitalize their heritage language and culture had a rather unintended outcome. Instead of shoring up and building on children’s already emerging Kaska knowledge, traditional forms of socializing children through an ideology of respect restricted their participation to listening and attending. Adhering to the respectful performance of their role as spectators, children were discouraged from actively initiating conversation with elders and other adults. Classrooms disrupted this pattern only slightly by limiting student responses to one or two Kaska word answers or by focusing on vocabulary lists, and ultimately “promoted yet constrained” language learning, further removing Kaska use from more everyday types of interaction (Meek 2010, p. 79). Kaska language materials also bore the stamp of marginalization. Unlike French curricula, which were progressively scaffolded and systematically offered learners new materials year after year, Kaska materials did not provide a comparable path; many of the materials used, such as flash cards and textbooks, gave greater prominence to English as the framing language than to Kaska (Meek 2010, p. 126). Combined with the new construction of elders as the rightful “owners” of Kaska, as suggested by their (nearly) exclusive participation in language revitalization efforts, younger generations interpreted the revitalization of Kaska as a status-granting achievement rather than a language learning process. For Kaska, the unintended consequence of the process of language revitalization revealed a disjuncture between the institutional efforts to strengthen Kaska language practices and the audience for which they were intended. While this disjuncture is not surprising, it was significant in that the communities assumed that the creation of immersion programs for their children and language “nests” for young families would stop the language loss that they were experiencing. Relatedly, some families felt that the language programming offered by the public schools contributed to the language shift. They saw a disjuncture between their home varieties of spoken Kaska and the language of instruction in the schools. Of course, not all families held this stance because some of them spoke the dialect of—and were related to—the instructor. As other scholars have noted, standardizing Indigenous languages can aggravate socio-political divisions within a community. At the time, the divisions within the Kaska First Nations were especially fragile because members were required to participate in land claims negotiations and these occasionally resulted in conflict along familial and dialectal lines.

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22  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

While these examples of sociolinguistic disjuncture highlight mismatches, gaps and/ or conflicts, they can also appear as intentional “un-making” of one language in preference of another (English-Only), the interruption of “re-making” (language shift), or an institutionalized (colonialist) “of-making” (valuing certain dialects over others). If language-making, with language revitalization as the quintessential example, is a process of (re-)connecting disjunctures—the “knots and tears” (Irvine 2005) in some sociolinguistic fabric—then there is also room for an unexpected making of linguistic connections that is neither the weft of one fabric nor the weave of another. This process is most apparent in the linguistic variation found in children’s speech. The rare recordings of children’s speech revealed a knowledge of Kaska that aligned with some of the grammatical categories of adults and yet allowed for their own innovation (Meek 2018). Children demonstrated an awareness of the phonological patterns of Kaska that made writing the language seemingly transparent (Meek 2010), and they understood the power of language in use, especially what J.L. Austin (1962) called the “perlocutionary effect” of the Kaska language in the reprimanding of miscreants. Despite language shift, some sociolinguistic connections persisted. Alas, though most Kaska families have some involvement with Kaska revitalization activities, adults use Kaska to talk to children only between 10 and 25% of the time, suggesting that habitual use of English greatly limits opportunities to use the heritage language outside of the very restrictive classroom routines. The government promoted slogan “We are our language” can be seen as itself a disjuncture of generational differences regarding knowledge and experience of the heritage language within the Kaska community. Even though many elders and adults know Kaska, the youth are de facto new speakers of a school-based variety of the language, while the elders speak the language they learned from informal community use while engaged in the practice of their culture. The ambiguity of the “we” and “our” joins the Kaska language community together, yet masks the sociolinguistic “tears” within the Kaska speech community.

Linguistic Sovereignties and Repertoires of Language and Identity Even this very brief exploration of some of the diverse language ideological assemblages (Kroskrity 2021) which contextualize the languages of Indigenous North America, should suggest that many languages are at a crossroads of sorts. Simply stated, language ideological assemblages are the dynamic bundling of beliefs, practices, and policies that exist in language communities in contact and that provide the basis for ongoing change. Almost all these language communities have experienced a language shift and these communities are definitely not on a path to “reverse language shift” (RLS). Fishman’s (1991) concept and prescribed steps for RLS seem to presuppose a language community with the resources of a nation-state, including its ability to endow official languages with all manner of political– economic support. But instead of looking to fully restore the traditional languages and their patterns of use, most Indigenous communities are attempting to find a form of multilingual adaptation in which the heritage language continues to perform a valuable role while conceding a very significant role, and often a dominant one, to state languages like English, Spanish, and French. Linguistic sovereignty in the twenty-first century is more about how communities manage their language and identity repertoires than about the comprehensive restoration of heritage language fluency for all members. Working with their specific histories and language ideological assemblages, each community decides through its formal and informal “language policies,” in the sense of McCarty et al. (2014),

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  23

how its people will manage their dual status as members of Indigenous communities (or polities) and citizens of settler-colonial nation-states. Underscoring the particular adaptations of First Nations language communities is an investment in “continuity,” in establishing—or re-establishing—the interdiscursive connections that render a group legible to itself and to others. “Continuity” has been a mainstay of tribal recognition and sovereignty as defined by North American settler-colonial governments. In the United States, for example, any tribe seeking federal recognition and the accompanying entitlements (usually some small parcel of land and some money) is required to prove a continuity of existence from historical times to the present. Much of this proof takes the form of treaties, colonial ledgers, historical narratives, and anthropological documentation because they are “reliable external sources” (BIA 1997, p. 41). The “entity” must also have “maintained a continuous community from historical times to present day” (BIA 1997, p. 44). The maintenance, or continued limited use, of a Native language is not required for federal recognition, but it is considered to be “very strong evidence for tribal continuity” (1997, p. 45). Echoing earlier colonial logic, these regulations rely on a logic of distinctiveness that compartmentalizes Indigenous practices, language included, into discrete, non-overlapping entities. By contrast, contemporary linguistic anthropological research in Native North America reveals a vastly more diverse, complex, and fluid Indigenous existence that has been and continues to be made manifest in everyday and not-so-everyday Indigenous language practices and adaptations to changing circumstances. In particular, Indigenous languages have been recruited by Native American communities as instantiations of tribal sovereignty and/ or as enactments of self-determination.3 Even though the concept of continuity remains a fraught metric for Indigenous groups, it has ignited innovative strategies for performing (linguistic) sovereignty and (re)imagining Indigenous linguistic futures. The outlines of the case studies in the previous section begin to illustrate some of the diverse adaptations available to communities. For the Western Mono, the absence of a long-standing, Indigenous discourse of language and identity and the limited influence of national models of emblematic language has produced a situation in which tribal members use Western Mono only in identity displays, such as greetings like Manahuu! ‘Hello!,’ and brief, often memorized, Mono language self-introductions—often by cultural authorities— that mention name, moiety, family information, and place of residence (Ahlers 2006). Apart from these displays, Mono is rarely used except by a few language activists who continue to struggle to find learners in a Mono language community that has continued to extend its Indigenous ideological utilitarian emphasis to the benefit of more English use because of the greater economic benefit it provides. Like the Mono, many Chickasaws support their language more by metalinguistic means than by actually speaking it. In other words, the support often takes the form of talk about Chickasaw rather than of talking in Chickasaw. But, as previously presented, there is a growing minority of very active new speakers and learners and a Chickasaw national policy of strong and overt support of the language as a revalorized emblem of tribal citizenship. Still, except for Chickasaw language teachers or those on a professional path to become part of the formal Chickasaw Language program, English is the most routinely used language in their linguistic repertoire. It is just as relevant as Chickasaw, if not more so, to the

3

  See for example, Cattelino 2008; Davis 2018; Debenport 2015; Dinwoodie 1998; French 2010; Nevins 2013; Richland 2018.

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24  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

economic revival which has relocated many tribal members back to that Native nation. Tewa is still a required liturgical language for full participation in the community’s vibrant ceremonial life, but many youth feel that their opportunities to learn the language are limited and cultural practices like Tewa language storytelling and other traditional forms of intergenerational communication are now rare (Kroskrity 2012). As with White Mountain Apache storytelling (Nevins and Nevins 2012), there appears to be miscommunication between the generations and insufficiently shared knowledge about how such events should be organized and initiated. In a study of metalinguistic commentary from some indigenous communities in the southwest, including Jicarilla Apache, Sandia Tiwa, and Tesuque Tewa communities, linguistic researchers from the University of New Mexico found a consistent pattern in how heritage language speakers verbally constructed the opposition of English as a “dead” ­language—lifeless, drab, and strictly transactional—with the vitality of their heritage languages as vital, colorful, and culturally meaningful ways of seeing and being in the world (Gomez de Garcia et al. 2009). Ironically all these language communities have experienced very significant language shift to English and the majority of their members are using English to accomplish most tasks in the practical world, reserving the heritage languages for Indigenous special occasions. While some speakers attributed the cultural superiority of their languages to the morphological complexity of polysynthetic languages, their discourse also seems to be related to the need to bolster and valorize an oppositional identity that compensates for heritage language contraction from practical and economic spheres by rhematizing an alternative group identity endowed with great cultural and spiritual value (Gomez de Garicia et al. 2009). But not all stances toward the dominant group have been so markedly oppositional. The Navajo Nation, or at least some of its citizens, seem to embrace a bilingualism that uses an ideology of identity that rhematizes a contemporary Navajo identity, not just to the heritage language but to a repertoire that includes both Navajo and English and perhaps even a “mixed” or creolized register of “Navlish.” With a population of 300 000—one half of whom are speakers—the Navajo Nation has experienced a language shift and considerable language contact in the form of linguistic convergence, language-mixing, and code-switching (Field 2009). For Navajo poets, the contemporary wordsmiths who write poetry in Navajo, English, and Navlish may suggest a partial alternative to oppositional identity. While they consciously use Navajo and English to index distinct cultural resources, they link their identities as contemporary Navajos not just to their heritage language but to their entire linguistic repertoire. By compartmentalizing the expressive use of Navajo to kinship, polite speech, sacred mountains, placenames, and other cultural domains, many Navajos use their poetry to preserve and ideologically distinguish the domains of use associated with each of their languages while simultaneously embracing both as part of contemporary Navajo identity (Webster 2012). This more cosmopolitan and contemporary Navajo identity fits well with other language and identity projects associated with Navajo poetry and language use. Navajo poets, like Jonas de Lioncourt (the author’s pseudonym), as presented by Webster (2017, pp. 160–163), are pushing the Navajo language into new internet contexts, like YouTube, while simultaneously bypassing conventional print literacy in “oral tradition” internet performance posts. For him and other avant-garde Navajo poets, most of whom publish in more conventional print media, the imagination of a future public for Navajo poetry can be viewed as joining other “world languages” through making distinctive contributions to a world literature.

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  25

While Navajo poets promote their heritage language on literary fronts, younger Navajo speakers have embraced film (including the Navajo-dubbed version of Star Wars), social media like Facebook and Twitter (Peterson 2017), and other uses of modern technologies and novel venues as a way of reconciling the view that many youth have concerning Navajo as “valued, endangered, forsaken, just the past” (McCarty et al. 2014, p. 41). Bringing Navajo into these new contexts is a way to assert its ongoing relevance. These novel uses, of course, are not without controversy, especially along generational lines. As in many other Native American communities, many youth do value heritage languages, but inhabit a complex world in which those languages are much more difficult to acquire. Their respect for these languages, and sometimes their shame in not speaking them more fluently, is often misrecognized as disinterest and a lack of concern by older generations (McCarty et al. 2014). In addition to such generational disjunctures, there can be ideological debates about the appropriateness of promoting Navajo in novel contexts. For example, the Navajo Times in 2020 reported that NASA’s Mars Mission “Perseverance” rover used the Navajo language to name landmarks and topographical features. The Mission team worked with the Navajo President’s office to compile a list of fifty words that could be used. President Nez rationalized the collaboration by saying “We hope that having our language used in the Perseverance mission will inspire our young Navajo people to understand the importance and significance of learning our language.” This apparent attempt to add value to Navajo for young Navajos was resisted by more traditional voices using the performative language ideologies associated with ceremonial speech. Representing the traditional knowledge keepers, Lorenzo Max of the Diné Hataali Association issued a response wherein he explained his objection—one ultimately rejected by the tribal president. ‘So the names of the rocks we use in our prayers, those names are being used on another planet,’ he said. ‘It might force me to abandon that prayer and not use it again. So when I say those names, I would be hesitant, and it would be difficult for me.’ (Allen 2020).

The Refusal of Heritage Language Death: From Language Reclamation to (Linguistic) Decolonization While these Navajo language ideological debates indicate clear signs of language life and the cultural significance of heritage languages in the contemporary world, many language communities continue to struggle with fewer occasions for using the language and dwindling numbers of speakers. Bernard Perley, a linguistic anthropologist and member of the Maliseet language community of the Tobique First Nation (New Brunswick, Canada), a nation in which the heritage language is seldom heard, has suggested a dramatic theoretical re-orientation in which scholars, activists, and speakers replace the frames of language death and the demographic decline of languages. Rather than focus on a former pre-­ contact state or on past colonization and its contemporary consequences, he emphasizes a new appreciation of current forms of emergent linguistic vitality and the agency of Indigenous actors who recontexualize their heritage language in new sites in an effort to revitalize it and re-Indigenize their contemporary worlds (Perley 2011). These emergent vitalities can assume such diverse forms as Maliseet language BINGO games or Perley’s own artistic installations that create an immersive experience in Maliseet language and culture (Perley 2017, pp. 121–123).

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26  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

This focus on the transformational powers of heritage languages, even those not widely spoken, also underlies the critical “language work” some communities have taken on in the seemingly impossible circumstances of language death. So-called “sleeping languages” (Hinton 2001) have been awakened from such diverse records as the treasure trove of notes left by the eccentric linguist J.P. Harrington (see Moore 2006) for languages like California’s Esselen (Yamane 2001) or from colonial records as in the case of Wampanoag—an Indigenous language of Southern New England that had not been spoken since 1860, but was revived by Jesse Little Doe Baird and other activists and powerfully represented in the film We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân (Baird 2013). Daryl Baldwin, a linguist and member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, has literally refused language death in his “refusal to mourn the last speaker” (Baldwin and Costa 2018). The last “traditional speaker” of Myaamia died in the mid-twentieth century, but Baldwin refused to allow the absence of traditional transmission to deny him and other tribal members the ability to learn from documentary materials and to become a language community of “new speakers,” in acts of what Miami linguist Wesley Leonard terms language reclamation (Leonard 2017). He defines this as “a larger effort by a community to claim its right to speak a language and to set associated goals in response to community needs and perspectives” (Leonard 2011, p. 141). This is a process of decolonization directed at both the settler-colonial society and its linguistic intolerance, but also at an ongoing colonial legacy of linguistics (Leonard 2017, pp. 15–16). It re-centers the agenda of language work in the self-determining beliefs and practices of the language community even as many Indigenous language efforts assume and reproduce old settlercolonialist tropes of race and racial exclusivity including metrics of “bloodedness”—the imposed requirement of genetic purity that will ultimately result in erasure and disappearance (Meek 2020). Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) lay bare the fact that decolonization is not a comfortable process of reconciliation between some imperial state and some conquered Indigenous sovereign entity (or entities). It demands discomfort, aggravation, even divisiveness, as steps are taken to disassemble powerful infrastructures that have long managed human/social differences in ways that maintain colonial/imperial regimes of value, privilege, and wealth. Laminated onto this social hierarchy is race, a feature for establishing difference and distributing differential treatment. Race is a guise for furthering the colonial project, part and parcel of processes of domination (Tuck and Yang 2012). Decolonization, then, becomes a process of deracialization. Deracialization then is the detachment of race from the process of recognition. Many cases of Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation, including those discussed here, exemplify this kind of deracialization. For example, university level Ojibwe language courses are opportunities to provide access for Indigenous students and to expand the speaking community (Morgan 2005). They extend the boundaries of the language community beyond a “blood”-based (tribal) citizenship and thus qualify as acts of decolonization in that they disregard a key colonizing feature. The acknowledgment of English as a Navajo language also interrupts the racializing effects of the Navajo language: Navajo Nation equation. Thus, deracialization in these sociolinguistic ways is potentially decolonizing and anti-racist. To decolonize language would thus mean a shift from the hegemonic romantic ideal of one language–one nation to a more diverse conceptualization of language and (language) communities. It would require three key moves: (1) the reconceptualization of language as linguistic varieties (or repertoires of signing/speaking), (2) the reimagining of

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on the social lives of indigenous north american languages  27

communities as linguistically diverse, and (3) the abandonment of colonialist metrics of authenticity/authentication (Stillman 2021). The process would also entail the acknowledgement that “[s]trategies of internal colonialism … are both structural and interpersonal” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 5). That is, to decolonize Indigenous languages requires not only disentangling linguistic practices and forms of sociolinguistic recognition from oppressive institutional infrastructures, but it also requires that individuals participate in a coming-into-awareness of those discourses that propagate “internal colonialism.” In other words, any process of decolonization requires “ideological clarification” (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998; Kroskrity 2009b) and active divestment from what Laura Graham (2020) has called “primitivist linguistic imagery” and the broader “primitivist” semiotics of which it is a part. One way in which such “decolonization” is being carried out is in relation to the protocols and expectations of linguistic anthropological research. Current scholars, Native and non-Native alike, have begun to think more explicitly about what it means to collaborate and to conduct ethical field research in alignment with Indigenous community goals and investments.4 Sarah Shulist, a linguistic anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous groups in Brazil and Canada, has argued that any (responsible) approach to collaboration requires ethnography (2013). Using her own field experiences, she demonstrates how her Indigenous interlocutors informed her reconceptualization of language revitalization, from a singularly language-focused enterprise to a messy, complicated, locally relevant, and multilingual one. Similarly, linguistic anthropologist Justin Richland (2018), in his work with the Hopi Tribe, has also interrogated the meaning of collaboration at the intersection of Hopi values and Federal Indian Law. For example, in attempting to have a meaningful consultation with USFS park rangers and archaeologists over the selling of traditional Hopi lands (owned by the park service), the Hopi consultants established their relationship to the land being discussed by paying respect to their ancestors currently occupying the land. It is a performance of social responsibility that enacts Indigenous jurisdiction regardless of the actual entitlement to ownership of property. Such linguistic performances accomplish acts of decolonization and deploy heritage languages as creative expressions of a cultural sovereignty that defies, resists, subverts, and refuses the worldmaking efforts of the shape-shifting, hegemonic tricksters of settler societies and their cultures (Greymorning 2004).5 Our attention to the social lives of Indigenous Native American languages is more than an overview of the contributions these language practices have made to the field of linguistic anthropology. It is a recognition of the ways in which these Indigenous sociolinguistic practices demonstrate a path forward, as willful and persistent efforts of decolonization, deracialization, and reclaimed processes of Indigenization. From settler-colonial metrics for evaluation to corresponding ideological proclivities, Native American language efforts similarly offer an opportunity to reimagine the academy through an Indigenous perspective, as Indigenous (re-)languaging.

4

 See also Ahlers 2009; Davis 2017; Leonard 2018; Leonard and Haynes 2010; Palmer 2017; Perley 2011; Shulist 2013.

5

  See Arapaho linguistic anthropologist Stephen Greymorning’s contemporary trickster narrative in which the hegemonic culture of the dominant society is the shape-shifting trickster. In his morality tale, heritage languages are presented as resources for resisting assimilation (Greymorning 2004).

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28  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

REFERENCES Ahlers, J.C. (2006). Framing discourse: creating community through native language use. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16 (1): 58–75. Ahlers, J.C. (2009). The many meanings of collaboration: fieldwork with the Elem Pomo. Language & Communication 29 (3): 230–243. Allen, K. (2020). Haataalii: use of Navajo on mars “disrespectful”. Navajo Times, 25 March 2021. Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Baird, J.L.D. (2013). Wampanoag: how did this happen to my language. In: Bringing Our Languages Home (ed. L. Hinton), 19–30. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Press. Baldwin, D. and Costa, D.J. (2018). Myaamiaatatweenki: revitalization of s sleeping language. In: The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages (eds. K.L. Rehg and L. Campbell), 553–570. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Boltokova, D. (2017). “Will the real semi-speaker please stand up?”: language vitality, semi-speakers, and problems of enumeration in the Canadian North. Anthropologica 59 (1): 12–27. The Bureau of Indian Affairs. (1997). The official guidelines to the federal acknowledgment regulations, 25 CFR 83. Office of Federal Recognition, Washington, DC. Cattelino, J.R. (2008). High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dauenhauer, N.M. and Dauenhauer, R. (1998). Technical, emotional, and ideological issues in reversing language shift: examples from Southwest Alaska. In: Endangered Languages. Grenoble, L.A. and Whaley, L.J. (eds.) 57–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, J.L. (2016). Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization. Language & Communication 47: 100–111. Davis, J.L. (2017). Resisting rhetorics of language endangerment: reclamation through Indigenous language survivance. In: Language Documentation and Description, vol. 14 (ed. W.Y. Leonard and H. De Korne), 37–58. London: EL Publishing. Davis, J.L. (2018). Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Debenport, E. (2015). Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibility in Indigenous New Mexico. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research. Dennison, J. (2014). Whitewashing Indigenous Oklahoma and Chicano Arizona: 21st century legal mechanisms of settlement. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37(1): 162–180. Dinwoodie, D.W. (1998). Authorizing voices: going public in an indigenous language. Cultural Anthropology 13 (2): 193–223. Dobrin, L.M., Austin, P.K., and Nathan, D. (2007). Dying to be counted: the commodification of endangered languages in documentary linguistics. In: Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory (eds. P.K. Austin, O. Bond, and D. Nathan), 1–10. London: SOAS. Dozier, E.P. (1954). The Hopi-Tewa of Arizona. In: University of California Publications in American Archeology and Ethnology, vol. 44, 1–118.University of California. Dozier, E.P. (1966). Hano: A Tewa Indian Community in Arizona. New York: Holt. Field, M.C. (2009). Changing Navajo Language Ideologies and Language Use. In: Native American Language Ideologies. Kroskrity, P.V. and Field, M.C. (eds.) 31–47. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Fishman, J.C. (1991). Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. French, B. (2010). Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity: Violence, Cultural Rights, and Modernity in Highland Guatemala. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gal, S. and Irvine, J. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gomez deGarcia, J., Axelrod, M. and Lachler, J. (2009). English is the dead language: Native perspectives on bilingualism. In: Native American Language Ideologies. Kroskrity, P.V. and Field, M.C. (eds.), 99–122. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Graham, L. (2020). From “ugh” to babble (or babel): linguistic primitivism, sound blindness, and the cinematic representation of Native Amazonians. Current Anthropology 61 (6): 732–762.

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Greymorning, S. (2004). Culture and language: political realities to keep trickster at bay. In: A Will to Survive: Indigenous Essays on the Politics of Culture, Language, and Identity (eds. S. Greymorning), 3–17. Boston: McGraw Hill. Gruber, J. (1970). Ethnographic salvage and the shaping of anthropology. American Anthropologist 72 (6): 1289–1299. Hill, J.H. (2002). “Expert rhetorics” in advocacy for endangered languages: who is listening, and what do they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12 (2): 119–133. Hinton, L. (2001). Sleeping languages: can they be Awakened? In: The Green Book of Language Revitalization (eds. L. Hinton and K. Hale), 413–417. San Diego: Academic Press. Irvine, J. and Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Regimes of Language (ed. P.V. Kroskrity), 35–83. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research. Irvine, J.T. (2005). Commentary: Knots and tears in the interdiscursive fabric. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 72–80. Krauss, M. (2007). Classification and terminology for degrees of language endangerment. In: Language Diversity Endangered (ed. M. Brenzinger), 1–8. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kroskrity, P.V. (1993). Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kroskrity, P.V. (2009a). Embodying the reversal of language shift: agency, incorporation, and language ideological change in the Western Mono communities of central California. In: Native American Language Ideologies (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and M.C. Field), 190–210. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kroskrity, P.V. (2009b). Language renewal as sites of language ideological struggle: the need for “ideological clarification”. In: Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance & Lessons Learned (eds. J. Reyhner and L. Lockard), 71–83. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. Kroskrity, P.V. (2012). Growing with stories: ideologies of storytelling and the narrative reproduction of Arizona Tewa identities. In: Telling Stories in the Face of Danger (ed. P.V. Kroskrity), 151–183. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma. Kroskrity, P.V. (2014). Borders traversed, boundaries erected: creating discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa. Language and Communication 38: 8–17. Kroskrity, P.V. (2021). Language ideological assemblages within linguistic anthropology. In: Crossing Borders, Making Connections: Interdisciplinary Linguistics (eds. A. Burkette and T. Warhol), 129– 141. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kroskrity, P.V. and Field, M.C. (2009). Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Kroskrity, P.V. and Meek, B.A. (2017). Engaging Native American Publics, 107–129. London: Routledge. Leonard, W.L. and Haynes, E. (2010). Making “collaboration” collaborative: an examination of perspectives that frame linguistic field research. Language Documentation & Conservation 4: 268–293. Leonard, W.Y. (2011). Challenging “extinction” through Modern Miami language practices. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35 (2): 135–160. Leonard, W.Y. (2017). Producing language reclamation by decolonising language. In: Language Documentation and Description, vol. 14, 15–36. London: EL Publishing. Leonard, W.Y. (2018). Reflections on (de-)colonialism in language documentation. In: Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. McDonnell, B, Berez-Kroeker, A.L. and Holton, G. (eds.) Language Documentation & Conservation, Special Publication No. 15, 55–65. Honolulu: HI: University of Hawai’i Press. McCarty, T.L. (2016). Policy and politics of language revitalization in the USA and Canada. In: Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (eds. S. Coronel-Molina and T.L. McCarty), 15–34. New York: Routledge. McCarty, T.L., Romero-Little, M.E., Warhol, L. and Zepeda, O. (2014). Critical ethnography and indigenous language survival. In: Ethnography and Language Policy (ed. T.L. McCarty), 30–51. New York, NY: Routledge.

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Meek, B.A. (2010). We are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Meek, B.A. (2016). Shrinking Indigenous language in the Yukon. In: Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (eds. E.S. Carr and M. Lempert), 70–88. Oakland: University of California Press. Meek, B.A. (2018). Learning a new routine: Kaska language development and the convergence of styles. In: Language Practices of Indigenous Children and Youth: The Transition from Home to School. Wigglesworth, G., Simpson, J. and Vaughan, J. (eds.) 337–364. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Meek, B.A. (2020). Racing Indian language, languaging an Indian race: linguistic racisms and representations of indigeneity. In: The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race (ed. H. Samy Alim, A. Reyes and P.V. Kroskrity). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mithun, M. (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, R. (2006). Disappearing Inc.: glimpsing the sublime in the politics of access to endangered languages. Language & Communication 26: 296–315. Morgan, M.J. (2005). Redefining the Ojibwe classroom: Indigenous language programs within large research universities. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 36 (1): 96–103. Moore, R., Pietikäinen, S. and Blommaert, J. (2010). Counting the losses: numbers as the language of language endangerment. Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (1): 1–26. Nevins, M.E. and Nevins, T.J. (2012). They don’t know how to ask: pedagogy, storytelling, and the ironies of language endangerment on the White Mountain Apache reservation. In: Telling Stories in the Face of Danger (ed. P.V. Kroskrity), 129–150. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma. Nevins, M.E. (2013). Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Palmer, G. (2015). The challenge of revitalizaing Heritage Languages. In: The World of Indigenous North America (ed. R. Warrior), 173–187. New York: Routledge. Palmer, G. (2017). There’s no easy way to talk about language change or language loss: the difficulties and rewards of linguistic collaboration. In: Engaging Native American Publics (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and B.A. Meek), 107–129. London: Routledge. Perley, B.C. (2011). Defying Maliseet Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perley, B.C. (2017). Future imperfect: advocacy, rhetoric, and public anxiety over Maliseet language life and death. In: Engaging Native American Publics (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and B.A. Meek), 107– 129. London: Routledge. Peterson, L.C. (2017). Reflections on Navajo publics, “new” media, and documentary futures. In: Engaging Native American Publics (ed. P.V. Kroskrity and B.A. Meek), 107–129. London: Routledge. Richland, J. (2018). Jurisdictions of significance: narrating time-space in a Hopi-US tribal consultation. American Ethnologist 45 (2): 268–280. Shulist, S. (2013). Collaborating on language: contrasting the theory and practice of collaboration in linguistics and anthropology. Collaborative Anthropologies 6: 1–29. Silver, S. and Miller, W.R. (1997). American Indian Languages: Cultural and Social Contexts. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silverstein, M. (1996a). Monoglot “standard” in America: standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In: The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (eds. D. Brenneis and R.K.S. Macaulay), 284–306. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Silverstein, M. (2017). The fieldwork encounter and the colonized voice of indigeneity. Representations 137: 23–43. Silverstein, M. (2018). Of two minds about minding language in culture. In: Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (eds. N. Blackhawk and I.L. Wilner), 147–165. New Haven: Yale University Press. Simpson, A. (2018). Why white people love Franz Boas; or, the grammar of indigenous dispossession. In: Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (ed. N. Blackhawk and I.L. Wilner), 166–181. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Speed, S. (2019). Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants in the Settler-Capitalist State. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Stillman, A.K. (2021). Beyond the coloniality of authenticity. American Quarterly 73 (1): 161–167. Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40. Webster, A.K. (2012). To give an imagination to the listener: replicating proper ways of speaking in and through contemporary Navajo poetry. In: Telling Stories in the Face of Danger (ed. P.V. Kroskrity), 205–227. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Webster, A.K. (2017). “I don’t write poetry, I just speak the poetry in Navajo”: ethical listeners, poetic communion, and the imagined future publics of Navajo poetry. In: Engaging Native American Publics (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and B.A. Meek), 149–168. London: Routledge. Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Yamane, L. (2001). New life for a lost language. In: The Green Book of Language Revitalization (ed. L. Hinton and K. Hale), 429–432. San Diego: Academic Press.

FURTHER READING O’Brien, J. (2010). Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Silverstein, M. (1996b). Encountering language and the languages of encounter in North American ethnohistory. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6: 126–144. Silverstein, M. (1998). Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 401–426.

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32  paul v. kroskrity and barbra a. meek

2

Creolization: Its Context, Power, and Meaning1 Christine Jourdan

Introduction The study of pidgin and creole languages developed in the late nineteenth century and started with the works of Hugo Schuchardt. The definitions given to the terms “pidgin” and “creole” have changed over the years. Today, creolists agree that pidgins are auxiliary languages used in reduced contexts of communication (trade, for instance) between people who do not share a common language. In general, they have a reduced lexicon, reduced morphology, and simple syntax. They are always secondary languages for their speakers who have their mother tongue to fall back on for other aspects of daily in-group communication. Examples include the Lingua Franca that was spoken in the Mediterranean Sea between the fourteenth and nineteenth century and Hiri-Motu, spoken today in Papua New Guinea. Pidgins appear and disappear. Some pidgins, such as Russenorsk, the pidgin formerly spoken between Norwegian fishermen and Russian traders in the nineteenth century, have now died out. By contrast, creoles are the main languages of speech communities and are used in all aspects of social interaction; they subsequently may become the mother tongues of children raised in these communities and the languages of specific social groups (urban groups, for instance) or ethnic groups. When the sociocultural contexts in which creoles are used expand, so do their linguistic and discursive features. Examples of creole languages include Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole, and Tok Pisin (in Papua New Guinea). There also exists in Melanesia and in West Africa what Peter Bakker (2008) calls pidgincreoles: they serve both as pidgins (auxiliary language) and as creoles (main language) for people living in different sociolinguistic niches. Examples include Bislama in Vanuatu, Pijin in Solomon Islands, and Vernacular Liberian English in Africa. Some creoles, under

1

This article is an extensively transformed, rewritten and updated revision of “The cultural in PC genesis” published in 2008 in the Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages, edited by Sylvia Kouwenberg and John Singler. London: Blackwell Publishing, 243–268.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

pressures of former colonial languages (now national languages) such as English or French, are now in danger of disappearing (Nala Lee 2020). Although I recognize the different socio-history of creoles and pidgincreoles, I group them here all under the term “creole.” Creoles develop in multilingual contexts when no single language is available that could have served as the common medium of communication for all speakers. They exhibit linguistic characteristics inherited from the languages in contact in these social settings. For instance, in most creoles, the bulk of the lexicon comes from the European languages (referred to as superstrate languages, or lexifiers) spoken by the plantation owners or overseers, and the structure (morphosyntax) is derived from the languages of the laborers (referred to as substrate languages). Some creoles received input from other languages (referred to as adstrates) later in the course of their histories (Kouwenberg and Singler 2018). From an anthropological perspective, the genesis and development of creole languages, called creolization, is associated with identity building and with language shift, as creole makers progressively shift away from their ancestral language and adopt the nascent (and later on, the established) creole. The genesis of creole languages includes the stories of the people whose life circumstances have set the stage, created the need, and made it possible for a new language to appear. These are stories of cultural contacts, often dramatic ones, and of cultural change, both radical and gradual, total and partial. And they are also stories of power relationships, of people on the move (traders, merchants, explorers), of the commerce in human beings and things, and of plantation societies. It is from the events told in these stories, and from the ideas about these stories and events that new words, meanings, and ways of talking are born. The bulk of the best-known creoles that have been studied by linguists and anthropologists developed during European colonization (in the second half of the seventeenth century), specifically in association with plantation economies in the tropical areas of the world. For this reason, the social background of creolization discussed in this chapter includes the European slave plantations in the Caribbean/Antilles regions and indentured labor in the Pacific islands where many of the creoles still spoken today developed. I do not claim that the ideas I present here apply equally well to all other contexts of creole genesis. My propositions do not apply to all plantation societies for that matter: plantations societies in the Pacific, for instance, were very different from those in the Atlantic and, in the same locale, plantations certainly differed in terms of work conditions, cultural diversity of the workers, or general social relations. The ideas about creolization this chapter presents also do not apply to all periods of African slavery on European plantations (cf. Singler 1993). Rather, the chapter focuses on the very early period of creole development i.e., the seventeenth and eighteenth century. If we have learned something about creolization since the 1990s, it is that in view of the diversity of historical contexts in which creoles appear, one theory alone cannot explain how all of them developed.2 Keeping the above in mind, this chapter takes as its main premise that the birth of a new language goes hand in hand with the birth of new ways of being and ways of living. The following discussion of the emergence of early creoles begins with the central question: How do we know when a new language is born? A possible answer lies in the identification of the necessary cultural conditions for a language to evolve. But let us keep in mind that outside of the South West Pacific where creolization occurred in the middle of the 2

  For a recent discussion see Kouwenberg and Singler 2018.

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34  christine jourdan

  35

twentieth century, creolization in the Caribbean happened about 300 years ago and was not documented as such then. In this chapter, using Melanesian examples, and mindful that social contexts varied from place to place, I am musing about the social processes that may have fostered creolization in other locales as well.

Theoretical Issues The field of creolistics is currently focused around three important theoretical issues. First, creolists do not all agree on the sociolinguistic developmental paths that lead to the creation of creoles. Some scholars such as Peter Mülhäusler (1997) and Peter Bakker (2008, 2014) propose that, when sociocultural conditions allow, creoles start as jargons (highly unstable, hybridized and simplified language forms), become pidgins (more stable but with limited morphology and syntax and a restricted lexicon) and finally turn into creoles (with stable and expanded morpho-syntax and lexicon). The best examples of this evolutionary cycle are the Melanesian pidgins that became functional creoles in the later parts of the twentieth century. Other scholars such as Salikoko Mufwene (2020) argue that jargons and pidgins can remain as such and even disappear (examples include Lingua Franca and China Coast Pidgin), and that, explained by Enoch Aboh (2015) and Mufwene (2020), creoles can appear and become the main language of a community in a generation or two without an intermediary pidgin stage. Second, creolists are still investigating the linguistic lineage of creoles, including their relationship to superstrate and substrate languages from which they develop. A few theories have become salient: (1) Because some creoles exhibit morphosyntactic resemblances with the superstrate language, scholars such as Robert Chaudenson and Salikoko Mufwene (2001) have proposed that creoles of the Indian Ocean result from a limited acquisition of superstrate features (typically the European language spoken locally) by the creole makers. (2) Other creoles show a close syntactic resemblance with the substrate languages, leading linguists to propose that these creoles result from a creative use by creole makers of their own mother tongues (substrate languages), on which they would have applied the lexicon coming from the European language. For instance, Claire Lefebvre (1999) explains that Haitian Creole is heavily marked by the substrate languages belonging to the Gbe family, through a cognitive process she calls relabeling. She defines relabeling as “a process that consists in assigning to a lexical entry of language x a new label derived from a phonetic string drawn from language y” (Lefebvre 2014, p. 4). (3) Some creoles exhibit morphosyntactic features resembling both the superstrate and the substrates, leading some scholars to suggest that different processes may have been at work. For instance, according to Mufwene (2001), the substrate and superstrate languages provide a “feature pool” from which creole patterns emerged. Enoch Aboh (2015) proposes that some creoles may be the result of a form of linguistic hybridization between superstrate and substrate. Jeff Siegel (2008), developing what he calls the “shifter principle,” explains that the development of creoles took place in two phases. In the first phase, the “feature pool” from substrate and superstrate languages is put to use and some features are recombined in the emergent creole, resulting in “some interplay of natively spoken varieties and learner varieties of the lexifier language and one or more substrate languages” (cited by Kouwenberg and Singler 2018, p. 219). In the second phase, the resulting emergent creole becomes the variety that subsequent waves of workers would learn and develop (see Siegel 2003, 2008). All these models emphasize the interaction of substrate and superstrate languages.

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

Finally, the last important debate concerns the typological status of creoles. Do they constitute languages that are different typologically from the other languages of the world, a difference that would warrant that we keep calling them by specialized labels such as pidgins and creoles, as Bakker (2014) and McWhorter (1998) insist we should? Or is there no typological linguistic profile specific to creoles, the only difference being the historical conditions of their emergence, as Mufwene (2020) and DeGraff (2005) assert? These debates reveal that the more we know about creoles and their social histories, the less we can expect that one single theory will explain how all of them developed.

Creolization as a Particular Form of Cultural Contact Creolization does not take place in each and every type of cultural or linguistic contact, but in hegemonical social contexts where three contributing factors exist: multilingualism, absence of a language that could be used as a lingua franca, and sustained but unequal power relationships between people in contact. Most typically, creolization is found in association with large and forced movements and displacements of populations (such as indentured labor or slave trades during the European colonial period) that took people of different ethnic origins speaking different languages from one part of the world and relocated them elsewhere. Cultural and linguistic rupture and geographical dislocation are part of the story of creoles. One expects that the workers/slaves remained isolated linguistically for some time after their arrival (unless someone of the same ethnic group was present). The first reason for this is linguistic: the co-presence of different languages spoken by workers, slaves, and overseers from different ethnic origins did not facilitate communication between groups. And bilingualism in situ could not develop fully either: first, in most places, there was no numerically dominant language among the workers that could serve as lingua franca for the group. The second reason is social. On plantations, two groups of people existed in unequal social relations: a small group of people having socio-economic power and speaking varieties of one socially dominant language (here the overseers or plantation owners speaking a European language) and a larger group of people who were in subordinate social positions and who spoke different languages (workers and slaves speaking their home language). This social organization did not encourage or create the conditions for the successful transmission of the superstrate language to the workers. The incipient creole that progressively emerged locally offered a new linguistic avenue for communication. To understand how these interacting factors led to the development of new languages, one must therefore ask, what kind of social worlds were these plantations? The historical evidence shows that the labor force was in many cases forcibly removed from its home countries. The ratio of men to women in the initial period was rather unequal on the Pacific plantations (see Peter Corris 1973) and more equal in other places such as Haiti and Martinique (Singler 1995), Suriname (Arends 1995, 2002), and Guadeloupe (Bernard Moitt 2001). Contact with the home country and the home language was maintained by a succession of cohorts of workers, so that parts of the cultural ways of home were kept alive for some time. Most of the social activities were initially work-related activities (Sydney Mintz 1982). Finally, not all members of the home society were represented. For one thing, elders were absent initially as only young people were taken away, and families, if any, were often dispersed. In addition, and as is typical of other self-contained social worlds such as prisons, institutions, hospitals, and boarding schools, social life was restricted and took place within the rules and confines of the plantations, usually around activities that were defined from above.

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Work as the Social Matrix of Creole Genesis

To what degree workers interacted with workers of neighboring plantations is still a matter of speculation for many plantation settings, particularly for the early period of the plantation system in the Caribbean, about which much historical work still needs to be done. But there were certainly situations where workers had opportunities to establish links with workers from other places, for instance through work-related activities, through trade, and during leisure. We can surmise, though, that the nature and the intensity of contact probably varied through time. And of course, there was marronage (escape from slavery), itself an extreme type of channel of exchange and diffusion of information between workers escaped from different plantations. As Bernard Moitt (2001) and Clive Moore (1985) have shown for the Caribbean and Queensland plantations, respectively, the long work hours typical of slavery and indentured labor did not initially leave much room, time, or opportunity for the development of other types of group-based cultural relationships or collective symbolic expression among the laborers. However, workers/slaves were able to take advantage of interstitial spaces, or “loopholes,” where they could engage with each other and were able to build on these exchanges. These loopholes were linguistic and cultural. For instance, Moore (1985)3 shows that in the initial period that followed their arrival on the Queensland (Australia) plantations, starting around 1860, workers sought to keep alive some cultural and linguistic dimensions of their home islands. Of course, the environment and the social context dictated what they could keep and what they could not. As much as was possible, they planted small vegetable gardens, propitiated ancestors and practiced divinations, and cooked food roasted on the fire or wrapped in banana leaves the way they used to do in their home country (Fatnowna 1989). Some men even kept men’s houses. But they could not uphold the rules of marriage (the preferred form was clan exogamy) for the good reason that not all members of their societies were there and membership in clans and lineages was difficult to reckon when clans and lineages themselves had ceased to be meaningful social units. Writing about African slaves in the New World, Sydney Mintz and Richard Price ([1976] 1992) explain that if ideas about institutions could be maintained, the institutions themselves could not. Their analysis also holds for the Pacific plantations. Whatever new social worlds were emerging out of the cultural encounter on plantations were the products of a group of workers who were no longer a crowd of individuals, but had become a community (Mintz and Price [1976] 1992, pp. 14–18). What is the relationship between these new cultural formations and the emergence of creoles? New ways of being, thinking and talking are likely to develop out of cultural spaces shared by workers on a regular basis. Work routines are such spaces. Not only did workers share their experiences of cultural, linguistic, and spatial dislocation, but they also shared their experiences of work conditions in a plantation setting: the same pressures from a rigid timetable and the long hours of work;4 the same hardship on the body; the same relationship, or lack thereof, with Europeans. Work practices became the locus for the exploration of meaning. Be it in the fields or in the sugar mills, work was also the

3

  In his analysis of the history of Solomon Islands indentured laborers in the town of Mackay in the state of Queensland (Australia), Moore writes about “Melanesian Mackay” and describes the coexistence of purely Melanesian religious rituals and Christian beliefs.

4

  Moore (1985, p. 123) notes that Melanesians in Mackay (Queensland) worked “under supervision in open fields for twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week.” Moitt notes that in the French Caribbean the Code Noir of 1685 placed no limits on a slave’s workday, but prohibited work on Sundays and other Christian holidays.

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

cognitive center of the plantation community around which much of the meaningful daily social life initially revolved. From its very nature (physical activities, gestures, movements, planning), work is an ideal locus for the birth and acquisition of a certain kind of vocabulary. Regular and sustained contact between peoples, including workers and overseers, makes transfer of technical and practical vocabulary possible and easy, whatever the occupations of the laborers in the plantation economy. By its very nature, work fostered the development of communicative collaboration: without collaboration, how could one interpret an order, learn to execute what was expected, explain to others how to perform tasks, and coordinate actions so that the work could be done in a speedier (or slower) fashion? Work provided the social space where individual identity could be reshaped and group consciousness could develop initially. All workers were defined in relation to it, and the hierarchical nature of the plantation social world came to the fore in those moments and activities. Given these factors, it makes sense to hypothesize that it is around work-related activities that creole varieties initially developed on plantations: it is also during work that these varieties were acquired by workers arriving subsequently. From the work-centered cultural sphere, creoles then spread to other cultural spheres of plantation social life, however limited they may have been. The incipient creole progressively became central to the social life of work, where most intergroup social interactions took place. It also became the form of communication that new arrivals would learn, often serving as a second language for workers (Siegel 2008). Thus, while the creole developed in response to or in association with local sociolinguistic conditions and demands (multilingualism, necessity, pragmatism, or group consciousness, among others), the ancestral languages were central to the cultural memory of the workers, to those cultural practices that they were able to maintain, and to the individual and personal contact workers may have had with members of their ethnic groups. They remained vital to any cultural consciousness anchored in the past and certainly facilitated the psychological and emotional transition into the present. As I will illustrate below, newly arrived slaves and workers kept their ancestral languages while acquiring in parallel the varieties of creoles that were developing (e.g., Pieter Muysken 2015).

Creolization as Cultural Interpretation One of the puzzles concerning how new languages develop, and how they are subsequently adopted by speakers, is how speakers ascribe meaning to the language that is developing. Adoption and transmission of a language should not be taken for granted. In the case of creole languages, given that superstrate and substrate languages have contributed to their emergence, why are creoles not direct copies of the languages that provided their linguistic input? As linguistic anthropologists have shown, linguistic and cultural meaning is not a given. It is the product of social relationships and social interactions, the results of cultural debates and negotiations, and in the end the result of the development or imposition of what functions as a consensus. How meaning emerges is often linked to the interpretations people make of cultural phenomena, interpretations that are mediated by people’s own experiences. In situations of cultural contact, such as those that prevailed on plantations, a great deal of the initial contact period is spent trying to understand the behavior of the “Other” and trying to render it meaningful. Newly arrived workers interpreted and ascribed meanings to the new social world they encountered from the perspective of their own cultural experience, tapping into their own cultural and individual skills. Plantation societies were

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social worlds where various knowledge systems, those of the workers5 and those of the Europeans, met and confronted each other. Since not all aspects of workers’ ancestral cultural domains or of European cultural domains were present on plantations, many semantic domains did not transfer into this new social world. Workers came to the cultural encounter with the European-ruled plantation world from the perspectives of their “home” cultural constructs but many of their own semantic categories were inapplicable. In the transition between the home world of the laborers and the world of the plantations, too many cultural changes had taken place that made it impossible for whole semantic domains and lexical categories to be systematically transposed from workers’ languages to the incipient creoles. In addition, new cultural phenomena developed locally that warranted the creation of new lexical items that were not present in the ancestral languages. We can understand the formation of creole languages better if we consider them to be the results of a process of cultural interpretation inherent to all instances of contact situations. Cultural interpretations, because they impact our understanding of the meaning of words and sentences, are important to the language being created. They are driven and made possible by individual agency and collective group consciousness. To illustrate the effects that cultural interpretations can have on the semantic categories of a new language, I present here an example taken from the kinship terminology of Solomon Islands Pijin (hereafter SIP). Kinship is an important cultural matter in Melanesian societies, structured as they are around clans and lineages. It organizes the social life of people, gives access to land, and regulates marriage and exchange obligations. SIP is one of three pidgincreoles that are found in the geographical region known as Melanesia (South West Pacific) (see Map 2.1). Their origin is found in the Kanaka Pidgin English that stabilized on the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Northern Australia) in the second part of the nineteenth century among indentured laborers originating from neighboring island groups (now countries) known as Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. On the Queensland plantations, newly arrived indentured laborers learned the pidgincreole that was stabilizing locally (Jourdan 1983). In Kanaka pidgin, the bulk of the lexicon came from English as it was spoken in Australia at the time, while the grammar was mapped on the Melanesian languages spoken by the indentured workers in Queensland. When these workers were repatriated to their home islands, they brought back the pidgincreole with them, where it became localized. In SIP, 80% of the vocabulary comes from English (referred to below as lexifier language) and 20% from the local languages. The syntax and morphology is directly mapped on that of the Solomon Islands languages spoken by the indentured workers in Queensland (Keesing 1988). In my fieldsite of Honiara, the multilingual capital of Solomon Islands, I gathered a corpus of the kinship terms belonging to thirteen different languages of the Solomon Islands6 and compared them with the kinship terms from SIP (Jourdan 2000). Table 2.1 shows examples of the comparison of the terms for “brother” and “sister” in SIP and in thirteen languages.

5

 We need to recall that the knowledge systems of the slaves, either in the Atlantic or in the Pacific, were heterogeneous. The slaves came from different cultural backgrounds, and, even though generalities could be established, these backgrounds were different, thereby creating de facto multiculturalism in single plantations. See also Mintz and Price ([1976] 1992, pp. 14–15).

6

  Language diversity in Melanesia is one of the highest in the world. Not counting colonial languages and creoles, there are seventy-four different languages in Solomon Islands for a population of about 660  000 people; 839 languages in Papua New Guinea for a population of about nine million people; and 138 languages in Vanuatu for a population of about 300 000 people.

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

PACIFIC OCEAN

Polynesia Outlers

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

SOLOMON ISLANDS Polynesia Outlers

Coral Sea

FIJI

VANUATU

NEW CALEDONIA

0

500 kilometers

Queensland

Map 2.1  Map of Melanesia showing the origins of indentured labourers to Queensland. Adapted from https://devpolicy.org/state-society-and-governance-in-melanesia20110502.

Table 2.1  Terms for brother/sister in 13 languages of Solomon Islands and in Solomon Islands Pijin (SIP) Languages

elder brother

younger brother

younger sister

elder sister

Kaoka

to'ona

sina

vavuvena

to'ona

Tolo/Moli

kasiqu

kasiqu

vavinequ

Vavinequ

Sa'a

aseru

mwatine

mwatine

Mwatine

Kwaio

o'amu

asimu

asimu

o'amu

Lau

auanau

ha'asigu

ha'asigu

auanau

To'abaita

tho'oko

thasiku

thasiku

tho'oko

Baegu

sauna

sasina

sasina

Sauna

Varisi

togana

kaena

kaena

Kaena

Roviana (male speaker)

tasina

tasina

tasina

Tasina

Roviana (female speaker)

kenuna

mudina

mudina

kenuna

Nduke (male speaker)

tughana

tasina

luluna

Luluna

Nduke (female speaker)

luluna

luluna

tughana

tughana

Ranongga

tughagu

taigu

taigu

tughagu

Bilua

kaka

visi

visi

Kaka

Lavukaleve

kakal

vais

vaisa

kakalea

SIP

brata

brata

sista

Sista

Source: Jourdan 2000, p. 106.

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The comparison of all the kinship terms reveals that the semantic categories of SIP kinship terminology are not identical to those of the Solomon Islands languages, nor are they identical to English kinship terminology. Rather, SIP kin terms are closer to what is known in anthropology as the “Hawaiian system” (Keesing 1975). In such a system, all members of the same generation will be referred to or addressed by the same label (all women of the generation of the mother will be addressed and referred to as “mother,” all boys of one’s generation will be addressed as “brother,” etc.), there is no distinction between members of the nuclear family and collaterals (relatives on both sides of the parents’ families), and there exist reciprocal terms of address for grandparents and grandchildren, and for aunts–uncles and nieces–nephews. These features also exist in Solomon Island languages in general. But other features such as a distinction between elder and younger sibling, cross and parallel cousins,7 etc., are present as well, and render these kinship systems much more complex. The resemblance of SIP kinship terminology with Hawaiian terminology is a surprise as none of the kinship systems found in the corpus of Solomon Islands languages displays typical Hawaiian-type kinship terminology. One wonders why SIP terminology has not kept all the kin categories labeled in the Solomon Islands languages spoken by indentured laborers in Queensland (including the distinction between cross cousins/parallel cousins and elder and younger male or female sibling). One can propose a few reasons for this. For one, the cultural world of Queensland that sustained the development of Kanaka pidgin was radically different from the Solomon Islands cultural world (Moore 1985). Second, not all members of the laborers’ kin groups were present in Queensland. Third, the indentured workers brought to Queensland from the neighboring Melanesian islands belonged to different ethnic groups and spoke different ancestral languages. These languages co-existed on the Queensland plantations in parallel to the stabilizing Kanaka pidgin) that was fast becoming the lingua franca of the local plantations. Ancestral languages were kept alive with each new wave of workers arriving from the home islands during the 40 years that the indenture period lasted. Be they from Vanuatu or the Solomon Islands, the indentured laborers in Quensland used their ancestral languages with members of their ethnolinguistic group whenever important cultural matters were discussed and precise cultural terms were needed (Fatnowna 1989) and Kanaka pidgin with members of other ethnolinguistic groups. The social make up of the plantations of Queensland was such that there was no need for workers to label in Kanaka pidgin the cultural categories of kin that were not relevant to the new social life. Labels such as cross cousin or parallel cousin, elder brother or elder sister, maternal uncle—typical of Melanesian kinship terminology—were irrelevant on a regular basis when most of the people who could have been referred to or addressed by such terms were not present in Queensland. If ever there was a need to refer to them, then the terms from ancestral languages could have been used in private conversation. A pidgin generic label could also be used to refer to these absent kin, and noun qualifiers could have been added to general pidgin kin terms, so that gender and other features could be expressed. For instance, to the Queensland pidgin term “pikinini” which means child, one can add the words “boe” (boy) or “gele” (girl) to specify the gender: “pikinini boe” for male child, or “pikinini gele” for female child. This linguistic strategy is still used in contemporary Solomon Islands Pijin, and we

7

  Cross cousins are the cousins born to the brother of one’s mother and the sister of one’s father; parallel cousins are born to the sister of one’s mother and to the brother of one’s father. These distinctions are crucial in societies that allow cross cousin marriage but prohibit parallel cousin marriage.

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

can assume that it was used in earlier times as well. When Solomon Islanders returned home from Queensland with Kanaka pidgin in their linguistic repertoire, they used it only with members of other ethnolinguistic groups, or with fellow former indentured workers, in sign of solidarity or recognition. Though the labels to name kin in SIP are borrowed from English, the lexifier of SIP, the kinship system is also totally different from that of English, which typically distinguishes members of the nuclear family from other kin. English labels were borrowed directly when they fit the vernacular kinship categories (dadi, mami, brata, sista), but have been also reanalyzed so that they can be mapped onto the vernacular system: grani is self reciprocal (for reference and address) for grandparent and grandchild irrespective of gender, a feature that does not exist in English kinship terminology. Following the nomenclature of Hawaiian terminology, mami refers to one’s mother and to all women of the generation of one’s mother including one’s aunts, be they related by blood or marriage. Dadi refers to one’s father, and to all men of the generation of one’s father (including one’s uncles), and so on for sista and brata. Cultural interpretations led to the development of a kinship terminology that is neither English nor Solomonic. It is in continuity with the latter, but it is responding to the social conditions in which the new language developed. Some streamlining of the most cultureheavy terms took place in the pidgin speech community and led to a selection of the more regular and universal semantic categories of vernacular kinship terminology.8

Creolization and Power Relationships A number of scholars who wrote on language ideology have argued that language is not a socially neutral tool.9 The production of speech is itself power-producing, in that it is reality-producing (Philips 2001). Speech takes place within social relationships that are constructed and reinforced through it. Through language, speakers engage social life, shape it, and are shaped by it, as language both presupposes and builds the social world. The birth of new languages such as creoles cannot be separated from the social forces that produce them. They involve power relationships typical of the colonial worlds, between the workers and their masters and between workers themselves vying for whatever distinction could bring recognition and possible advantages. In addition, power relationships on plantations were couched in and built on race relations, with the result that the discourse on race became central to the discourse on language within colonial relationships. It should not come as a surprise that the languages created in these circumstances were gathered into and confined by a label such as pidgin, the meaning of which was associated by observers (and sometimes speakers) with simplicity and inadequacy (see also DeGraff 2001). This ideology has negatively impacted the linguistic development of creoles and has denied them, in colonial and some post-colonial circles, the status of “real” languages.

8

  This explanation is reinforced by observations made in some parts of the Solomon Islands (P. Maranda, personal communication 22/9/99) and Papua New Guinea (E. Schwimmer, personal communication 22/9/99) where individuals perform some unballasting of the vernacular cultural categories in two particular instances: between people who entertain good relationships; and when distance away from the cultural center of reference (usually the home village) removes the constraints on individuals and the need for them to respect the prescribed kinship labels. In addition, distance creates a form of desacralization of the categories, and thus makes it possible for them to be dropped.

9

  See e.g., Bakhtin (1981), Bourdieu (1975), Woolard and Schieffelin (1994), Schieffelin et al. (1998).

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Structural conditions left colonial laborers little room for cultural and linguistic maneuvering, particularly in the early phases of the labor trade. This, along with the initial shock caused by their new life conditions, rendered them relatively passive at first. They would not, however, remain passive for long. Human agency is such that “non-places,” a term anthropologist Marc Augé (1992) uses to refer to transitional locales such as airports, are eventually transformed into cultural places, with individuals adding their own imprint to change things, exploit cultural loopholes, or take whatever cultural space can be appropriated, sometimes in the form of covert resistance. Language is often instrumental to these efforts. And, as Susan Gal (1995) explains in her critique of James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, these efforts cannot be dissociated from the linguistic ideology that frames them. Whether the workers wanted it or not, whether they were conscious of it or not (and it is most likely that they were not conscious of it, particularly if by consciousness we mean deliberateness), the development of creoles proved to be one the most important symbolic and pragmatic actions that the workers could undertake on a path to resistance. It was the first step towards empowerment (however minimal this empowerment may have been given the context), the first step towards a subversion of linguistic hegemony, the true product of cultural agency. I am not suggesting here that creoles developed only out of a deliberate desire on the part of workers to challenge the hegemonic conditions that controlled some aspects of their life. But they were vehicles of resistance, understood here as an engagement with the conditions of domination and their transformations, and not only as refusal of this engagement. Resistance to hegemony is not limited to the use of force; it often has to do with seizing whatever space is devoid of controls and claiming it. In this case, the void was linguistic, and creole makers quickly filled it with a language of their own. All the while, they developed a new cultural identity that could now be expressed in words. On the plantations of Queensland around 1890, words such as “niusam” (new chums), “kanaka” (man), “wakaman” (worker), “ovasia” (overseer), “wantok” (fellow countryman), “pasis” (passage, as in point of origin), “kalafule” (feast), “sios” (church) expressed part of the daily new reality lived by the indentured laborers brought from the neighboring Melanesian islands. Writing about the centrality of language to the perennity of human beings, paraphrasing Blanchot, Michel Foucault (1977, p. 53) muses: “Speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word.” To speak is to create; it is to represent; it means establishing a link between self and the world; it is to live. To speak a word is to appropriate and harness its meaning and its power. By virtue of having a new language at their disposal that was in continuity with their ancestral languages and with significant elements of the superstrate languages, creole makers set themselves on a course of linguistic independence that changed their relationships to the world and shaped their own identity. Philip Baker (1994, 1995) proposes that conscious creativity drove creole genesis. While agreeing with his interpretation, I am not prepared to go as far as he does on the degree of deliberate social consciousness that he attributes to creole makers in the process of creole genesis. Bourdieu’s structuring structures are useful again to help us understand how practices and representations (here linguistic) “can be objectively regulated and regular without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goal without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 72). In social settings such as plantations, collaborative behavior among workers would have been the key to physical survival and psychological health. One place where collaboration is certainly needed is in the development of a new language: collaboration in the

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

interpretation of meanings, in letting people talk, in proposing words for ideas, in understanding the intention of the interlocutors, in allowing phonological and syntactic variations, in conceding that one’s own choice of words becomes secondary or even eliminated, and so forth. Communication is a story of concessions and collaboration as well as of turn taking, indifference, stealing the floor, and shouting matches. And, certainly, communication is what makes it possible for social and linguistic accommodation to take place. Along these lines, we can consider “foreigner talk”—the simplification of one’s native language to speak with non-fluent, non-native speakers (Ferguson 1975)—to be a form of linguistic collaboration, as much as an expression of power on the part of speakers. And we can also consider that creolization is the result of linguistic cooperation. In his article on the principles that guide the processes of language mixing and the leveling of variation in the process of creolization, Siegel (1997) explains that the relevant linguistic features that promote efficiency of communication are unmarkedness (dominant form), transparency (meaning is readily accessible), regularity (rule following), frequency (of words in speech), and economy of the linguistic forms (fewer words lead to greater clarity) that are developed in the new language. These are the features we find in creole languages, which suggests that collaboration was a prime mover of creolization. This cooperation is best seen in the process of dialect leveling. As creoles are derived from the interaction of the substrate and superstrate languages, it ensues that individual dialectal variation must have existed in the initial stages of creole formation. Not everyone had the same mother tongue and not everyone was of the same ethnic origin. Donald Winford (2003) argues that linguistic variation was present in the early creole speaking communities. How can a language emerge in a developing community that is very diverse linguistically and ethnically? Through dialect leveling, the progressive diminution of linguistic varieties rests on a combination of collaborative and non-collaborative power related behaviors, and of linguistic accommodation and cooperation among creole makers. Dialect leveling is not only a series of steps towards efficient communication, but it is also a direct product of cultural jelling i.e., the progressive development of cultural patterns. Dialect leveling is the product of social forces at play and results in the progressive adoption of one linguistic form over another by the linguistic community (because of the sheer number of speakers using this form or because of ideological forces), or in the rejection of another. As such, dialect leveling is a form of linguistic change, a linguistic harmonization with the social pressures and cultural values at play. But as Siegel (1997) makes clear, dialect leveling does not imply a resulting overarching homogenization. We can observe similar processes in urban Solomon Islands today: while some form of convergent dialect emerges out of everyday communication within the speech community of young urban people, in association with vernacularization, co-existing varieties remain. Variation is still present in the speaker’s mental lexicon and grammar, and it is likely to resurface in different communicative events and in cultural contexts where the speaker’s speech variety may be given more space or accorded more legitimacy.

Motivations for Creolization An additional factor that informs creole development is efficiency. It relates to speakers’ communicative needs. What do I need to do in order to be understood? What do I need to do in order to understand? For successful communication to happen, creole makers had to position themselves in the same communication frame and in the same temporality of intention as their interlocutors. They needed to create/establish coevalness (Fabian 1983) i.e.,

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to focus on the fact that they were in the same place at the same time, were caught up in the same social world, and shared the psychological and social context of enunciation. This included speakers’ individual needs for recognition, belonging, and social positioning, all of which mattered greatly because in situations of liminality (such as was experienced by workers on plantations), the importance of these needs increased. Fulfilling them may have started with a search for cultural and linguistic conformity, or difference, and may have led individuals to closely monitor their own speech in relation to that of their interlocutors. Therefore, one can say that dialect leveling is not only a product of community formation; it also contributes to the formation of communities of linguistic practice. Since the conditions that led to the creolization of SIP in Honiara, where I did my field work, were very different from those that led to creolization 300 years ago on the plantations of the Caribbean, we cannot compare them fully. Yet we can draw some useful insights from the Honiara situation: Language shift and identity building are central to creolization. In Honiara, creolization took place when urbanites started to shift to SIP as their main language in non-ethnic spheres of daily life (work, church activities, relationships with neighbors, and leisure activities). It was reinforced when the same urbanites, bilingual and multilingual individuals, stopped teaching their own ancestral languages to their children, and raised them in SIP, thinking that this was the language they would need for the future. As with what happened in the Caribbean 300 years ago where language shift progressively took place, language shift is central to creolization. In Honiara, the creolization of SIP was further developed when the same children raised their own children in SIP, away from any ancestral language, and when these young people, as young adults, started to use SIP as a symbol of their own urbanity. Identity-building is another important ingredient of creolization. Young speakers put their own imprint on SIP and appropriated it, creating new ways of speaking the language among them, encouraging group linguistic conformity (see Jourdan and Angeli 2021), thus increasing the linguistic, ideological, and social distance between them and other members of their larger linguistic community. Full creolization took place when these young speakers became a linguistic and social community distinct from that of their forebears. Elsewhere in Melanesia, similar processes of language shift away from ancestral languages motivated by identity building took place recently, such as in Papua New Guinea as described by Don Kulick (2019) and in neighboring Vanuatu as analyzed by Leslie Vandeputte-Tavo (2011). In these cases, as in Solomon Islands, local creoles displace ancestral languages and, in some cases of rapid social change, this leads to language death. This occurred, for example, with Tayap in Papua New Guinea (Kulick 2019).

Conclusions In this chapter I have argued that the development of new languages such as creoles was concomitant with the development of new social settings where individual speakers were cut off from their original linguistic communities and could no longer use their own native language(s). Faced with a social situation over which they had no control, workers—slaves or indentured laborers—engaged with the social world that controlled their life by putting on it their linguistic and cultural imprint. The work-related activities and communities that developed on the plantations are, thus, the points of departure of these new linguistic worlds. When cultural worlds are in contact, as they were on the plantations, individuals and groups need to accommodate to what we call “otherness.” The making of the “other” involves the interpretation of the “other.” This interpretation takes place in the light of

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creolization: its context, power, and meaning

one’s own cultural, linguistic, and personal experience, and within the ideological confines that govern cultural life and social relationships. This results in different outlooks that individuals have on their new social world. Focusing on Solomon Islands SIP kinship terminology, I showed that when contact takes place between groups who do not share the same type of cultural categories and dominant ideologies, not all original cultural domains are re-interpreted in the new language that emerges, and those that are relevant to the local conditions are negotiated. Not surprisingly, people use the linguistic resources at hand (their own language and the superstrate language) as the template for building a new language. The transferability of substrate and superstrate semantic features to the languages that are emerging in these social conditions is directly linked to the cultural interpretations made by language makers/speakers. A new language therefore develops as cultural emplacement deepens. Finally, a discussion of the dialogical nature of power allows for different analyses of the social relationships likely to foster the emergence of creoles. In addition to the conflictual relationships characteristic of many colonial worlds, more consensual relationships are also necessary for new languages to appear. In situations of cultural alienation or liminality, the creation of a new medium of communication can be seen as a form of resistance to hegemonic social conditions, as much as an expression of identity. In this light, the emergence of a creole language is as much the result of the need to break social isolation as it is a form of empowerment on the part of its makers. A new language is born when, through interactions, a community of speakers gives it linguistic contours sufficiently distinct from other available languages, so that this language has to be learned. The creole that develops becomes then the language variety that is learned by slaves/workers who arrived subsequently. Dialect leveling, a normal process of communication produced by the need to understand and be understood, is thus part of the constitution of a new language. Subsequently, it is essential to the development of communities of linguistic practice. Just as cultural and social patterns develop and transform over time, so do the creole languages that become their linguistic medium. Languages cannot exist without the communities that sustain them, and they cannot develop before these communities develop; both go hand in hand, in a constant positive feedback between the two, through which social groups become encultured and therefore enlanguaged.

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Bakker, P. (2008). Pidgins versus Creoles and Pidgincreoles. In: Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (ed. S. Kouwenberg and J.V. Singler), 130–157. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bakker, P. (2014). Creoles and typology: Problems of sampling and definition. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 22 (2): 437–455. Bourdieu, P. (1975). Le fétichisme de la langue. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 4: 2–32. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corris, P. (1973). Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands Migration, 1870–1940. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. DeGraff, M. (2001). On the origin of Creoles: A Cartesian critique of neo-Darwinian linguistics. Linguistic Typology 5 (2/3): 213–310. DeGraff, M. (2005). Linguist’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole exceptionalism. Language in Society 34: 533–591. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fatnowna, N. (1989). Fragments of a Lost Heritage. North Ryde, Australia: Angus and Robertson Ltd. Ferguson, C. (1975). Toward a characterization of English foreigner talk. Anthropological Linguistics 17 (1): 1–14. Foucault, M. (1977). Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (ed. D. Bouchard), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gal, S. (1995). Language and the “arts of resistance”. Cultural Anthropology 10 (3): 407–424. Jourdan, C. (1983). Mort du Kanaka Pidgin English à Mackay, (Australie). Anthropologie et Sociétés 2 (3): 77–96. Jourdan, C. (1991). Pidgins and Creoles: The blurring of categories. Annual Review of Anthropology 20: 187–209. Jourdan, C. (2000). My nephew is my aunt: Features and transformations of kinship terminology in Solomon Islands Pijin. In: Processes of Language Contact (ed. J. Siegel), 99–121. Montreal: Fides. Jourdan, C. and Angeli, J. (2021). The development of weak normativity in Solomon Islands Pijin. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 36 (1): 46–76. Keesing, R. (1975). Kin Groups and Social Structure. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Keesing, R. (1988). Melanesian Pidgin and the Oceanic Substrate. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kouwenberg, S. and Singler, J.V. (2018). Creolization in context: Historical and typological perspectives. Annual Review of Linguistics 4: 213–232. Kulick, D. (2019). Death in the Rainforest. How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonguin Books. Lee, N.H. (2020). The status of endangered contact languages in the world. Annual Review of Linguistics 6: 301–318. Lefebvre, C. (1999). Creole Genesis and the Acquisition of Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefebvre, C. (2014). Relabeling in Creole Genesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McWhorter, J.H. (1998). Identifying the Creole prototype: Vindicating a typological class. Language 74 (4): 799–818. Mintz, S. (1982). Caribbean market places and Caribbean history. Radical Historical Review 27: 110–120. Mintz, S. and Price, R. ([1976] 1992). The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press. Moitt, B. (2001). Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moore, C. (1985). Kanaka Maratta: A History of Melanesian Mackay. Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and the University of Papua New Guinea Press. Mufwene, S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, S. (2008). Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London/New York: Continuum.

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Mühlhäusler, P. (1997). Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. London: University of Westminster Press. Muysken, P. (2015). Conclusion: Feature distribution in the West Africa–Surinam Trans-Atlantic Sprachbund. In: Surviving the Middle Passage: The West Africa–Surinam Sprachbund (eds. P. Muysken and N. Smith), 393–408. Berlin: de Gruyter. Philips, S. (2001). Power. In: Key Terms in Language and Culture (ed. A. Duranti), 190–192. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Schieffelin, B.S., Woolard, K.A., and Kroskrity, P.V. (1998). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Siegel, J. (1997). Mixing, leveling, and pidgin/Creole development. In: The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles (eds. A. Spears and D. Winford), 111–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins publishing company. Siegel, J. (2003). Substrate influence in Creoles and the role of transfer in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, special issue on Reconsidering the role of SLA in pidginization and creolization, 25 (2): 185–210. Siegel, J. (2008). The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Oxford, UK/New York: Oxford University Press. Singler, J.V. (1993). The cultural matrix of creolization: Evidence from Goupy des Marets. In: The African Presence in Caribbean French Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: Documentary Evidence, 187–224. Travaux de recherche sur le créole haïtien. UQAM, Montréal: Groupe de recherche sur le créole haïtien. Singler, J.V. (1995). The demographics of Creole genesis in the Caribbean: A comparison of Martinique and Haiti. In: The Early Stages of Creolization (ed. J. Arends), 203–232. Amsterdam: John Benjamin. Vandeputte-Tavo, L. (2011). Mécanismes d’identification linguistique et jeunesse urbaine à Port-Vila (Vanuatu): une approche anthropologique. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 133: 241–254. Winford, D. (2003). An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell. Woolard, K.A. and Schieffelin, B.S. (1994). Language Ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 55–82.

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3

Language Endangerment and Renewal

Sean O’Neill Introduction The world’s languages are now in crisis. Centuries of colonialism, across the planet, have brought most the world’s Indigenous tongues to the brink of extinction in a very short span of time. Languages, in this way, are more ephemeral than most of us imagine, taking root only when a fluent speaker shares a body of accumulated wisdom with another person, who becomes a conduit for this ancestral knowledge. For this reason, a language can be lost, almost overnight, as the last speaker passes away. Around the world today, efforts are now underway to reverse the erosion of languages and the accumulated wisdom associated with oral traditions. According to experts1 most of the world’s Indigenous languages will go extinct in the next century if nothing is done to reverse the scope of the current loss. Each year, we lose a few more, each of them with thousands of years of history behind the words and stories, wrapped up in everything from conversation to the realm of storytelling. As the proverbial “last speaker” dies, taking their secrets to the grave, the loss is something akin to a library burning in the night—a vast storehouse of ancestral knowledge, never to be recovered. Of the 6000 or so languages that are still spoken, experts estimate that fewer than 500 will survive the next century, leaving us all—that is humanity as a whole—with a small fraction of the diversity the world once knew. By and large, the languages affected are Indigenous ones, in place for thousands of years before colonial settlers arrived to displace them on their own ancestral turf, driving them away to hostile, foreign lands through humiliating processes of removal, dispossession, and dislocation, carried out over many generations, while resulting in inter-generational traumas. Countless languages, through such a process, nearly perished in the wake of global colonial conquest, something which took a sharp turn over the past 500 years, with the so-called “Age of Discovery,” when European powers, such as the Spanish, British, and Portuguese, 1

  See Harrison 2008; Krauss 1992; Nettle and Romaine 2002.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

arrived in the the Americas. This so-called New World was, of course, long the ancestral land of the Indigenous people, who made their homes here for many millennia before outside settlers from Europe and afar arrived to displace them, generally in violent ways that involved uprooting their sacred traditions in language and culture—their medicines, songs, and ceremonial ways that offer visions from the past as a path to the future. For centuries now, colonial administrators around the world have relegated Indigenous people to the past, condemning their languages to eventual extinction, as obstacles standing in the way of supposed “progress.” In this vein, authorities among the world’s colonial powers have long been forecasting the demise of the world’s Indigenous languages and cultures—in advance, and with perhaps a modicum of self-interest in the eventual, self-serving outcome. Such has been the grand narrative, offered up by colonial powers and broadcast around the world—one that is still with us, though the roots can be traced back at least as far as the Roman Empire, when the target consisted of “barbarians,” such as Celts, whose “tribal” languages were also supplanted and replaced in such lands as Spain, Portugal, England, and France. These old, hackneyed discourses about “tribal peoples,” “savages,” and “barbarians” come to a head in another wave of rhetoric, which situates all of these groups in the era of the past, as part of an imaginary unilineal historical progression, wherein they occupy the outmoded role of the “primitive,” without granting them the space to inhabit a shared future, in, for example, a multilingual and multicultural world. When portrayed in such terms, with the weight of celebrated scholars, such prophecies have the power to become self-fulfilling, especially when phrased in such damning terms as language “endangerment” or even “death.” As an ethnographer and member of the Maliseet community in Eastern Canada, Bernard Perley even floated the idea of “death by suicide,” in a frank discussion of psychological factors that eat away at speakers, after experiencing generations of trauma and ideological warfare the hands of colonial settlers (see Perley 2011, pp. 121–148, 2012). Some have questioned the very language of endangerment (see Hill 2002), which potentially creates a self-fulfilling narrative; as community members learn that experts have pronounced their languages dead, they may lose hope. Linguists, for our part, have perhaps spoken too soon about “dead” or extinct languages, without considering the force of such rhetoric within communities. As we now know, even a “dead language” can sometimes be reborn, as illustrated in the striking case of modern Hebrew or the Myaamia language of Oklahoma. Even in the face of centuries of brutal oppression, a handful of languages have come back from the supposed grave to be reborn and revived, with the hope that this inspiring process—reversing the damage of colonialism—may one day take hold. Against all these odds—from long-term genocidal campaigns to the enduring force of official rhetoric on behalf of governments or even the academy—Indigenous communities the world over are now actively renewing the languages and cultural traditions that were nearly destroyed at the hands of colonial regimes around the world, including the United States. Efforts are now underway throughout the world, from Ireland to New Zeeland, from California to Oklahoma, to reverse the precipitous decline in accumulated knowledge associated with the oral traditions that go back to time immemorial (Harrison 2008). Even after surviving generations of trauma, languages are now being reborn, sometimes after a long hiatus, and sometimes even with no speakers remaining in the current generation, coming back under the support of scholarship and community activism. The Māori people of New Zealand have faced similar problems with colonial oppression, which resulted in devastating loss of their Native tongue (Te Reo) and ancestral way of life, as the British colonies pushed into their homeland, claiming it for their own. Even the name

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of the island reflects this story, with a European reference displacing the Native cultures in place long before the British “discovered it” (for themselves), as they did with the so-called New World. The return of Māori on the world stage stems from decades of commitment on the part of activists, including the community-based linguist, Timoti Kāretu (1937–). Decades ago, Kāretu embarked the long-term project of renewing his language, culture, and music together, with the pioneering concept of the “language nest,” where children could once again experience complete immersion in the home and throughout the course of the day, without the intrusion of other languages.

Documentary Linguistics and the Role of Anthropology Anthropologists have been engaged in endangered language research from the start, given their long-standing professional commitment to non-Western societies, who have been at the primary subjects of colonial destruction. Franz Boas (1858–1942) set out to inscribe Indigenous languages and cultures, even before the field of linguistics itself emerged as a profession in the United States. One of his earliest papers (Boas 1889) defended the sound patterns of Indigenous tongues, paving the way for what would eventually be called the phoneme as a language-specific unit of sound perception. This paper, in a profound way, represented a defense of the legitimacy of Indigenous perceptual categories, setting off a revolution that would eventually become an argument in favour of the intellectual equality of all human languages and cultures, later known as cultural and linguistic relativism. He went on to write an ethnography and dictionary of the Inuit people of Baffin Island (Boas 1888), before eventually training Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who went on to inscribe dozens of Indigenous languages in the literature of the profession.

Relativity

In time, the principle of cultural relativism became the centerpiece of American anthropology, as a sustained defense of human diversity. Armed with comparative anthropological knowledge, claims about supposed superiority could be demolished in the face of the demonstrable relativity of cultural practices. Each language and culture was to be understood on its own terms, with language serving as the key to understanding other people and their social realities—in their own words and in relation to their own ways of life. Relativity, in Boasian terms, was truly relative to the position of the observer, with the understanding that multiple worldviews could exist within the same language, culture, or society. Language, for the Boasians, was not uniform across a speech community, in the sense of a ideal system of grammatical rules, as proposed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Nor was language a perfect mirror of thought, but a creative platform, allowing for the expression of individual nuance—a position that Edward Sapir, in particular, developed throughout the course of his career. Taking other cultures seriously paved the way for linguistic relativity, as a core axiom of the profession, proposed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), as a corollary to cultural relativism (Sapir 1949; Whorf 1956). The principle of linguistic relativity focuses on how people everywhere construct compelling social realities from the symbolism of everyday language, including everything from religious worldviews, as delivered in sayings or prayers, to gender roles, with their recognizable accents and familiar scripts. In a similar way, everyday language potentially perpetuates enduring societal scourge such as racism, sexism, or classism (Hill 2008).

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For many Indigenous people throughout the world today, the concept of “linguistic relativity” is not a just academic matter—for debate among college students—but a issue of real concern in daily life, when it comes to reestablishing traditional linguistic practices in relation to everything from medicine to storytelling or even musical performances. Learning a heritage language is like opening a page in the book of life, receiving guidance from one’s ancestors on practical matters. In opening such metaphorical book, one may find the names for plants and medicines that have been lost in a sea of English or other colonial tongues. As Dell Hymes (1927–2009) once pointed out, there are at least two types of linguistic relativity, starting with the one that has reached the public in terms of conceptual frameworks that differ from one language to the next. For Hymes (1966), on the other hand, the real point of departure could be found in differences in social orientation, differences in how people interact, in the theater of everyday social life. Such difference, over the broad arc of history, are only secondarily represented in everyday grammar and vocabulary, as social realities that can then be broadcast in everyday linguistic practice.

Ethnography

Flowing directly from this principle of relativism, or taking other people’s cultural realities seriously, early anthropologists sought to transcribe oral narratives from languages around the world, vividly depicting scenes from everyday life, generally collaborating with fluent speakers to elicit myths, legends, descriptions of rituals, specialized lexicons, etc. The resulting works often depict scenes from everyday life, told from an Indigenous point of view, as illustrated in the life and work of Edward Sapir (Sapir 2001). Yet, even before Sapir’s time, linguistics such as James Owen Dorsey (1848–1895) and Pliny Earle Goddard (1869–1928) transcribed countless hours of oral narratives, which have proven indispensable to community members as they renew their languages, drawing on these materials as a resource. By the mid-twentieth century, a new school of thought known as the “Ethnography of Speaking” emerged as the dominant paradigm in linguistic anthropology (Bauman and Sherzer 1975; Hymes 1962). The central question, in this school, was relationship between language and social action in everyday life. The movement was coeval with the so-called “Chomskyan Revolution” in linguistics, which, sadly, initiated a retreat from fieldwork into the ivory tower, in a time when many of the world’s languages entered a moment of passing from endangered to moribund to critically endangered (see Newmeyer 1986). Yet the new paradigm was also based in part on the insights of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and even Franz Boas, who sought to situate the words they studied in an ethnographic context, drawing attention to the central place of language in facilitating everyday social interactions. For a time, scholars in linguistic anthropology attended to these matters, writing linguistic ethnographies, such as Keith Basso’s classic book on Western Apache place names (1996), where the author reveals the layers of poetry, storytelling, and history that can be distilled from ordinary vocabulary. Contemporary examples include the works of Barbara Meek (2010) and Bernard Perley (2011), both detailed ethnographies looking not so much at traditional culture, but at the renewal of languages in contemporary times, including the politics of language renewal against the backdrop of oppression and resistance in a time of reawakening.

Ideology

Engagement with ethnography, when seen through the lens of language, soon gave way to a theoretical focus on ideologies—those systems of ideas through which we interpret the world around us, including language itself (Kroskrity 2004). At a certain point, every

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52  sean o’neill

serious ethnographer must ask, What conceptions of language circulate in a given community? In turn, one must also ask, What impact do those ideas have on linguistic practice? Do people regard speech as a solely human endowment, or as something that other species share? Is the gift of speech something that flows from our biology or does it come from a divine source? These are ancient questions and the answers have profound repercussions for how community members relate to language—as a divine gift or a point of ethnic pride, for instance. Alternatively, for many colonial administrators, ideology could be used as an instrument of genocide, if they could convince oppressed peoples that their languages were “backwards” or “primitive,” with their languages and cultures perishing along the way, as a self-fulfilling prophecy on the many Trails of Tears their ancestors walked, making graves along the way. Either way, ideology makes all the difference. Thus, even the professional talk of linguists has sometimes had unforeseen consequences in communities, as expressions like “language death” and even “endangerment” can strike listeners as discouraging—potentially becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, as community members take those damaging pronouncements to heart, giving up (see Dorian 1993; Hill 2002; Perley 2011, pp. 2–3). Language ideologies, though often accepted and spread on an unconscious basis, can play an important role in shaping the destiny of any language (or dialect), in terms of the social values with which speakers imbue their speech. As Michael Silverstein (1986) has shown, in relation to the loss of thee and thou in modern English, the association with religious fundamentalism, particularly Quakers and the revolt against hierarchy in English vernacular, led to a turning away from such constructions, which came to be strongly associated with religious fundamentalism on ideological grounds. To utter ‘thee’ or ‘thou’ branded one as a fundamentalist, and the masses wanted to push away from this stigma. When it comes to renewal efforts, language ideology, as a guiding theoretical model, holds important lessons. As Jane and Kenneth Hill have shown in their work on Nahuatl (Hill and Hill 1986), an Indigenous language of Mexico, purist ideologies can work against renewal efforts, when the standard is set too high for learners to enter the fray, which often involves making mistakes and even changing the language in the process.

Identity

For many Indigenous communities throughout around the world today, language is a poignant symbol of ancestral heritage—a precious heirloom, passed down over the generations. This position echoes one of the core premises of linguistic anthropology—namely, that language occupies a central place the performance of identity, as one of the core functions that language plays in daily life. When it comes to renewal programs, language can play a powerful role in cementing a sense of national or ethnic pride, creating powerful sustained indexical ties to the past and serving to strengthen bonds within the community, among fellow speakers, aligned in a common cause. As a poignant symbol of group membership, language can play a decisive role in the process of language renewal. As Susan Gal and Judith Irvine (2000) have pointed out, language can also undergo a process of iconization in relation to identity, with any feature of that language reflecting some aspect of the social life of the community, as a living embodiment, for those who understand the subtle semiotics at play. Click sounds (formally known as implosives) have, in such a fashion, become icons of African identity in South Africa, not just among the Khoisan languages, where this feature originates, but also among unrelated languages in the Bantu family (Gal and Irvine 2000). In contemporary terms, many heritage languages have been reframed as identity markers. The rise of Israel as a

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nation in the twentieth century, for instance, provided a powerful ideological motivation for language renewal, reawakening an ancient language, Hebrew, that had been “sleeping” for nearly 2000 years—re-emerging, not just as a literary tongue or bearer of tradition, but as a functional system of communication for an incipient Zionist movement. In the case of Ireland, the rise of Irish nationalism has provided a powerful motivation—as visceral as ideological—for renewing the language and ancestral way of life, with its long association with the poetry, music, and folklore of the land. Yet language is more than just a symbol of heritage. Once reawakened, a spoken language can once again become a living embodiment of those ethnic practices that were associated with the heritage language—including everything from conversational frames to gender roles or even speech genres and storytelling modalities. As Barbara Meek has shown in her book, We Are Our Language (2010), reviving a heritage language goes hand in hand with renewing cultural practices and maintaining a sense of identity as a community. When the surviving speakers are no longer talking on a regular basis, the language can go into a state of hibernation, and memories can even begin to slip, all of which can be turned around, almost overnight, when there is a reason for the speakers to reunite as a group. In breathing new life into a language, those ancient words once again become flesh, in a sense that is more than symbolic. Here identity becomes practice, as ideology is enacted every time a speaker opens his or her mouth to speak. In this sense, identity is more than just mirror of ideology. Once internalized, identity also becomes a visceral experience, as a felt attachment to a heritage language that goes right to the heart (Webster 2016), stirring emotions that may have been buried behind centuries of trauma, potentially healing old wounds in the community, as practices come back to life. Writing systems, in this capacity, potentially send poignant messages when it comes to the expression of social identity; they are visible symbols of speech communities, with distinctive features that even an outsider can detect at a glance (Blommaert 2008; Sebba 2009). As is often the case with semiotics, in its many modalities, there are no truly neutral choices when it comes to orthographies, as a system that sends both visual and auditory messages. Accepting an outside system proposed by a consulting linguist potentially blindsides community members, who may have their own preferences. At the same time, most of the phonetic systems advanced by linguists are, in turn, distantly inspired by the Roman or Greek alphabets, with their own disturbing colonial histories. Community members, for their part, may have advanced a baffling diversity of self-fashioned orthographies for practical purposes, only contributing to the ongoing Tower of Babel when it comes to writing, as each system is somewhat incompatible with the next—even when representing the same language. Ultimately, having a distinctive orthography is a matter of pressing concern for many communities, one that is vetted and approved by a Council of Elders, often in association with a consulting linguist, who can provide some guidance while still respecting the prevailing community ethos.

Rising from the Ashes of Colonialism: Ethnographic Illustrations Even after being condemned to extinction for centuries at the hands of colonial governments, many of the world’s Indigenous languages have returned from the supposed grave only to be reborn. On this other, “deathly” side of this colonial process, genocide itself is a fate worse than death: watching your loved ones die before your eyes, digging graves for your elders or children, while walking so many trails of tears, on the path to removal from your ancestral homeland, never to return. The rest of this chapter

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examines several apparently far-flung ethno-historical cases, in an effort to uncover the parallels in terms of how colonial processes have affected the dispossessed, while shedding light, in a comparative sense, on the practices that are now leading the way to rebirth. Just as languages can die, leaving behind no speakers at all, so too they can be reborn—or perhaps reincarnated, to use another gripping metaphor, one that captures how deeply the waves of history can be received and even reembodied through the medium of language.

Oklahoma: Removals and Returns

The genocidal campaigns that ravaged the world arrived in what is now the US state of Oklahoma with a vengeance—with great violence and at an accelerated pace. As a result, Oklahoma is now a hotspot for linguistic diversity on the global stage. A wide range of languages were affected, coming from multiple source stocks and distant homelands, including Iroquoian, Algonquian, Siouan, and even Athabaskan. The language families of the state in fact represent the majority of those found in the continental US, even including the Modoc (Penutian), who were removed from southern Oregon, as punishment, following the Modoc War in the late nineteenth century. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by Andrew Jackson, thirty-nine Tribes were, in time, removed and relocated to what was then known as “Indian Territory,” over the course of mere decades, rather than centuries. The Cherokee Trail of Tears (1830– 1850) is probably the best-known narrative here, but many other Tribes swiftly suffered a similar fate, being brought to the land beyond the Mississippi River at gunpoint, with relatives dying along the way. The Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, on the other hand, was one of the last, making their way, also at gunpoint, in 1887. Graves continue to mark the spots where loved ones perished on the voyage. Literacy Practices  Throughout the nineteenth century, many of the Tribes of Oklahoma developed thriving literacy programs, publishing books and grammatical primers in languages such as Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw. In the language of the day, the land had been given to Native Americans “as long as the rivers would flow, or grass would grow,” even if that promise was swiftly taken away, after a few short decades (Zinn 2015). Right from the start, many of the Tribes set out to document their languages—for the express purpose of teaching them in the schools and transmitting the wisdom of their ancestors to future generations, even in a strange and hostile new land. The Cherokee, for example, famously devised their own writing system, a syllabary, which was the product of deep inspiration on the part of Sequoyah (ca. 1770–1843), a gifted Native American linguist and polymath. Afterwards, a thriving literacy emerged among the Cherokee, with reams of correspondence emerging from the early days of Indian Territory. For a short time, before the land was opened up to settlers in 1889, education took place in Indigenous tongues—even as English began to make inroads into daily life, particularly in relation to dealing with agents of the government. Several Tribes, including the Creeks and Cherokees, even produced grammatical primers of their native language for use in the classroom. Even political affairs were largely conducted in Indigenous languages, with elaborate notes that are now housed at the Oklahoma Historical Society, once the US government seized those records to make an archive for surveillance of Indian Affairs. Many of these colonial documents have now found a new purpose, as priceless records that sustain revitalization efforts in the present epoch.

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Divide and Conquer: The Dawes Act, Statehood, and Dispossession Shortly following the Civil War, the US government initiated a crafty legal plot, aimed at dispossessing Native peoples of their newfound territories—following the initial removal from their ancestral homelands. With introduction of the Dawes Act of 1887, the land would be divided among descendants into infinity, with the plots becoming incrementally smaller over the generations. This was followed by a more serious blow to sovereignty, as Indian Territory was opened up to non-Native settlers to make way for statehood, something that became official in 1907. By the early twentieth century, the languages of Oklahoma slipped into a precipitous decline, with the unwelcome intrusion of English into what was once Indian Territory. Shortly afterwards, boarding schools were established, and children were ripped away from their families to learn English amongst hostile strangers; many were subjected to terrible abuse, instilling a deep sense of shame in relation to their Native tongues and ancestral traditions. The guiding wisdom of the day was “kill the Indian, save the person,” as state licensed motto for genocide—one that was certainly meant to wipe out the heritage languages and the precious ancestral knowledge contained therein. Indigenous Intellectuals and Activists  Rather than being crushed under the power of the US government, the Tribes of Oklahoma have risen against the forces of colonialism, resisting even from the beginning. Dr. Louis Headman of the Ponca Tribe is another example of an Indigenous intellectual and autodidact linguist. Franz Boas, for his part, benefited greatly from his associations with several Indigenous intellectuals whose gifts he cultivated, including George Hunt (1854–1933) and Ella Deloria (1889–1971). Most communities have speakers who are inclined to analyze the forms of speech, or the patterns of culture, giving rise to Indigenous linguists and intellectuals. In the case of Oklahoma, there are extensive archives, which can be mined for useful information, even if these contemporary efforts go far from what the creators of those archives ever imagined. Within the Kiowa community, for example, the self-taught linguist Parker McKenzie (1897–1999) developed his own script for writing this language, in consultation with the eminent field linguist John P. Harrington (1884–1961). The two scholars worked together for years, with Parker McKenzie serving as the expert speaker at first and eventually taking on the role community linguist. Though Harrington was committed to accurate transcription from a phonetic angle, insisting on a unique character for every possible sound human language, McKenzie had his own goal, which is writing the language on a typewriter. Yet the elders, over the years, had advanced their own practical orthographies, creating a situation Palmer and Neely describe as “heterographia” (2009), with multiple writing systems existing, side-by-side, as a both a poignant visual symbol of social diversity as well as a regular point of conflict in achieving the collective goal of arriving at a common system of writing. Much the same is true elsewhere in the world’s Indigenous language communities. As a contemporary Indigenous linguist, Daryl Baldwin of the Myaamia Tribe of Oklahoma, wears many hats. He started out as an Indigenous activist, later training as an academic linguist, and, in time, he became one of the first people on the historical record to revive a language from the dead, so to speak. In his work reviving his own language of heritage, which experts once pronounced as dead, he was able to resurrect Myaamia. The tools he carried with him were in part heirlooms from his own family, but also treasures from the academy, including tools for linguistic analysis. As with the revival of Hebrew, teaching the language to his children was the secret to the resounding success,

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drawing on detailed grammatical materials and extensive archives, even a sophisticated computerized database. Returning to the case of Cherokee, the Indigenous linguist Sequoyah fashioned a writing system in the early nineteenth century, one of the few syllabaries to take a place on the world stage in modern times. Within his lifetime, the language began to bear a literature, finding its way into print and an abundance of correspondence that began to document the language as it accumulated in the mid- to late-nineteenth century to the present, making Cherokee one of the most profusely documented native languages on the face of the planet. More recently, the distinguished linguist Durbin Feeling (1946–2020) grew up speaking Cherokee in Eastern Oklahoma, becoming literate as a soldier in Vietnam, writing messages for his mother in the iconic script that Sequoyah himself had devised a century before. Those tools, including the syllabary, and the lessons from the past, provided poignant lessons for future generations, as he transmitted the ancestral knowledge of his own family. Bringing all of these lessons to a head, he published his classic dictionary in 1975, which quickly became the primary resource for learning everything from conversational Cherokee to the intricacies of the grammar, even literacy (Feeling 1975).

Ireland: Resistance and the Rise of Nationalism

Ireland was one of the first of many lands to confront the waves of colonial destruction that eventually swept the planet. The assault on Ireland and its people began about 800 years ago, when the armies of King Henry II descended on Dublin, itself a colonial city established by previous waves of Viking invaders. The English, for their part, sought mastery over Ireland and its people, eventually dominating not just the economy, but also the language and the culture, the very spirit of the people they hoped to crush. Yet, for centuries, Irish Gaelic remained the primary language of everyday life, and English rarely made an appearance beyond Dublin, the center of British colonial rule. In time, the British hatched a cruel plot to dispossess the Irish, making them servants to the British Empire and banning Catholics from holding property. Thus, in the year 1600, under the genocidal leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the English reinvaded Ireland, pushing deeper into the heart of the country, quickly supplanting Irish Gaelic with the newly prestigious colonial tongue of the overlords. As with the Dawes act in Oklahoma, the English found a way to remove the Irish from their homes, claiming that Catholics could not own property or till their own soil, effectively removing the Irish from their own ancestral lands. As with the conquest of the Americas, the conquest of Ireland resulted in relocation and removal, as Catholics peasants and even noblemen were removed from their homes, on their own hallowed Native grounds. Over the next two centuries, English gradually became the majority language in centers like Dublin and Belfast. The echoes were heard throughout the land, as English encroached still further into the heart of the country. The pattern became a familiar one throughout the world, with Ireland serving as kind of a test case for global colonialism. The strategies tested in Ireland—dislocation, dispossession, and killing off the language—ultimately proved effective, especially in other lands such as Oklahoma or California, where the pace only accelerated. But what the English met in Ireland was endless resistance, despite their sustained efforts to undermine Irish people on their own soil. In the end, Gaelic has, like many Indigenous languages, made a remarkable return in the modern world.

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language endangerment and renewal  57

The Great Famine (1845–1852)  Irish Gaelic continued to thrive for centuries, even under British rule, eventually becoming a minority language in places such as Dublin. The turning point came in the mid-nineteenth century, when Ireland became a massive death camp in a sense, as perhaps 1 million people died of starvation. By that point, British colonial practices had overturned the traditional economy—once a small-scale peasant society based on fishing and family farms. Even the once-thriving oak forests, a key symbol in traditional Irish religion, had been devastated—as most of the trees had been chopped down and shipped out as firewood, to fuel thriving British ocean fleets. Many died, even as their thriving cash crops—such as wheat and barley—were shipped away for export to foreign markets. Many also fled for the so-called New World, as their beloved homeland became a living hell. As a result, the Irish language fell into sudden decline, remaining the majority language only in a few places such as Donnegal, Mayo, Galway and Kerry. As the Great Famine reached its height, the people of Ireland received some relief from the Choctaw Tribe of Oklahoma, as a small but symbolic sum, meant primarily as a show of solidarity among the dispossessed. In sympathy for the plight of the Irish, in this moment of mutual suffering, the Choctaw forged a lasting relationship with the people of Ireland, based on a sense of alliance, as colonized peoples who had been displaced by the British and impoverished on their own ancestral turf. The alliance between these two nations also exposes the myth of race, with the Irish being one of the earliest targets, as supposedly “non-white,” primitives in British and American colonial discourses (Hill 2008, p. 14), a position that Indigenous people and other minorities later came to occupy. A century and a half later, both groups are reviving their languages, survivors of a dark moment in human history and exemplars for the rest of the world. Twentieth Century Renewal  With the rise of the Irish Republic in 1922, the New Irish government set their sights on the goal of cultural literacy, not necessarily absolute fluency in all varieties of speaking throughout the day. Nowadays, in public schools, most children learn to read and write in Gaelic, as a basic duty of citizenship. Public servants, for their part, must demonstrate some competence in Irish Gaelic to earn their keep, including everyone from teachers to postal workers to those holding government posts. Taken together, these policies will, hopefully, ensure a bright future for Irish Gaelic, particularly in relation to its cultural significance as a viable language in the modern world—one that bears a proud tradition in oral literature, folklore, poetry, and music, on the world stage. When it comes to resources for language renewal, the people of Ireland have a rich trove of self-made treasures to explore, carefully crafted by the scholars of a bygone era. The dawn of literacy came early to Ireland. By the time Saint Patrick (ca. 385–461), as a former slave, introduced Christianity, scholars and monks had begun to translate the gospel from multiple languages, starting with Greek and Latin, reaching into Gaelic. Historically speaking, lessons of language have mostly been passed down by word of mouth, only secondarily finding expression in the letters we transcribe on the printed page. Writing itself has a relatively recent vintage among humans worldwide. Not only did these scholars document the gospels in translation, comparing various versions that circulated in Latin and Greek for centuries beforehand, they also began to transcribe the poetry and literature of the ancient bards, those who came before the arrival of Christianity. Over the centuries, Irish Gaelic has eventually taken on strongly nationalist overtones, in relation to the resistance movements that took root since the language slipped into decline under British colonial rule. Until as recently as the nineteenth century, Gaelic was simply the language of the land; everyone in Ireland spoke Gaelic in some fashion, including the many

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regional dialects. Then, as the language began to slip away, speaking Gaelic became a powerful symbol of national identity. Ideologically speaking, when investing all of the time it takes to learn a language, relating to this new form of speech as a source of ethnic heritage and national pride makes all the difference (Avineri 2014). Here, again, the relationship between ideology and practice potentially produces measurable results in the world. In time, Gaelic became an emblem of Celtic heritage, and the pain of living, as a disposed people, under foreign rule. (My own grandfather spoke some Gaelic, as an inheritor of this tradition of resistance in the long O’Neill line.) Along these lines, Gaelic has become an international symbol of pride among Celtic Peoples, including those in Scotland, Wales, and Brittany.

Goals and Methods for Future Research For the vast majority of the world’s endangered languages, the existing documentation is woefully inadequate for the demands of community-based language renewal. Among Indigenous activists struggling to revive endangered languages throughout the planet, there’s an evocative adage: One must know a language well enough to get through the proverbial day without switching into another tongue, even for a moment, whatever the circumstances—however exalted or mundane the situation, perhaps even in one’s dreams. While this level of mastery may be within easy reach for learners of a handful of colonial tongues, like English, which fill the airwaves everywhere on the planet, this kind of proficiency is almost unattainable for prospective speakers of endangered languages once these tongues have fallen out of daily use. In many cases, the existing scholarly archives, books, and multimedia recordings are simply not enough, when it comes to knowing all of the appropriate speech genres, prayers, and songs, which have often been overlooked by past waves of research. Again, the anthropological approach to language has much to offer when it comes to these renewal efforts, starting with the copious bodies of oral literature that early salvage anthropologists collected.

Community-Engaged Research

Documenting language as it is used in everyday life has been a glaring oversight in many of the archives over the past several centuries—a sustained pattern that has endured for many generations in the profession, especially when it comes to documenting Indigenous tongues. Too often, words and stories were transcribed without much sense of the social context— the meaning of those forms as they were delivered in everyday life. In the heyday of early ethnography, everyday language rarely made an appearance in scholarly studies of the world’s Indigenous societies. However eager community members may be to reawaken the wisdom of their ancestors, those ancient words are often locked up in archaic scripts that even contemporary academics scramble to interpret, based on writing systems that are now outmoded or paradigms of linguistics that have been superseded by newer models. Around the world today, however, community activists are now working with outside scholars—and a growing body of Indigenous academics—to document their heritage languages, going beyond the traditional academic interest in the structure of language to place special focus on the cultural uses of language in everyday life. To take one example, the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma is now engaged in a long-term effort to renew their language, after generations of brutal treatment from the US Government. Like many of the Tribes of Oklahoma, they came to the state on a Trail of Tears (see above) that is perhaps not as well-known, with many elders and even children

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language endangerment and renewal  59

dying along the way. Tragically, this removal was initiated on the eve of Oklahoma statehood, just as non-Native settlers were allowed to enter in droves, displacing the Tribes, who lost most of their rights, on the authority of the state. Not long after the Poncas were removed to Oklahoma, the land was once again taken away from them in a tragedy of historic significance, with Chief Standing Bear (1829–1908) guiding them through this difficult time as their heroic leader. A century later, one elder in particular—Dr. Louis Headman—retained a crystal-clear memory of the language from growing up around his grandparents during his early childhood. It is no accident that, as descendent of Chief Standing Bear, he was the one who received this ancestral line of knowledge, taking it upon himself early in life to document the history of the Ponca Tribe. Over the course of his life—against all odds—Headman became a distinguished linguist, anthropologist, and Tribal historian, as witnessed in The Dictionary of the Ponca People (Headman and O’Neill 2019). This contribution was quickly followed by another—namely his testament to Ponca Tribal History, Walks on the Ground (2020). It goes without saying that there are very few other books in this category, not only as a Tribal history told from an Indigenous point of view, but also as one that invokes the perspectives of the many elders in the community, from the time of his childhood to the present-day. Along the way, adopting a formal system of writing was a matter of pressing concern, as it is for many Indigenous communities throughout the world today. In time, Headman came to adopt something resembling the Americanist script, based on his own knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, dating back to his college days at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. While most of the world’s languages were passed down purely by word of mouth in the past, literacy has become crucial to language learning today, in part because the written records themselves have become supplementary resources in a time when fewer elders are available to teach the languages in person. In language renewal programs, literacy is often taught alongside other modes of social engagement, such as storytelling and song.

Repatriation

Past research cannot be ignored in the interest of gathering a wide range of useful materials for language renewal, given the enormous body of work that has already been carried out at the hands of government agents, outside academics, and Indigenous scholars going back countless generations, including those who first began to write their languages with whatever means they had. All of these materials—however inadequate on their own—can be brought to bear on the quest for renewing languages in the present for the sake of the future. Any gaps in the research can often be filled even by working with speakers who have some amount of knowledge of the language as it was spoken when it was vibrant, including a knowledge of the ecology, environment, traditional lifeways, conversation—the primary subject-matter of linguistic anthropology for over a century now. Though these archives were often created for other purposes, including academic research or government surveillance, the resulting records find their deepest meaning upon returning to their home communities. When it comes to Ponca, for instance, the language had already been documented extensively by the linguist James Owen Dorsey, whose archives often served as valuable guides when jogging the memory of elders, as we pored over them while vetting and compiling the Ponca Dictionary with the Council of Elders (Headman and O’Neill 2019). In a similar vein, there were also extensive lessons buried in the Cherokee archives, even in materials that left many unanswered questions about such things as regional dialects. Teaming up with some of the Cherokee language instructors at the University of Oklahoma, including Durbin Feeling and Christine Armer, we revisited old manuscripts to

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develop a more accurate model of the Cherokee verb, one that not only takes variation in the tones into consideration but one that will also be useful to future generations of speakers (see Feeling et al. 2010). In the late 1990s, while I was doing fieldwork in Northwestern California, the Hupa Tribe was hosting weekly language sessions, with elders getting together in the company of the younger learners, including children and teenagers. At the time, there were only a handful of fluent speakers left in the Tribe, all of them elderly. Many of those sessions revolved around the meanings of specific words, some of them under negotiation as neologisms, as the language had stepped into decline back in 1930s. Afterwards, many of the elders invited me to their homes where we worked on old stories, as I read words from their own ancestors for them to decipher, interpret, and retell according to the versions they themselves had heard in childhood. Often these visits resulted in new versions of the tales, as elders remembered alternative family traditions beyond what had already been documented before. In this way, the exercise was a productive one, in terms of generating new material for the community to access in the future, as the languages undergo renewal (O’Neill 2015). The language was undergoing a reawakening after a long hiatus, with the elders coming together again to recite their knowledge of the language and present it to the next generation, even going so far as to accommodate the children in their need for new words to discuss contemporary topics.

Modes of Speaking

For generations now, scholars in linguistics have focused their attention on language in written from, following the model of old religious or philosophical texts. Sadly, this hallowed scholarly tradition almost entirely cuts out the language of everyday life or even ordinary conversation, where words are used “to do things” (Austin 1962). When early anthropologists set out to document Native American oral literature, engaging in so-called “salvage anthropology,” a few of them ever imagined that these oral traditions would ever be revived to “do things” again. However, as Indigenous languages begin to undergo renewal around the world, all these archival materials are taking on a new significance, a new place in the world. In working with the Hupa Tribe of California, I found that repatriating materials sometimes opens the door to questions about the speech genres involved, as the elders asked pointed questions aimed at restoring the context that was absent from the documentation process. Where was the story told? To whom, under what circumstances, in what settings? How are the stories to be interpreted? Were they meant to be prayers or medicines? Or were they meant as jokes, with some allegorical message? Some of the stories, as it turns out, had all of those possibilities, depending on the context of the telling. Once I was invited to a sacred dance ground, traditionally regarded as the very center of the universe, as a place with direct access to the pantheon of spirit beings in the heavens. As I listened to the elder who took me there, he spoke in a version of the language I had never encountered, even in the archives I had consulted. There, at this sacred center, in addressing the ancestors and the spirit deities, rather than saying, whi-k’iwinya’nyaan, the expected form for ‘my people, ancestors,’ he chose the archaic shi-k’iwinya’nyaan ‘my people, ancestors,’ which would have sounded more intelligible in Navajo, going back to a time when the two speech communities were one. As anthropologists have established, gender roles differ in significant ways across languages and cultures, something that plays out in terms of specialized registers, which English speakers may recognize in terms of the distinctive speech of surfers or Valley Girls,

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for instance. Once, while working with the Hupa Tribe in Northwestern California, Edward Sapir collaborated with an ostensibly male speaker, named Sam Brown, who heavily identified, in sociological terms, with the traditional female roles in Hupa society—with his great aunt, a doctor and spiritual healer, known as Emma Frank (or Silis in Hupa). At the time, Frank [or Lewis?] was the most accomplished practitioner of traditional doctoring, based in part on her direct knowledge of the spirit world, which she received in visions and dreams— a role that was also heavily linked with women at the highest levels (Sapir 2001, pp. 238– 250). Though Sapir collected about a dozen texts from Emma Frank herself, as the chief expert on traditional medicine, her nephew, Sam Brown dictated a few additional texts— often slipping into his great aunt’s voice. When delivering texts on her behalf, Brown often spoke in a female register, dictating these stories in a characteristically female voice, along the lines of the shamanic role he sought to emulate. Thus, over the summer, Sam Brown and Edward Sapir perhaps went beyond what Sapir set out to document—going far beyond the concerns of the time in either linguistics or anthropology.

Conclusions: Renewals and Returns As illustrated throughout this essay, the issues addressed and raised by endangered language research will have lasting repercussions, going far beyond the halls of the academy, right to the heart of anthropology, as a field devoted to the history and future well-being of our species. In a profound sense, the crisis that has engulfed the world’s languages now threatens to swallow humanity as a whole. Ultimately, the collective fate of our species is at stake, as we jettison eons of traditional wisdom, including the languages that have borne this knowledge throughout the ages. Today, even languages that were once severely endangered, on the verge of extinction— such as Ponca, Myaamia, Irish Gaelic, or Māori—have seen a rise in enthusiasm, with new speakers emerging in the present generation, engaging not only with the language in its structural complexity, but also with all of the cultural entailments that come with learning a language enough to speak it throughout the day. Today, we are even witnessing the return of multilingualism among Indigenous peoples, who often straddle multiple languages and worlds, mastering both Native and non-Native vernaculars. The West Coast the United States was once, for instance, a thriving multilingual center, with about a hundred languages spoken in the modern-day state of California alone. The scale of the diversity there is rivaled only by a few other places on the planet, such as the Caucasus mountains, New Guinea, or the Amazon Basin (Golla 2011). Trade networks and cultural ties stretched as far as the Puget Sound, along the Pacific Northwest, near present day Seattle along the Canadian border. All of that changed almost overnight with the arrival of the Gold Rush in California in 1849. By the mid-1850s, on the heels on the famine in Ireland, the series of parallel genocides that swept the Americas arrived on the West Coast, displacing Indigenous people at a greatly accelerated pace (Madley 2016). What had taken centuries to unfold along the East Coast of the US, or mere decades in Oklahoma (“Indian Territory”), happened almost overnight in California, in the span of a few short years, as California passed from Mexico to the United States. All the hundred-plus Indigenous languages of California now face the pressing issue of endangerment. Owing to the long-term efforts of community activists and outside scholars, Indigenous communities throughout California are now engaging in a wide range of innovative practices for teaching Native languages, both within the home and in the school systems,

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62  sean o’neill

including Tribal centers. Advocacy groups, such as the Advocates for Indigenous California Languages’ Survival, have provided outreach and financial support for seeding local renewal efforts throughout the state, including the innovative master apprentice programs they pioneered in the late twentieth century, pairing fluent speakers with younger learners, giving them the time to pass entire seasons—or even years—speaking strictly in their Native tongues. These programs have also benefited from the moral and intellectual support from academic linguists, such as those working at the Survey of California and Other Indian languages, housed at UC Berkeley (Hinton 1994). When confronting issues of such profound importance, both for the sake of the future and as a way of honoring ancestors, language renewal programs around the world have had to confront difficult questions. Just what are the worthy goals of renewal, for instance, in a world ravaged by genocides that in fact threaten us all—the species as a whole? What issues should be prioritized along the path to reawakening? Absolute fluency throughout the day, as in the case of the Maori, or something akin to cultural literarcy, as in the case in Ireland today? The fate of the world’s languages hangs in exactly this balance. The Irish have, for example, largely settled on cultural literacy as a worthy goal, leaving aside the question of fluency for a later moment. In the end, the Irish renewal effort has produced only a modest number of fluent speakers, numbering perhaps 200,000 today, a small fraction of the population, and barely enough to make the language sustainable as a mode of regular communication. Yet the general public is now educated in their language of heritage, with over a million souls overall—or a third of the country—who can carry out conversations or even read and write with some proficiency. Historically speaking, knowledge of Gaelic has also been a powerful source of inspiration for writers and poets (such as James Joyce), even as they work in English, highlighting again the importance of syncretism, blending traditions, in a multilingual world. When reviving heritage languages within the context of modern nations, one core question revolves around maintaining the boundaries of the speech community, including the sensitive elements of worldview that are potentially shared with outsiders when learning a language and its literatures. Should these reach out only to members of the group, or even to outsiders, who could add to the critical mass? As the Chickasaw Nation began to contemplate the awesome responsibility of renewing their language, the prospect of offering lessons to outsiders warranted serious consideration, especially when they considered the place of Chickasaw in everyday life in the early days of Indian territory, when outsiders often spoke the language as minorities themselves within Indian territory. In the early days of statehood for example, even shopkeepers spoke Chickasaw with their non-Chickasaw neighbors. Thus, in modern terms, producing more speakers, even those of non-Native descent, simply ensures a greater critical mass for the speech community, as the language returns, once again, to the settings and scenes of everyday life. Ultimately, endangered languages throughout the world today are now on the rebound, owing in no small part to the commitment and diligence of community activists, who took it upon themselves to restore heritage languages from the home to the halls of government. The cases of both Oklahoma and Ireland speak to this general situation, which also applies to places like New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand, among the Islands of the Pacific, as well as other colonized lands, such as elsewhere in the Americas. In the case of Ireland, the language has gone from critically endangered to vibrant in the past several decades, owing to grass roots efforts among community members, from classrooms to the halls of government. Much the same now holds in the state of Oklahoma, where the majority of the languages are now undergoing renewal.

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REFERENCES Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avineri, N. (2014). Yiddish endangerment as phenomenological reality and discursive strategy: Crossing into the past and crossing out the present. Language & Communication, 38: 18–32. Basso, K. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bauman, R. and Sherzer, J. (1975). The ethnography of speaking. Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 95–119. Blommaert, J. (2008). Grassroots Literacy: Writing, Identity, and Voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. Boas, F. (1888). The Central Eskimo. Bison Books. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, (1964). Boas, F. (1889). On alternating sounds. American Anthropologist 2 (1): 47–54. Boas, F. (2017). Introduction. In: Handbook of American Indian Languages and to Handbook of American Indian Languages/Indian Linguistic Families of North America, Franz Boas and John Wesley Powell, with a Foreword by Preston Holder (eds.) and with a New Introduction by Michael Silverstein. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published in 1911). Dorian, N.C. (1993). A response to Ladefoged’s other view of endangered languages. Language, 69(3), 575–579. Feeling, D. (1975). Cherokee-English Dictionary. Tahlequah: Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Feeling, D., Armer, C., Foster, C., Berardo, M., and O’Neill, S. (2010). Why revisit published data of an endangered language with native speakers? An illustration from Cherokee. Language Documentation and Conservation 4: 1–21. Gal, S. and Irvine, J. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, Identities (ed. P.V. Kroskrity), 35–84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Golla, V.K. (2011). California Indian Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harrison, D. (2008). When Languages Die: The Extinction of Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Headman, L. with Sean O’Neill and the Ponca Council of Elders: Vincent Warrior, Hazel D. Headman, Louise Roy, and Lillian Pappan Eagle. (2019). Dictionary of the Ponca People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Headman, L. (2020). Walks on the Ground: A Tribal History of the Ponca Nation, with an Introduction by Sean O’Neill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hill, J. (2002). “Expert rhetorics” in advocacy for indigenous languages: who is listening, and What do they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12 (2): 119–133. Hill, J. (2008). The Everyday Language of White Racism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, J. and Hill, K.C. (1986). Speaking Mexicano: The Dynamics of Syncretic Language in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hinton, L. (1994). Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages. Berkeley: Heyday Press. Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In: Anthropology and Human Behavior (eds. T. Gladwin and W.C. Sturtevant), 13–53. Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington. (Reprinted in Fishman, J.A. (1968). Readings in the Sociology of Language, 99–138. The Hague: Mouton). Hymes, D.H. (1966). Two Types of Linguistic Relativity. Berlin: Mouton. Krauss, M. (1992). World’s languages in crisis. Language 68 (1): 4–10. Kroskrity, P.V. (2004). Language ideologies. A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology 496: 517. Madley, B. (2016). An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Meek, B. (2010). We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Nettle, D. and Romaine, S. (2002). Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford University Press. O’Neill, S. (2015). Translating oral literature in indigenous societies: ethnic aesthetic performances in multilingual and multicultural settings. In: The Legacy of Dell Hymes: Narrative Inequality, and Voice (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and A.K. Webster), 206–239. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

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Newmeyer, F.J. (1986). Has there been a “Chomskyan revolution” in linguistics? Language, 62(1), 1–18. Palmer, G., Jr. and Neely, A.A. (2009). Which is the Kiowa way? Orthography choices, ideologies, and language renewal. In: Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country (eds. P.V. Kroskrity and M.C. Field), 271–298. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Perley, B. (2011). Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perley, B.C. (2012). Zombie linguistics: experts, endangered languages and the curse of undead voices. Anthropological Forum 22 (2): 133–149. Sapir, E. (1949). Edward Sapir: Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality (ed. D. Mandelbaum). Berkeley: University of California Press. Sapir, E. (2001). The Collected Works of Edward Sapir, Volume 14: Northwest California Linguistics (eds. V. Golla and S. O’Neill). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebba, M. (2009). Sociolinguistic approaches to writing systems research. Writing Systems Research 1 (1): 35–49. Silverstein, M. (1996). The monoglot standard in America: standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. In: The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology (ed. D.L. Brenneis and R.K.S. Macaulay), 284–306. Boulder: Westview Press. Webster, A. (2016). Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Whorf, B.L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (ed. J.B. Carroll). Cambridge: MIT Press. Zinn, H. (2015). As long as grass grows and water flows. In: A People’s History of the United States: 1492–present, Chapter 7. 125–148. Routledge.

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4

Narrating Transborder Communities Elizabeth Falconi

Introduction Personal narrative often figures centrally in the maintenance and reproduction of ­transborder communities among individuals who live their lives moving across cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or geopolitical boundaries. This chapter reviews anthropological research on la­ nguage, community, and belonging and illustrates how personal narratives can provide a sense of community coherence amid transformation and rupture. The concept of narrated community is used here to describe how speakers produce a community by means of a body of shared cultural perspectives and experiences, even when particular community members may not share a language variety, through the telling and circulation of culturally-specific narratives. The concept of communities as homogeneous cultural entities has been transformed as anthropologists increasingly recognize the global transactions and flows that shape all human populations.1 Likewise, the foundational concept of “speech community” (Gumperz 1968), understood as a social aggregate within which individuals interact with high-­ frequency, has been debated and transformed as linguistic anthropologists have struggled with the problem of how to delineate and define such aggregates of speakers in relation to their linguistic knowledge and communicative practices (Irvine 2006; Morgan 1994). Scholars have looked within and across traditionally defined speech communities to consider how various social groups are linked to one another, through complex “speech networks” (Milroy and Milroy 1992), through “communities of practice” created through shared participation in particular activities (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), or through “metalinguistic communities” (2019), which are groups of individuals who co-identify with a shared heritage language. The concept of imagined communities was introduced by Benedict Anderson (1983) to capture how standard written language serves to connect anonymous publics through the consumption of print media. This perspective opened up new avenues for describing how the circulation of discursive forms, both spoken and written, can create many kinds of imagined social groupings (see Spitulnik 1998, p. 95). 1

See Appadurai 1996; Kearney 1995; Ong 1999; Sassen 1998.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Marcyliena Morgan has pointed out that “the current state of technological communication, globalization, and transmigration continues to test [the viability of the speech community concept]” (Morgan 2004, p. 5). Scholarship on language use within migrant and diasporic communities has pushed thinking on speech communities in new directions as researchers have demonstrated the ways speakers evoke their ties to distant places and contexts through talk to mark their affiliations with, or distinctions from, particular interlocutors.2 For example, the collaborative narration of the miraculous apparition of La Virgen de Guadalupe by teachers and students in a Spanish-language doctrina (catechism) class in Los Angeles facilitated the creation of a distinctly Mexican community among class members. Their sense of shared belonging was based on their orientation to a common heritage language, shared moral values, and a shared ancestral homeland, México, a country that many students in the class had never visited (Baquedano-Lopez 2001). The term “transborder community” is useful for pointing to the myriad forms of border crossing, including geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders, that permeate the everyday lives of diasporic populations such as these. In her piece “Conceptualizing Transborder Communities,” Lynn Stephen describes her preference for describing highly mobile and diasporic populations as “transborder” rather than “transnational”: [T]he ‘national’ at the root of ‘transnational’ has the tendency to result in the flattening of other non-national dimensions of migration experiences … The concepts of borders, border crossing, and borderlands may be more fruitful analytical terrain for understanding migrant communities than a focus that centers only on the national or transnational. The crossing of many borders, and the carrying of these borders within one’s experience allow us to see migration in terms of family relationships; social, economic, and cultural relationships; communities…. (Stephen 2012, pp. 458–459)

Other scholars, such as Ana Maria Relaño-Pastor, have adopted this term transfronterizo (the Spanish translation of transborder) to describe “the fluidity of languages and cultural milieus in which [border youth] are involved everyday” (Relaño-Pastor 2007) in San Diego, California. I use the term “transborder” to highlight how the increasing mobility of Zapotec migrants is experienced and responded to by community members. For example, practices of domestic and international migration are bound up with a widespread process of language shift away from the use of San Juan Guelavía Zapotec. Given the central role of narrative and circulating forms of discourse to the integrity of community bonds among Guelavians, language shift is of particular significance, as it threatens community members’ abilities to imagine and describe their connections to one another. However, a pervasive preoccupation with linguistic and cultural loss circulating through Guelavians’s talk about themselves and others creates a shared moral orientation that in turn contributes to the cohesion of this narrated community.

Defining Narrated Communities The breadth of scholarship across disciplines on the role of narrative in the human experience is vast. Work on narrative can be found in conversation analysis, psychology, sociolinguistics, psychological and medical anthropology, oral history, folklore, and linguistic anthropology (among other fields). As Cynthia Gordon (2015) explains: 2

See Duranti 1997, Eisenlohr 2004, Mendoza-Denton 2008, Parsons-Dick 2010.

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narrating transborder communities  67

Because narrative is a prominent discourse form, and the term ‘narrative’ is so widely used in academic and lay discourse alike, defining what ‘counts’ as (a) narrative is not a straightforward task. One confounding factor is that the term is used to refer to the process of storytelling, the stories produced, and the abstract cognitive schemata that shape such stories. (Gordon 2015, p. 311)

Similarly, Mike Baynham suggests that what many scholars call “narrative” is more accurately a “family of narrative genres” (2015, p. 120), encompassing everything from a spoken or signed rendering of personal experience, to a stained-glass window, or a comic strip. Here, I am largely concerned with personal experience narratives, as well as culturally specific narrative tropes that are highly recognizable to members of particular groups, and which circulate within them. In their work on narratives of personal experience, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps argue that the chronological dimension of narrative “offers narrators a vehicle for imposing order on otherwise disconnected experience … coherence that is reassuring” (1996, p. 24). Ochs also describes how through narrative, tellers are able to “traverse multiple temporal domains” (2004, p. 275), thereby “bring[ing] memories of their lived pasts … into their consciousness of the present” (2004, p. 273).3 Additionally, narrative settings provide an important means for situating stories, and “establish a rationale for the reportable event and/or its aftermath e.g., depicting relevant times, locations, shared knowledge, prior events, and situational conditions” (Ochs 2004, p. 271). Settings are of particular importance in the narratives of members of geographically dispersed communities who share a place of origin in common. In her work on narratives about the apparition of La Virgen de Guadalupe in Catholic Doctrina classes, Patricia Baquedano-Lopez demonstrates how the use of a two-part narrative structure by Doctrina teachers encourages their students to identify with particular geographic locations in Mexico that connect them with their ethnic and religious heritage. The excerpt shown below is taken from the second portion of this two-part narrative, where the teacher asks students to provide the names of the key locations that she modeled in the first part: (Señora Lala, Second Telling) 1 Lala: Qué pasó con la Santísima Virgen            what happened with the Blessed Virgin 2         dó::nde se apareció primero            where did she appear first 3         voy a preguntar.            I am going to ask 4         cuántos saben.            how many know 5         (2.2)/((Luis raises hand)) 6 Lala: Dónde            Where            ((signaling to Luis)) 7 Luis: Tepe-en el Tepe yac            at Tepeyac 8 Lala:  En el Tepeyac, en el Tepeyac             at Tepeyac, at Tepeyac 9          (2.0) 3

See also Bauman 2004; Bruner 2002; De Fina 2003; Ochs and Capps 2001.

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10 Lala: el Tepe   yac              where is Tepeyac 11         (0.2) 12 Luis: En México              In Mexico 13 Lala: En México. en el Distrito Federal.               In Mexico. in the Federal District. (Baquedano-Lopez 2001, p. 439)

In this excerpt Señora Lala affirms the importance of the place of the religious apparition of la Virgen, while also modeling a way of referring to particular locations within Mexico that are more typically used by Mexican nationals, such as the phrase “Distrito Federal” for Mexico City. While many of the students in the class were born in Mexico, they have lived the majority of their lives in the US. These forms of explicit socialization into narrative forms and place names thus serve as a primary means of forging ties between the students in their present-day circumstances, and the people and places of their heritage. Within linguistic anthropology, an overarching concern with context has led many scholars to consider how particular narratives of personal experience are “embedded in social processes extending beyond the immediate social encounter” (Goodwin 1982, p. 799) in ways that are “consequential for the construction of a story by a speaker and its interpretation by a hearer” (ibid). This insight aligns with the foundational work of Harvey Sacks on the phenomenon of “second stories,” (Sacks 1995 Volume II, Part IV, Lecture 5, p. 251), which show how a hearer of a (first) story in a conversational setting has been attending to the content of the story as well as to the nature of the telling, in order to determine what is tellable in subsequent turns of talk. This has yielded a large body of work on ­interdiscursivity, focused on the interactive construction of temporal frames within and across conversations and texts (see Cavanaugh 2004; Eisenlohr 2004; Inoue 2004; Irvine 2004, 2005; Silverstein 2005). A particularly relevant insight of this work for the study of diasporic communities, and those communities stretched across geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders is that the invocation of absent others in an interaction through direct quotation, or a shift in participants’ stance towards other speakers can create “shadow conversations” (Irvine 1996) that transform the meaning of a narrative or interaction. More recent work on narrative in linguistic anthropology has emphasized the multifunctional and dialogic qualities of language, and the need to carefully attend to the contextualization of discursive forms (see DeFina and Georgakopoulou 2015; Parsons Dick, Segura, and Dennnehy 2017). Much of the scholarship on narrative has grown out of the analysis of face-to-face interactions among co-present individuals. A taken for granted assumption at the heart of such work is that the default form of interaction, and of spontaneous narratives of personal experience, is between individuals who are frequently in close proximity to one another. One might imagine any number of such scenarios that constitute social life, such as chatting with neighbors while walking children to school, talking with a cashier at the grocery store, or gossiping with a close friend over a cup of coffee. As Elizabeth Krause and Aline Gubrium (2019) point out, these same “[s]edentary orientations … pervade political culture” (2) as well as mainstream discourses about family life and parenting, all of which reflect a “tendency in the modern world to root particular identities in national territories” (ibid, see also Leinaweaver 2007). However, given the current landscape of social life, shaped by heightened mobility alongside the increasing proliferation of digitally mediated forms of communication, physical co-presence cannot be presumed as the default interactive modality. The inclusion of interactions and social exchanges that unfold across distance and time, and in a variety of modalities (such as online) stands to productively expand the scope of ­scholarship on narratives in face-to-face

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narrating transborder communities  69

settings. In my work with transborder migrants and their non-migrant kin, I have found that through the circulation of narratives among geographically dispersed participants who are not co-present, tellers are able to traverse multiple spatial and temporal domains. Many scholars across disciplines who work with highly mobile populations are moving towards a “new mobilities paradigm” (Krause and Gubrium 2019, p. 2). As Baynham has pointed out, “stories that are centrally about mobility and displacement—where mobility in space effectively is the story—problematize and require us to expand this narrative orientation” (2015, p. 20) that presumes a settled sense of place. In her ethnography of diverse residents of Tijuana, Rihan Yeh demonstrates how individuals’ narratives, which embody their identities and sense of belonging in a collective ‘we,’ are bound up with their ability or inability to ‘pass’ the border. Mobility itself becomes a marker of socio-political status for some, who view Tijuana as “a city of people whose very sense of local belonging is rooted in their ‘right’ to pass the border and leave Tijuana temporarily behind” (Yeh 2018, p. 46). Narrative can thus be seen as mediating relationships between individuals separated by time and space. Shared forms of narration, discursive patterning, and in particular, reflexive forms of talk can be a powerful means of instantiating and maintaining a narrated community amid separation and fragmentation. For example, in his ethnography of the geographically dispersed Hadarima, Enseng Ho states that he is “emboldened in calling these persons a society, in the singular, only because they share stories about themselves and each other … [and] because many of its stories begin in, and return to, a particular place” (Ho 2006, p.  xix). “Narrated community” in this sense is a form of collective belonging, or ­co-identification, created and maintained largely through the production and circulation of culturally specific narratives across speakers, borders, and languages. These include: (1) Narratives about key geographic locations, spaces, places, and events of local significance; (2) Narratives about migration itself; and (3) Narratives in which group and family belonging are an implicit and explicit focus. Alongside these circulating narratives, other forms of semiotic circulation can also encourage and promote shared cultural orientations among geographically dispersed members of transborder communities. Scholars of language and migration have noted that among populations whose members are highly mobile, common ways of talking about space and time often develop. For example, Ana DeFina (2003) has discussed how orientations in space and time are produced as collaborative discursive constructions, building off shared understandings that accrue over time amid continual border crossings. John Haviland has noted that the analysis of deictic transpositions in the speech practices of migrants, particularly in the use of ‘here’ and ‘home’ as markers of actual location versus designators of origin and affiliation, can reveal a speaker’s “stance of closeness to home … which sustains a sociocentric perspective” (Haviland 2005, p. 123) despite distances in time and space. The excerpt shown below is taken from a collection of tape-recorded telephone calls and cassette letters in which Haviland analyzes the way Mamal, a central research participant who had migrated from Zinacantan, Mexico to Oregon, juggled deictic forms linked with his physical location in Oregon versus his orientation to his natal home: (32) ‘I sent money with your compadre’          86      ijakbe tal jlik vun                    I sent a letter (to here)…          88      i: ali tak’in k’u yepal avalojbon to`ox ti.                     and the amount of money that you had told me before          89      sk’oplal cha-chajtakbe tal                    That I should send (to here). (Haviland 2005, p. 123)

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70  elizabeth falconi

As the highlighted terms above make clear, Mamal referred to Zinacantan as ‘here’ even when speaking from a distance in which he was physically located in Oregon. As Haviland points out “his references to ‘here’ routinely project him as talking from the perspective of the village” (ibid). For migrants and their non-migrant kin who are often separated for years, or even decades, narrative offers a way to evoke past experiences that interlocutors shared together and, as in the excerpt above, to create shared experiences in the present. This can also enable members of diasporic communities to imagine possible future moments of togetherness. Building from scholarship on communities created and maintained by means of linguistic communication without spatial proximity, this approach to conceptualizing community has implications for the analysis of mobile populations shaped by spatial and temporal separation. Mike Baynham describes how among members of highly mobile communities “joint construction of orientation against a backdrop of shared understanding [is] sedimented over years and innumerable crossings” (2015, p. 24).

Case Study: A Zapotec Narrated Community Between 2008 and 2010 I conducted ethnographic research in San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Los Angeles California with indigenous Zapotec migrants and their nonmigrant kin. Over the course of this initial period of research I collected a large body of audio data, including interviews with migrants and non-migrants, spontaneous conversations across a range of contexts, oral performances of folktales, and video recordings of a wide range of celebrations, festivals, and ritual events that research participants requested that I film. I took extensive photographs, and was co-opted into networks of reciprocal exchange through which disparate kin maintain relationships and webs of mutual obligation, ferrying goods back and forth between Oaxaca and LA. I have maintained contact with many research participants since that time and continue to research and analyze the discursive and technological strategies used by members to create and maintain relationships and a sense of shared belonging. The village of San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca is located in the central valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, in between the capital Oaxaca City and the market town of Tlacolula de Matamorros. This is one of the most linguistically and ethnically diverse regions in Mexico and Mesoamerica more broadly, and is often described as a “linguistic hotspot,”4 owing to the large number of languages spoken by groups in close geographic proximity to one another. Multilingualism is widespread, and many individuals are fluent users of multiple local indigenous languages, as well as Spanish and English to varying degrees. Historical policies of castillianization (aka “Spanish only”) in Mexican rural schools combined with growing pressures to migrate domestically to seek wage labor in Spanishdominant regions, pushed many Guelavians away from the use of San Juan Guelavía Zapotec, the local indigenous language, towards the use of Spanish. Practices of discrimination that have historically targeted indigenous language speakers are linked with a pervasive shift towards the use of Spanish as the primary language of child socialization, particularly among migrant parents living outside of Guelavía. Since the 1990s, migration between the rural village of San Juan Guelavía and Los Angeles, California has intensified, catalyzing a shift towards the use of Spanish and English among Guelavian families living in the US. These historical and social processes highlight how 4

https://livingtongues.org/language-hotspots.

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narrating transborder communities  71

…locally operating relations are defined, determined or modulated by transnational developments leading to a reordering of repertoires and their internal structure, and thus reshaping the patterns through which particular codes come to index status and prestige. (Blommaert 2005, p. 130)

In the case of indigenous Zapotec migrants from Mexico, the colonial dynamics that shaped the relative prestige and value of Spanish relative to regional indigenous languages is projected in diaspora onto the relative prestige of English over Spanish. In this context, the place of heritage indigenous languages like Zaptoec is obscured, if not erased from view altogether. These shifts then have implications for language choice among both migrant and non-migrant members of communities spread out across borders. Other scholars have described the impact of parallel processes in communities throughout Oaxaca. Widespread shifts to the exclusive use of Spanish have already taken place in many indigenous Oaxacan Valley communities (see Pérez-Baéz 2014; Sicoli 2011). Gabriela Perez-Baez describes how ‘family language policy’ (Perez-Baez 2014) among migrants from the village of San Lucas Quiavini (located approximately 20 km from SJG) who raise their children in Los Angeles is shaping the future prospects for the survival of the Zapotecan language spoken in the village. Among Guelavians, the impact of these border crossing experiences is most evident in the differential access of migrants and non-migrants to shared bodies of knowledge, linguistic repertoires, and cultural practices. Linguistic knowledge is distributed unevenly across generations of speakers and there are stark differences in the ways that individual speakers deploy and display their knowledge within and outside of the community. Amid these separations and disjunctures, the patterning of Guelavians’ personal narratives and other speech practices around common geographic, moral, and cultural frames of reference produces a discursive center of gravity for community members living in culturally and geographically disparate spheres. In the examples I consider here, I highlight how Guelavians create interdiscursive links to one another both through the circulation of stories about their experiences and through patterns in the structure and content of these stories. As Michael Prentice and Meghan Barker explain, attention to interdiscursivity within anthropological scholarship has grown from a move among some scholars away from “situating meaning within a clause or isolated interaction, emphasizing instead the contextual basis of meaning” (2017, Oxford Bibliographies Online),5 in terms of both prior discourse and broader social and ideological currents. My approach to analyzing narrative patterning and circulation between speakers and across contexts draws from the framework of “second stories” (Sacks 1995), used to describe the process by which speakers shape and organize their experiential narratives to align structurally, thematically, and morally with the stories of other speakers.

Reflexivity in Migrant Narratives

It was common for Guelavian migrants in Los Angeles to tell stories that included embedded responses to typical criticisms levelled against migrants by their non-migrant kin. Migrants frequently mentioned the competing demands they faced between what their non-migrant kin expected of them and what they sought for themselves and their spouses and children. These dynamics are characteristic of many geographically dispersed communities (Reynolds 2013).

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https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0171. xml.

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Ilana Gershon (2000) describes how Samoan migrants in New Zealand and California maintained ‘certain strategic ignorances’ (85) regarding individuals’ financial circumstances in order to meet the competing financial demands of their local lives and requests for aid from Samoan relatives abroad. In Example 4.1, Gael (a pseudonym) describes a similar tension: Example 4.1  Recorded 6/12/2009 in Los Angeles, CA Y pienso uno diferente por uno mismo, si es cierto está uno allí con los papas, hay que ayudarles pero (mas) ellos piensan pues en en est- en que estemos alla pero uno va a pensar en uno mismo, hay que hacer algo

And one thinks differently for one’s self, yes it’s true one is there with the parents, one has to help them but (more) they think well in-in tha-in that we are there but one is going to think of one’s self, one has to do something

This type of reflexive talk is characteristic of many migrants’ narratives, in which they consider their own points of view and location alongside those of their non-migrant kin (see bold text above). The repetition of the deictic locatives allí and alla point to the physical location of non-migrant kin and at the same time the expectation that migrants themselves should always be oriented first and foremost “there,” meaning their natal village of San Juan Guelavía, “con los papas” (with the parents) and the priorities of their extended family. At the same time, they are faced with the exigencies of their own immediate circumstances and needs which drive them to “pensar en uno mismo” (to think of oneself). Whether or not they ever made the decision to migrate, the separations and tumult of transborder life is a source of inner and outer struggle. Whatever their goals, motivations or needs, migrant populations must grapple with the visions, expectations, and goals that others project onto their journeys. Drawing on the reflexive capacity of narrative, Gael positions himself between the moral stance of his family members back in Oaxaca, which foregrounds the primacy of the village and the needs of natal community, and the moral exigency of caring for himself, his wife, and his child (see Ochs 2004, p. 284). This simultaneous inhabiting of geographies and perspectives is a defining feature of life in what Gloria Andalzua called the “borderlands” (1987). Similarly, Jennifer Reynolds (2013) describes a series of debates among a group of siblings, some of whom live in Guatemala and others in Postville, Iowa, regarding who should migrate, the allocation of financial responsibilities, and decisions about which of them should enter the workforce or stay in school. She argues that through these transborder discussions among disparate kin, “global childhood certainly informed life back in Guatemala” (Reynolds 2013, p. 878). This form of discursive connection can also enable individual community members to reframe one another’s actions and experiences to foreground affective bonds to kin and community and thus to promote the maintenance of relationships across time and space. In my own research I found evidence that this pattern of alignment applied not only to narratives proper, but also to a variety of other linguistic and cultural practices, as well as processes of semiotic circulation. Haviland introduced the concept of discursive tracks left by those who have gone before, which create “a conceptual presence, a body of information about the ‘North’ ” (Haviland 2005, p. 94) that subsequent generations of migrants draw on in the process of imagining and setting out on their own migrant journeys. I encountered a striking example of this in Guelavía where a returned migrant had opened a cantina on one of the main streets of the village called “La Once” (see Figure 4.1) with reference to 11th Street in Santa Monica, California, where many newly arrived migrants wait in front of a building supply warehouse as day laborers hoping for work. Close attention to such patterns offers insights into the dialogic construction of cultural forms in communities spread out across borders, as well as the strategies used by migrants and non-migrants to cope with the competing demands of mobility and rootedness.

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narrating transborder communities  73

Figure 4.1  Bienvenidos A “La Once” (photo taken by author).

It is additionally important to recognize the difficulties that can hinder the creation of alignment within diasporic communities in the absence of shared spaces, experiences, or even a shared language. The political and social dominance of Spanish in Mexico and the dominance of English and Spanish among Latinx populations living in the US has led to a shift among younger Guelavians away from the use of Zapotec towards the use of Spanish and English. Some community members are involved in cultural and linguistic revitalization efforts to reverse this pattern of shift, but in many Guelavian families this shift has transpired so quickly that grandparents and grandchildren do not always share a language in common. Amid a widespread preoccupation with fragmentation and loss, transborder community members tell and circulate stories and second stories (see previous description) about themselves and others, producing a shared body of references and common orientations that constitutes a powerful form of connectivity: a narrated community. The Guelavian transborder community, like other communities, is never complete, as there are many obstacles, such as language shift, that divide people, precluding them from achieving connection. Rather, community building is always in process, conjured anew in the voices and minds of Guelavians through their effortful engagements with one another.

Moral Stance in Non-Migrant Narratives

Both domestic and international migration can provide a variety of short and long-term benefits: a way to make a lot of money quickly, buy property, or build a house, as well as providing a shortcut around many of the forms of reciprocal obligation associated with community membership and ritual kinship ties (see Cohen 2004; Hondagneu-Sotelu 2003; Pauli 2008). Migration to the US can be appealing for young people who want to experience life elsewhere and can provide a buffer from the responsibilities associated with adult life in Guelavía. For undocumented migrants, the dangers associated with border crossing, such as apprehension by border patrol, abandonment in remote terrains by traffickers (aka coyotes), and kidnapping for ransom, preclude easy mobility, so that migration is patterned in correspondence with particular moments in the lifecycle when individuals, couples, or families feel especially compelled to risk the journey. Across the interviews that I recorded, in which individuals described their migration experiences, it was extremely common for

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migrants to focus their narratives on the difficulties they faced as new arrivals in Los Angeles struggling to find work and being pitted against other Mexican and Latino workers for lowpaying jobs that they desperately needed. In their descriptions of experiences living and working in El Norte (‘the North’ their term for the US), many migrants used phrases such as sufrí mucho, (‘I suffered a lot’) and me costó mucho, (‘it cost me a lot’), a testimony of the lived consequences of the stigmatization and devaluation of migrants whose value is often reduced to their productivity as laborers (see DeGenova 2002, p. 433).6 Stories of border crossings themselves similarly emphasized the difficulties and pain that come from long days of walking without sufficient food or water. Others described the fear and terror of apprehension, fleeing from immigration enforcement agents, or even greater dangers such as kidnapping for ransom and the drug cartel violence that dominates the borderlands between the US and Mexico. Even when they are able to cross into the US safely and secure housing and employment, due to their legal vulnerability many Guelavian migrants continued to live in a “precariously permanent” (Hallet 2013, p. 147) state for decades or more. Hilary Parsons Dick discusses a similar predicament in the narratives of migrants who returned to their natal community in Uriangato, Mexico, because of the moral corruption and temptation they had encountered para alla, meaning up north in the US (2018, p. 145). One of her research participants explained that “the family falls apart there—because, there is a lot of possibility, but there is also a lot of perdition” (ibid, p. 145). Given the extreme difficulties associated with migration and life in diaspora, many migrants’ family members have opposed and continue to oppose their decision to migrate. Often mentioned by migrants were pervasive intra-familial tensions and the competing demands they faced between what their non-migrant kin expected of them and what they sought for themselves, their spouses, and children. These dynamics are characteristic of many geographically dispersed communities (see Reynolds 2013). Parents of migrants in particular espoused the view that the purpose of migrating was to work and earn money to help one’s extended family, and as soon as these financial goals were achieved, migrants should promptly return to their families in the country of origin. Non-migrant parents criticized their migrant children for all manner of shortcomings. Among Guelavians, sometimes these criticisms came in the form of complaints about how little one’s children have sent back, a reflection of the pervasive expectation that migrants should be sending financial and material resources back to family members left behind, such as dollars, T-shirts, music, and the like. The excerpt in Example 4.2 was taken from a conversation with Gilberto (a pseudonym), a man in his seventies, some of whose children had migrated to Los Angeles. He was wearing a University of California, Los Angeles T-shirt at the time, which prompted this exchange. The failures of individual migrants to fulfill their family’s expectations were frequently interpreted as moral failings, measured against the actions of other community members. The goods sent by migrants or purchased with their remittance dollars circulated alongside the narratives that facilitate the maintenance of relationships and webs of reciprocal obligation among Guelavians in diaspora and their kin back in Oaxaca. Conversely, the circulation of semiotic and material resources, such as specialty Oaxacan food items (tortillas, quesillo, chocolate), photos, videos, and local artisanal crafts sent from Guelavians located in Oaxaca to their migrant kin enabled Guelavians living outside the village to reaffirm and display their connection to their natal community. The village of San Juan Guelavía serves as a geographic center of gravity for far-flung community members, 6

See also Hill 2001; Urciuoli 1995.

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narrating transborder communities  75

Example 4.2  Recorded March 14th 2008, San Juan Guelavía EF:  Y a veces cuando esto:y a-en el camión

And sometimes when I a:m go-on the bus

G:  En el camión

On the bus

EF:  Viniendo par acá hay mucha gente [con

Coming here there are many people [with

N: [Mucha gente

[Many people

EF:  Camisas de la [UCLA

Shirts from [UCLA

N:                        [Sí sí sí muchos este

                  [Yes yes yes many uhm

EF:  Y sombre:ros

And ha:ts

N:  Yo apenas este

I just this one

EF:  Sí

Yes

N:  Como casi no me mandan nada

As they send me almost nothing

around which transborder life is organized. Migrants’ primary identification as Guelavian, and their narratives about people, places, and events located within the village, affirm the crucial importance of San Juan Guelavía as a physical, moral, spiritual, cultural, and linguistic anchor for all community members. In keeping with the centrality of the village to the cohesion of the Guelavian community, non-migrants frequently discussed migrants’ presence or absence from the community or the frequency of communication that they maintained. I often heard this kind of talk during weekly visits to the home of Ermelinda, a woman in her late seventies who lived in Guelavía. During these visits, she regularly received telephone calls from her children, all five of whom were living away from the village in other parts of Mexico and the US. The excerpt in Example 4.3 is her report of a conversation she had recently had with her daughter, Selena. It is a longer excerpt in which Ermelinda (E) repeated a lot of content, initially in Spanish, and then modeled in Zapotec for me to imitate. The sections of her narrative that she repeated of are particular interest: Example 4.3  Recorded 3/23/2008, San Juan Guelavía (Spanish in italics; Zapotec underlined; English translation in right column, boldface author’s emphasis) E:  Pero pura de pobre pues pura pobre pues voy a trabajar aquí, también Selena, voy a trabajar, pura trabajar, toda la noche, toda el día, cuando hablar conmigo a vec vaya a vec cuando hablar “Ay mama por qué no hablar’ pues dice vaya dice yo ‘Por qué no hablar Selena? Porque ya-ya se murió tu mama?” ((laughing)) dice yo vaya…Yo-yo-yo dice vaya “Taba guti xnanu” rapiebi, a ver que dice pues? “Taba guti xnanu quëtru ni cuend güenquë quëtrunu cuend iniu telefono cun xnanu… nare ana nabania, xinii quëty rguiliu xnanu nare”…porque se enoja, vaya, no hablar

But only poverty well only poverty well I go to work here, also Selena, [goes] to work, only work, all night, all day, when [she] talks to me sometimes well sometimes when [we] talk “Oh *[daughter] why don’t [you call]” like that’s what I say then “Why don’t [you] call Selena? Because your mother has already – already died?” ((laughing)) I say well… I-I-I say well “Has your mother already died?” I say to her, ok what did I say well? “Has your mother already died? You don’t even notice well you don’t even notice [or] call on the phone to find out where your mother is…I am alive, why don’t you look for me I am your mother”… because [I] get mad, well, [that she] doesn’t call

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This portion of Ermelinda’s longer narrative began with her description of how much her daughter Selena works and the poverty that drove her to work such long hours, leaving her with little free time to travel or even call home. This background contextual narrative served to indicate in advance of her subsequent joking banter that she really understands why Selena doesn’t call her as often as Ermelinda might like her to, thus creating a bridge over a potential source of rupture in their relationship. It is then that her narrative takes on an accusatory tone, when she asks, “Por qué no hablar Selena?” [Why don’t you call Selena?], the moral reprimand suggested by the question then heightened by the repeated, code-switching refrain in Spanish and SJG Zapotec of “Porque ya se murió tu mama?” and “Taba guti xnanu?” [Has your mother already died?] (see boldfaced text). Ermelinda juxtaposes her disappointment and her longing for Selena’s return home with her reflections on the challenges of economic survival and the myriad obligations that keep all of her progeny away from the village for years or decades at a time. In her narrative Ermelinda brings her own experiences and those of her daughter “into moral focus” (Ochs 2004, p. 284), creating a shifting moral stance that encompasses both of their perspectives, while ultimately highlighting her own disappointment and anger. Just like the reflexive talk of migrants described above, this synthesis of experience and reflection through narrative is an important way that non-migrant Guelavians connect with their migrant kin, enacting the narrated community to which they collectively belong. Ermelinda and her children continue to navigate the fraught moral terrain of transborder family life in each phone call and visit. Through the repeated narration of this story of separation, she aligned herself with her migrant children, granting legitimacy to their actions while also reminding them of their continuing moral obligations to their family back in the village.

Narrating Migration in “Hostile Terrain” The stories of migration I have shown thus far both align with and challenge scholarly understandings of personal narratives, which have been described as “a recounting of human plans gone off track, expectations gone awry” (Bruner 2002, cited by Ochs 2004, p. 271), or as devices for coping with unexpected life events. Among migrants and their kin, suffering, separation, privation, the threat of assault or kidnapping, and death in what Jason De León has described as the “hostile terrain”7 of the US Mexico border region are normalized through repetition; the unexpected IS expected in such a space. While stories of such experiences may not be surprising, they are a marker of the trials and tribulations that many transborder members share in common. While migrants’ stories often focused on the dangers of clandestine border crossing and the guilt of leaving behind one’s kin, non-migrants’ narratives frequently gave voice to the emotional and sometimes even physical consequences of migration on those left behind. Many people I worked with described how they or their family members had become physically ill from the pain of missing their departed migrant kin. I personally observed a session with a curandera (healer) who performed a limpia (cleansing ritual) on a woman who had

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https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/hostileterrain94.

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narrating transborder communities  77

become sick with grief when her husband left for Los Angeles. Other recent work on embodiment and loss within transborder communities points to the prevalence of these phenomena. Rebecca Crocker, Robin Reinecke, and María Elena Ramos Tovar (2021) collected narratives from the family members of migrants who opposed their relatives’ decision to migrate and experienced acute anxiety about their departures. One of their research participants, Alma, explained: I felt something like a really bad pain in my chest, something like a heart attack. And supposedly that is a mother’s premonition when something bad happens to her child. That is something that we have in Mexico, we say that when something is wrong with our child or that something is happening to them, we feel pain in our heart. (Crocker et al. 2021, p. 603)

This preoccupation with separation among family and community members was also evident in the frequency of migrants’ return visits to the village on special occasions (e.g., weddings and patron saint festivals), which were often marked by the performance of ritualized narratives that reaffirmed their membership in and connection to their natal village (see Falconi 2011). Sometimes migrants encounter hostilities within their natal communities during these return pilgrimages. Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez (2013) discusses the tensions and conflicts that arise during the festival of San Antonio in the Zapotec village of Yalalag, when many migrants return to celebrate. In the following excerpt, a non-migrant, Victor, complains about the behaviors of migrants who have returned for the fiesta from El Norte: I don’t know what is wrong with these immigrants. But once they get here, they start showing off. However, the villagers are very sharp. If immigrants arrive with new clothes and want to impress the locals, then the danzantes (dancers) invent dances to make fun of them during the days of the fiesta … What the danzantes like to do is to imitate and exaggerate how immigrants behave. Sometimes you can even tell who they are making fun of. It is hilarious. (CruzManjarrez 2013, p. 161)

These narratives comprise the discursive tracks of migration that reflect speakers’ alignment with, and/or their criticism of the actions of absent migrants. Much like the cantina “La Once,” the choreography of the danzantes described above is a product of transborder flows that circulate across contexts and between speakers. They enable migrants and nonmigrants (as well as the occasional anthropologist) to engage with and understand one another’s actions, forming the foundation for the production of narrated communities, even amid discord and conflict.

“Disposability,” “Deficiency” and the Narration of Latinx Identities As evidenced by the examples given above, transborder migration brings constant changes and social transformations, in social relationships, cultural practices, and the geography of community life. The Guelavian migrants I have worked with share in common with other non-indigenous Latinx migrants the profound experience of dislocation and exclusion associated with their structural position in a social and economic context dominated by Englishspeaking Euro-Americans. The challenges of striving to maintain community and cultural continuity amid practices of discrimination that devalue and marginalize their cultural and linguistic heritage are myriad. A potent example of this was performed for me by the

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nine-year-old daughter (D) of a Guelavian man, Gerardo (G), who had returned back to the village to marry and start a family. She had never been to the US, but while I spoke to her father about his experiences with migration, he turned to her and asked her to tell the joke in Example 4.4: Example 4.4  Recorded 4/18/2008, San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca G: Cuéntale de la del japonés y

D: (…que fiesta…es…) la cosa es que estaba un éste un mexicano y un japonés y un Americano… En un barco. Entonces el japonés empezó a tirar sus perfumes… Y le dijo el mexicano ‘Oye Japonés porqué tiras tus perfumes?’ ‘Es porque en Japón hay mu:chos perfumes’ ‘A’ dice y entonces el mexicano empezó a tirar sus tequilas y que le dice el americano ‘Oye Mexicano porque tiras tus tequilas?’ ‘Es que en México hay mu:chas tequilas’ dice ‘A’ dice, y que va el americano y que avienta el mexicano al mar, y que dice el japonés ‘Oye americano porque tiras el mexicano?’ ‘Es que en América hay mu:chos mexicanos’

Tell her the one about the Japanese guy and (…what party…it’s…) the thing is that there was a uhm a Mexican guy and a Japanese guy and an American guy… In a boat. Then the Japanese guy began to throw his perfumes… And the Mexican said to him ‘Listen Japanese why are you throwing your perfumes?’ ‘It’s because in Japan there are ma:ny perfumes’ ‘Oh’ he said and then the Mexican began to throw his tequilas and then the American said to him ‘Listen Mexican why are you throwing your tequilas?’ ‘It’s because in Mexico there are ma:ny tequilas’ he says ‘Oh’ he says, and so the American goes and throws the Mexican into the sea, and the Japanese says ‘Listen American why do you throw the Mexican?’ ‘It’s because in America there are ma:ny Mexicans’

During the interview Gerardo had touched on many somber topics, such as his long-term separation from family members, and I now suspect that he invited his daughter over to join us in order to provide comic relief. Humor and light-hearted banter were prevalent in many Guelavians’ accounts of the, often painful, challenges of transborder life (see Example 4.2). The joke offered a way for his daughter, who had never set foot in the US, to engage with and think about the experiences that had shaped his life and the lives of so many others in the community. The dehumanizing stereotype of the disposable Mexican laborer at the heart of this joke was very real to many people that I worked with both in the village of San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, and in Los Angeles, California. It comprises part of the discursive processes of subjectification that cast migrants as a monolithic group defined both by their labor and their marginalization, “leaving individual Latino subjects to make sense of essentializing narratives that marginalize and devalue their ethnolinguistic identities” (Carter 2014, p. 210; see also Chavez 2008; Santa Ana 2002, 2013). The joke shown above is a final example of a narrative that circulates among Guelavians across discursive and geographic contexts, enabling community members to construct a

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narrating transborder communities  79

shared moral orientation towards a defining aspect of transborder life—in this case the exploitation of migrant laborers in the US. They collectively illustrate how the affective experience of social marginality … transforms our critical strategies … to engage with culture as an uneven, incomplete production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and practices, produced in the act of social survival. (Bhabba 1994, pp. 246–247)

Through their laughter, following the delivery of the punch line (see boldface text), interlocutors are able to affirm their alignment with migrants in opposition to this discriminatory stance, and to articulate the moral code shared by members of this narrated community. The relationship between processes of racialization and linguistic practices has long been a focus of scholarship on language minorities in the US (see Hill 2008; Urciuoli 1996). Recent work in the field of “raciolinguistics,” (see Alim et al. 2016; Rosa 2019) has renewed interest in these topics by calling attention to the means by which linguistic forms come to be seen as emblems of particular racial groups. Rosa highlights the way that Latinx youth in educational settings are relegated to a “perpetual status of linguistic deficiency” (2019, p. 6) that he describes as an ideology of “languagelessness” (p. 127). These ideologies are so pervasive that they are linked with the use of “inverted Spanglish” among Latinx youth so that they are able to “meet the demand that they speak Spanish in English without being heard to possess an accent” (Rosa 2019, p. 160), meaning any hint of Spanish phonology. Rosa discusses an example of two high school research participants who toss inverted Spanglish insults back and forth, the first saying “What’s up cuhbron?” with the other responding “Not much, pendayho!” (Rosa 2019, p. 161). Their use of American English phonology in uttering Spanish insults allowed them to index in-group Latinx knowledge of language and culture while also laying “claim to ‘cool’ Americanness through English language dexterity” (ibid). It is important to note that these linguistic practices are often fodder for in-group mockery by more fluent Spanish speakers, as in the rise of memes and other viral jokes about “no sabo kids,” who are criticized for their mixed linguistic forms.8 This phrase pokes fun at how some Spanish/English bilingual speakers engage in hypercorrection, in this case by regularizing the conjugation of an irregular Spanish verb. In standard Spanish the irregular verb “saber” (to know) is conjugated in the first person as “se,” which would yield the phrase “no se” (I don’t know). “No sabo kids” are those who employ regular conjugation forms here, parallel to the first-person conjugations for verbs like “hablar” (to speak) which would be “hablo.”

Conclusions: Narrating Indigenous Transborder Communities These essentializing discourses are doubly poignant for indigenous Latinx communities whose members have been historically marginalized in Mexico and who comprise a minority within a minority in the US. There are also particular challenges and consequences associated with membership in an indigenous community spread out across social, linguistic, and geographic borders. One of the most pervasive and morally fraught 8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5x2IJ0bPRM https://belatina.com/yo-no-sabo-kids-judging-our-owncommunity.

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issues that Guelavians and other indigenous migrants contend with is language shift away from the use of indigenous languages towards socially dominant languages, which represents a potent legacy of settler colonialism in many parts of the world. A defining attribute of membership within indigenous transborder communities is the role of shared experiences of discrimination that are often manifest in stereotypes that denigrate indigenousness, broadly construed. One of my research participants said that when she spoke Zapotec around her son, who is bilingual in English and Spanish, he told her in Spanish, “Te hablas muy chinito,” meaning ‘You speak very like a Chinese person.’ The use of the out-group ethnic identifier in his characterization of her talk created a sharp divide between himself and his linguistic practices and the use of Zapotec, which he rendered as radically other. Similarly, Lynn Stephen (2007) discusses how references to the diminutive physical attributes that are presumed to index the indigenous ancestry of Zapotec and Mixtec migrants are also connected with the use of indigenous languages. One of her research participants was extolling the virtues of Mixtec, while lamenting the fact that his children were uninterested in speaking it. In response, one of his children exclaimed: “We don’t want to be Oaxaquitos. We speak English and Spanish” (Stephen 2007, p. 216). The default term to reference someone from Oaxaca in Spanish is Oaxaqueño/Oaxaqueña. When the suffix “itos” is added it acts as a diminutive, which can either be used as a term of endearment for a close friend of kin, or as a form of belittlement. It is this latter meaning that the child is referencing, as it indexes both their social status relative to non-indigenous Mexicans, and stereotypes about their small physical stature. These shifting patterns of use are a salient topic within the narratives of migrants and non-migrants across generations, reflective of the complex dynamic of pride and shame that characterizes life in many indigenous transborder communities. As Katja Kvaale (2011) has argued culture plays opposing roles among indigenous peoples and immigrants in relationship to nation-states, where indigenous persons are expected to maintain distinctive cultural traditions and practices and immigrants are expected to assimilate to linguistically and culturally dominant groups. What then of indigenous migrants, whose very identities are rendered paradoxical by this logic? I found a pervasive preoccupation with indigeneity and what it signifies across geographic and social contexts to be a defining aspect of life within the Guelavian narrated community. Similarly, Adriana Cruz-Manjarrez has pointed out that second-generation Yalatecos living in Los Angeles, whose parents migrated from Yalalag, Mexico, describe unease at their assimilation into Chicano ideology. Their discussions reveal a political and ideological framework that ignores their indigenous ethnicity as second-generation Yalálag Zapotecs and imposes a homogenous and hegemonic identity as Mexican American. (2013, p. 136)

One of her research participants, Leticia, explained further that: When I was in high school, my professor of history, who was a Chicana, was giving a talk about the history of the Aztec people. She told us that we were the descendants of them … And I thought, no I am not. I am the descendent of the Zapotec people. But anyway, I had to listen to her class. (2013, p. 136)

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Those few times when indigenous identity is recognized or explicitly discussed in relation to the identities of Latinx migrations like Leticia, indigeneity is reduced to an ancestral tie to some imagined past group connection, in this case described through the phrase “the descendants of the Aztec people.” This effectively erases the place of contemporary indigenous persons whose identities reflect their diverse backgrounds and complicated life histories. Future work on these themes might explore how racialized ideologies that posit the languagelessness of marginalized groups of speakers can be expanded to consider the dynamics of language, mobility, and belonging characteristic of transborder communities like those I have discussed here, which have been shaped by fluidity and transformation. Additionally, a consideration of complex constructions of indigeneity, and the overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) discourses of coloniality through which indigenous Latinx migrants have been rendered as ‘Others’ along linguistic, cultural, and racial lines of differentiation could contribute greatly to these vibrant and growing areas of research and scholarship.

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Crocker, R., Reinecke, R., and Ramos Tovar, M.E. (2021). Ambiguous loss and embodied grief related to Mexican migrant disappearances. Medical Anthropology 40 (7): 598–611. Cruz-Manjarrez, A. (2013). Zapotecs on the Move: Cultural, Social, and Political Process in Transnational Perspective. Rutgers University Press. De Fina, A. (2003). Crossing borders: time, space, and disorientation in narrative. Narrative Inquiry 13 (2). DeFina, A. and Alexandra G. (eds.) (2015) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Wiley Blackwell. DeGenova, N. (2002). Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–447. Duranti, A. (1997). Indexical speech across Samoan communities. American Anthropologist 99 (2). Eckert, P. and McConnell-Ginet, S. (1992). Think practically look locally: language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1). Eisenlohr, P. (2004). Temporalities of community: ancestral language, pilgrimage, and diasporic belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1). Falconi, E. 2011. Migrant stories: Zapotec transborder migration and the production of a narrated community. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gershon, I. (2000). How to know when not to know: strategic ignorance when eliciting for Samoan migrant exchanges. Social Analysis 44 (2): 84–105. Goodwin, M. (1982) ‘Instigating’: storytelling as social process. American Ethnologist, 9 (1): 799–819. Gordon, C. (2015). Narrative in family contexts. In: The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (eds. A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou). Wiley Blackwell Press. Gumperz, J. (1968). The speech community. In: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9 (ed. D.L. Sills), 381–386. New York: Macmillan. Hallet, M.C. (2013). Rooted/uprooted: place, policy, and Salvadoran transnational identities in rural Arkansas. In: Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland: Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America (ed. L. Allegro and A.G. Wood). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Haviland, J. (2005). Dreams of blood: Zinacantecs in Oregon. In: Dislocations/Relocations: Narratives of Displacement (eds. A. De Fina and M. Baynhem). Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing. Hill, J. (2001). Language, race and white public space. American Anthropologist 100 (3). Hill, J. (2008). The Everyday Language of White Racism. Wiley Blackwell. Ho, E. (2006). The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hondagneu-Sotelu, P. (2003). Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends. University of California Press. Irvine, J. (1996). Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles. In: Natural Histories of Discourse: Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban (eds.) University of Chicago Press. Irvine, J. (2005). Knots and tears in the interdiscursive fabric. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1). Irvine, J. (2006). Speech and language community. In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2e (ed. K. Brown). Oxford: Elsevier. Kearney, M. (1995). The effects of transnational culture, economy, and migration on Mixtec identity in Oaxacalifornia. In: The Bubbling Cauldron: Race, Ethnicity, and the Urban Crisis (eds. M.P. Smith and J.R. Feagin). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Krause, E.L. and Gubrium, A.C. (2019). ‘Scribble scrabble’: migration, young parenting Latinas, and digital storytelling as narrative shock. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33 (3). Kvaale, K. (2011). Something begotten in the State of Denmark: immigrants, territorialized culture, and the Danes as indigenous peoples. Anthropological Theory 11 (2): 223–255. Leinaweaver, J. (2007). On moving children: the social implications of Andean child circulation. American Ethnologist 34 (1). Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Blackwell Publishing. Milroy, L. and Milroy, J. (1992). Social network and social class: toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society 21.

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Morgan, M. (1994). The African American speech community: reality and sociolinguistics. In: Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations. Los Angeles: CAAS Publications. Morgan, M. (2004). Speech community. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Duranti, A. (ed.) Blackwell Publishing. Ochs, E. (2004). Narrative lessons. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (ed. A. Duranti). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (1996). Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 19–43. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Harvard University Press. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Parsons-Dick, H. (2010). Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican non-migrant discourse. American Ethnologist 37 (2). Parsons D.H., Segura, C., and Dennehy, N. (2017). Narrative in sociocultural studies of language. In: Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0180. Pauli, J. (2008). A house of one’s own: gender, migration, and residence in rural Mexico. American Ethnologist 35 (1): 171–187. Pérez-Báez, G. (2014). Determinants of language reproduction and shift in a transnational community. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Vol 227.special theme issue on migration and language shift. Prentice, M. and Barker, M. (2017). Intertextuality and interdiscursivity. In: Oxford Bibliographies Online. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0171. Relaño-Pastor, A.M. (2007). On border identities: transfronterizo students in San Diego. Discourse Journal of Childhood and Adolescent Research 2 (3). Reynolds, J. (2013). (Be)laboring childhoods in Postville Iowa. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (3). Rosa, J. (2019). Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press. Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on Conversation, Volumes I and II. Wiley Blackwell. Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press. Santa Ana, O. (2013). Juan in a Hundred: The Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Evening News. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: New Press. Sicoli, M. (2011). Agency and ideology in language shift and language maintenance. In: Ethnographic Contributions to the Study of Endangered Languages (eds. T. Granadillo and H.A. Orcutt-Gachiri), 161–176. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Silverstein, M. (2005). Axes of evals: token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1). Spitulnik, D. (1998). The language of the city: Town Bemba as Urban Hybridity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8 (1). Stephen, L. (2007). Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California and Oregon. Durham: Duke University Press. Stephen, L. (2012). Conceptualizing transborder communities. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of International Migration. Marc R. Rosenblum and Daniel J. Tichenor (eds.) New York: Oxford University Press. Urciuoli, B. (1995). Language and borders. Annual Review of Anthropology 24. Annual Reviews. Urciuoli, B. . (1996). Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Yeh, R. (2017). Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City. University of Chicago Press.

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FURTHER READING De Certeau, M. (1985). The jabbering of social life. In: On Signs (ed. M. Blonsky). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Falconi E. (2013). Storytelling, language shift and revitalization in a transborder community: “tell it in Zapotec!”. American Anthropologist 115 (4). Falconi E. (2016). Transborder contact: shifting patterns of linguistic differentiation in a Zapotec transborder community. The International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2016 (240). Stephen, L. (2005). Zapotec Women: Gender, Class and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. Durham: Duke University Press.

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5

Mixing, Switching, and Languaging in Interaction

Jan David Hauck and Teruko Vida Mitsuhara Introduction Across the world, speakers of different languages have always come into contact with one another, be it through migration, trade, conquest, colonization, or different media. Language contact can result in people shifting to a different language, sometimes resulting in language endangerment and death (Chapter 3, O’Neill), or in the formation of new languages such as pidgins or creoles (Chapter 2, Jourdan). It can also lead to people maintaining repertoires comprising elements from more than one language and using all of them in varying constellations. Consider the following two examples: It is hot and humid in the fifth-grade classroom of the Mayapur international school located in the countryside of West Bengal, India. The lesson is almost over and the students are awaiting the school bell announcing recess. Vish, a Bengali student, throws a paper ball to hit the back of the head of Madhu, his Russian classmate. Madhu swings around and hollers, “HEY PAGOL!” Vish responds, “You’re the pagol, PAGOL!” The bell rings and the two boys quickly race outside for a game of tag. Pagol is a curse word from the Bengali language. It means ‘crazy person’ and can index solidarity, start a fight, or calm a friendly quarrel between friends. Despite their different national, ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, Vish and Madhu are indeed friends. And although they speak English with one another, they frequently incorporate words from Bengali, Russian, and other languages into their repertoire. On the other side of the globe, in a remote rural village of eastern Paraguay, a group of Indigenous Aché children is playing soccer. Two trees standing a few yards apart delimit the goal. One boy, Joaquín, shouts to his brother Gachogi, “Ãtã esuta! ÃTANA ESUTA

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

adja gope de mungetama ina!” which translates roughly into English as ‘Kick it hard! When you KICK IT HARD you’re gonna put it in!’ Gachogi kicks the ball past his opponent and runs after it approaching the goal. Joaquín continues to cheer him on: “ESUTA ATU, gope emunge!” ‘KICK IT, C’MON, put it in there!’ Gachogi kicks the ball again and all kids scream in unison “GOOOOOL” as the ball enters its target. The children are speaking an Indigenous language, but you might have noticed the similarity of the word ­­gol—lengthened here to “goooool”—with the English goal. Gol is indeed a foreign word that they have incorporated into their speech from Spanish (historically related to the English goal), one of the official languages in Paraguay. While mostly spoken in cities, many Spanish words have made their way even to such remote corners of the country as this Aché village. In fact, in the above interaction, there is another word that was borrowed from Spanish: the construct esuta, which we have translated as ‘kick it,’ is composed of the imperative marker e- and the verb suta, a modified form of the Spanish verb chutar (related to English shoot). Slightly changing the pronunciation from “ch” to “s,” adding the imperative prefix “e-,” and emphasizing the final syllable “-ta,” Joaquín has neatly integrated the Spanish word into the morphophonemic structure of his own language. Exchanges such as these, where speakers mix elements from multiple languages, are not uncommon. Many communities around the world are multilingual in that two or more languages are used daily. Speakers may switch between them or mix features depending on context, participants, and purpose. However, many people still hold language ideologies that take monolingualism as the norm and naturalize the relationship of standard varieties to national identities. Often legacies of colonialist and nationalist projects, such ideologies cast multilingual or hybrid practices and the use of non-standard varieties as aberrant. Especially in educational contexts, students who bring linguistic elements into the classroom that are seen as deviating from whatever is defined as the national or educational “standard” are frequently subject to discriminatory or exclusionary practices. Research by linguists and anthropologists has challenged such ideologies in several ways: emphasizing that named languages such as English, Spanish, or Bengali are socio-political constructs that don’t exist as natural entities in the world; highlighting the arbitrariness of linguistic boundaries; showing that language contact has been ubiquitous in human history and that there are regularities in the ways in which speakers alternate between languages. A number of concepts have been developed to analyze multilingual practices, such as borrowing, the incorporation of a foreign term into the lexicon of a language, codeswitching, the switching from one language to another, and language mixing, more frequent mixing of features from multiple languages. In recent years, some scholars have argued that these strategies do not go far enough. Contemporary contexts are characterized by high levels of diversity and increased circulation and combination of linguistic elements of different origins as the result of new flows of migration and interconnectedness through modern media. The resulting heterogeneous and fluid practices challenge existing theoretical frameworks and analytic vocabulary: Is the word pagol that Madhu used a “borrowing” from Bengali or is he “codeswitching” between Bengali and English? Is Joaquín “switching” to Spanish when he uses the verb chutar/ suta or is he “mixing” Spanish with his heritage language? And, since the word is modified with the initial “s-” and integrated into its surroundings, what warrants identifying it still as a “Spanish” word? Instead of trying to classify multilingual practices in terms of “languages” that people mix or switch, what if we conceptualize human communicative behavior as the use of “linguistic resources” or the practice of “languaging”? A number of scholars have suggested that in order to do justice to the linguistic complexities of the twenty-first century we need to

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move beyond the recognition of multilingualism towards an era of “post-multilingualism” (Li 2018, 15). This chapter gives an overview over current debates about multilingual and post-multilingual interaction. We begin with a brief overview over the state of the art in research on multilingualism before introducing new theoretical developments that have challenged previous research, including concepts such as superdiversity and (trans-)languaging. We then analyze two ethnographic examples from the two fieldsites referenced in the introductory paragraphs, which showcase different ways in which multiple semiotic resources are used jointly in interaction. These examples also allow us to show where some of the current theoretical innovations fall short and where existing analytic concepts may be more pertinent, as well as areas that call for further theoretical work. One such area is the relationship between multilingualism and multimodalilty, another the concept of emergence.

Multilingualism and Language Alternation Multilingualism refers to the knowledge or use of two or more languages by the same individual, in the same interaction, in the same community, and/or in the same country. Thereby, the use of multiple languages presupposes multilingual competence—to some degree at least. There is an ongoing debate about what form this competence takes. Do multilingual speakers have discrete mental representations of each language in their repertoire? Do they share some elements between them (MacSwan 2017)? Or do they possess a single integrated system that just happens to include elements that are ascribed socially to different named languages, with pragmatic considerations governing the deployment of one or the other (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015, 2019)? Research on the acquisition of multilingual competence by children1—e.g., children whose parents speak different languages, whose home language differs from the language spoken in their community, or who grow up in a multilingual community—suggests that children are able to keep languages separate from the very beginning of the acquisition process, which is understood to imply that these languages are also stored separately in the brain (Genesee 1989; Köppe 1996). Most of this research, however, comes from contexts in which the linguistic input is also clearly differentiated: different languages are spoken by different participants or in different contexts. By contrast, studies from multilingual environments where codeswitching or mixing is frequent have shown children to integrate words from different source languages into a single syntactic structure (Wilson, Hurst, and Wigglesworth 2017), which can lead to the formation of new mixed languages (McConvell and Meakins 2005; O’Shannessy 2005; Auer and Hakimov 2021). The mental representation of multiple languages thus appears to depend largely on patterns of use in the contexts in which children are socialized. The use of multiple languages in a given community can take a variety of forms. There is considerable terminological disagreement concerning concepts such as codeswitching, mixing, borrowing, language alternation, and similar terms. We will specify these in what follows, using language alternation as encompassing term for phenomena involving the use of more than one language or variety. At the broadest level, people can alternate languages between different contexts and speech domains. Commonly described as diglossia (Ferguson

1

  We use multilingual here as the umbrella term referring to two or more languages, noting that most research focuses specifically on bilingual children.

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1959; Fishman 1965), the languages or varieties spoken in a multilingual community are often unequally distributed. A language with higher prestige (such as an official or national language) is used in the public sphere, written communication, and formal education, whereas other languages are used in more informal settings. Sometimes, multiple languages and varieties thereof are situated on multiple scales with high-, mid-, and low-points in complex systems of polyglossia (Platt 1977). Thereby, languages differ not only in terms of prestige but frequently have different communicative functions. Specific languages may be used in intimate settings, for commercial interactions, or for the expression of sarcasm or humor. This is because different languages index (Chapter 33, Duranti) different aspects of context. In all communities, even monolingual ones, there are “different ways of saying ‘the same’ thing” (Silverstein 2003, 212), for instance, “polite language” or “youth slang” or “formal” and “informal speech” and the like—what linguists call registers (Agha 2004) or styles (Labov 1972). Using these in context indexically entails particular identities, stances, or relationships between interactants (Ochs 1992; Silverstein 2003). In multilingual communities this indexical work is often accomplished by the use of different languages or codes (Garrett 2005). Frequently, speakers alternate between these also within a single context or interaction, mobilizing the indexical meanings of different languages, and at times also subverting language hierarchies (de León 2019).

From Codeswitching to Language Mixing Switching from one language or style to another within an interaction is generally described as codeswitching (Woolard 2004) and can take a variety of forms. In intersentential codeswitching one sentence is completed in one code and the next one in a different one; in intrasentential codeswitching codes are switched within a single sentence. Other codeswitching phenomena include tagging on a part in a different code to an otherwise complete utterance, inserting a single word into a monolingual sentence to use as a crutch (when the corresponding term is not immediately available), and even switching codes within a single word (intra-word switching) (Zentella 1997, 80–114). Different forms of codeswitching serve different functions. Jan-Petter Blom and John Gumperz (1972) distinguish between situational and metaphorical codeswitching. Situational codeswitching is a change of code depending on the participant, activity, setting, or domain. For example, a speaker may choose to switch code to talk to their neighbor who is at the door who may speak a different language. Or one may talk to a friend on the playground using a particular style or register, but then switch to a different one when they are in class. Metaphorical codeswitching—later referred to as conversational codeswitching (Gumperz 1982, 61)—is a change of code that has a communicative effect in that it is designed to add information to how the utterance is supposed to be understood—what Gumperz (1982, 82, 131) calls a contextualization cue. For example, one may use a particular word or phrase from a different language or variety in order to let an interlocutor know that what one is saying is not supposed to be taken too seriously. In the interaction in the introductory paragraph, the word pagol ‘crazy person’ may signal that now it is playtime. Different forms often correlate with different functions—situational codeswitching more often being intersentential than intrasentential, for example—but function cannot be read directly from form and depends on the sequential and overall communicative context in which a given switch occurs.

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In all these ways codeswitching effectuates what Erving Goffman (1979) describes as a change in footing, a change in the alignment or stance of participants. The switch in codes marks a shift in the interactional frame. It does something, it is marked (Myers-Scotton 1993, 80–150) in that it has a communicative, indexical function. However, the literature is equally replete with cases where codeswitching is the unmarked choice (Myers-Scotton 1993, 80–83) and the individual transitions between codes are “meaningless” (AlvarezCáccamo 1998, 29) for the participants. The outside observer may still detect that one word comes from one language and the next one from another. But this information is irrelevant for the participants as the interaction unfolds. For the Aché children, the words gol or chutar are simply the conventional ways in which scoring a goal or kicking the ball are expressed. They may not even be aware that the words are from Spanish. None of the transitions between units of different origin acts as an indexical cue or change in footing. The words are what linguists call borrowings (Field 2002), words that have been integrated into the lexicon of a language, such as the English word kindergarten that comes originally from German. Marked codeswitching can over time become unmarked. Ana Celia Zentella’s (1997) work in El Bloque, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York, provides an example. Speakers in the neighborhood use multiple varieties of Spanish and English. Each of these indexes a particular identity or stance. A competent speaker in El Bloque knows how to switch between them depending on the situation, communicative purpose, or interlocutor. But at the same time—and also because of its frequency as a practice—codeswitching itself, as a global practice, has become a “badge of identity” (Zentella 1997, 112–4). It is the “overall effect of using a ‘code-switching style’ that is tactically exploited for group identification” (Alvarez-Cáccamo 1998, 36–37). In El Bloque what would warrant calling such practices codeswitching at all? As Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo (1998, 29), puts it, “if codes do not contrast, can we maintain that they are indeed distinct codes?” Addressing this point, Peter Auer (1999) suggests restricting the term codeswitching to those kinds of switches that are interactionally and indexically meaningful. Inspired by work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Garfinkel 1967), he proposes a framework that situates different possibilities of language alternation on a continuum ranging from codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects. In codeswitching the juxtaposition of two languages is “perceived and interpreted as a locally meaningful event by participants” (Auer 1999, 310). By contrast, in language mixing and fused lects the two languages and switching between them are no longer perceived as meaningfully distinct at all, the difference between the latter two being different degrees of variation and grammaticalization (see Backus 1999; Auer and Hakimov 2021). We will explore language mixing and fused lects further in a later section. We note here that all of this research shows language alternation to be “systematic and meaningful” (Woolard 2004, 74). Far from an aberrant practice that demonstrates lack of competence or incomplete mastery of languages, knowing how and when to switch codes and how to combine heterogeneous elements requires particular skills and profound knowledge of the complex ways in which different communicative forms relate to aspects of context. Codeswitching research has thus “waged a war on deficit models of bilingualism and on pejorative views of syncretic language use by insisting on the integrity of language mixing and by examining it for its grammatical systematicity and pragmatic coherence” (Rampton 1998, 306). In recent years, however, a number of scholars have argued that showing the systematicity and grammaticality of multilingual practices does not go far enough; they advocate for a

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more radical perspective that questions the existence of separate languages in the first place. Such calls are issued in particular in response to the perception of an increase in diversity in urban centers of the Global North, what has been described as “superdiversity.”

Superdiverse Challenges to European Ontologies of Language The term superdiversity was coined by Steven Vertovec (2007) to describe the changing demographics of urban spaces in Europe resulting from new waves of migration from the Global South. The term highlights the complex nature of contemporary, migration-driven diversity, in which not only ethnicity, but also other variables play a role, including national and class background, legal status, gender, and age, among others. While Vertovec did not include language in his original formulation, superdiversity was soon taken up in sociolinguistics and beyond as a way of recognizing that communication in the twenty-first century is informed not only by local, ethnic, or national categories, but embedded in larger complexes characterized by translocality, connectedness, and heterogeneity (Blommaert and Rampton 2011). Superdiverse linguistic ecologies brought about by recent migrations may indeed be a novel reality for modern nation-states that were founded upon ideologies of linguistic and cultural uniformity (Anderson [1983] 2006). But high levels of language contact and multilingualism are well attested historically as well as cross-culturally. For instance, as Michael Silverstein (2015) points out, what is today recognized as “the English language” is the result of several waves of migration to the British Isles from the eighth century onwards, each bringing new linguistic material, resulting in contexts certainly comparable to the “superdiverse” ones debated in Europe today. Completely isolated communities were an exception, and in many parts of the world complex systems of multilingualism and language contact have existed for centuries, where speaking more than one language on a daily basis is quite an “ordinary” (Lee and Dovchin 2019) affair. Therefore, Jan Blommaert (2015, 84) suggests that rather than describing a radically new phenomenon, the concept of superdiversity offers a new “paradigmatic perspective” that provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach multilingual communication (Reyes 2014, 367–8). What is characteristic of the new perspective is a fundamental questioning of the concept of language itself (Jørgensen et al. 2011; García and Li 2014; Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015). In much research, languages are simply taken for granted as objects of inquiry. Indeed, for Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 1983) the existence of languages was a precondition for linguistics as a science. But the concept of language arose from a particular intellectual tradition in a particular cultural context. In a landmark study, Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (2003) show that many current taken-for-granted understandings of what language is originated in the works of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophers. In those works, we find the notion of language as an autonomous domain, an abstract entity that is wholly distinct from everyday speech, as well as the idea that there is one language that corresponds to each nation’s culture and character. Even though these ideas of what language is are not shared by many other cultures (Hauck and Heurich 2018), they have become the dominant ways of conceptualizing language across the globe that enable negative stereotypes of practices such as codeswitching, language mixing, and the use of non-standard varieties, frequently associated with racialized and socioeconomically marginalized populations (Rosa and Flores 2017). As part of current efforts at intellectual decolonization, the goal of many theorists is therefore not merely to counter deficit views of codeswitching and mixing but to question

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the European philosophical premises on which such views were built (Pennycook and Makoni 2020), questioning whether something such as language exists at all and interrogating what kind of thing language is—the underlying ontology of language (Seargeant 2010; Hauck forthcoming).2 On one level, this critique questions the existence of language in general (in the singular) (Ingold 2000)? More often, however, its targets are particular languages (in the plural), especially “named languages” (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015; Sabino 2018, 8), conceived as bounded, homogenous, and shared systems. Robin Sabino (2018, 3), for instance, criticizes what she calls the “languages ideology” (note the plural!), a term she uses to refer to the belief in the existence of languages. What she means is the belief in the existence of languages as anything other than sociocultural or ideological constructs or “inventions” as Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook (2007) put it. This is not to deny that inventions can have “very real effects” and “material consequences” for people (Makoni and Pennycook 2007, 21, 27). For example, educational materials may be designed in a particular standard language, to the detriment of those whose home ways of speaking differ. But languages are not natural objects found in the world, waiting to be encountered, discovered, and described. This language-critical stance has birthed a variety of new concepts to replace language, many of them compounds of the verb languaging. The term goes back to a short paper by Alton Becker (1991), who incorporates the concept from the work of Chilean biologists and philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela ([1984] 1998). He writes, “there is no such thing as Language, only continual languaging, an activity of human beings in the world” (Becker 1991, 34). Sabino (2018, 34) defines languaging as “the storage, deployment, and processing of linguistic resources during the ebb and flow of form/ meaning potentials and situation/genre-bound expectations for their use.” Recent decades have seen a proliferation of similar concepts including translanguaging (García and Li 2014), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010), polylanguaging (Jørgensen et al. 2011), or transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005), among others. Some of these concepts are designed explicitly as alternatives to terms such as codeswitching, which some argue “still constitutes a theoretical endorsement of the idea that what the bilingual manipulates, however masterfully, are two separate linguistic systems” (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015, 282; but cf. Li 2018, 27). If we disavow the idea of separate languages then inevitably concepts such as multilingualism also lose their purchase; we are entering an era of “post-multilingualism” (Li 2018, 15). The basic theoretical premise underlying all of these approaches is to grant ontological primacy not to language or languages, but to linguistic resources or features, and to understand languaging as the practice of putting those features to use.

Linguistic Resources, Features, and Units The focus on features or resources and individual and community repertoires thereof has been advocated for by linguistic anthropologists for some time (Gumperz 1964, 137; Heller 2007, 1). A useful theoretical elaboration is the units-based approach developed by Nick Enfield (2005, 182) who understands languages as “populations of associated units” such as phonological elements, grammatical elements, words, constructions, and idioms

2

  In philosophy, ontology is the study of the nature of existence or what there is. Thus, an ontology of language refers to a particular understanding of the nature of language, what language “is.”

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(see also Blommaert and Backus 2011, 7). Units do not spread randomly through communities but cluster in ways such that units that are used by individuals in the same groups are aggregated or bundled in similar ways and passed on together, which gives the impression that people “speak the same language” (Enfield 2005, 195). Languages change through the cumulative effect of speakers adopting words, sounds, or grammatical patterns from other speakers—whether they are parents, peers, powerful leaders, or people from a different linguistic and cultural background. Language shift and death mean simply adopting massive clusters of features together while abandoning others (Sabino 2018, 37–38). In this view, languages do not exist but linguistic features do, and speakers “deploy” them (Sabino 2018, 34), often “in strategic ways” (García and Li 2014, 10). Different features are “associated with” (Jørgensen et al. 2011) or “belong to” (García and Li 2014, 10) different named languages. But these languages are sociocultural constructs. Moreover, counter to research that suggests that bilinguals or multilinguals possess distinct mental grammars of the different “languages” in their repertoire (Genesee 1989; MacSwan 2017), proponents of languaging and translanguaging hold that all speakers have a single, unitary system. Linguistic individuals speak their own unique idiolects (Li 2018, 18–19; Sabino 2018, 41–56), “structured lists of lexical and grammatical features” (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015, 289) that may belong to one or more named languages. Translanguaging, then, is “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages,” as Ricardo Otheguy, Ofelia García, and Wallis Reid (2015, 283) have succinctly defined it. Much of this research addresses educational settings. Indeed, the term “translanguaging” was conceived to describe specific pedagogical practices in which language boundaries were crossed (see Li 2018, 15). Educational institutions with highly diverse student populations should not rely only on standard languages and instead allow and encourage students to use all linguistic resources at their disposal. Doing so affirms students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which among other things positively impacts students’ relationships with each other (Paris 2009) as well as improves school performance (Lippi-Green 2012, 308–9). The shift in focus to individual and community repertoires of linguistic resources (Blommaert and Backus 2013) helps to move beyond conceptualizations of languages as abstract, autonomous, and bounded systems and to rehabilitate practices that do not fit into the mold of standard languages. However, the literature on languaging and translanguaging has also come under critique for failing to adequately account for differences among all the possible ways of juxtaposing and aggregating units in everyday interaction. As Auer (forthcoming) points out, when we subsume all (post-)multilingual practices under an umbrella term such as translanguaging, analytic distinctions between, for example, codeswitching and language mixing are lost. To better illustrate the merits but also the shortcomings of post-multilingual approaches we will now turn to two examples drawn from our respective fieldwork in communities in India and Paraguay.

Translinguistic Brokering in Mayapur Our first example comes from Mayapur, a newly-formed transnational religious village in a rural area of West Bengal, India, home to middle and lower-middle class religious converts from across Asia, the Americas, Africa, and Europe (Mitsuhara 2019, 2021). Here, migrant

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children of diverse national backgrounds and local Bengali children interact frequently, such as Vish and Madhu, whom we encountered at the beginning of the chapter. The wide variety of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds of Mayapur’s population make it no less superdiverse than London, Amsterdam, or Berlin. In this way, Mayapur stands in stark contrast to other places in the Global South where white immigrants from the Global North form exclusive enclaves in which their children do not interact with local populations, except with nannies and servants (e.g., Hindman 2013). The religious ideologies driving migration to Mayapur foster a disposition to downplay class, racial, and ethnic divides, leading children to incorporate a wide variety of linguistic resources of different origins into their repertoire. Mayapur thus seems to provide an ideal context for the uninhibited, fluid, and dynamic transcending of language boundaries that proponents of translanguaging are advocating for. Children are encouraged—indeed, often required—to use resources from the full repertoire of their various idiolects. But does that mean that they use them “without regard” for language boundaries? In what follows, we will analyze an episode that exemplifies postmultilingual translanguaging and use it to critically discuss the concept. The episode takes place in the nursery of one of Mayapur’s local schools. Vanimali and Nitai are two three-year old boys. Vanimali has lived in Mayapur for two years with his Russian parents. While he can speak in English, his language of comfort is Russian. Nitai is a monolingual Spanish-speaking Argentinian boy who has been in Mayapur for approximately two months prior to the filming of the following interaction. Both Nitai’s parents speak Spanish at home and can converse minimally in English. Their nursery teacher, Priya, is from Ukraine and has lived in Mayapur for more than five years. Languages that she uses in daily life include her mother tongues Ukrainian and Russian, as well as English and basic conversational Bengali. She works in the nursery every day and attends to its fluctuating class of approximately fifteen children. Six of the children are Indian, with varying home languages: Bengali, Kannada, Hindi, and Oriya. One girl of mixed ethnic background speaks two languages at home, Latvian with her father and Bengali with her mother. The other eight children are not ethnically Indian and migrated from Argentina, South Africa, the United States, Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Russia. One day, shortly before recess, Nitai tries to inform his teacher Priya about a spider he encountered at a sink in the classroom. He has trouble communicating his message since his repertoire does not yet contain either the English or the Russian word for “spider.” He wiggles his fingers in a crawling fashion but the teacher does not understand. Vanimali, who has been watching the interaction, intervenes and is able to elicit the meaning “spider” from Nitai to then relay it to the teacher. Vanimali thus acts as a spontaneous translinguistic broker (Reynolds and Orellana 2015) between his peer and teacher.3 Transcript 1 1     nitai:          Mataji:: 2                        (.9) 3                        I di- di- (.2) this (.) this- rou[ 4                       ((raises right hand palm down and begins to move fingers in crawling gesture)) 5                        (.8) 6                        Y I- (.)   I- (.) e- I throw water [ 7                                     ((drops arms and moves both forward in dangling motion))         ((several lines omitted)) 3

  For transcription conventions please see page 103.

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94  jan david hauck and teruko vida mitsuhara

29      vanimali:     ↑What do you say.= 30                          = ºTalk to me?º [ 31                            ((raises right hand with index finger up)) 32                         (.5) 33      nitai:           >I ((shrug)) ↑know?< (.)   Uhh [ 34                                                                 ((puts hands together)) 35                         (.2) 36                          I-  I- thro [ 37                             ((mimicks throwing bucket of water)) 38                         ((raises right hand again  and does crawling gesture, Figure 5.1)) [ 39                                                               from this (.) look 40                         (.3) 41      ((Priya has turned to interacting with other children and is ignoring the two boys.)) 42      vanimali:         Sp↑ider?= [ 43                         ((raises right hand and mirrors crawling gesture, Figure 5.2)) 44      nitai:           =((nods head)) 45                         (.4) 46                        ((slight head nod ‘yes’)) 47                         (.3) 48      vanimali:      You  touched (.) the sp↑ider,= [ 49                                 ((repeats crawling gesture)) 50      nitai:            =((nods head ‘yes’))= 51                           =Yeah. 52      vanimali:     Is that sp↑ider. [ 53                         ((repeats crawling gesture)) 54      nitai:           ((nods and  tilts head)) [ 55                                          Ye ↑A::::::H= [ 56      vanimali:                            ((turns toward the teacher and  reaches forward)) [ 57                                                                                               ↑MATAJI 58                         (.3) 59                          ↑MATAJI PRIYA. [ 60                          ((pulls her shirt)) 61                          Он хотел тебе сказать что он он потрогал                               He wanted to tell you that he he touched 62                          s- sp- паука [pauka]                              s- sp- spider

At first sight, this interaction does appear to display all the characteristics of translanguaging, the deployment of the full repertoire of participants’ idiolects. The two boys are using elements from what an outsider may label as English, Russian, and Spanish, as well as a number of nonverbal resources to communicate. However, the ways in which the boys employ these resources with one another and the teacher also shows that they do not simply disregard boundaries between languages. In the following two sections we will proceed with a detailed analysis of this interactional sequence to illustrate the kinds of practices that post-multilingual approaches try to capture but also to emphasize aspects that challenge and point beyond current conceptualizations of languaging and translanguaging.

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Beyond Verbal Languaging The first issue that is salient in the interaction is the boys’ extensive use of nonverbal resources. Despite the recognition of trans- and other languaging as always multimodal (Blommaert and Backus 2011; Jørgensen et al. 2011; Li 2018), only recently have scholars begun to pay attention to nonverbal modalities, including sign languages and embodied interaction (Kusters et al. 2017). But especially in so-called superdiverse contexts where the verbal repertoires of participants overlap only partly, embodied resources are an indispensable component of any communicative interaction. For example, in their study of translanguaging in a butcher’s stall in a British city market, Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (2017, 266) emphasize the body as a semiotic resource, noticing that through the deployment of “gestures, eye gaze, nods and head shakes, shrugs and smiles, commercial activity goes on in a convivial way that is not seriously troubled by apparent differences between linguistic, cultural, or national backgrounds.” In both of his exchanges, with the teacher and with Vanimali, Nitai draws on verbal and nonverbal resources simultaneously. He deploys his limited English verbal resources together with several gestures, first and foremost the crawling gesture that iconically resembles a spider’s movement (Figure 5.1). It is this iconic gesture that allows Vanimali to disambiguate his use of the deictic “this” in line 3 (see Goodwin 2018, 329–47) and helps him co-construct the meaning to be relayed to the teacher. Vanimali mirrors this gesture (Figure 5.2) and pairs it three times with the English word spider. He elicits Nitai’s confirmation directly with his verification question “is that spider” (line 52) to make sure his interpretation is accurate.

Figure 5.1  Nitai’s crawling spider gesture, line 38.

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Figure 5.2  Vanimali mirroring Nitai’s spider gesture, line 43.

Interactions such as these suggest that we would be well-advised to shift our attention from linguistic or verbal resources and repertoires (Gumperz 1964, 137) to semiotic resources and semiotic repertoires in recognition that “all human interactions, and linguistic repertoires, are (and always have been) multimodal” (Kusters et al. 2017, 220). With great skill, Nitai and Vanimali integrate verbal and nonverbal resources moving across linguistic and modal boundaries. Such mixing of modalities is especially visible in line 33 when Nitai inserts the conventionalized gesture of a shoulder shrug, in substitution for the English negation (don’t): “I ((shrug)) know?” Note that the shrug appears in the syntactic slot appropriate for the negation in both English and Spanish. But while the two boys draw freely from nonverbal resources, they do not use all of the verbal features in their repertoire indiscriminately. Nitai does not use those features that we may label as Spanish. Vanimali does not use those labeled Russian with Nitai. He does so only when he turns to the teacher. This means that the children here do not fully disregard the distinctions between elements in their repertoire that are associated with one language and another.

Not All Languaging is Alike Even if we disavow the existence of language(s), and even if we restrict our analytic focus to individual semiotic features, communicative actions, and interactants, we must still account for the question why interactants choose this or that feature over another one in a given situation. In the section “From Codeswitching to Language Mixing,” we have distinguished between marked and unmarked codeswitching, between codeswitching that is indexically meaningful, and language mixing, which is not. Meaningfulness, here, is to be understood from the perspective of the participants of an interaction, whether the transition is understood as a change in footing (Goffman 1979). In other words, rather than establishing that the juxtaposition of two words is meaningful by some predefined criteria—such as that the first word is associated with English and the next one with Russian—the analyst must follow the procedures that members themselves use to interpret a particular interaction—their ethnomethods (Garfinkel 1967). Thus, rather than completely disavowing notions of language or code in favor of languaging or translanguaging, to understand (post-)multilingual interactions in highly diverse context it is important to take into account whether or not participants orient to languages as distinct (Auer 2022). Taking such a perspective, if we closely analyze the transcripts, we note that while certainly deploying verbal and nonverbal resources from their entire repertoire, the children do not

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do so “without regard” for language boundaries. From his entire repertoire, Vanimali chooses those elements that he associates with English to co-construct the meaning of the story with Nitai. Subsequently, when he turns to the teacher in line 56, he markedly switches to that part of his repertoire that he associates with Russian. This would qualify as a participant-related codeswitch, in Gumperz’s terms, a switch occasioned by the linguistic identity that Vanimali associates with the teacher. Vanimali would not have to do this switch, as the teacher speaks English and conducts most of the class in English. But while it represents only a subset of his repertoire that he shares with the teacher, he deliberately chooses this subset. This is further evidenced by the repair in line 62. In a repair the speaker suspends the flow of the utterance to, for example, substitute a word with a more appropriate one (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). In our case, Vanimali starts with the sound s-, followed by sp-, both of which he cuts off in order to produce паука [pauka], the Russian word for ‘spider.’ The syllable-initial consonant cluster [sp] is not allowed by Russian phonotactics (i.e., possible combination of sounds) and must therefore be analyzed as the beginning of the English word spider. But he does not complete the word. Vanimali deliberately targets the Russian form, showing that he treats English and Russian as distinct codes. Even Nitai himself, despite his still limited competence, must be understood as orienting towards English as a distinct language. Except for the Spanish conjunction y ‘and’ in line 6, Nitai does not use any further Spanish words—which neither the teacher nor Vanimali would understand. At three years of age, Nitai already seems to know that that particular part of his repertoire would not lead to successful communication with one specific set of participants. He restricts the verbal elements that he uses to the small set of English words he commands in conjunction with a number of gestures in order to get his message across. What this shows is that even interactions that would seem to demonstrate uninhibited translanguaging as the use of a wide variety of resources associated with different languages, participants frequently orient towards those languages as distinct entities (Auer forthcoming). Otheguy, García, and Reid (2015, 298) recognize that at times “it may be legitimate to use terms like code switching and language mixing” but only when expressing “the outsider’s perspective.” By contrast, what the foregoing shows is that these terms are especially important when analyzing interaction from the perspective of the interactants themselves. There is a difference between Nitai’s mixing of the Spanish y with the otherwise English utterance and Vanimali’s switching into Russian. Nitai’s Spanish insertion has no contextualization function. Vanimali’s codeswitch indexes a major shift in footing in the participation framework, to the teacher Priya as the addressee and changing his own role into that of a mediator who is relaying a message on behalf of Nitai. For the analyst, it is therefore crucial to be aware of the ways in which distinctions of languages emerge in interaction and become meaningful for interactants—but also to not assume them to exist when they do not. The remainder of this chapter will discuss what an understanding of language boundaries as emergent phenomena may offer to research on post-multilingual interaction. We will illustrate the concept of emergence with a second example of children’s interactions but from a context very different from Mayapur, a small remote Indigenous Aché village in eastern Paraguay.

Language Mixing in an Indigenous Aché Village The Aché used to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers until the 1960s and 1970s, when they were settled on reservations. Sedentarization led to radical sociocultural changes including a dramatic reconfiguration of the communities’ linguistic repertoires. Their traditional ways of speaking—what is today recognized as their heritage language, ache djawu ‘the Aché

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language/speech’ (Hauck 2018)—has fallen out of use in favor of a mixed way of speaking that incorporates elements from Aché and the national language Guaraní, often called “Guaraché.” Whereas in language mixing speakers still draw quite freely from resources of different origin, if such practices become frequent in a given community, over time patterns in the ways in which elements are juxtaposed begin to emerge, leading to a fused lect (Auer 1999), what is often called a mixed language in the literature (Backus 1999; Matras and Bakker 2003). Guaraché is currently on its way to becoming a full-fledged mixed language, learned by children as their first language (Hauck 2022). Most elements of Guaraché are from Aché and Guaraní but speakers also use some Spanish words. This is due to Paraguay’s particular history that led the Indigenous language Guaraní to become a national language being spoken also by the majority of the country’s non-Indigenous population alongside Spanish, the language of the colonizers. Bilingualism is being promoted through the educational system and everyday usage is characterized by frequent codeswitching and language mixing (Hauck 2014), and thus many Spanish elements have made their way even into remote corners of the country such as the Aché villages. In light of Guaraché now being the community norm, many Aché have become concerned about the imminent loss of their heritage language in its original form and Aché is now taught as a subject in the primary schools. Here we will consider a brief episode from a heritage language class. The teacher is teaching a text (written on the blackboard) in Aché to second graders (the students are between 6 and 9 years old). The text is about elders going fishing at one of the many ponds or streams that meander through the forest. In the episode transcribed below the teacher is testing his students’ comprehension of the text, currently asking where they can find fish.4 Transcript 2 1   teacher:           Moõpe                              moõ-pe                              where-loc                                Where 2   chewugi:          Ype                               y-pe                               water-loc                               In the water 3   kanegi:             Riope                               rio-pe                               river-loc                               In the river 4   teacher:            Y::     pe ñande mechãta pira                                      y-pe           ñande  mechã-ta       pira                                     water-loc  1pl.in   watch-prosp  fish                                In     the water we will see the fish 5   tatugi:                     Rio (.) profesor                                        rio     profesor                                         river  teacher                                        River (.) teacher 6                           (.5) 4

  For transcription and glossing conventions please see page 103.

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   7                         Riope                               rio-pe                               river-loc                               In the river    8   teacher:        Hã                              Huh?    9   tatugi:           Riope                              rio-pe                              river-loc                              In the river 10   kradjagi:        Riope                              rio-pe                              river-loc                              In the river

11   teacher:        Riope ñande ma’e ̃ta                              rio-pe        ñande  ma’e-ta ̃                              river-loc  1pl.in   see-prosp                               In the river we see [it] 12                          Y   wachu, da’e rio                              y         wachu   da’e           rio                              water  big        neg.cop  river                                   Y   wachu, it’s not rio 13                         Y wachugipe=                              y          wachu-gi-pe                              water   big-nmlz-loc                              In the river 14   chewugi:        =Ypa wachugi                              y-pa                  wachu-gi                             water-compl    big-nmlz                                In the big lake

Responding to the teacher’s question “moõpe” ‘where’ they can see the fish, two students, Chewugi and Kanegi, chime in simultaneously (lines 2 and 3) with the competing suggestions “ype” ‘in the water’ and “riope” ‘in the river’ respectively. The two words are noun phrases composed of the roots y ‘water’ and rio ‘river’ respectively and the locative suffix -pe ‘in/at.’ Both are correct responses to the teacher’s question. What is noteworthy is that the two words are of different origin: y is from the Aché language (it has the same form in Guaraní as well), rio is from Spanish. This shows that the students are here freely using “resources” from multiple “languages” (Aché, Guaraní, Spanish), seemingly without regard for boundaries between them, much in line with the definition of translanguaging (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015, 283). But even without reconceptualizing communicative interaction as translanguaging we would expect this if, as we suggested, children in the communities learn a new mixed language, Guaraché, as their first language. While it may have been borrowed from Spanish, rio is as much a part of the Guaraché lexicon as is y, a borrowing from Aché. From the perspective of the students then, these are simply different words for different things (water, river, lake), not different words for the same thing in different languages. But we are in Aché class and the teacher’s job is to teach Aché—i.e., only a subset of his and his students’ full linguistic repertoires. This explains what happens next: The teacher first confirms Chewugi’s suggestion, “ype,” elaborating on it with “y::pe ñande mechãta pira” ‘in the wa::ter we will see the fish,’ lengthening the word for ‘water’ for emphasis.

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This prompts another student, Tatugi, to repeat Kanegi’s initial suggestion, rio ‘river,’ seeking confirmation for this alternative formulation from the teacher, also trying to get his attention with the Spanish word profesor ‘teacher.’ After a few repetitions the teacher initially does confirm this alternative formulation in line 11 with “riope ñande ma’e ̃ta” ‘in the river we see [it].’ However, he immediately repairs himself in line 12, saying “y wachu da’e rio” ‘y wachu, it is not rio’. Y wachu literally means ‘big water’ in Aché. He does not mean that a ‘big water’ is not a ‘river’ (it is!) but that the correct Aché word for river is not rio but y wachu. Here he is orienting towards a linguistic distinction between Spanish and Aché, or, more precisely between “not Aché” and Aché. He is socializing his students to notice that difference. How then are we to understand this difference? What is the ontological status of Aché and Spanish? One solution would be to return to the old understanding that Spanish and Aché are two “languages,” each wholly distinct and with its own lexicon, the former including the lexeme rio, the latter including y wachu. It should be clear from the discussion so far that this solution is not viable, neither from the perspective of the analyst, nor from the perspective of the children in the classroom. But the alternative, that all they are doing is translanguaging doesn’t do justice to the teachers deliberate correction of the students. Therefore, neither assuming the a priori existence of Spanish and Aché as “languages” independent of their deployment in interaction nor maintaining that they are fully irrelevant, mere “social constructions,” we suggest here to understand the distinction between the two words qua words of Spanish and Aché as emergent in the interaction. We thus turn to the concept of emergence as a third perspective on (post-)multilingual interaction.

Emergent Distinctions The concept of emergence has been used in the language sciences as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to language. Broadly, the idea underlying work on emergence is that language emerges from patterns of usage across time on different interrelated levels and different timescales (MacWhinney 2015). The notion goes back to Paul Hopper’s (1987) work on the emergence of grammar. Hopper maintains that rather than being the result of accumulated linguistic knowledge deposited in an individual’s brain, structure in language emerges in real time in ongoing interaction. He distinguishes emerging grammar, understood as the sedimentation of recurrent patterns over time in a community’s repertoire, from emergent grammar, as the ongoing always unfinished process of structuration. Auer and Pfänder (2011) describe emerging grammar as diachronic emergence and emergent grammar as synchronic emergence. We suggest rephrasing synchronic as enchronic emergence, using Enfield’s (2013) concept of enchrony, the turn-by-turn, sequential unfolding of interaction, which is in line with Hopper’s approach. The concept of emergence may help us resolve our question about the ontological status of Aché, Guaraní, and Spanish. For most of the interactions in the classroom, the distinction between Aché, Guaraní, or Spanish is indeed irrelevant. The bulk of the linguistic material used by teacher and students alike qualifies as language mixing or a new mixed language. However, when the teacher intervenes in line 12 to tell the students that y wachu is not rio, the distinction between the two terms becomes indexically meaningful. What is important, however, is that this distinction does not reside in the terms themselves; rather, it emerges in the interaction in the way in which it sequentially unfolds. The teacher’s paradigmatic substitution of rio with y wachu establishes their metalinguistic nonequivalence, producing a linguistic distinction that before that moment was not present.

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This means however, that ontological primacy should not be granted to pre-existing “languages,” “codes,” and boundaries between them, and rather to the ways in which interactants produce them in interaction (Gafaranga 2016). While we may be “used to approaching conversational codeswitching from the presumption that there are two codes (languages) which are used alternatedly” and subsequently “proceeding to investigate the function switching between them may have,” Auer (1999, 313) suggests stating “the question the other way round.” We should start “from the observation that there are two sets of cooccurring variables between which participants alternate in an interactionally meaningful way, and then proceed to ask whether we can see them as belonging to or constituting two varieties or languages” (Auer 1999, 313)—whether these are named languages, or different registers or styles (Alvarez-Cáccamo 1998, 29). To be sure, from the perspective of the teacher the boundary between Spanish and Aché is not a boundary that he produces out of thin air. His own upbringing and education have contributed to a “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994) that is able to discern linguistic distinctions in terms of named languages. And yet, even the teacher uses elements from Aché, Guaraní, and Spanish indiscriminately most of the time. Thus, even in a highly ideologically regimented encounter such as a heritage language class, linguistic distinctions are not set in stone and need to be reenacted in order to be reproduced. Over time, this ad hoc production of linguistic distinctiveness can socialize students into perceiving and producing boundaries between entire sets of linguistic units. Emergent distinctions can become emerging distinctions, sedimenting into new constellations that may once acquire names such as “Guaraché.” But these boundaries do not precede the (cumulative) interactions through which they are constituted.

Conclusion Research on multilingual communicative interaction from different disciplines has challenged nationalist and colonialist ideologies of language that take monolingualism as the norm and languages as bounded, homogenous units. Codeswitching and language mixing are ordinary, ubiquitous, systematic, and meaningful practices in many communities across the world. Their indexical entailments are used by speakers often in strategic ways to shift interactional frames or portray particular identities. The observation of ubiquitous heterogeneous and hybrid practices in contemporary “superdiverse” contexts has led some researchers to argue for a more radical abandonment of the concept of language as such as part of efforts at intellectual decolonization. In challenging a priori assumptions about the ontological status of languages they advocate for recasting communicative practices in terms of (trans-)languaging and the use of linguistic resources. This literature has made an important intervention in rehabilitating hybrid practices seen as deviant and inferior to normative standards, especially in educational settings. However, the subsumption of all kinds of multilingual and post-multilingual phenomena under an umbrella term such as translanguaging also bears the risk that important analytic distinctions between different practices are lost. To be sure, speakers everywhere use a multiplicity of verbal and nonverbal semiotic resources in their interaction. And there are certainly many interactions in which distinctions between them in terms of named languages are indeed irrelevant—or should be. But there are equally many instances where speakers orient to them as distinct precisely because of the indexical associations of different languages or varieties. Therefore, instead of making a priori decisions as to whether or not languages exist, whether speakers are codeswitching or translanguaging, as

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analysts we should shift our focus to the specific ways in which distinctions emerge in interaction. Distinctions between codes are the result of ways in which heterogeneous elements are juxtaposed in the sequential unfolding of talk. Over time the marked use of distinct elements (i.e., codeswitching) can contribute to maintaining and solidifying language boundaries, as well as to drawing new ones. Conversely, frequent switching between disparate linguistic resources (i.e., language mixing) can lead to linguistic convergence and fusion and to the emergence of new mixed languages, which then may again be used in contrastive ways with other ways of speaking. An emergentist approach remains agnostic as to the existence of languages and linguistic boundaries and allows us to appreciate languages as the products of speakers’ choices in everyday interaction, i.e., as interactional achievements.

Transcription and Glossing Conventions TEXT speech in high volume; ºtextº speech in low volume; >text< rapid delivery of speech; slow and drawn out delivery of speech; = latching (no interval between turns); :::: lengthening of immediately preceding sound (number of colons is relative to duration of sound); - cut-off of current sound; (.5) silence in seconds and tenth of seconds; [ overlapping turns; . falling intonation on preceding syllable; , slightly rising or ­falling-rising intonation on preceding syllable; ? rising intonation on preceding syllable (question intonation); ↑ rising intonation on following syllable; ((comment)) comments and nonverbal behavior. LOC locative; 1PL.IN first person plural inclusive; PROSP prospective; NEG.COP negative copula (‘is not’); NMLZ nominalizer.

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6

Postcolonial Semiotics

Angela Reyes Introduction For several decades, the field of anthropology has been engaged in a reflexive critique of its foundational entanglements with colonialism. Exploring how anthropological thought, imperial expansion, and modern understandings of race mutually informed one another as they developed in the nineteenth century and beyond, this critique interrogates the role of anthropology in advancing colonial logics and racial science and increasingly calls for the decolonization of the discipline (Allen and Jobson 2016; Harrison 1997). Yet it was not until the twenty-first century that the subfield of linguistic anthropology produced major works centered squarely on questions of language and colonialism, beginning with Linguistics in a Colonial World (Errington 2008), followed by Converting Words (Hanks 2010), and Language, Capitalism, Colonialism (Heller and McElhinny 2017). It is not that colonialism was ignored in linguistic anthropological scholarship across the twentieth century, but that outside of work on missionization, indigeneity, and creolization, it was often bracketed as historical or contextual background rather than foregrounded as a central theoretical focus. Indeed, linguistic anthropology still struggles with the very conceptualization of colonialism. Is it a past influence in the historical establishment of world orders? Is it a contemporary construct that emerges and circulates with material significance for present-day actors? Is it of less consequence than other large-scale formations, such as the nation-state, capitalism, and post-socialism? If colonialism’s magnitude and temporality span the historical and contemporary, how do we account for the ongoing relevance of colonialism as an organizing principle in current societies? One way into these questions is to focus on what I refer to here as “postcolonial semiotics”: how linguistic and broader sign processes are linked to the colonial and its ongoing relevance in the production of value. By framing the problem this way, linguistic anthropologists can conceptualize the contemporary presence of colonialism as a reflexively constituted ethnographic category, oriented to by participants who create and organize sign relations as colonial. In this chapter, I unpack what a postcolonial semiotics is, then center

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

on a narrow but key realm within it: elite formations in the postcolony. This focus illuminates how economic interests are advanced through the creation of elite emblems and the ambiguous value that is attached to them. Postcolonial elites are often evaluated as artificial, contaminated, and unrestrained in the ways in which they appear, communicate, and consume. I thus focus on how the concepts of “fake,” “mix,” and “excess” constitute qualities, which form emblems of elite distinction that are fastened to a colonial present. This is accomplished through spatiotemporal contrasts: a modern/nonmodern temporality and a mobile/immobile spatiality, which are often mapped onto an urban/rural within the nation and an external/internal to the nation. Drawing on several ethnographic examples, I show how the qualities of fake, mix, and excess are anchored in time and space to create ambivalent, aspirational postcolonial eliteness in processes of value production, maintenance, and transformation.

From Colonial Linguistics to Postcolonial Semiotics Postcolonial semiotics has its conceptual roots in “colonial linguistics.” Colonial linguistics explores “how representations of linguistic structure and colonial interests shaped and enabled each other” (Errington 2001, p. 20). Documenting languages upon imperial contact, colonial linguists did not so much describe linguistic structure as much as reduce complexity and objectify difference through the creation of unified written representations. These authoritative grammars helped naturalize linguistic and racial distinctions and hierarchies not only in colonial encounters, but also in scholarly fields, such as comparative philology. Colonial linguistics has been a longstanding area of focus in linguistic anthropology, particularly in work on language ideologies (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994), as well as adjacent disciplines, such as history (Rafael 1988). To demonstrate how the mechanisms of colonial linguistics do not end with decolonization, Errington (2008, p. 151) fleshes out a “postcolonial linguistics” as “ongoing in nation-states that have inherited colonial borders and infrastructures.” He offers the example of when colonial languages are assigned official status in the postcolony, and when access to these languages reproduces hierarchies among postcolonial populations, maintaining the interests of “new national elites.” “Postcolonial semiotics,” as used in this chapter, names the processes through which linguistic and other signs are linked to the colonial and its ongoing relevance in the production of value. If colonial linguistics is driven by the “professional linguist,” postcolonial semiotics is driven by the “everyday semiotician” (cf. Rymes 2020 on the “citizen sociolinguist”), embodied by social actors who create, regiment, and circulate signs that presuppose colonialism’s contemporary presence. Postcolonial semiotics encompasses a broad range of phenomena: from modern-day yoga practice where words like “balance” presuppose British colonial discourses on health and Orientalist framings of spirituality (Rosen 2019), to current debates about sports mascots as signs taken to honor Native Americans or uphold settler-colonial logics (Avineri and Perley 2018). In colonial linguistics, collaborating linguists rely on centripetal forces to produce homogenizing categories of language and people. Colonial linguistics serves imperial interests by constructing unitary formations of the colony and metropole alike. In postcolonial semiotics, in contrast, everyday populations rely on centrifugal forces to produce a heterogeneous array of linguistic and person types. Postcolonial semiotics does not construct unitary formations as much as produce multiplicity, ambivalence, and uncertainty around the question of colonialism’s endurance.

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Problems with the Term “Postcolonial” Many scholars have critiqued the term “postcolonial,” not least for its spatiotemporal presuppositions. The “post-” asserts a temporality—an “after” of colonialism—implying that colonial systems are in the past rather than an ongoing structure of contemporary societies (McClintock 1992; Wolfe 2006). The “-colonial” suggests a spatiality—the geographical entity of the colony—even though the metropole and non-colonized territories are also dynamic terrains that are simultaneously shaped by global imperial orders (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Several questions emerge. What is “post-” about settler-colonial states, like Canada and the US (Byrd 2011; Simpson 2014)? When is a postcolony a “neocolonial appendage” (San Juan 2000)? How does a nation with no formal colonial history, like Thailand or Greece, become a “crypto-colony” that is organized by colonial logics nonetheless (Herzfeld 2002)? Scholarship on these questions explores how colonialism exceeds its time and space, agreeing with Ranajit Guha (2001, pp. 41–42) that “the colonial experience has outlived decolonization and continues to be related significantly to the concerns of our time.” Given these critiques, “coloniality,” a term most associated with Latin American subaltern studies, offers a compelling theory of power that emphasizes the endurance of a range of colonial systems in the postcolony, including modes of control over the economy, subjectivity, and knowledge (Mignolo 2001; Quijano 2007; Wynter 2003). Despite the limitations of the term “postcolonial,” it nonetheless helps define “postcolonial studies,” an important body of critical scholarship that has produced a range of key concepts and insights, including the reflexive critiques above. Concerns of language emerge across this field. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988), for example, famously framed the question of the subaltern as a linguistic one—can the subaltern “speak” (or “listen” [Slotta 2017])?—to examine issues of representation and political participation. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, p. 77) used the concept of “linguistic terrorism” to describe how the imposition of English, as the “oppressor’s language,” attempts to dominate and disparage Chicano ways of speaking as “deficient” and “mutilated.” Frantz Fanon (1967, p. 18) explored how linguistic competence in the colonial language can transform the humanity of the colonial subject: “The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately Whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ratio to his mastery of the French Language.” Although the field of postcolonial studies has been criticized for producing cultural essentialisms and identity politics that lack analyses of political economy (Chibber 2013), it has a long tradition of Marxist analysis of the postcolony (San Juan 2000), advancing materialist critiques such as “colonial capitalism” (Alatas 1977). The postcolonial is a construct that presupposes the ongoing relevance of the colonial. Spatiotemporal, linguistic, and material concerns of the postcolonial are thus fundamentally ethnographic, semiotic, and ontological questions (Chumley 2017; Rosa and Díaz 2020; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). Linguistic anthropology enhances postcolonial studies because it can examine how the postcolonial is produced on the ground with everyday actors by tracing sign mechanisms through which value is attached to forms of being and speaking that are tied to colonialism’s endurance.

Semiotics of the Postcolonial If the “colonial present” (Gregory 2004) is not a seamless continuity of imperial rule, but rather a set of “recuperations, reactivations, and recombinations of familiar forms” (Stoler 2016, p. 32), research must trace how structures and hierarchies taken as colonial are

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actively reformulated through sign processes. Not only do everyday actors attend to signs in a postcolonial semiotics, so do the linguistic anthropologists who study them. I thus outline here sign processes of concern to both linguistic anthropologists and the everyday actors they investigate: namely, how “qualities” attach to “registers” and other “emblems” of personhood that are “interdiscursively” linked to the colonial and reconfigured in what Susan Gal and Judith Irvine call “fractally recursive” forms (see below). Each of these technical terms will be defined with examples in this section. Although these semiotic concepts are applicable to areas of focus beyond the scope of this chapter, I do suggest that they have a distinct efficacy in illuminating concerns of the postcolonial. In a theoretical framework based on the works of semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1932), abstract qualities (like “fake,” “mix,” and “excess”) are potential components of yet unrealized signs. When they are felt in material form, these qualities are experienced as “qualities instantiated or embodied in entities or events” or qualia (Chumley and Harkness 2013, p. 5). Since qualia are experiences of sensuous qualities, they can be perceived not as the attributed phenomena that they are but as intrinsic features that appear “natural” or “real.” Such qualities can be incorporated into an emblem, “a thing to which a social persona is attached” (Agha 2007, p. 235). Emblems construe signs as linked to social figures (Goffman 1981). For example, in the context of the Philippines, “light skin” can be emblematic of elites (Reyes 2020b). This is a semiotic process: when a quality (“light”) is experienced in an entity (“skin”), it can be taken as an emblem (“light skin”) of a figure (“Philippine elites”) within a social domain whose members recognize it as such. Registers often function as prominent emblems of figures and can be experienceable through qualia as well, such as “gentle Taglish” (Tagalog-English), another emblem of Philippine elites (Reyes 2017b). A register is not a stable language variety but an extracted moment within a wider-scale process called enregisterment “whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users” (Agha 2005, p. 38). Enregisterment is dependent upon extensive speech chains through which social actors form and circulate these models of recognition. As social actors encounter these models, they also locate themselves relative to them as well as to the qualities, emblems, registers, and figures of which they are comprised, thus forming and transforming their value. Through “interdiscursive webs” (Wirtz 2014), these phenomena are entextualized and recontextualized across social events as well as anchored to other (including “colonial”) times and spaces.1 Central to these processes are oppositions built through bundling signs and placing them in contrasts for qualitative comparison and value allocation, what Gal and Irvine (2019) call “axes of differentiation.” For example, “light skin” and “gentle Taglish” can only be emblematic of Philippine elites as they emerge in contrast to “dark skin” and “rough Taglish” that are assigned to the Philippine masses (Reyes 2017b). Binaries like elite/masses—as well as others germane to this chapter, such as colonizer/colonized, real/fake, pure/mixed, and moderate/excessive—are often produced through “fractal recursivity” (Irvine and Gal 2000, p. 38), which “involves the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level.” Here, a principal axis of differentiation, such as colonizer/colonized, can recur at other levels, such as subcategories of the colonized like elite/masses, thus positioning the corresponding ends of each pole in an iconic relation: elites as colonizers, and masses as colonized. Such downward recursions of established colonial hierarchies—what I have called “colonial recursivity”

1

  Bakhtin (1981); Bauman and Briggs (1990); Duranti and Goodwin (1992); and Wortham and Reyes (2021).

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(Reyes 2017a)—can be reproduced to a seemingly infinite degree, creating contrasting categories of being and speaking that reactivate the relevance of colonial categories in contemporary forms.

Postcolonial Elites Now that some key elements of a postcolonial semiotics have been outlined, this chapter considers in more detail a particular realm within it: elite formations. By the 1970s, anthropology was increasingly widening its gaze to “study up” (Nader 1972, p. 289), that is, to “study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty,” such that even “First World elite identity” (Silverstein 2004, p. 649) could be an object of analysis. The term “elite” has been enjoying robust circulation across the globe in recent years. It is often accompanied by modifiers, such as “liberal elite,” “ruling elite,” and “global elite,” situating elite figures as politically powerful and progressive, as coastal and cosmopolitan, and as associated with aspects of refined culture: from fine wines (Silverstein 2004) to luxury travel (Thurlow and Jaworski 2006), to upscale residential complexes (Searle 2013), and prestige registers of dominant (Agha 2007; Zhang 2017) and indigenous (Durston and Mannheim 2018) languages. Eliteness can be highly gendered, such as when girlhood frames elite figurations of “Kong girls” in Hong Kong (Kang and Chen 2014), “schoolgirls” in Japan (Inoue 2006), and “white girls” in the US (Slobe 2018). As a popular lay term, “elite” requires a careful theorization as an analytical concept. In the introduction to The Anthropology of Elites, Tijo Salverda and Jon Abbink (2013, p. 1) conceptualize elites as “a relatively small group within the societal hierarchy that claims and/or is accorded power, prestige, or command over others on the basis of a number of publicly recognized criteria, and aims to preserve and entrench its status thus acquired.” In Max Weber’s (1947) perspective, eliteness is not a stable “class” position determined by economic capital, but a socially constituted “status” position that requires distinction for its existence (Bourdieu 1984). Elaborating on a Weberian class conception, Niko Besnier (2009, p. 216) emphasizes that rather than focus on “the relationship between groups occupying different positions vis-à-vis capital and labor, Weber understood class as the product of people acting in a similar fashion in given social situations, for example, having similar aspirations, making similar decisions, and harboring similar affects.” Thus, economic capital is not a necessary criterion for some person or group to be regarded as elite. There are other forms of capital and social practice, including language, that can form the basis of elite identification (Bourdieu 1991). Building on this scholarship, “postcolonial elites” can be understood as a construct informed by conceptions of “colonial elites” under imperial rule. Colonial governments often created exclusive educational opportunities for local elites to be educated in European modes of knowledge and language (Quijano 2007). These opportunities helped solidify divisions within the colonized, producing what has been referred to as “internal colonialism” (Mignolo 2001) or “internal empire” (Kramer 2006), where local elites maintained power by accepting the terms of modernization offered by colonial regimes, as was the case in many parts of South America and the Caribbean. Conversely, elites could use the tools of empire to lead movements of reform or revolt against it, as was the case with the Philippine ilustrado (‘enlightened ones’) in the late nineteenth century (Rafael 2000). For these reasons, colonial elites are regarded with deep ambivalence and suspicion: as self-interested collaborators benefiting from colonial governance

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or as revolutionary heroes rising up against colonial power. Postcolonial elites are often viewed as the ongoing beneficiaries of this colonial order, as ambiguous extension and residue of imperial regimes. As such, they are commonly regarded as inauthentic, hybrid, and unrestrained, forming postcolonial modes of being and speaking that can be admired as much as reviled, avoided as much as anxiously aspired to (Besnier 2011; Park 2009), particularly from a striving middle class positionality (Banda 2020; Besnier 2009; Hall 2019; Reyes 2017a). The concept of postcolonial elites is thus less a material fact of class, and more a differentiated status position that forms and circulates as an object of discourse, as a category that social persons can evaluate and be interpellated into. In the next three sections, I provide examples from linguistic anthropological scholarship that illuminate how a postcolonial semiotics produces elites as “fake,” “mix,” and “excess,” that is, as desirable yet disloyal cosmopolitan figures set in contrast to figurations of the immobile, rural, and poor in the postcolony.

Fake The concept of “fake” is often set in contrast to notions of “authenticity” (Bucholtz 2003), and in proximity to notions of “mimicry” (Taussig 1993), “imitation” (Lempert 2014), and “copy” (Inoue 2006). When something is read as mimetic practice, discerning between original and copy relies on a differential that is “felt to exist” (Lempert 2014, p. 381). “Feeling” a fake, I suggest, often involves rendering something as that which aspires through double voicing (Bakhtin 1981). That is, the fake is construed as attempting to approximate a voice that does not match its own (Lo and Choi 2017). Whereas the real is often seen as being itself, the fake is often seen as failing to resemble (i.e., stand in iconic relation to) what it aspires to be. In this section, I draw on ethnographic examples that illustrate how the quality of “fake” is experienced when attached to three postcolonial elite types: “nose brigade” in Zimbabwe, “burger” in Pakistan, and “D4” in Ireland. Viewing postcolonial elites as fake positions them as too tainted by the metropole to represent or act in the interests of the “real” postcolonial population. Muzi Mlambo (2009) discusses a postcolonial elite type defined by its inauthenticity: “nose brigade,” a derogatory term for black Zimbabweans accused of emulating a Western nasal quality when speaking English. Members of the nose brigade are evaluated as “unzimbabwean” and “westernized” (Neate 1994, p. 69), “affected” and “misguided … because they are perceived to be uninterested in their African culture” (Mlambo 2009, p. 22). As a type of speech, nose brigade is recognized as a prestige register of English “spoken by pupils and students who live in English acquisition-rich residential areas” and do not “want to have social interaction with people from English acquisition-poor environments, who speak what is referred to as rural English” (Mlambo 2009, p. 22). These “rural English” speakers are called SRBs (strong rural background) by the nose brigade, just as SRBs are credited with coining the term nose brigade. Thus the rural/urban axis is mutually configured on the basis of personhood (SRB/nose brigade) and language (rural English/nose brigade variety), as is the external/internal axis through the construct of “overseas,” which forms a central aspiration of those labeled nose brigade (Neate 1994). Moreover, Rob Pattman (1999) finds that men from rural and working-class backgrounds derisively label female intellectuals “nose, nose,” “modern,” and “trying to emulate whites” as a reflection of their own projected anxieties about cultural loss in the aftermath of the Rhodesian settler state. Nose brigade elites are thus framed as “the whites they have replaced” (Bennell and Ncube 1994, p. 601), defined by their orientation to the Global North and thus positioned as thwarting decolonizing efforts of “real” Zimbabweans.

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In her study of Pakistani-origin youth formations, Mariam Durrani (2016) examines a postcolonial elite type also evaluated as fake: “burger,” named after the introduction of American fast food culture to Karachi and the kinds of people who favor expensive foreign hamburgers over cheap local cuisine. Burger circulates as a cosmopolitan, upper class figure that represents a double exteriority: “urban” in the urban/rural axis, and “American” in the American/Pakistani axis. A major emblem of burgers is linguistic: being fluent in English and incompetent in Punjabi. Durrani analyzes how burgers are ridiculed and mocked for being “detached” from Pakistan: “so modernized and influenced by Western cultural practices that they are out of touch with the experience of everyday Pakistanis” (Durrani 2016, p. 108). Not only do burgers betray their country, they also betray their gender: male burgers are viewed as “girly-boy” types and female burgers are viewed as “not very girl-like.” Yet burgers also accrue value and serve as targets of aspiration, given that they are tied to economic mobility. Durrani argues that burger points to “postcolonial anxiety where youth who seek to become more urbanized, English-speaking cosmopolitans” must contend with how to be modern, “grappling with their own mobility trajectories that take them physically and ideologically between rural and urban imaginaries” (Durrani 2016, p. 113). Finally, Robert Moore (2011) discusses another fake figuration of the postcolonial elite: “D4,” a fashionable Irish English accent associated with affluent youth, named for the postal code of an upper class residential area of Dublin. D4 speakers are characterized as sophisticated, urbane, international, and “pretending to be something they aren’t” (Moore 2011, p. 42) by, for example, imitating accents linked to British, American, and Australian Englishes. Moore examines the dual avoidance of D4 as an accent that avoids “pronunciations seen as emblematic either of working-class Dublin identity or of rural Irish provincialism. And now, ‘D4’ itself has become an accent to avoid” (Moore 2011, p. 41), in fact, an accent that no one claims as their own. Questions of fake are central to D4: the register is viewed as artificial, as not spoken by “real” rural or working-class Irish people, and as associated with an Anglophone exteriority linked to colonialism where “[t]he English language, then, becomes a site for the expression of a particular kind of split subjectivity in Ireland, a society where the primary linguistic emblem of national belonging is still Irish (Gaelic), and English is generally regarded, when it is regarded at all, as a tool of convenience as well as colonialism” (Moore 2011, p. 49). Moreover, as D4 emerged in the context of an economic boom and influx of migrants, D4 speakers are not viewed as “the immigrants who ‘refuse to integrate,’ but their mirror image: they are the ‘native Irish’ who actively dissociate themselves from their congeners, co-nationals, and kin—people whose very existence is the symptom of an Irish society dis-integrating from within” (Moore 2011, p. 59).

Mix In addition to “fake,” postcolonial elites are often evaluated as “mixed.” The notion of “mix” I draw on here is informed by theorizations of “hybridity” of both person and linguistic types.2 Hybridity has been a concept of sustained interest, from eighteenth century natural sciences on plant and animal crossbreeding, to nineteenth century racial theories on “mongrelizaton” and linguistic theories on contact languages as “creoles,” to twentieth-century humanities scholarship on the colonial anxiety surrounding cultural forms. For Homi Bhabha (1994), hybridity frames the ambivalences of imperial rule as 2

  Chun (2017); Heller and McElhinny (2017); Reyes (2020a); and Young (1995).

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enacted by colonized subjects, who relocate the signs of colonial authority through mimicry. Language is a central sign of this relocation, in that colonial contact is also linguistic contact, leading to syncretic practices that appear to be outside the prescribed official languages authorized by the state. In this section, I discuss studies that explore how the quality of “mix” is experienced when attributed to three postcolonial elite types: “conyo” in the Philippines, “fresa” in Mexico, and “Engsh” in Kenya. Viewing postcolonial elites as racially and linguistically mixed positions them as containing both the colonizer and colonized, as enviably “doubled” (Rafael 2000) or indecently “contaminated” (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016). As “mixed” qualities form desirable status emblems, they can maintain the value of body and speech types linked to colonial empires. Reyes (2017a) examines a postcolonial elite figure and register framed as mixed: “conyo” in the Philippines. Conyo—often recognized as deriving from the Spanish word coño (a term for genitalia that is also a popular curse word)—“is regarded as a contemporary iteration of the Taglish-speaking Philippine mestizo [mixed race] elite, one that enjoys the usual advantages of wealth, but one that is also youthful, consumerist, and vapid” (Reyes 2017a, p. 213). Commentary about conyo is driven by private-school educated youth, who are accused of being and speaking conyo themselves. But these youth rarely claim conyo as their own, similar to D4 as an avoidance register. Conyo emblems still emerge as desirable targets of aspiration, spawning many imitators, such as “paconyos” (wannabe conyos), and set in contrast to the supposedly tacky sensibilities of the lower classes: urban “jolog” and rural “promdi” (‘from the provinces’) (Reyes 2017b). Conyo are viewed as thoroughly mixed in body and speech, as well as loyalty. They are regarded as light-skinned due to a history of racial mixing, and Taglish-speaking due to a history of linguistic mixing, emerging as figures to admire but also condemn for being indelibly tainted by empire. Their “mixed” speech, in particular, is an object of ridicule, encapsulated by the widely circulating example of reported speech: “Let’s make tusok tusok the fishballs” (‘Let’s get fishballs’ [lit: ‘Let’s make skewer skewer the fishballs’]). Mixed qualities also frame the Mexican elite type of “fresa”: “a Mexican Spanish slang term for a young person from the urban, middle-class, predominantly European-descent elite” (Mendoza-Denton 2008, p. 11), who is associated with aspirational lifestyles that “pseudo-fresas” (like paconyos) come to envy, such as “attending private schooling institutions, driving expensive cars, wearing expensive clothing, owning vacation homes, extensive international travel, being fluent in English and other languages, etc.” (Chaparro 2016, p. 52). In her study of Latina youth gangs in California, Norma Mendoza-Denton (2008, p. 21) examines how “cosmopolitan” fresas emerge in a contrast with rural, working-class “piporras,” a distinction which “reproduced urban/rural and white/indigenous/black divisions prevalent in postcolonial Latin America.” Fresa also emerges in a similar contrast with “naco,” such that “fresas phenotypically are depicted as light-skin and European descendant, while nacos are darker skinned, closer to indigenous phenotypes” (Chaparro 2016, p. 16). In her study of fresa and naco metadiscourses in Mexico, Sofía Chaparro (2016) finds that fresas are seen not only as racially mixed but also linguistically mixed, using English phrases and American English pronunciations that signal a preference for the foreign. As with conyos, fresas are often ridiculed through reported speech that is taken as a mixture of registers. For example, Chaparro (2016) analyzes song lyrics that typify the “mixed” speech of fresas as preferring English “ice cream” to Spanish “helado”: “Entonces un ice cream de perdida no?” (‘Then an ice cream at least, ok?’) Finally, “Engsh” in Kenya illustrates another case of how mixed qualities get attached to elite types. Considered a “hybrid code” (Kaviti 2015) of English and Kiswahili, Engsh is purportedly spoken by the sophisticated and fashionable children of the Kenyan elite residing

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in the wealthy, racially mixed Westlands area of Nairobi. Among the middle and upper classes, there is a shift from Kiswahili and mother tongues to English, particularly American English as a prestige, aspirational variety given the influence of American popular culture and media. Engsh emerges in contrast to “Sheng,” the more popular Kiswahili-dominant register spoken by the lower-class youth masses (Makoni et al. 2017). That Engsh and Sheng constitute an axis of differentiation characterized by mutual hostility “is a manifestation of class struggle among the youth that also represents, at the national level, the social stratification and consequently perpetual class distinctions in Kenyan society” (Abdulaziz and Osinde 1997, p. 54). Like conyo, Engsh is tied to the university setting yet also perceived as “vulgar” and an “adulteration of the purity of Kiswahili” (Mukhwana 2015, p. 97). Not only is Engsh regarded as “mixed,” it is also regarded as containing unnecessary linguistic features that are “excessive,” the subject of the next section. For example, Engsh is noted for its double pronouns and double plurals: providing two pronominal forms when one would suffice (e.g., “On that day, me I was kamata-ing” [‘On that day, I was drinking’]); and adding plural suffix—z to nouns that are already plural (e.g., Kiswahili plural “wadosi” [‘rich people’ and Engsh plural “wadosiz”) (Barasa and Mous 2017, p. 60).

Excess In addition to “fake” and “mix,” postcolonial elites are often linked to modern “excess” from the perspective of an anxious, moral, middle-class position. “Modern” characterizes an image of the colonizing European world in relation to how colonized “nonmodern” worlds are viewed from the supposed centers of modernity (Chakrabarty 1992). To understand one’s relationship to modernity is to be aware of this purported provenance and gaze and to anxiously aspire to the modern through personal and social transformation. Anxieties about modernity can constitute a middle-class nationalist morality that monitors excess and appropriate consumption (Besnier 2009), what Laura Nelson (2000, p. 107) calls “consumer nationalism”: “a moral practice of cultural preservation from the corruption of luxury and modernization.” Here, ideas about excess are intimately linked to the nation and its internal social divisions, that is, to anxieties about who is and who is not appropriately modern. Thus, signs of excess can index not only elite arrogance but also fundamental moral shortcomings that require restraint to be “suitably modern” (Liechty 2003). In this section, I draw on work that exemplifies how the quality of “excess” is experienced in the construction of three postcolonial elite types: “Peter” in India, “Model C” in South Africa, and “limeños” in Peru. Viewing postcolonial elites as excessive positions them as participating too enthusiastically in colonial models of behavior that are seen as overly modern and a national betrayal. In his study of Tamil youth style in South India, Constantine Nakassis (2016) discusses an elite personification of excess: the “Peter” figure. The Christian name “Peter” is used for a snobbish, arrogant show-off, who “unabashedly attempts to inhabit the space of cosmopolitan globalism through his or her use of English” (Nakassis 2016, p. 109). College students are anxious about English: not only about speaking it poorly, but also about speaking it too well. Given the mapping of “linguistic difference (English vs. Tamil) onto regional and class difference (cosmopolitan Chennai vs. backwater Madurai)” (Nakassis 2016, p. 109), an excessive quantity of or ability in English can highlight social divisions that threaten the egalitarian ideals of the university. Nakassis (2016, p. 111) notes that this English excess is not about an absolute quantity but “about the differential relationship that such affected speech diagrams between a speaker and his or her interlocutors.” Thus, a Peter’s excessive

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use of English can be perceived as denigrating the lower classes who are linked to less English fluency. But it is not just English excess. Several elements of the Peter’s style go “too far” (Nakassis 2016, p. 110), including an excessive desire for the foreign, flashy brands, and hair that is too long or too short. To avoid being called a Peter, one has to try to carve out a middle position between extreme poles: between the local nonmodern and the global cosmopolitan, between too little and too much. Another figuration of excess is found in “Model C” in South Africa. Model C was a classification for white semi-private, state-supported schools in the early 1990s. Although the post-apartheid government abolished this classification, the term is still used for these now ex-Model C schools, which have increasingly admitted black students, primarily from the elite and upwardly mobile middle class (Mesthrie 2017). Black South Africans who orient to linguistic and other social practices associated with these previously all-white, Englishmedium schools are called “Model C” (Collins 2017). The black ex-Model C student is marked by excesses in terms of both race and language: too much whiteness (Wale 2010) and too much English (Rudwick 2008). Moreover, their speech is framed in terms of elite consumption, with one participant calling it “Louis Vuitton English” (McKinney 2013, p. 23). Rajend Mesthrie (2017, pp. 318–319) also notes how media commentary attributes “soft” and “rough” qualities to an elite/masses linguistic distinction: “soft cadences of a private school education” in contrast to the “rough tones of a working class.” Since English is linked with social and economic mobility, as well as unity and liberation due to its role in the anti-apartheid movement, South Africans, including black youth labeled Model C, feel pressure not only to know English, but a prestigious variety of it. The linguistic and material excesses attributed to Model C symbolize “an upwardly mobile elite who invest in the present status hierarchy of South African society” (Mesthrie 2017, p. 342) and therefore “provide a clear example of how deep historical inequalities persist well past the formal end of colonialism” (Christie and McKinney 2016, p. 2). Finally, Diego Arispe-Bazán (2021) discusses how excess relates to the construction of upwardly mobile “limeños”: native residents of Lima, Peru. As opposed to excessive qualities being attributed to limeños, limeños attribute excessive qualities to Spanish migrants in Peru. Spaniards are regarded as speaking at an “excessive” volume and with an “excessive” amount of expletives, qualities set in contrast to the supposedly moderate and respectable manner of middle class limeños. Excess is attributed not only to language, but also to personhood, as Peruvian returnees regarded as performing excessive Spanish features are also regarded as performing excessive Spanishness. As limeños repurpose colonial forms of respectability, Arispe-Bazán (2021, p. 5) notes that “language ideologies around middle classness both sustain and obfuscate colonialism’s longue durée.” Although limeños frame Spanish migration to Peru in colonial terms of “re-conquest,” “it became clear that, to middle class limeños, discourses around rejecting the Spanish migrants served to bolster their bids for upward mobility, rather than contend seriously with the contemporary legacies of colonization” (Arispe-Bazán (2021, p. 2)).

Conclusions If “languages could be powerful naturalizing instruments for colonial power” (Errington 2001, p. 34), what of semiotics for the postcolonial? Postcolonial semiotics describes how everyday people create and circulate signs that presuppose colonialism’s ongoing relevance in the production of value. This chapter has focused on a narrow realm within postcolonial semiotics: evaluations of the supposedly fake, mixed, and excessive qualities that form

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emblems of postcolonial elite types that are anchored in time and space. Linguistic anthropological scholarship illuminated how extensions of colonial-era systems of inequality do not require colonizers or collaborating colonial elites, but the semiotic constitution of differentiated categories of postcolonial elite figures and registers in fractally recursive forms. Colonial hierarchies persist through the continuous production of divisible interior alterities that create nested categories of the formerly colonized, producing elite types that are both denigrated and admired for their supposed approximation to imperial modes of being and speaking. The study of postcolonial semiotics has several theoretical, methodological, and thematic implications for future research. First, by framing the question of the postcolonial as a reflexively constituted ethnographic category, research on postcolonial semiotics advances a theoretical orientation that does not take history or materiality as transparent truths in the world. Instead, a postcolonial reality is constituted by participants who create, use, and organize sign relations as colonial. Since the role of the linguistic anthropologist is to trace these sign processes, work on postcolonial semiotics has methodological implications as well. Ethnographic research is required to trace the social and discursive practices that bring into continual being colonialism’s contemporary presence. Linguistic anthropology offers a methodological orientation for this work, given its sophisticated tools for semiotic analysis. These tools do not limit analyses to the denotational and symbolic realms of language, but instead trace sign processes through which qualities, emblems, and registers are produced in the formation of models of personhood and the world. Finally, this chapter focused on only a narrow set of themes: postcolonial elite formations, and the fake, mix, and excessive qualities attributed to them. By no means is this limited realm meant to constitute the entire potential of what research on postcolonial semiotics can reveal. What of the semiotics of postcolonial non-elite forms? What of the semiotics of postcolonial social movements? What of the semiotics that deny rather than confirm colonialism’s ongoing relevance? More research that investigates additional facets of postcolonial semiotics within or outside of elite formations is needed in order to provide a fuller sense of how the postcolonial is experienced and entangled in value production.

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7

Deaf Communities: Constellations, Entanglements, and Defying Classifications

Erin Moriarty and Lynn Hou

Introduction In this chapter, we interrogate some fundamental concepts that have been and are used to discuss deaf people and sign languages, which are minoritized languages that use visual and tactile modalities (Kusters et al. 2020). Language can be expressed and perceived through different modalities, or transmission channels. Signed languages are produced by the hands and bodies and perceived through vision and touch, whereas spoken languages are mainly produced by the vocal tract and perceived through hearing. We begin with an overview of the ways in which deaf people have been talked and written about (see below for a definition of the distinction between deaf and Deaf), and then we describe the ways that deaf people and their languaging practices, a term that situates language as a social activity, have been categorized in ways that have obscured the complexities of their multimodal and multisemiotic languaging practices. Much of what we are referring to as deaf languaging practices are various modalities (such as gestures, pointing, and signing) and contexts (such as within the family, household, or village) broken down into classifications along a developmental cline that ranges from gestures at one end of the cline to a national/urban sign language at the other (see Kusters et al. 2020, p. 12). We offer some examples from our own work in linguistic ethnography to show the ways in which concepts that have been used in Deaf Studies and sign language linguistics, are enmeshed in specific historical contexts and disciplinary traditions. Linguistic ethnography emerged in the UK in response to the lack of institutionalization of linguistic anthropology in British anthropology (Rampton 2007). As indicated by the name, linguistic ethnography combines the methods of ethnography and linguistics to investigate language use in

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

everyday contexts, similar to what linguistic anthropology does (Ahearn 2021). Concepts typically used in Deaf and sign language studies have led to the development of theories that do not necessarily and fully represent deaf people’s everyday lived experiences with communicative practices. Language is situated in social action: it is multimodal and interdependent in the sense that the user and the listener cannot be separated from their semiotic environment (Ahearn 2021; Goodwin 2004). Researchers using the approach of linguistic ethnography have been able to describe deaf languaging practices and the contexts where they take place in ways that better resonate with deaf people than other approaches (Hou and Kusters 2020; Kusters et al. 2020). Deaf Studies is the study of deaf people’s ontologies (experiences) and epistemologies (knowledges), communities, networks, ways of connecting, and communicative practices (Kusters et al. 2017). Yet the current scholarship in Deaf Studies is largely whitecentered, US- and Eurocentric. Building on Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook’s call for the historicization of languages and “rethinking the ways we look at languages and their relation to identity and geographical location” (2007, p. 3), we suggest that we critically rethink how deaf communities and sign languages have been theorized and categorized in a global context. Deaf Studies as an academic field emerged in the US in the 1980s, after the recognition of American Sign Language (ASL) in the field of linguistics in the 1960s, which led to deaf people “talking culture,” meaning that deaf people began to think of themselves as having a distinct culture based on their use of sign language, moving away from pathological understandings of deafness (Humphries 2008; Murray 2017). “Talking culture” led to the widespread use of concepts such as a Deaf community (Padden and Humphries 1988) and a Deaf culture (Padden 1980) to talk about deaf people as a group, both in academic and popular discourses. These concepts were foundational in the emergence of Deaf Studies as a field but have recently been contested for being too narrow in their scope, as they presume an encompassing totality and a universality of the deaf experience worldwide (Kusters et al. 2017). In popular and academic discourses, people often refer to a singular Deaf community, despite the existence of multiple sign languages and deaf people in diverse geographical locations in the world (LeMaster and Monaghan, 2004; Hou and de Vos, 2021). Since then, concepts and labels used to describe deaf people and their languaging practices have varied, based on socio-political context and trends (De Meulder, 2016). An example of this is the d/D distinction, originally suggested by a White hearing linguist from the US, James Woodward (1975). In this understanding, “deaf” is used to mean deaf people who do not sign and hews to a medicalized understanding of deafness, as opposed to Deaf, which is used to describe people who take pride in being sign language users and identify as members of a cultural group (Kusters et al. 2017). We choose to employ “deaf” rather than “d/Deaf” or “Deaf” to minimize the risk of making essentialist and blanket assumptions about the diverse identities and experiences of deaf people everywhere (Kusters et al. 2017), although we capitalize “Deaf” in reference to theoretical concepts and in citation practices of other scholars’ work. In the following sections, we historicize Deaf Studies and sign language linguistics, then discuss sign language ideologies, both academic and vernacular, and discuss how they have influenced the research agenda, especially in terms of categories and typologies for various signing practices and the contexts where they take place. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the usefulness of ethnographic approaches to deaf people and their languaging practices.

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Historicizing Deaf Studies and Sign Language Linguistics In 1959, the US National Science Foundation funded incipient linguistic research at Gallaudet University (then Gallaudet College) on ASL (Cokely and Baker 1980). At that time, deaf people called ASL “the sign language” or “the natural language of signs” or even “signing,” terms that have been around since the beginning of the twentieth century, if not earlier.1 The first modern linguistic study of ASL was published in 1960 and then an ASL dictionary was published in 1965 (McBurney 2012). These publications inspired a new line of research, sign language linguistics, in the 1970s (Cokely and Baker 1980). Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, hearing researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, established one of the two research groups that founded the field (Newport and Supulla 2000), where they trained most, if not all, of the subsequent sign language researchers in the US until the early 1990s. For several years, most of the publications on sign language linguistics originated from the Salk Institute (McBurney 2012; Newport and Supalla 2000), tending to focus on what a sign language researcher called “the big questions” regarding the nature of languages and their relationships with cognitive and neural mechanisms (Newport and Supalla 2000). As sign language linguistics research continued to expand in the 1980s, Deaf Studies became an established academic field. Scholars working in Deaf Studies tend to highlight the ways that deaf people are unified by their deafness, calling it “global Deafhood” (Ladd 2015) or “DEAF-SAME,” a form of deaf similitude based on a deeply felt belief that deaf people around the world are connected by their experiential ways of being in the world (Kusters and Friedner 2015, p. x). Even as the notion of being Deaf as a cultural identification resonated with many deaf people, it failed to account for the lived experiences of deaf people and their entanglements with other groups and people. Deaf people live in various forms of social structures, engage in different socialites, and are often living in contexts of language contact and multilingualism. Deaf people often engage in multilingual and multimodal communicative practices, which can include resources from named sign languages, spoken languages, gestures, pointing, and so forth.2 As such, a conceptual inventory that attempts to neatly classify deaf people, their ways of life, and languaging practices does not necessarily encapsulate the full spectrum of deaf experiences as deaf people are much more diverse than most classifications have been able to account for (Hou and de Vos 2021); however, inventories can serve as a starting point to understand the differences between groups of deaf people.

Language Ideologies and Sign Languages Essentially, language ideologies are thoughts and beliefs about language varieties, modalities, and the people who use them. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to cover the rich literature available on language ideologies.3 Language ideologies naturalize particular social groupings that include or exclude people based on their languaging practices, depending on whether they accord to the dominant group’s norms and expectations (Kusters et al.

1

  Murray (2017); Padden and Humphries (1988); and Supalla and Clark (2014).   Byun et al. (2017); Fenlon and Wilkinson (2015); Kusters et al. (2017); Hodge et al. (2019), and Moriarty and Kusters (2021). 3   See Woolard and Schieffelin (1994); Schieffelin et al. (1998); Irvine and Gal (2000); Kroskrity (2000); and Kusters et al. (2020). 2

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124  erin moriarty and lynn hou

2020). A key domain where sign language ideologies emerge is naming conventions for sign languages (Kusters et al. 2020). An example of an academic ideology that resulted in the erasure of the various deaf social formations that can be present in a particular geographical area would be the practice of assigning nomenclatures to sign languages. Nick Palfreyman (2015, pp. 27–28) observed that many nomenclatures for present-day sign languages are intertwined with the concept of nation-states. The territorial boundaries for sign languages tend to correspond with the boundaries of nation-states such as Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Japanese Sign Language (JSL). In a few cases, sign language nomenclatures correspond with the boundaries of spoken language territorialization, such as Quebec Sign Language (LSQ) and Flemish Sign Language (VGT). The transmission and vitality of such national sign languages have been traditionally associated with residential schools for the deaf, deaf clubs, and/or deaf organizations since most deaf children are born to hearing families with no knowledge and experience of a sign language. Those children attended residential schools for the deaf and congregated in social spaces, although this has been becoming more of an exception in the recent several decades (Padden and Humphries 2005; Singleton and Meier 2021). In many parts of the world, sign languages do not necessarily come into being as a result of gradual change of a prior language over a long period of time, as is the case for most spoken languages. Sign languages can emerge very quickly, within one or two generations; the flip side of this is that they can be particularly vulnerable to language contact with another sign language (Nonaka 2014) or destruction during war and genocide because of their particular sociolinguistic profiles (i.e., often very localized and/or linked to specific institutions like deaf schools) (Moriarty 2020). In other, more extreme cases, such as in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where social upheaval, mass displacement and executions, and destruction occurred, certain ideologies advanced as the United Nations and non-governmental organizations assumed control of the country (Moriarty 2020). As there was not widely available documentation of the presence of deaf education, a Cambodian deaf community (in itself an ideological construct), or a national sign language, the people and organizations that entered post-war Cambodia believed that the schools and programs they established represented the first time that deaf people had come together to form a community and create a national sign language (Moriarty 2020). These ideologies centered on questions of what should be defined as the national sign language, and not necessarily on sign language(s) as used in everyday practice by deaf people themselves. It is important to note these categories, especially in the case of deaf people, because deaf people who do not use what is considered “conventional” languaging practices are often labeled as “languageless” or as having no language (Moriarty 2020; Moriarty Harrelson 2017). In this section, we outlined the emergence of linguistics studies of sign languages and Deaf Studies, and the conceptual tools that have been used to discuss deaf people’s lived experiences and social formations. In the next section, we discuss a typology of sign languages and signing communities as developed by scholars working in sign language linguistics.

Diversity of Sign Languages and Signing Communities

Deaf and signing communities have long been characterized by their signing practices. Deaf people constitute a minority who cannot fully access spoken language and thus cannot take communication for granted, and have used their hands and bodies for communicating with one another and with other people. Here we use the term signing practices as an

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all-encompassing descriptor for languaging that occurs in any and all forms of communication between deaf and DeafBlind people with their deaf, DeafBlind, and hearing interactants.4 The practices can and do include translanguaging and calibration, the process by which deaf people use a variety of semiotic resources such as conventional gestures, drawing pictures, and interacting with objects to communicate with people.5 In this section, we provide a few types of signing practices that are largely based in the US. Signing practices are known by many names. In contemporary scholarship, a signing practice may be classified as sign language, gesture, or homesign / home sign system. Home sign is an individual and idiosyncratic languaging practice that emerges in contexts where a deaf person or a few deaf people do not have access to a conventionalized sign language (Brentari and Coppola 2012). Other scholars have opted to not to use “homesign” but instead use other labels such as family sign, natural sign or local sign (see Table 7.1 later in the chapter). The terminological choice is contingent on a scholar’s theoretical views, research methods, and analysis of deaf people’s signing practices. Some scholars may classify the practice by characterizing demographic elements of the signing community such as national, urban, macro-community, rural, village, indigenous, and micro-community. They may also classify the practice to indicate its age or time depth like emerging, new, young, first / second generation, conventional, mature, established, or institutionalized. There was a time when many linguists viewed signing practices as “gesture languages” and manual derivatives of spoken languages (Bloomfield 1933, pp. 39, 144). In the 1960s and 1970s, this view gradually shifted with the authentication of sign languages e.g., “American Sign Language”, as full-fledged, bona fide languages with their own grammars (McBurney 2012). The paradigm shift led to the establishment of sign linguistics as an academic discipline in its own right, transforming how scholars think about sign languages. Before the recognition and naming of sign languages, educators for the deaf from eighteenth century and nineteenth century Europe distinguished different forms of signing. “Natural signs” or “colloquial signs” referred to deaf people’s signs as used in spontaneous interactions that occurred in social spaces, whereas “methodical signs” referred to modified signs for teaching deaf children the grammar of a spoken language in educational contexts such as residential schools for the deaf (Stokoe 2005). The colloquial signs also referred to the sign language that we now know as ASL (Padden and Humphries 2005). It was this variety of signing that caught the attention of William C. Stokoe, a professor who was hired to teach English at Gallaudet College. He observed how deaf people’s signing practices were not drawing pictures in the air with their hands, but symbols organized by a combination of discrete elements that by themselves were meaningless, thereby establishing an analogy with spoken languages where meaningful elements like words are a combination of meaningless individual sounds or phonemes from a finite set (e.g., the English sounds /k/, /a/, and /r/ make up the meaningful word car, and changing one phoneme with another phoneme can lead to another word such as changing /r/ to /t/ leads to the word cat). This is what André Martinet called “double articulation” and Charles F. Hockett “duality of patterning.” The observation of phonological structure led Stokoe to develop a structuralist linguistic analysis of ASL and publish it in a monograph entitled Sign Language Structure (Stokoe 1960, 2005). Subsequently, Stokoe collaborated with two deaf colleagues, Carl Croneberg and Dorothy Casterline, to publish A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, or 4

  Edwards (2012); Green (2014); Kusters (2017); Kusters and Sahasrabudhe (2018).

5

  de Meulder et al. (2019); Kusters and Hou (2020); Kusters et al. (2017); Moriarty Harrelson (2017); and Safar (2017); Moriarty and Kusters (2021).

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DASL for short (Stokoe et al. 1965). This dictionary stood out from earlier dictionaries because it was organized by analytic categories like handshapes, types of movement, and relative location, rather than by English glosses or pictures. While Stokoe is credited for publishing the first modern linguistic analysis and dictionary of a sign language, almost a decade earlier, Bernard Tervoort had published a linguistic analysis of signing practices by deaf children in the Netherlands who had created their own signs on the school playground (Tervoort 1961). The school used oralism, an exclusive method of speaking and listening, for educating the children, while forbidding the use of signs. The children’s signing practices were considered home signs or new school signs and thus not representative of NGT (Nederlandse Gebarentaal—one of the dominant sign languages used in the Netherlands); for this reason, Tervoot’s work is not held in the same regard as Stokoe’s. The publication of the DASL sealed the nomenclature of ASL as we know it today. The data collected for the DASL focused on one variety of ASL that was understood to refer to the body of “colloquial signs” used among a particular group of deaf people who were considered the “grassroots” deaf in the US Deaf community (Padden and Humphries 2005). The term “grassroots” has been strongly associated with working-class deaf people who graduated from residential schools for the deaf but never attended college, frequented Deaf clubs, and held blue-collar jobs—and they signed “ASL.” By contrast, the “elite” deaf attended college, belonged to national or international organizations, and held middle-class professions (Stokoe et al. 1976). They modified their signing to resemble certain grammatical properties of the structure of the English language more closely such as incorporating more fingerspelling and following its subject-verb-object order. Such modifications have been identified as contact signing, the practice in which deaf signers use linguistic features of both ASL and English (Lucas and Valli 1992). Another example of an understudied category of signing practices is Black ASL, which emerged from the racial segregation of residential schools for the deaf and departments in the US South (McCaskill et al. 2011). In the 1960s, when Carl Croneberg was conducting research for DASL, he interviewed a young Black deaf woman and white deaf people from the same city in North Carolina and noted “a radical dialect difference between the signs” of the Black signer and those of the white signers (Croneberg 1965, p. 315). This observation was documented in Appendix D of the DASL and was subsequently picked up by other researchers who published qualitative analyses, but a systematic, large-scale investigation of the sociohistorical contexts and linguistic variation of Black ASL was not carried out until the late 1990s and early 2000s when a team of linguists launched the Black ASL project (Hill 2017; McCaskill et al. 2011). Since the last residential school was desegregated in 1978, Black ASL has been primarily transmitted in multi-generational Black deaf families and has recently become more visible through social media (Waller 2021). There are also variations in signing styles in ASL associated with gender and/or sexuality identities (Blau 2017; Moges 2020). Some deaf signers construct their signing styles to signal their membership in different communities of practice, and their styles challenge signing styles associated with heteronormative and cisgender categories. Rezenet Moges (2020) conducted an ethnographic study of how Deaf female-bodied masculine lesbians produce a distinct ASL signing style by signing “bigger,” producing sneering facial expressions, and positioning their bodies to occupy more space. Moges argues that this signing style constitutes “queering” ASL because it challenges heteronormative gender norms; it also demonstrates the role of embodiment in signing, which cannot be separated from the bodies of the signers. Tactile sign languages, the form of signing used by deafblind (or DeafBlind) people, have been recently garnering more academic attention (Willoughby et al. 2018). DeafBlind people in the United States have begun to work with linguistic anthropologists like Terra Edwards (2015, 2017) to document Protactile, which is distinct from what they call visual

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sign language. Protactile emerged from the everyday communicative practices of DeafBlind people and according to Clark and Nuccio (2020): One of the most fundamental things that distinguishes Protactile from ASL is that Protactile is rooted in “contact space.” ASL, on the other hand, makes use of air space, or the visual space on and around a signer’s body. ASL uses air space, which to us, just feels like hands moving around in empty space. There is nothing to ground it. By contrast, everything in Protactile is anchored in contact space. Contact space consists of areas of the body that we frequently call into use to make our messages with. When I express my thoughts and feelings in contact space they can be felt through the parameters of protactile language. We feel language. This is a profound difference.

Researchers working with DeafBlind people approach the research in different ways: first, there has been in-depth ethnographic work on DeafBlind languaging norms, and this is based on observation/documentation of everyday DeafBlind languaging (Edwards 2015). Other approaches include the elicitation of protactile language by providing objects to DeafBlind participants to touch, feel, and then describe to a conversation partner, revealing intuitively generated patterns and conventions (Clark and Nuccio 2020). Elsewhere, researchers have used a modified version of Conversation Analysis to study different tactile sign languages (see Willoughby et al. 2018 for a review). This section has discussed variations of deaf people’s languaging practices in the United States and the ways they have been described by their users, as well as researchers. We now turn to the documentation of sign languages outside of the United States and the labeling of these sign languages, or, rather, signing practices and communities of practice.

Diversification of the Documentation and Classification of Signing Practices In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of sign language linguistics diversified with the documentation of signing practices outside of the US and Europe. Some of the documentation involved sporadic publications about various signing practices in rural areas scattered throughout the world, including the Yucatán Peninsula,6 Central Australia,7 Martha’s Vineyard,8 Providence Island,9 northern India,10 and Amami Island in Japan.11 These were followed by more ethnographic and linguistic publications about previously undocumented signing practices such as Adamorobe Sign Language,12 Ban Khor Sign Language,13 Israeli Sign Language,14 and Kata Kolok.15 The aforementioned documentation of signing practices demonstrated that signing practices occurred in many communities without the presence of dedicated residential schools for the deaf. Such schools are viewed as key for the transmission and maintenance of sign languages because they draw critical masses of deaf children with no shared biological

6

  Johnson (1991) and Shuman (1980).   Kendon (2013). 8   Groce (1985). 9   Washabaugh (1986). 10   Jepson (1991a, 1991b). 11   Osugi et al. (1999). 12   Kusters (2014, 2015); and Nyst (2007). 13   Nonaka (2009, 2012, 2014). 14   Meir and Sandler (2007). 15   Branson and Miller (1996). 7

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kinship ties (Singleton and Meier 2021). In some of these publications, the researcher assessed the signing in question and classified it with specialized terminology. Initially, the terminology was intended to indicate that a signing practice was a product of the local language ecology and was not necessarily inferior or superior to other signing practices in other language ecologies. A classic example is the use of “village sign language” to indicate that the signing practice originated in a village and may exhibit certain linguistic characteristics that are not associated with signing practices based in schools or large deaf communities. The trend of classifying signing practices expanded significantly in the late 1990s and 2000s onwards with increased documentation of the variety and complexity of signing practices in diverse language ecologies (Hou and de Vos 2021). Many of these signing practices were either explicitly or implicitly analyzed for their linguistic structure in comparison to what had already been documented about ASL, BSL, and other well-known signing practices associated with urban Deaf communities. One outcome is the proliferation of terminology for classifying signing practices, as shown in Table 7.1. Many of the labels were originally designated to refer to signing practices in a geographically delineated area ranging from a family to a town to certain parts of a nation-state. These labels were later generalized to different signing practices. Different researchers use different terminology for labeling signing practices and the contexts in which the practices occur in their publications; the choice of the terminology is motivated by various etic and

Table 7.1  Names of different types of signing practices References (not exhaustive)

Name

Description

Example

Urban Sign Language

A sign language that is standardized among deaf people, including educated and middle-class professionals

Urban Indian Sign Language

Jepson (1991a, 1991b); Zeshan (2004); Zeshan and de Vos (2012)

Rural Sign Language

“Idiosyncratic”—a sign language that is invented by a deaf individual or a few deaf individuals to communicate with their hearing interlocutors in a village

Rural Indian Sign Language

Jepson (1991a, 1991b); Zeshan (2012)

Indigenous Sign Language

A sign language that emerged in a small village with a large proportion of deaf people, but the language can also emerge in families or social groups in bigger towns

Ban Khor Sign Language

Woodward (2000); Nonaka (2007; Nonaka 2009)

Original Sign Language (“Original Indigenous” in Woodward 1996)

A Southeast Asian sign language that developed in contact with other sign languages in Southeast Asia but minimally with Western sign languages

Original Bangkok Sign Language

Woodward (1996, 2000)

(Continued)

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Table 7.1 (Continued) References (not exhaustive)

Name

Description

Example

Modern Sign Language (“Modern Standard” in Woodward 1996)

A mixture or even a creolization of an original sign language and a Western sign language like ASL or LSF. This term is not widely adopted

Modern Thai Sign Language

Woodward (1996, 2000)

National Sign Language

This is similar to “Modern Sign Language” and has been widely adopted

American Sign Language, British Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language

Nonaka (2014)

Village Sign Language

A sign language that is used by deaf and hearing people in a village community— this is often interchangeable with Woodward’s “Indigenous Sign Language”

Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, Ban Khor Sign Language

Zeshan (2004, 2006)

Deaf Community Sign Language

A sign language that arises when a group of deaf individuals from different places convene and form a community. This is often interchangeable with “National Sign Language”

Nicaraguan Sign Language, Israeli Sign Language

Meir et al. (2010)

Shared Sign Language

A sign language that arises in a shared signing community, i.e., the practice of signing is widely shared by both deaf and hearing people (c.f. Kisch 2008)

Adamorobe Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

Nyst (2012)

Emerging Sign Language

A sign language that is “new” and “young” i.e., it emerges within one or few generations, although there is no cut off for when a language is no longer new

Nicaraguan Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

Senghas et al. (2004); Meir et al. (2010)

Homesign / Home Sign (System)

Gestures/signs developed by a deaf individual or a few deaf individuals who have not been exposed to “sign language”. These forms are used for primary communication with hearing families and other interactants. These forms are considered more complex than silent gestures and co-speech gestures used by hearing speakers.

Often are no specific names for this signing practice

(Goldin-Meadow 2003; Brentari and Goldin-Meadow 2017)

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emic perspectives which are theoretically and socio-politically loaded. For example, Jill Jepson (Jepson 1991a, 1991b) employed the terms “urban Indian sign language” (UISL) and “rural Indian sign language” (RISL) to refer to two types of signing practices. UISL is described as more syntactically complex and arbitrary, standardized, and widely used among deaf people in major cities. RISL is a generalization referring to any signing practice that arises between deaf persons and their hearing interactants in villages. Jepson distinguished these signing practices on the basis of the grammatical structure of signing and the language ecology in which the signing occurred. Coincidentally, the description of RISL overlaps with later descriptions of “homesign” (Brentari and Goldin-Meadow 2017; GoldinMeadow 2003) with a few noticeable differences: UISL and RISL are not situated on a developmental cline, and one practice is not considered more “linguistic” and “superior” than the other. At the same time, from the mid-1990s onward, psycholinguistic studies of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) gained widespread attention for their research on the emergence of a new sign language and its development of complexity in a “natural laboratory” i.e., a school for the deaf (Senghas et al. 2004). From around the mid-2000s, linguistic research on Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) and other signing practices in rural communities with high incidences of genetic deafness were viewed in a similar light (Sandler et al. 2005). Both NSL and ABSL are frequently cited as evidence for the emergence of sign languages in distinct language ecologies. These languages are textbook examples of “emerging sign languages,” a term popularized by Irit Meir et al. (2010) in a Deaf Studies handbook. Meir’s chapter is one of the more oft-cited references in contemporary publications classifying sign languages and signing communities. Emerging sign languages are situated in opposition to “established sign languages.” These terms have been subsequently adopted and adapted by various scholars.16 The signing community of ABSL was noted for its high incidence of hereditary deafness that persisted for multiple generations (Kisch 2008, 2012). Shifra Kisch coined the term “shared signing community” to characterize the community of deaf and hearing ABSL signers and their interactants. That term also abstracted away from classifying a community as a type of Deaf community, which other researchers have done for other communities in earlier times. Victoria Nyst (2012) proposed the term “shared sign language” as an analogy to “shared signing community.” This term has been adopted by a few scholars (Kusters 2015; Yano and Matsuoka 2018), although “village sign language” continues to be used as well, sometimes in conjunction with “emerging sign language” (Brentari and Coppola 2012; Nonaka 2012, 2014; Tano 2016), even though there is some overlap between those two terms along with “indigenous sign language.”

Approaches: Sign Language Typology and Language Emergence

The proliferation of documentation and classification of signing practices has fostered at least two threads of scientific discourse. One thread concerns sign language typology, which seeks to investigate the similarities and differences among diverse signing practices as well as between signed and spoken languages.17 The other thread is an intellectual motivation to map a developmental trajectory of language emergence, a research topic

16

  Fenlon and Wilkinson (2015); Hou and de Vos (2021); Le Guen et al. (2020); and Zeshan (2012).

17

  de Vos and Pfau (2015) ; Nyst (2012); Zeshan and de Vos (2012); and Zeshan and Palfreyman (2017, 2020).

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that has been recently trending in linguistics and related fields (Brentari and Coppola 2012; Brentari and Goldin-Meadow 2017). Those two threads are not necessarily at odds with one another. Many scholars have proposed a taxonomy of sign languages based on relatively discrete linguistic and sociolinguistic criteria to better understand the circumstances in which sign languages emerge, grow, and change. The typology is generally based on implicit assumptions of some distinction between three major categories: gesture, homesign, and sign language (Brentari and Goldin-Meadow 2017; Le Guen et al., 2020). These categories themselves hold ideological implications about what constitutes language vs. not-language on a linear continuum, with gesture situated at one end, homesign in the middle, and sign language on the other end (Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018). These categories also hypothesize what kind of communities tend to be associated with particular signing practices because of certain linguistic and sociolinguistic criteria. The language and not-language categories used by researchers to distinguish among different kinds of communities tend to be associated with sociolinguistic and linguistic criteria from an evolutionary angle (Green 2014; Nyst 2012). The sociolinguistic criteria often list the number of deaf and hearing signers, the size and location of the population in which the signing community is located, the nature of linguistic input, the time depth of the signing practice, and the context and domains in which the signing occurs (de Vos and Pfau, 2015; Le Guen et al. 2020; Zeshan and de Vos, 2012). The criteria for the kinds of signing practices associated with different communities, by comparison, are far less defined since different researchers highlight varied aspects of the grammatical structure of the signing practice in question and utilize different methods for collecting data and analyzing it. There have been some observations about how certain linguistic features such as duality of patterning (the ability to combine discrete, meaningless units to form distinct signs, and combine these signs to form utterances) and agreement morphology (particularly agreement of the verb with the subject and/or the object) are not uniformly distributed among many signing practices associated with smaller signing communities (de Vos and Pfau 2015). Some researchers have abstained from aligning their work with the two aforementioned threads of scientific discourse (Green 2014; Nyst et al. 2012). For example, Lynn Hou conducted an ethnographic study of the communicative practices of deaf and hearing children in signing families in a rural Chatino (Mesoamerican indigenous) community in the San Juan Quiahije municipality in Oaxaca, Mexico (Hou 2016, 2020). While Hou coined “San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language” as an academic descriptor, she described it as “a constellation of family sign languages” to avoid classifying the signing practices based on their time depth and also to try to capture the families’ perspectives about their signing practices, since the families did not have a conceptual and lexical distinction between “gesture,” “homesign,” and “sign language.” The phrase furthermore reflects the emic perspective about how the families’ signing practices were distinct from one another because of residence and kinship associations but also overlapped with the shared repertoire of conventionalized gestures of hearing Chatino speakers in the community (Mesh and Hou 2018).

The Relationship between Signing Practices and Signing Communities Many scholars continue to categorize signing practices as “gesture,” “homesign,” and “sign language” and view them as discrete and categorical. Other scholars approach signing practices as more gradient, falling along a continuum. Victoria Nyst identifies a “grey area” in

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these categories because they do not correspond to prototypical sociolinguistic ecologies such as a “Deaf community” or “a shared signing community” (Nyst et al. 2012). There is a widespread consensus that there is variation in the structure of diverse signing practices and the variation is correlated with or influenced by certain demographic characteristics. However, there appears to be little pushback to using those characteristics as criteria for classifying sign languages and signing communities and for drawing broad generalizations. The criteria can be reductionistic and may do little justice to the complex representation of signing communities. There has not been extensive anthropological and ethnographic research about the social dynamics of small-scale, rural signing communities (Hou and Kusters 2020), but this is gradually changing. A few recent case studies include research from Claire Ramsey (2012) about older generations of students who graduated from the last deaf residential school in Mexico City and Anne Pfister (2015, 2017) about sign language socialization of young deaf children and their families in Mexico City, Shifra Kisch (2012) about language contact and shift in the shared signing community of Al-Sayyid Bedouin in Israel, Angela Nonaka (2012, 2014) about the language contact and shift in the village of Ban Khor in Thailand, Annelies Kusters (2015) about deaf sociality in the shared signing community of Adamorobe, and Monica Rodriguez (2019) about the communities of practices of young deaf students in urban Guatemala. National and urban sign languages are more likely to be characterized as practiced by prototypical Deaf communities and treated as static or stable (Fenlon and Wilkinson 2015; Meir et al. 2010). In fact, there has not been much ethnographic research on the these signing communities as dynamic, ever-shifting communities of practice. Ben Braithwaite (2020) suggests that micro-communities and macro-communities of signers are not necessarily that different from each other, implying that some researchers may have overemphasized the differences between communities of different size. Braithwaite also asserts that issues such as language deprivation, limited access to educational opportunities, and sign language interpretation are not limited to national, macro-Deaf communities but occur in smaller and rural signing communities as well.

Conclusions This chapter has been written with the hope to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation about the usefulness of certain categories and classifications for analyzing and interpreting deaf people and their languaging practices through a linguistic ethnographic lens (Hou and Kusters 2020; Kusters et al. 2020; Kusters and Hou 2020). Historically, sign language linguistics has focused on documenting national sign languages and also on questions related to the origins of language with research projects based on how children acquire and use language. Our aim has been to show the complexity of the ideological work taking place in Deaf Studies and sign language linguistics, especially in terms of labeling signing practices and creating histories and tracing geographies of signed languages throughout the world, particularly in the contemporary moment of advancing technologies, different forms of mobilities, time–space compression, and increased contact between various signed languages. Attempts to classify deaf people into neat categories and bounded communities can become problematic because of the sheer variety of lived experiences and deaf languaging practices, which include multimodal semiotic repertoires. It is difficult to delineate the boundaries of a deaf community or a signing community because the boundaries of signing communities have always been permeable, such as in communicative ecologies where

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deaf and hearing people use a continuum of gestures, signing, speech, home signs, writing and so on, or in online communities. For this reason, contemporary linguistic ethnography, which views language as socially constructed and situated practice (Ahearn 2021; Rampton 2007), is invaluable for opening new paths of inquiry by moving beyond the categories and paradigms that have historically been used in research with deaf people and sign languages. An overdetermination of various categories, such as deaf, nondeaf, deaf/Deaf, and so on has not only limited our understanding of everyday deaf languaging practices, it has also resulted in harm towards deaf people, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, such as deaf people who are members of a diaspora, Black, Indigenous, and/or postcolonial subjects and so on, as their signing practices are rendered invisible or become the exception, rather than the norm. While “deaf” has its usefulness as a category in terms of establishing the boundaries of a group, it is not possible to separate the diverse, lived experiences of deaf people, their bodies, and sensorial orientations from their language ideologies and contextual languaging practices.

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8

Global Hip Hop: Style, Language, and Globalization

H. Samy Alim Introduction The last fifteen years or so have seen the emergence of an international body of literature in “Hip Hop Linguistics,” or “HHLx” (Alim 2006), comprising many rich and varied linguistic practices of Hip Hop communities “from Brooklyn to Baghdad” collectively representing the originality and complexity, the dynamism and diversity, and the power, politics, pleasure, and potential of youth linguistic creativity (Alim 2006, p. 7). Linguists researching Hip Hop Culture have enlivened scholarship on language through in-depth analyses and critical reframings of key concepts in linguistic anthropology. At the same time, these scholars have also enhanced Hip Hop Studies by foregrounding language use and linguistic structure in their analyses of Hip Hop cultural practice, thereby adding a layer of empirical studies to an area of inquiry dominated by cultural studies and humanistic approaches. This chapter reviews key issues in the study of style, language, Hip Hop Culture, and globalization and concludes by offering some implications for a linguistic anthropology of globalization. Critically synthesizing a wide range of recent work on Hip Hop, I present an empirical account of youth as cultural theorists. In doing so, I bring together the insights of hiphopography—a paradigm in Hip Hop Studies that integrates the varied approaches of ethnography, biography, and social, cultural, and oral history (Spady et al. 2006)—with key issues in linguistic anthropology. With their ideas, Hip Hop youth help us make sense not only of one of the most important linguistic movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also of broader cultural changes across contemporary societies. For this reason, I frame my discussion in the context of shifts in the study of language brought upon by a world increasingly characterized by transnationalism, immigration, hybridity, diaspora, and fluidity. In response to these shifts, several fundamental, taken for granted concepts in linguistic anthropology have come under increasing scrutiny. For example, one key concept that has

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

undergone drastic revision is the notion of “local speech community.” As noted by Ben Rampton (1998) and Michael Silverstein (1998), speech community (Gumperz 1968, p. 381)—“any human aggregate characterized by regular and frequent interaction by means of a shared body of verbal signs and set off from similar aggregates by significant differences in language usage”—has always been a troubled term (see Suzanne Romaine (1982) for an earlier critique), mired in a number of methodological, theoretical, and political debates. A key study in this area by Debra Spitulnik (1996) addressed the social circulation of media discourse in Zambian society and introduced several new ways of thinking about speech communities in mass-mediated, technologically connected, large-scale societies. Marcyliena Morgan (2004, p. 3) has noted that the concept of speech community needs reworking in situations marked by “change, diversity, and increasing technology.” For a global level of analysis, we can think in terms of translocal style communities, which can be discussed from the point of view of the transportability of mobile matrices—sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities. These communities are built on both stylistic commonalities and differences and can be analyzed to explore the repeated stylizations involved in Global Hip Hop Culture(s) (Alim 2009). This line of research builds upon Alastair Pennycook’s (2006 p. 73) call for an “anti-foundationalist” view of language, one that views language as a product of repeated stylizations rather than a predetermined object of analysis. Another concept that has been the focus of much debate has been that of style or stylization (Rampton 1999, 2006; Eckert and Rickford 2002; Alim 2004a; Coupland 2007; Mendoza-Denton 2008). The growing consensus on the fluidity of identities and focus on stylization developed, in part, because identities were being theorized in a world witnessing a proliferation of non-regionalized virtual places and increasingly decentralized authority (Meyrowitz 1986). Recent work on stylization and Hip Hop Culture(s) supports Rampton’s (1999, p. 423) perspective on style by problematizing “production within particular cultural spaces” and instead looking at “projection-across,” at speech’s “transposition into and out of arenas where social conditions and social relations are substantially different” (original emphasis). Globalization has created multiple new opportunities for youth to reinvent identities through the remixing of styles which are now, as a result of a multitude of technological innovations, more globally available than ever before. Following Jan Blommaert’s (2003) call for a much-needed “sociolinguistics of globalization,” the chapter concludes with some ideas about a linguistic anthropology of globalization characterized by comparative, multisited ethnographic explorations and a theoretical focus on popular culture, music, and mass-mediated language as central to linguistic processes. This linguistic anthropology of globalization explores youths’ fundamentally agentive act of theorizing the changes in the contemporary world as they attempt to locate themselves at the intersections of the local and the global.

Global Hip Hop Culture(s) and Style(s) As Pennycook (2007) pointed out in his in-depth exploration of the relationship between Global Englishes and Hip Hop’s “transcultural flows,” Hip Hop Cultures may in fact be one of the most important sources for the study of globalization, not only because Hip Hop has reached far corners of the globe but also because it is a mass-mediated popular cultural form that relies heavily on the use of language and technology even as it radically transforms them. Below I address a related and significant set of questions: How did Hip

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Hop Culture become a primary site of identification and self-understanding for youth around the world? And even more specifically, what stylistic resources do youth manipulate, (re)appropriate, and sometimes (re)create, in order to fashion themselves as members of a Global Hip Hop Nation? How do these youth, through their use of multiple styles and language varieties, negotiate their membership within this “nation” as they index the multiplicities of their identities? Finally, and most importantly, how have explorations of these questions about the globalization of Hip Hop Culture led to the reworking of major concepts in the study of language (including language itself) and to a centering of popular cultural and mass-mediated forms of language use? Youth all around the world have engaged Hip Hop, creating their own versions of Hip Hop Nation Language Varieties (HHNL and HHNLVs, see below) and communicating with one another through the prism of style to form a global style community. Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating “an origin” (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force (Appadurai 1996; Blommaert 2003; Pennycook 2003). For Arjun Appadurai, unlike previous centerperiphery models, the global situation is constructed of multiple, interactive nodes. This suggests that a global style community such as the Global Hip Hop Nation is better thought of as a network of overlapping and intersecting translocal style communities, with members in particular localities “making a choice to be connected across recognized boundaries” (Cooke and Lawrence 2006, p. 1). This persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities.

Glocal Stylizations and Style as Glocal Distinctiveness James G. Spady (1991, pp. 223–225) was one of the earliest scholars to comment on Black American Hip Hop’s global influence: “Hip Hop Culture, that irresistibly dynamic and alluring Black American expressive form, is rapidly juicing the world … Styling and Profiling … [Hip Hop artists] are bringing about a revolution in dress, talk, song, dance and nonverbal discourse [and] they are in the enviable position of influencing international values, trends, and styles.” Spady’s comments allude to “style” and “Styling and Profiling” in the Black American tradition and their global spread, as well as the multimodality of Hip Hop style through embodied verbal and nonverbal modes of communication. Style is central to Hip Hop Culture(s) as an overarching, ideologically mediated and motivated aesthetic system of distinction (Irvine 2001). In cultural studies, the most notable work in this area is by Dick Hebdige (1979), who highlights several uses of style by youth, most notably as resistance to subordination. In her work on Hip Hop, Tricia Rose (1994, pp. 37–38) productively draws on Hebdige, arguing that Hip Hop artists use style for alternative status formation, “forging local identities for teenagers who understand their limited access to traditional avenues of social status attainment.” She continues, quoting US Hip Hop MC and graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy on the relationship between style, identity, and local status in Hip Hop: “You make a new style. That’s what life on the street is all about. What’s at stake is honor and position on the street. That’s what makes it so important, that’s what makes it feel so good—that pressure on you to be the best. Or try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with” (quoted in Rose 1994, p. 38).

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

We can theorize style not simply by reading cultural texts but by taking the cultural theories of the stylists themselves as important points of departure (Muggleton 2000). This approach is exemplified by the “hiphopographies” collected by researchers at Philadelphia’s Black History Museum (Spady et al. 1999, 2006, 1995; Spady and Eure 1991). For example, in their interview with bicoastal US Hip Hop artist Kurupt, Spady et al. (1999) provide a deep sense of rappers’ personal investment in style. Below, Kurupt explains that he learned his rhyming skills as a young boy in the East Coast ciphas (or competitive and communal rhyme circles; see Alim 2006) of Philly: Back in the day, I was like thirteen. A circle of ten or twelve people, ages of like thirteen and below, one might have been twenty, twenty-one. And when it came down to the last two [rhymers], I was always there. And I’ve always been number one. Always. I never lost them type battles. You bust and it’s like you don’t say the next person’s name, and you’re out of there. I’ve always been in there. I just sit back and bust rhymes and I used to spell things on people’s shirts. Like he’d have a shirt that says “Walk” on it. I’d break it down like the “W” is for this, the “A” is for that, the “L” is for this, and the “K” is for that. And they be like, “What?!” That’s my style. Nobody else was doing that. That’s something I created … Like, he could have a soda can, “Pepsi.” Once, I spelled Pepsi for this nigga. “The ‘P’ is for punctuating rhymes and woo-woo-woo. ‘E’ is for executing.” And they’re like, “God!” And I’m like what – thirteen, fourteen. C’mon now. They called me “The Kid.” That was my rappin name because I was the youngest nigga that would always make it into the cipha. (quoted in Spady et al. 1999, p. 539)

For Black American Hip Hop artists, and in Black American cultural practice more generally, style, as expressed through the creation and invention of new, fresh, original, and innovative productions, is critical to the artists’ reception. Further, in addition to style as distinctiveness (Irvine 2001), Kurupt’s comments also frame style as competitiveness: “And when it came down to the last two [rhymers], I was always there. And I’ve always been number one. Always. I never lost them type battles.” Or as Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon demonstrated, responding to an interview question about what makes a “dope MC,” style can be framed as originality: “Style, you know what I mean, you just gotta be original. You gotta be able to say things, you know, automatically that people don’t normally say. You gotta design your own flow, you know what I mean? Because it’s so many people out there with different type of flows, but if you make your own flow up, that makes you more original and makes you one of the more outstanding MCs” (unpublished ­interview, Alim 2001). The above examples demonstrate the centrality of style in Hip Hop and its function as a system of distinction, driven by a nearly obsessive desire to be “original,” “creative,” or simply “the best.” In Spady et al. (2006) Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness, the word style appears 260 times in the 700-page tome, which covers a wide range of interviews with artists from the United States, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Crucially, style appears to be equally prominent in discussions with MCs, DJs, dancers, and graffiti artists. Style in Hip Hop, as Judith Irvine (2001, p. 23) notes regarding subcultural style in general, cuts across “communicative and behavioral modalities,” and importantly, “integrates them thematically.” It is primarily for this reason that I have argued for style as the central rubric through which to read Hip Hop Cultures. Further, my use of style extends what Marco Jacquemet (2005, p. 264) refers to as transidiomatic practices to describe “the communicative practices of transnational groups that interact using different languages and communicative codes simultaneously present in a range of communicative channels, both local and distant.” As previously noted, style allows us to integrate such insights and expand them to work at a level beyond linguistic structure.

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In this globalizing era of rapid technologically mediated communication, style is relevant to the gaining of local status (as in Rose 1994, above); serves as a system of distinction and aesthetics organized around locally relevant principles of value (as in Irvine 2001); is the property of local speech communities or locally situated communities of practice (as in much of the sociolinguistic and linguistic-anthropological literature). We can also view style, as theorized by global Hip Hop youth, as glocal distinctiveness, where members of the Global Hip Hop Nation put style to use in order to distinguish themselves from adherents to other possible styles in their local arenas as well as to simultaneously contrast with and connect themselves to a global network of practitioners, each claiming their “own style” (or what US rapper KRS-One [1996, p. 60] refers to as a “my-style” and a “your-style”). Importantly, as Irvine (2001, p. 21) notes, “though [style] may characterize an individual, it does so only within a social framework (of witnesses who pay attention)” and “it thus depends on social evaluation” and “it interacts with idealized representations.”

Stylistic (Re)mixing In the case of the glocal stylizations found in Global Hip Hop Cultures, local styles interact dialectically with the idealized representation of Black American HHNLVs (the whole range of possibilities in an approach to language that is as contingent upon Black America’s continued role as a dominant frame of reference as it is on local approaches to language) and various other possible styles, drawing on each other’s semiotic resources in a process of “semiotic reconstruction” (Pennycook 2003, p. 527, citing Kandiah 1998, p. 100). This stylistic (re)mixing, as many have pointed out, goes well beyond mere imitation. The radical recontextualizations and creative uses to which semiotic resources are put signal an era of “global linguistic flows” (Alim et al. 2009) in which linguistic and other semiotic material circulates around the world’s “langscapes” (cf. Appadurai 1996; Blommart 2003; Pennycook 2003) to produce not global languages that function via shared linguistic norms, but, rather, global and translocal style communities operating on stylistic commonalities and contrasts that pay equal attention to the local and the global. Black American Hip Hop artist Raekwon’s interactions with multiple communities, from “the streets” of the United States to the banlieues of Black-Beur France, illustrate these non-language-bound concepts of global and translocal style communities. A member of the mighty Wu-Tang Clan, Raekwon hails from Shaolin, also known as Staten Island, New York, and specifically the Park Hill neighborhood. Like other Wu affiliates, he’s known for rappin in a distinct Shaolin, New York, East Coast style that highlights clever word and sound play, esoteric slang, and ample use of the Five Percent Nation of Islam’s Supreme Alphabet and Supreme Mathematics (Miyakawa 2005). In addition to this local level of stylistic distinction, he is also in dialogue with various global Hip Hop artists. As Morgan (2004, p. 6) has pointed out, membership in the Global Hip Hop Nation is “partially constructed through transnationalism, technology, music, and politically and socially marginalized youth.” Raekwon’s collaboration with Black French artist Ol Kainry, “De Park Hill à 91 Pise” (2004), provides a perfect example of this and highlights the level of communication that is at work here, one that is not constrained by any one particular linguistic system. In the video for “De Park Hill à 91 Pise,” Ol Kainry and Raekwon trade verses in a mixture of English, French, verlan (a French youth register where words are encoded by reversing syllables and by changes in spelling), Black Language (also known as Ebonics or African American Vernacular English), and their respective HHNLVs. They rhyme in a

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

studio, set against a moving backdrop of their local hoods (Park Hill and 91 Pise), with their lyrics inscribed on and circling the concrete buildings and streets of the Shaolin housing projects and throughout New York City. In this first verse, Raekwon rhymes while Ol Kainry interjects: Raekwon: Hey yo, hey yo, hey yo, drugs get served when it’s nighttime / Bodies get found [Ol Kainry: Mm-hmm] / So many young niggaz gettin lifetime/ Don’t know nu’in but the scrape up / That’s France, shit, [Ol Kainry: Word!] / in other words, sun, get yo cake up…

Here, Raekwon begins his flow with the classically Shaolin phrase, Hey yo, hey yo, hey yo and then uses a stream of esoteric and encoded HHNL to highlight the connective marginalities (Osumare 2008) in both rappers’ local hoods. His narrative depicts drug-dealing (“drugs get served”) and its consequences—death (“bodies get found”) or life in prison (“so many young niggaz gettin lifetime”)—and a generation of youth who have no other option but to participate in the informal economy (“don’t know nu’in but the scrape up”). He closes by addressing the young men in that situation as sun (which doubles for son, as well as the Five Percenter term for “male”1), and offers an empathetic word of compassion that acknowledges one’s right to do what is advantageous for oneself (“get yo cake up”). All the while, Ol Kainry interjects with stock phrases from Black American HHNL, such as Word! which also stems from the language of the Five Percenter community in the United States. Ol Kainry, whose name is in fact verlan for ‘Old American’,2 both sees himself and is viewed by audiences in France as having an “American” style. Throughout, he interjects phrases like Word! and Hey, yo! and rhymes whole lines that complicate any notion of discrete languages. For example, he begins the last verse like this: “Yo, mon mic est un flingue pour mon hood un bad clin d’oeil” [Yo, my mic is a gun / and much respect to my hood (or “for my hood, a bad shout-out”), pointing out how his “mic” serves as a weapon for his “hood.” Further, his use of bad here follows Black American semantic inversion to mean something positive, as Run DMC pointed out over two decades ago in “Peter Piper” (1986), “not bad meaning BAD, but bad meaning GOOD!” In this second example, the two rappers exchange lines in the hook, and we see some more verbal play: raekwon: 

Me and Ol Kainry explain / De Park Hill à 91 Pise, les scarlas s’tchekent (‘From Park Hill to 91 Pise, gangstas link up’) / Ice Water Inc., Ol Kainry, Raekwon the Chef / raekwon:  From Park Hill to 91 Pise, gangstas link up / Ice Water Inc. and Ol’ Kainry / We all thinkers… ol kainry: 

In the above example, Ol Kainry employs verlan when he spits “les scarlas”, which is an inversion of the syllables in the French term lascars, meaning ‘gangsta’ or ‘thug’. Additionally, he employs a Black American term, check (in French spelling, tchek), as in “Yo, I’ma go check my man” i.e., ‘I’m going to go see how my friend is doing,’ and recontextualizes it,

1

  In the Five Percent Nation of Islam, the sun represents man. The moon represents woman. The stars represent children. The Five Percent Nation of Islam (The Nation of Gods and Earths) was founded in Harlem in the 1960s and practices an indigenous form of Islam in the US. 2   Ol Kainry adopts a Black American naming practice in Hip Hop, as seen in the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol Dirty Bastard (there’s no father to his style, he claims!), but uses the French youth register of verlan in which Américain (‘American’) is shortened to ricain and then the syllables are reversed and the spelling changed to yield Kainry.

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submerging the term in a French HHNLV that incorporates verlan, French, and Black American HHNL. As mentioned above, Hip Hop style does not impose a homogenized “one-world” culture upon its practitioners. Through Raekwon’s use of Black Language and a Park Hill HHNLV and Ol Kainry’s use of the French youth register verlan and the 91 Pise Hip Hop HHNLV—their respective “resistance vernaculars” (Potter 1995)—membership in the global style community of Hip Hop is negotiated not through a particular language, but through particular styles of language, and these styles are ideologically mediated and motivated in that their use allows for a shared respect based on representing one’s particular locality. A global style community is one that is not located geographically or even linguistically, as we have seen; rather, membership may have to do with language ideologies and transidiomatic practices as much as with shared linguistic systems and local norms (cf. Morgan 2004). The notion of global and translocal style communities is more complex still. Despite the all too available metaphor of Hip Hop as a universal language, style in global and translocal style communities is hotly contested, as it is often a critical measure of one’s artistic self-worth and a litmus test of one’s authenticity in a community where, as Raekwon raps above, “we all thinkers.” Previous research (Alim et al. 2009) has examined these tensions around moments of identification with local and global aspects of Hip Hop. Below, I reframe the HHNL model in relation to issues of globalization.

Mobile Matrices and the Remixing of Hip Hop Nation Language Varieties

A preoccupation with style and stylization and their links to identity and identification is found in nearly every locale where Hip Hop is practiced. In Italy, for example, style emerges as central in rapper Neffa’s rhyme Dimmi com’è che Snefs stila ’sti stili (‘Tell me why Snefs styles these styles’) (cited in Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003, p. 475); in Japan, in Hip Hop group Rip Slime’s song “Yo, Bringing That, Yo Bring Your Style” (cited in Pennycook 2006, p. 96); in Senegal, Positive Black Soul discusses style at length in a conversation that itself is loaded with African American stylizations (Spady et al. 2006, pp. 639–655); and in Nigeria, in Hip Hop artist 2-Shotz’s commitment “to do am Naija style” [to do it Nigerian style] (cited in Omoniyi 2008). In the Philippines, Hip Hop group GHOST 13 (Guys Have Own Style to Talk; cited in Pennycook 2006, pp. 130–131) explicitly makes the link between stylization and their linguistic and cultural identities when they claim: “Listen everyone we are the only one rap group in the land who represent zamboanga man! / Guyz have own style, style to talk a while di kami mga wanna [‘we are not imitators’] because we have own identity.”3 As this example illustrates, issues of locality, authenticity, and style as glocal distinctiveness abound in global Hip Hop Cultures. In theorizing globalization, a focus on style in Hip Hop Cultures allows us not only to highlight the role of aesthetics, but also to put some empirical clothes (baggy jeans and a white tee perhaps) on Appadurai’s theoretical hanger, which gives us a promising vision of cultural globalization but no sense of its workings. Hip Hop is an example of what I have referred to as mobile matrices, where sets of styles, practices, ideologies, knowledges, 3

  According to Pennycook (2007, p. 130), Zamboangueño is the most widely spoken of a number of Spanishbased creoles in the Philippines. Chavacano is the general term for these creoles and is derived from the Spanish chabacano (‘vulgar’). In line with Hip Hop’s language politics, the marginalized Chavacano is celebrated by GHOST 13.

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

and  aesthetics travel together across the globe—globe-hip-hopping, if you will4—and are ­necessarily engaged with as a unit (but taken up partially and differentially) across a wide range of contexts (Alim 2009). Like Pennycook and Mitchell (2009), I am not arguing that some hegemonic form of Hip Hop moves wholesale around the global market and creates other Hip Hops in its own image and likeness. Rather, I would like to draw our attention to how Hip Hop youth theorize the differential adoption/adaptation of the styles, practices, ideologies, knowledges, and aesthetics that necessarily must be engaged (sometimes by mere imitation, sometimes by outright rejection, but oftentimes by creative reworking) when entering the Hip Hop matrix. Though not using these terms, Richardson’s (2006, p. 65) discussion of respect and Pennycook’s 2006, p. 14) discussion of authenticity in Hip Hop Culture are helpful in elucidating what I mean by Hip Hop’s mobile matrix. Richardson describes how German Hip Hoppers were introduced to Black American ideologies of respect and adopted them in their online practice. In addition, Pennycook highlights the “constant tension” between the global spread of authenticity in Hip Hop, “a culture of being true to the local, of telling it like it is” and “the constant pull towards localization that this implies.” All over the world, he argues, there is a “compulsion to not only make Hip Hop locally relevant but also to define locally what authenticity means.” Viewing Hip Hop as a mobile matrix suggests that there are at least two levels of meaning working simultaneously in Hip Hop’s globalization: the imperative to identify with global Hip Hop (with Black America as a dominant frame of reference for many contexts) and the imperative to create something that pushes local boundaries and distinguishes oneself from both local and global Hip Hop styles (mediated by a demanding and competitive ideology of style). Turning specifically to language, I reframe my working notion of HHNL and HHNLVs (Alim 2004b, 2006) in relation to this concept of Hip Hop as a mobile matrix. In brief, in that work I described HHNL as a language variety that relies heavily on the African aspect of Black American uses of English; this characterization leans on Kamau Brathwaite’s (1984, p. 13) description of “nation languages” in the Caribbean: “English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English.” As articulated in Hip Hop youths’ theorizing, language refers not only to internal, structural qualities but also to the many discursive and communicative practices (call and response, battling and freestylin in tha cipha, multilayered totalizing expression, poetics and flow, etc.), language ideologies (often counterhegemonic), understandings of the role of language in both binding/bonding community and seizing/smothering linguistic opponents, and “language as concept” (having to do with broader forms of semiotic expression), including clothing styles, facial expressions, dance styles and body movements, graffiti styles, and so on (see further Alim 2006, p. 71). Further, in that earlier work I outlined ten tenets of HHNL, which collectively r­ ecognized the importance of style and aesthetics, language ideologies and processes of identification, and the sociopolitical contexts of language use in Hip Hop, as well as both the regionalization of HHNL in the US and the globalization of HHNL Varieties around the world. Specifically, I noted that HHNL “is widely spoken across the country, and used/borrowed and adapted/transformed by various ethnic groups inside and outside the US” (Alim 2004b, p. 394). In this chapter, I continue to describe the use of language in diverse Hip 4

  Globe-hip-hopping is a play on Ferguson’s (2006, p. 38) term globe-hopping, which he uses to emphasize the point that the “movement of capital” does not “cover the globe” but rather “connects discrete points on it.” The Hip Hop matrix travels and circulates in a similar manner, but I do not mean to suggest that it covers the world like a global blanket. Rather, it globe-hip-hops through various hoods.

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Hop locales as Hip Hop Nation Language Varieties. Rather than the normative use of Hip Hop Nation Language to refer specifically to the language of Black American Hip Hop and its remixes, it is preferable to use the global term Hip Hop Nation Language Varieties to refer to the use of language in and across specific Hip Hop localities (including the US). For some scholars, the language remixes involved in the creation of global Hip Hops cause us to remix the very notion of language.

Linguistic Remixing and Agentive Languaging Looking more closely at linguistic structure, HHNLVs abound with examples of linguistic remixing, giving us yet another reason to put “language” in quotation marks. Above, I described a view of language from within Hip Hop that stresses far more than linguistic structure and internal characteristics. Beyond this, the use of language in global Hip Hop Cultures causes us to de-essentialize languages in the same way that we have de-essentialized identity categories such as race and gender in postmodernity. Several examples serve to make the point. Haitian, Dominican, and African rappers in the complex multiethnic and multilingual Hip Hop communities in Canada view their linguistic remixes as community-building practices, enabling translinguistic communication through the production of Hip Hop style. As Haitian-Canadian rapper Impossible states in an interview with Mela Sarkar and Dawn Allen (2007) regarding style and locality in le style montrealais: “I’d define the Montreal style as, it’s the only place where you have a cultural mix like that, where you have a mixture of languages like that, whether it’s English, [Haitian] Creole, then French, but all the same a Quebec French” (Sarkar and Allen 2007, p. 122). The authors show that, through continual linguistic borrowing, Montreal youth involved in Hip Hop carve out a place for themselves in the public sphere while creating a community “based on a mixture of French and English as a common language, but with an ever-present and constantly changing admixture of words and phrases from other sources as its defining feature.” Sarkar and Allen note that in the midst of all of this multilingualism, and even in Quebec where the most widely used language in Hip Hop is French, not English, Hip Hop artists use aspects of African American English (AAE) in their lyrics and everyday speech (2007, p. 120). Black American HHNLVs are remixed in numerous scenes around the world, as evidenced in global Hip Hop naming practices like the names of Tanzanian artists “Nigga J,” “Ice II,” and “G.W.M. Gangstas with Matatizo” (cited in Perullo and Fenn 2003, pp. 23–24) and German record companies “Yo Mama” and “Put da needle to da groove,” or European remixes of Black American rhetorical formulae like “Snoop Doggy Dogg is in the house” (X ist im Saal in German; X (est) dans la place in French; and X (está) en la casa in Spanish): all cited in (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003, p. 474). Also relevant are the practices of battlin and freestylin in Australia (Maxwell 2003); Japan (Condry 2006); in Nigeria (Omoniyi et al. 2008); and South Africa (Williams 2017). In Tanzania, several scholars have written about the mixing of Black American HHNLVs with Swahili and other languages. As in the case of Oxmo Puccino in France (previously discussed), both Remes (1998) and Perullo and Fenn (2003) discuss Tanzanian Hip Hop artists studying Black American artists, imitating their flow and delivery, and even using similar names to carve out particular styles. Tanzanian artist Ice II, for example, states that he looked up to US rapper Ice-T and modeled his style after him (Perullo and Fenn 2003, p. 29), while Mr. II reports that he modeled himself after Tupac (an apparently ubiquitous Hip Hop icon in

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

Tanzania) “sounding out the words until he had a sense of the rhyming and flow” (2003, p. 24). But what does this self-described imitation mean for the supposed centrality of style in this global style community? If translocal style communities are about inventing a style “nobody can deal with,” what are the implications of such imitations of Black American styles for our discussion? As we might have expected, Perullo and Fenn conclude, “even if rappers borrow from American rap icons,” in the end, “they must still show that they are creative and have a unique style of rapping” (2003, p. 29, my emphasis). Higgins (2008), also working in Tanzania, shows us that this unique style of rapping is often done in multiple languages, such as Swahili, Kihuni (a sociolect spoken by self-ascribed wahuni, ‘hooligans, gangsters’), and AAE, with Higgins focusing on the use of (African American) HHNL. In all of these works, we see that rappers flex various styles to convey a sense of multiple belongings and allegiances. Through various practices such as battles, rhyme ciphers, shout outs, and naming practices, and the use of Black American lexicon, phonology, and syntax, Black American HHNL is central to these youths’ imagining themselves as both local and global agents in the world. Linguistic remixing in Hip Hop is even more complex, as described in Pennycook’s (2003, 2007) analyses of the language of Hip Hop Culture in Japan and Malaysia. Table 8.1, for example, is derived from Pennycook’s discussion of three songs by Japanese Hip Hop group Rip Slime. In his analysis of “Bring Your Style,” Pennycook (2003, pp. 515–517) discusses the use of Black American HHNL (such as the globally present indexical Yo!) right alongside the Japanese jinrui saigo no furiikiisaido ‘the last freaky side of the human race,’ in what these youths call “freaky mixed Japanese.” The Japanese lyric, however, is already mixed, with the first part of the phrase written in Japanese kanji and the second part written in both katakana (used generally for the transcription of non-Japanese words) and hiragana (used mainly for Japanese grammatical inflections). Further, as Pennycook explains, “in furiikiisaido we have a created, English-based word (saido [side] is commonly used, furriikii [freaky] less so).” This linguistic remixing presents us with important questions about the supposed one-to-one relationship between language and identity, between English for global purposes and Japanese for local purposes, and between “a language” and “a structure.”

Table 8.1  Lyrics by Japanese Hip Hop group Rip Slime (from Pennycook 2003, pp. 515–526); translation in boldface Lyrics

Transliteration and translation

Yo Bringing That, Yo Bring Your Style 人類最後のフリーキーサイド ‘Bring Your Style’

Yo Bringing that, Yo Bring your style Jinrui saigo no furikiisaido Yo Bringing That, Yo Bring Your Style The last freaky side of the human race

By the Way Five Guy’s Name (×3) Five Guy’s Name is Rip Slyme 5ʹ ‘By the Way’

By the Way Five Guy’s Name (×3) Five Guy’s Name is Rip Slyme 5ʹ

錦糸町出 Freaky ダブルのJapanese ‘Tokyo Classic’

Kinshichoo de freaky daburu no Japanese Freaky mixed Japanese from Kinshichoo

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Rip Slime is clearly influenced by Black American HHNL. The group name itself builds upon the tradition of creative wordplay in that it exploits the sometimes globally marginalized r/l distinction in Japanese English to produce “Lips Rhyme” (Pennycook 2003, p. 530). But despite this global influence, the use of language by these artists is indexical of multiple cultural affiliations and identifications. As Pennycook concludes, Rip Slime’s uses of multiple forms of Japanese, “Japanese which may locate these rappers as decidedly local (Kinshichoo) or which may signal their sense of cultural mixing,” and multiple forms of English, which “at times explicitly echoes African American English while [at] other times seems more Japanese in its usage,” avoids designations of local or global and appears to “flow itself across the boundaries of identity” (Pennycook 2003, p. 527). The multiplicity of indexicalities brought forth by such complex, multilayered uses of language demands an approach that gives a more central role to linguistic agency on the part of youth, as their remixes of the Hip Hop matrix indicate that these heteroglot language practices are central to their local/global understandings of self. Pennycook (2007) reports similar cultural remixes elsewhere in Asia. In a Malaysian nightclub where Black American Hip Hop styles influence the various modes of Hip Hop stylizations, he discussed rap duo Too Phat (most certainly a carryover of US Hip Hop names such as Too Short and Too Live Crew, not to mention the word phat), comprised of Joe Flizzow and Malique.5 Too Phat’s rhyme demonstrates their simultaneously global and local orientation: “Hip Hop be connectin Kuala Lumpur with LB / Hip Hop be rockin up towns laced wit LV / Ain’t necessary to roll in ice rimmed M3’s and be blingin/Hip Hop be bringin together emcees.”6 Pennycook describes the Black American influences on pronunciation (consonant cluster reduction) and syntax (multiple uses of habitual be), but complicates the picture by noting that the rappers, “while locating themselves within the linguistic and cultural world of Hip Hop, which links across the globe yet operates as a cultural code, are also locating themselves in Malaysia and positioning themselves in particular ways in relation to Hip Hop Culture” (2003, p. 3). He goes on to show that other Too Phat lyrics make multiple references to Malaysian locales, foods, traditions, and the Muslim fajr prayer, and even potentially exclude a wider audience through the use of Malay mixed with Black American language: “Ya!!! Kau tertarik dengan liriks, baut lu terbalik / Mr. Malique, Joe Flizzow dan T-Bone spit it menarik … Pertama kali gilang gemilang ku rap Melayu” (“You are attracted to the lyrics, they make you feel good/Mr. Malique, Joe Flizzow and T-Bone spit it out cool … First time, just brilliant, I am rapping in Malay”). As Pennycook concludes, phrases like spit it menarik (Black American spit it means ‘rap’ and menarik means ‘cool’ in Malay) do not always have to be interpreted as cases of “styling the Other” (Rampton 1999). Rather, the use of various codes in the process of the simultaneously localizing and globalizing linguistic remixes in both Japan and Malaysia points to the need for an “anti-foundationalist” view of language, one that questions the status of separate languages as a priori given objects of analysis, de-essentializes language in the same way other social categories have been de-essentialized, and breaks down any isomorphic conception about the relationship between cultures and languages.

5

  Flizzow is based in the Black American practice of inserting the infix izz and means Flow (a central Hip Hop term). The practice is found in US rapper Jay Hova’s song “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, with lyrics “H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A,” as well as in phrases like “Fo shizzle, my nizzle” (‘For sure, my nigga’). 6   LB refers to Long Beach, California; LV refers to fashion designer Louis Vuitton; Ice rimmed M3’s refers to a BMW automobile with flashy rims.

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

Hip Hop Youth Theorizing and a Linguistic Anthropology of Globalization Hip Hop has helped linguistic anthropologists look beyond local communities and language as it is used in specific field sites and begin, through ethnographies of popular culture and mass-mediated language, to theorize a linguistic anthropology of globalization. Hip Hop artists manipulate, (re)appropriate, and sometimes (re)create stylistic resources through a process of stylistic remixing to construct themselves as members of the Global Hip Hop Nation. Following Pennycook (2007), the radical recontextualizations and (re) creative uses of stylistic and semiotic resources mark an era of “global linguistic flows” (Alim et al. 2009) in which cultural and linguistic material travels around the world to produce not global languages but rather global and translocal styles. These stylizations operate in a system of glocal distinctiveness, a system which functions not on shared linguistic norms but on stylistic commonalities and contrasts that pay equal attention to the local and the global. Youth all around the world have engaged Hip Hop and created their own HHNLVs and communicate with each other through the prism of style—a diversity of styles as lingua franca, if you will—to form a global style community. Unity within the Global Hip Hop Nation does more than merely tolerate diversity; it demands it. I have argued that style is the central rubric through which to read Hip Hop Cultures. Blommaert (2003, p. 608), following Dell Hymes (1996) and Silverstein (1998), suggested that for a global level of analysis we need to “move from Languages to language varieties and repertoires” because “it is not abstract Language” that is globalized but rather “specific speech forms, genres, styles, and forms of literacy practice.” This is certainly the case with Hip Hop. Its rhyming practices have altered poetic genres across the globe: Hip Hop artists in Japan have restructured Japanese in order to rhyme and flow (Condry 2006; Davis and Tsujimura 2008), and they, along with artists in Korea (Pennycook 2006, p. 128) and Italy (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2003, pp. 474–475), have produced poetic structures such as the back-to-back chain rhymes and bridge rhymes similar to those described in Black American Hip Hop (Alim 2006). Pushing Blommaert’s argument even further, as we have seen in the case of Hip Hop, a language variety in the Hip Hop sense of “language as concept” does not refer to specific dialects or languages or styles per se; it refers to the variation between translocal style communities within the Global Hip Hop Nation style community. HHNLVs refers to the whole range of possibilities to an “approach to language” that relies equally upon Black America’s continued role as a key frame of reference and on local approaches to language. The multiple indexicalities brought forth by such complex, multilayered uses of language necessitates a linguistic anthropology of globalization that gives a more central role to linguistic agency on the part of youth as they appropriate and remix the Hip Hop matrix. Youth around the world have created styles and languages that (re)mix dominant styles and languages in relation to those already present in their repertoires. It is the creation of these languages through agentive languaging that best describes globalization—not just language entering into and moving across various localities, but language created out of translocalities. This is a kind of agency that includes but goes beyond what Alessandro Duranti (2004) called “self-” or “ego-affirming” because Hip Hop artists are simultaneously using language to affirm a unique identity within a global community and shaping the kind of language that defines such community. Finally, in theorizing language and globalization, I have tried to argue that language does not move around the world as a solo traveler. Rather, it travels within what I have called mobile matrices—sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that move in and out

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of localities and cross-cut modalities. As these matrices travel around the globe, people from diverse contexts engage them in their entirety but selectively adopt, adapt and/or reject varying aspects. This idea that languages-in-motion are traveling within mobile cultural matrices ironically requires linguistic anthropologists to pay even more attention to the local than ever before. For in order to read events (trans)locally, we will need more in-depth ethnographies, because globalization not only depends upon local arrangements but it also rearranges, reorders, and restructures those arrangements (Blommaert 2003; Alim and Pennycook 2006).

Some Caveats: Extreme Locality, Cisheteropatriarchy, and a Path Forward As I have shown, Hip Hop youth’s global consciousness and their theories about the interrelatedness of style, language, and globalization offer us new ways of imagining our world, ways that ground current theories of global flows (Appadurai 1996). In-depth ethnographic explorations of Global Hip Hop Culture(s), and popular culture and mass-mediated and mass-circulated language more generally, can help us bring forth new understandings of linguistic and cultural processes in this global era. However, my more recent research on Hip Hop Culture in South Africa has led me to offer at least two important caveats to the ideas shared within this chapter. The first follows from the above discussion. No matter how languages, cultures, and ideologies move throughout the globe, I want to caution against a rush to emphasize “global linguistic flows” at the expense of the enduring centrality of the local. Second, even as we celebrate the truly remarkable global cultural flows of Hip Hop, I want to maintain a critical distance vis-à-vis the kinds of ideologies that “go global.” It is imperative that we consider how localized regressive (read: exclusionary and harmful) ideologies are reified when enduring global systems such as patriarchy and homophobia, for example, come to be embedded in global youth cultures at least as deeply as the progressive, counterhegmonic language ideologies I have written about. In considering the local, Quentin Williams (2016, 2018) has written about extreme locality in his ethnographies of Hip Hop cultural spaces in the “Coloured” townships of Cape Town, emphasizing how the performance of a rap battle and its locality are mutually constituted. He shows how local-spatial coordinates and non-local spatial elements are entextualized in the actual performance between two emcees. He also emphasizes the construction of the “extreme local” by focusing on how language varieties, styles, gestures, and audience interaction are variously referenced multilingually and incorporated into the performance, requiring a host of local knowledges to unpack, and therefore, appreciate. Specifically, he demonstrates how, through live performance, youth forge a local variety of HHNL that relies on the strategic and creative use of linguistic resources associated with English, Cape Afrikaans (Kaaps or Cape Afrikaans is a variety of Afrikaans spoken widely in the Cape Flats; see Afrikaaps below), the local street variety Sabela (an admixture of isiXhosa, Kaaps, Zulu, and non-verbal gang signs), and African American Language (AAL). At least three zones of language ideological combat are relevant here. First, the hegemonic dominance of AAL in some global Hip Hop sites, including Cape Town, is being challenged in favor of more local varieties that privilege locally-relevant identities, politics, and epistemologies. Second, in a linguistic context where Cape Afrikaans is stigmatized across nearly all social domains related to power and upward mobility (from education to politics to the job market), “these youth registers challenge the supposed inferiority of this

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global hip hop: style, language, and globalization

variety; its very use resists long-held stereotypes about Cape Afrikaans—and its speakers, mostly working-class Coloureds—as unintelligent, lazy, and criminal” (Williams 2016, p. 114). Third, in a context where the nation-state espouses multilingualism as the law of the land, yet hegemonic language ideologies continue to frame South Africans of Color as “illiterate” and their linguistic behavior as “disorderly” or “threatening,” youth are creating an agentive multilingual citizenship through their local performances. More recently, in collaborative work with South African scholars Quentin Williams, Adam Haupt, and Emile Jansen (Alim et al. 2021; Haupt et al. 2019), the local has emerged as central to the Afrikaaps language movement in Cape Town. In our theorizing of the language–race–land complex (Alim et al. 2021, p. 195)—the range of issues with respect to the co-constitution and refusal of the colonial logics of language, race, and land—the local emerged as central to the counternarrative of “Coloured” speakers of so-called “Afrikaans.” I place this variety in quotes because Afrikaaps is a South African hiphopera that disrupts white settler colonial logics of language, race, and land through an interrogation and revision of white supremacist constructions of Afrikaans. This reinvention of language, race, and land frees the Afrikaans-speaking, Coloured community in Cape Town from oppressive, colonial, apartheid era logics and offers them new ways of envisioning their linguistic, racial, spatial, and political–economic futures in South Africa. What’s relevant to this chapter is that the power of the movement is derived, in part, from the very specific role that the Cape played in shaping the language that artists and activists are reclaiming as Afrikaaps— and not just the Cape (Kaap) but Afrika as well (hence, Afrikaaps). While Afrikaaps Hip Hop artists and activists foreground Indigenous perspectives on land and ownership that disrupt white settler colonialist and white settler capitalist understandings of land as the property of humans to be bought and sold, their critical revision of white Afrikaner narratives of the linguistic history of Afrikaans relies centrally on the role of Indigenous people in the Cape who shaped the language’s early development. In other collaborative work with South African Hip Hop linguist Quentin Williams, we presented the first comparative analysis of the creative, improvised linguistic performances of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality by young men in freestyle rap battles and ciphers across two ethnographic sites: Los Angeles (United States) and Cape Town (South Africa; see Alim et al. 2018, 2020). Our comparative approach focuses on how young men in Project Blowed in Los Angeles (Leimert Park) and Club Stones in Cape Town (Kuilsriver) use improvised verbal art to position themselves and others within a local, critical circle of artists and within the broader discursive fields of race, gender and sexuality. In our analyses, youth across these two sites are shown to rearticulate the intersecting dominant discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body by drawing on conceptions of race to provide momentary, creative benefits while further marginalizing the marginalized. Collectively, young men of color often challenge the dominance of Whiteness, while simultaneously celebrating and reifying particular kinds of Blackness/Colouredness at the expense of already marginalized gendered and sexualized bodies. These hegemonic practices reconstitute social divisions that benefit cisheteropatriarchy, an ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means to “look” and “act” like a “straight” man and marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender non-conforming bodies that challenge the gender binary. It is a system based on the exploitation and oppression of women and sexual minorities. In terms of a linguistic anthropology of Hip Hop, specifically, and globalization more generally, we need more in-depth ethnographic explorations of Global Hip Hop Culture(s), a context in which team ethnographies could be used to maximal effect, in order to understand linguistic and cultural processes in this global era as well as comparative, multi-sited ones.

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Spady, J.G., Alim, H.S., and Lee, C.G. (1999). Street Conscious Rap. Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Press. Spady, J.G., Alim, H.S., and Meghelli, S. (2006). Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness. Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Press. Spady, J.G., Dupres, S., and Lee, C.G. (1995). Twisted Tales: In the Hip Hop Streets of Philly. Philadelphia, PA: Black History Museum Press. Spady, J.G. and Eure, J. (1991). Nation Conscious Rap. New York: PC International Press. Spitulnik, D. (1996). The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6 (2): 161–187. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1996.6.2.161. Williams, Q.E. (2016). Ethnicity and extreme locality in South African Hip Hop ciphas. In: Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, 1st e (ed. H.S. Alim, J.R. Rickford, and A.F. Ball). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Williams, Q.E. (2018). Multilingual activism in South African hip hop. Journal of World Popular Music 5 (1): 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.36672. Williams, Q.E. (2017). Bark, smoke and pray: multilingual Rastafarian-herb sellers in a Busy Subway. Social Semiotics 27: 474–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1334397.

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PART

II

Literacies and Textualities Across Time and Space

9

Ancient Literacy Practices and Script Communities

Alice Mandell Introduction Ancient texts from the ancient Near East (dating as far back as the early fourth millennium bce) tell us a great deal about the making, reading, interpretation, and other uses of texts. Scholars of the ancient Near East have also been developing strategies to better understand the people behind ancient writings through approaches that combine linguistic, visual, and material culture analysis. The study of ancient literacies is impacted by three key issues: (1) the limitations of the written evidence preserved in the archaeological record; (2) the limited range of people that are represented through texts (largely scribes, administrators, or elite men); and (3) the limited ways in which the textual record reflects the literacy practices of ancient people.1 Three approaches can help us to push past these challenges, to better understand ancient literacies: New Literacy Studies (NLS), situated learning and the Community of Practice approach (CoP), and the multimodality perspective regarding the analysis of texts. These approaches move the study of ancient texts beyond linguistic or literary analysis, to a much more nuanced assessment of the broader literacies and literacy practices of ancient people in the Near East (see also Flamenbaum and George, this volume). These approaches pave the way for fresh perspective into how ancient texts elucidate the literacies of “script communities,” which are understood as communities engaging in shared literacy practices that are interconnected to the technologies, scripts, written language variety(/ies), and roles of writing in their particular community.2 1

See Halton and Svärd (2017) and Michel (2020) for recent explorations of the literacies of ancient women. The concept of a “script community” was developed to differentiate between written and spoken language practices (Houston 2008; Houston et al. 2003). For example, in the instance of “script death” a community no longer uses a writing system or script, yet might continue in their language practices. Houston, Baines, and Cooper defined “script community” as “a socially constituted group that uses and disseminates writing across

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A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

This chapter concludes with an overview of three ancient Near Eastern scripts (the Egyptian, cuneiform, and alphabetic scripts) that demonstrate how literacies in the ancient Near East were diverse and interconnected to different technologies, materialities, and roles of writing. We can apply the three approaches mentioned above to analyze diverse ancient Near Eastern corpora as portals into the literacies of diverse ancient script communities.

New Directions in the Study of Ancient Literacies The diverse written media that we see in the archaeological record speaks to the important role of writing in the ancient Near East, in particular, in royal, administrative, religious, and pedagogical contexts. Depictions and descriptions of the literacy practices of scribes are also helpful in understanding ancient literacy practices in a professional context. The question remains: how can we fill in the gaps in the inscriptional evidence for ancient literacies outside of these scribal or elite communities? The approaches outlined below advance the study of ancient literacies in two main ways: (1) they offer fresh perspective into the literacy practices behind the diverse forms and uses of writing that are attested in the material record; and (2) they pave the way for a more inclusive way to study ancient corpora as portals into a broader range of literacy practices, that were shared by scribes, palace and temple officials, and literate elites, but also by other people who are less well represented in the written record. Not all texts were made to be actively read, or even to communicate through their words. Some genres of writing were linguistically very simple or cryptic, were made to be hidden or were inscribed in inaccessible locations, or were made to be used (and sometime even destroyed) in ritual performance.3 The approaches below therefore address the importance of balancing the study of a text’s words with other facets of textual design, as well as its lived and used context, to the degree possible. All of these facets of ancient writings are critical for enhancing our understanding of ancient literacy practices and the communities that such texts represent.

The New Literacy Studies Approach

The first approach, New Literacy Studies (NLS) explores literacy as a phenomenon situated in particular social and cultural settings (Barton et al. 2000; Gee 2015). Literacy practices (“what people do with literacy”) are practices where people engage with, encounter, and talk about texts (Barton and Hamilton 2000, p. 7). Such practices are interconnected with the diverse contexts in which texts are made, used, and valued (Barton et al. 2000; Scribner and Cole 1981; Street 1984). “Literacy events” are any engagement where people interact with texts, or where texts and their content, meaning, and purpose are focal to a moment of interaction (Heath 1983). This extends our study of literacy practices beyond the mere production and reading of texts, to their uses in social spaces and any talk about them.4 By adopting an NLS perspective, we are better positioned to study a script community, namely,

generations through apprenticeship and other modes of training” (Houston et al. 2003, p. 431, n. 2). Houston later defines a script community, drawing upon the situated learning framework, as “a social group committed to learning, using, and transmitting a writing system” (Houston 2004, p. 235). 3 See Hogue (2021), Levtow (2012), Mandell (2022), Mandell and Smoak (2017, 2019), Richey (2021), Smoak (2019), and Watts (2013). 4 See Ahearn (2001) and Besnier (1995).

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the people using shared literacy practices connected to a specific script and its technologies, who used and valued texts for similar functions.

Community of Practice Approach to Study Script Communities

The second approach, which stems from the framework of situated learning in a community of practice (CoP), helps us to theorize how ancient script communities developed and reproduced themselves. Situated learning describes the process of knowledge acquisition and transmission but also of membership in a CoP (Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 29). CoPs emerge from a domain of interest; a community made up of people who engage with others based on their mutual interest and participation in this domain; and the practice, which entails the doing of their domain (that is the skills, processes of problem solving, knowledge about the domain, and discourse about the domain). The situated learning framework has been applied to the study of the ways that language practices are transmitted in a CoP, and how they evolve over time with the addition of new community members (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992; Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999; Eckert 2006). However, the diverse aspects of a group’s literacies afford a different set of practices than spoken language alone, and therefore necessitate a different mode of analysis.5 We can adapt the CoP framework to study the literacies of diverse communities using a shared script and written language for similar purposes. A group’s literacies are interconnected with the writing technologies of their script and written language tradition but also to the uses and values ascribed to writing in a given community. Texts also reflect ideologies and conventions about written language and literacies through the choices that people make in the scripts that they use, in their orthographic practices, and in the visual design of texts.6 When we turn to the literacies reflected in the ancient Near Eastern inscriptional record, it is important to remember that ancient people used, valued, and transmitted written languages in ways quite different from their uses of spoken language varieties. The people using scripts often engaged with written language in limited ways that were connected to their professions, offices, or to specific roles that writing played in their given communities, or to particular contexts.7 Membership in a “script community” meant learning and engagement with the conventions of the script and written language, but also technological, material, and embodied practices that were critical to the meaning of texts and their use (Houston 2004, 2008). Written languages learned through the transmission of a script did not always reflect the speech practices of the people behind ancient texts; moreover, written languages were also learned as a bundled part of a script tradition. (For example, Sumerian and Akkadian were transmitted along with the logo-syllabic cuneiform script throughout the Near East, where other languages were spoken.) The advantage of anchoring the study of ancient literacies in script communities is the fluidity of this model and its adaptability to differing bodies of epigraphic evidence in a script tradition (Houston 2008, pp. 236–240). A script community can encompass all people who use a script tradition over the longue durée (a more expansive unit of study) but can also be narrowed to the study of a smaller group using a script and associated set of literacy practices for a particular purpose or period. 5

The differences in speech and writing and associated practices have been explored in different ways in Basso (1974), Tannen (1982), Kress and van Leeuwen (2006, 2021), Olson (1996, 2016), and Sebba (2007, 2013, 2015). 6 Jaffe et al. (2012), Sebba (2007), and Sebba et al. (2012). 7 See the approaches in Piquette and Whitehouse (2013); Delnero and Lauinger (2015); Balke and Tsouparopoulou (2016); Boyes (2021a); Boyes et al. (2021); Steele and Boyes (2022); also Cleath et al. (2021).

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The Study of Texts as Multimodal Things

The third approach, the multimodality perspective, as applied to the study of texts, offers us a way to analyze the broader ways that texts communicate and engage their audiences. The premises are as follows: (1) texts are made up of various modes, which are “semiotic resources” that can include their material, visual, haptic, spatial, and linguistic properties;8 (2) these modes are interconnected with each other in the space of a text; (3) the properties of texts are also interconnected with the broader conventions of the visual and material culture of a given group; (4) people access and engage with texts in diverse ways, depending on their ability to analyze and interpret the different modes in texts, but also based on the socio-spatial location in which they are used, displayed, and engaged with (a.k.a. their “site of display”).9 This approach calls for a more nuanced and inclusive perspective on the diverse ways that people engage with writing and textual media, through language-based modes of texts, but also through their layout and composition and their other visual design elements, as well as their material and sensorial properties.10 It also considers how ancient audiences engaged with, used, and interpreted texts based upon their socio-spatial contexts, and how changes in their media and display impacted their meaning.11 Another implication of this approach is that it extends our understanding of “reading” to a broader set of engagements with texts, including interactions between authors, texts, and diverse audiences, who have a range of literacies. We might therefore extend the principle of “co-authorship” from conversation-based exchanges to interactions between texts and audiences (Goodwin 1986). Reading or other engagement with texts was “not a passive activity” but rather “a form of re-contextualization” based on the audience’s experiences, and we can add, literacies (Duranti 1986, p. 244). The crafting of a text and the act of writing in the ancient world was often conditioned by a text’s intended audiences; moreover, its lived meaning was impacted by what audiences brought to their experience of the text and how they used it.

Ancient Texts, Literacies, and Script Communities Together, the three approaches outlined above enhance our ability to study ancient script communities and their literacies through the written record that they left behind. Shifting the focus of the study of ancient texts from the language practices of speech communities to the literacies of script communities (using the CoP framework) behind ancient texts has several advantages. 1. Using the script community as a locus of study reframes the study of texts from the study of written language conventions, alone, or even the speech communities potentially behind texts, to the study of how ancient communities used, viewed, and encountered texts, and, in so doing, shaped their script and written language traditions. 2. The CoP framework’s focus on shared practices and on the transmission of this knowledge highlights a broader range of literacy practices that were critical to

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A mode is “a socially shaped and culturally given resource for meaning making” (Kress 2017, p. 60). Modes serve a representational and communicative function, and they are community-specific and situational (Kress 2017, pp. 64–65). 9 See the approaches to texts as visual media in Kress and van Leeuwen (2006, 2021); Kress (2010); and Jewitt (2017); also the discussion of the interactive nature of a “site of display” in Jones (2017). 10 See for example, Mandell (2018, 2022a); Mandell and Smoak (2017, 2019); and Smoak and Mandell (2019). 11 Hogue (2019, 2021); Levtow (2012); Mandell (2021); Smoak (2019); and Watts (2013).

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ancient script communities, which included linguistic, but also technological, material, and embodied practices critical to the production and transmission of scripts and written media. 3. The script community model includes the literacies of a broader range of people using a particular script and writing system. Methodologically, it pushes the study of texts past the literate/non-literate binary that has dominated much of the study of ancient texts. 4. The script community model is malleable and descriptive, rather than prescriptive, in its application. It can be used for both the diachronic and synchronic analysis of ancient literacies. It can be adapted to study macro-trends spanning historical periods, or synchronic phases of a writing system that are shared by multiple script communities, or to differentiate the unique literacy practices of people within a script community, or to examine intra-group literacies. 5. This approach also paves the way for a more nuanced analysis of texts that considers their multimodality and how they communicated meaning in diverse ways to ancient audiences beyond their words or their audience’s ability to read and write, in the conventional sense.

Egyptian, Cuneiform, and Alphabetic Literacies and Script Communities By way of review, the first evidence for writing (that is, conventionalized marks used to express a specific language) in human history comes from the late fourth millennium bce:12 the cuneiform script from Mesopotamia and the hieroglyphic and hieratic scripts in Egypt, whereas the early linear alphabetic script (the ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets), developed in the early second millennium.13 The textual, pictorial, and archaeological evidence of these three scripts can be used to study diverse script communities that developed their own conventions regarding the forms and functions of written language. The overview of these ancient Near Eastern script communities demonstrates how the three approaches outlined above can be used to explore a range of literacy practices, beyond the practices of reading and writing.

The Evidence for Ancient Script Communities and Literacies Egyptian Literacies  Ancient Egyptian script communities left behind diverse types of texts that offer us a window into the diverse literacy practices connected to the Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts. These scripts were used to write different phases of the Egyptian language, but also for different text types (Baines 2007).14 Egyptian descriptions of the scribal profession in texts and in other material culture speak to the development of a shared identity (Ragazzoli 2019). For example, the Egyptian “Satire of Trades” is a humorous description of a range of professions. It opens as an instruction from a father, Dua-Kheti, to his son, Pepy, who is being sent to scribal school. Dua-Kheti lists 12 For an explanation of what distinguishes writing from spoken language or from marking systems, see Coulmas (2003, pp. 1–17; 18–36). 13 For an overview of the phases and materials used in these three script traditions, see Woods (2010). 14 Hieroglyphics and hieratic were used side-by-side from the earliest phases of Egyptian writing (ca. 3200 bce) and onwards; demotic was used from the seventh century bce onwards to write Late Egyptian.

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ancient literacy practices and script communities  163

several professions and argues that the profession of scribe is superior to all others because it will offer Pepy a life that is autonomous and prestigious (following Lichtheim 1997): See, there’s no profession without a boss, Except for the scribe; he is the boss. Hence if you know writing, It will do better for you Than those professions I’ve set before you, Each more wretched than the other.

There are also figurative representations of scribes doing their work (Figure 9.1), as well as preserved writing implements that are informative about Egyptian scribal script communities (Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.1  The Seated Scribe (4th Dynasty; ca. 2620–2500 bce).15 Photo (C) Art Resource.

Figure 9.2  18th Dynasty Scribal Palette with Two-Ink Wells (BM EA5512). © The Trustees of the British Museum. 15 

https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010006582.

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Additionally, inscriptional and material evidence in Egypt also speaks to the literacies of diverse people, including royal literate elites, administrators, ritual specialists, and artisans, and other people who engaged in literacy practices, who were not scribes (Allon and Navratilova 2017; Pinarello 2015). Literacies beyond scribal communities are also evident in the creation of texts in craft production and in diverse uses of graffiti (Davies and Laboury 2020). For example, the epigraphic evidence at the New Kingdom site of Deir el-Medina, which include papyri and ostraca, but also graffiti on rocks and structures, highlights the literacy practices of people creating the elite tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens (Haring 2006, 2018). Cuneiform and Its Script Communities  The cuneiform script (“wedge-shaped” writing), which was used over three millennia in the Near East by diverse script communities, was a way of writing by impressing a stylus into clay. While first used to write Sumerian in the early fourth millennium bce, it was adapted to produce texts in other languages by diverse script communities who adapted this script, and its ink and clay-based technology, for their own communicative needs (e.g., Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, and Old Persian). Our best direct evidence for the literacy and educational practices connected to this script come from scribal contexts: the depictions of scribes and descriptions of their work, and the texts that they used to transmit their literacies. For example, in the Neo-Assyrian Period, royal reliefs document the work of scribes who participated in military campaigns (Figure 9.3). The relief in Figure 9.3 portrays two scribes who use different writing materials: the leftmost scribe holds a stylus and a clay tablet; the scribe next to him is writing using ink on a leather scroll (Taylor 2011). These two scribes show the important roles that both cuneiform (writing the Neo-Assyrian dialect of Akkadian) and the alphabetic script (writing Aramaic) played in the Neo-Assyrian empire. Cuneiform texts, which reflect a scribal perspective, describe the life, training, and genealogies of scribes. For example, edubba (‘tablet house’ in Sumerian) literature describes aspects of the life of scribes, and includes references to educational practices (Sjöberg 1976); such texts date to the Old Babylonian Period, but may be descriptive of practices that

Figure 9.3  Neo-Assyrian Period Scribes: A Cuneiform Scribe and an Alphabet Scribe. Nimrud, Central Palace Wall Relief Scene (BM 118882). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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ancient literacy practices and script communities  165

precede this period (George 2005). The following passage describes a day in the life of a writer in training. “Schooldays” (Kramer 1949, p. 205, lines 1–10) “Schoolboy, where did you go from earliest days?” “I went to school.” “What did you do in school?” “I read my tablet, ate my lunch, prepared my tablet, wrote it, finished it; then my prepared lines were prepared for me (and in) the afternoon, my hand-copies were prepared for me. Upon the school’s dismissal, I went home, entered the house, (there) was my father sitting.”

The archaeology of Nippur and other cities with robust local scribal presences in this period indicates that scribal training took place in homes and was limited to a few students per master scribe (Charpin 2010; Robson 2001). Educational materials found in the archaeological record include exercises in cuneiform-sign writing, exercises in creating sign and lexical lists, mathematic texts, letters, contracts, and literary texts (Delnero 2020; Kleinerman 2011; Veldhuis 2014). Similarities in the types of texts used in education (sign lists, lexical lists, mathematical texts, proverbs, and a range of inherited literary compositions), in the range of tablet sizes, forms, and shapes, in the formatting and range of texts inscribed in this script, and in the written language and orthographic conventions of writers, but also in the practices of storing tablets speak to the transmission of shared literacy practices in diverse scribal communities in Mesopotamia but also throughout the Near East.16 The differences in the skill levels reflected in these tablets also enables scholars to reconstruct tiers of scribes and administrators based on their knowledge of and skill writing in cuneiform, and to understand the forging of scribal identities in localized cuneiform communities (Delnero 2016; Robson 2011; Veldhuis 2011). Differences in the forms and functions of cuneiform text types also speak to highly localized literacy practices that were rooted in local communicative needs and ideologies about writing and can be used to differentiate different subsets of cuneiform script communities.17 There is also textual evidence for the use and knowledge of cuneiform outside of explicitly scribal contexts. For example, 23,500+ tablets discovered at Kanesh (Kültepe) in Anatolia dating to the early second millennium bce reflect the literacies of a community of Assyrian merchants (Larsen 2015). This script community used a more narrowed inventory of cuneiform signs and word dividers, related to their use of this script, to write letters and create contracts. These Old Assyria and Kanesh letters reflect both the business concerns of families separated between Assyria and Kanesh and issues of domestic life, but also elucidate the literacies of women who played an important economic role (Michel 2020). Another example of a group that adapted the cuneiform script for their highly localized literacy practices can be found in the cuneiform-writing scribes of the Levant in the midfourteenth century bce. During this period, Canaano-Akkadian was the written scribal code that was used in diplomatic letters to the Egyptian court. The Canaanite Amarna Letters are a group of approximately 350 diplomatic letters and letter fragments, which

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Charpin (2010); Crisostomo (2019); Radner and Robson (2011); Ryholt and Barjamovic (2019); Taylor (2011); and Velduis (2014). 17 See, for example, the analysis of tablet design and layout as a window into different scribal communities in Fleming and Démare-Lafont (2009); Waal (2015); Vita (2015); Lauinger (2019); van den Hout (2021); and Mandell (2024, forthcoming).

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were discovered at the ancient site of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), Egypt. Cuneiform letters operated as communicative exchanges between elites during this period, but also served as a form of diplomatic currency in international exchanges and diplomacy (Feldman 2006). The Canaanite Amarna Letters provide valuable information about the unique literacy practices of scribes trained in the cuneiform script in this period of Canaanite and Egyptian relations, who wrote on behalf of Levantine rulers. Their letters stand out from what other scribes in the broader Near East were writing in this same period, including in their diplomatic letters to the Pharaoh. The written language of the letters, Canaano-Akkadian operated as a cuneiform-based scribal code that reflects the literacies of scribal communities in Canaan who engaged in written communication with Egypt (Mandell 2022b, 2024, forthcoming). It reflects orthographic conventions from an earlier phase of Akkadian (the Old Babylonian period of scribalism), and the impact of the morphology and syntax of the scribes’ own spoken languages.18 Scribes also wrote occasional words and phrases in Canaanite and in Egyptian in these letters using phonemic spellings. Common elements in the Canaanite Amarna Letters speak to a shared understanding of the form and formulae appropriate in a diplomatic letter. For example, similar greeting formulae and politeness language (“honorifics”) points to similar training practices for scribes, with some regional variation (Mynářová 2007). Moreover, the use of Middle Babylonian forms in the introductions of letters speaks to the pragmatic force of this register of written language in letters to the Pharaoh. This register was critical in the negotiation of Canaanite political identity, but also to the footing (or alignment) of individual rulers in their negotiations with Egypt and in their specific requests to the Pharaoh (Agha 2005, p. 40). There is also much variation in the Canaanite Amarna Letters that points to the development of regionally-specific inscriptional practices, but also of other facets of letter making (Lauinger 2019; Mandell 2024, forthcoming; Vita 2015). Moreover, the letters also speak to the creativity of individual scribes to get their message across to their scribal audiences in Egypt through multimodal linguistic and visual strategies. Canaanite scribes used code-alternation (linguistic and orthographic variation), a range of scribal marks, spatial cues, but also structural devices, such as repetition and parallelism to add nuance and depth to these letters (Mandell 2022b, 2024, forthcoming). Such features also encoded metadiscursive information about how these letters were to be held, read, and accessed, about the relative hierarchy of importance of sections of letters, and even about the scribe’s own training and identity. Only cuneiform scribes had the range of training required to fully access the tiers of meaning encoded in these tablets. The multimodality of El-Amarna Letter (EA) 147 demonstrates how a Canaanite scribe harnessed features particular to scribal practices in Tyre to negotiate the power relations between Abimilki and his powerful overlord, the Pharaoh. The broader language of this letter is the Canaano-Akkadian scribal code, however, the scribe also employs code-alternation, comprising linguistic and orthographic variation and scribal marks (Mandell 2024, forthcoming). In the passage below, the scribe frames the exchange between the two elites as if it were a face-to-face conversation through linguistic and visual strategies, through the employment of code-alternation (marked in bold) and scribal “gloss” marks (double wedges, which are marked below by \\). 18 Canaano- or Canaanite Akkadian has also been described as continuum of local dialects of Akkadian; a mixed language; a logographic system used to write Canaanite; and a stabilized, scribal interlanguage. See Andrason and Vita (2014); Baranowski (2016); von Dassow (2004); Izre’el (2012); and Rainey (1996).

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EA 147: 35b-40 (Abimilki; Tyre)19 e-nu-ma 36iq-bi LUGAL be-li-ia \\ ku-na 37a-na pa-ni ÉRIN.MEŠ GAL ù iq-bi 38ÌR-du a-na be-li-šu \\ ia-a-ia-ia 39a-na muh-hi ga-bi-dì-ia muh-hi \\ .sú-ri-ia40 ˘ ˘ ˘ ˘ ú-bal a-ma-ta5 LUGAL be-li-ia 35b

“When the king, my lord said \\ ‘Prepare for the arrival of the great army,’ then the servant said to his lord \\ ‘Yea, yea, yea!’ On my stomach and on my back I bear the word of the king, my lord.”

In this excerpt, the Pharaoh orders Abimilki to “prepare” for the arrival of his army, using a Canaanite verb, and Abimilki responds using an Egyptian exclamation. The scribe created parallelism in this passage that is both linguistic and visual. Each clause begins with verb of speech in Akkadian (iqbi ‘he said’); next, the scribe identifies the speaker, respectively the Pharaoh and Abimilki. The scribe then employs a scribal mark, a double cuneiform wedge; this is followed by direct speech, whereby the rulers “speak” in each other’s language. The scribe spells out two words that represent the languages used by these two rulers using phonemic spellings: the verb ku-na is a Canaanite imperative, while ia-a-ia-ia is an exclamation in Egyptian.20 Here we can see the unique literacy practices of this scribe, but also the impact of the script community at Tyre. The use of the two wedges is characteristic of the scribal marking system used at Tyre; scribes in other areas of Canaan typically only use one-wedge gloss marks. Such scribal marks (known as gloss marks) are not read linguistically as words in the text, but can encode metadiscursive information about the following words. In the Canaanite Amarna Letters, scribes typically use such wedge marks to signal words that are not a part of the Canaano-Akkadian scribal code, or to indicate the order of reading of cuneiform signs (for example to indicate to a reader that signs from one line of text “overflow” to another tablet line). In this text, the Tyre scribe is using these scribal marks to indicate that ku-na and ia-a-ia-ia are foreign words to the habitual Canaano-Akkadian code, but also signal that these words are quotes in Canaanite and Egyptian. As this example shows us, rather than approaching these letters as works between kings, we might consider them as crafted, scribal artifacts that reflect the multimodal strategies of Canaanite scribes to reach out to their scribal peers in Egypt. The writer of EA 147 employed linguistic, orthographic, but also visual parallelism, through the repeated signs and scribal marks, to highlight this critical passage in the letter. Indeed, the glosses and direct speech are placed in succession like a live “question and answer” session. Code-alternation works in this letter as a mode to bridge the geographic and linguistic gulf between a Canaanite king and his Egyptian overlord, to create a moment where they interact directly in the space of a letter. The Early Alphabet and Its Script Communities  The script communities that developed and transmitted the linear alphabetic script during the second and first millennium bce are less well

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For translations of the whole letter, see Moran (1992) and Rainey (2015). See Moran (1992, pp. 233, 234, n. 8); also Albright (1937, p. 197, n. 4.) There is one additional Canaanite gloss in this passage: *zḫr > ṣu’ru, ṣūru ‘back.’ 20

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understood than script communities using the Egyptian and cuneiform scripts.21 The earliest agreed upon Early (or Proto-) Alphabetic inscriptions discovered in Egypt (ca. eighteenth century bce), are thought to have been influenced or inspired by the Egyptian writing system (Haring 2021).22 The early alphabetic script used a limited range of consonantal signs, which differentiated this script from contemporary scripts. Whereas the Egyptian and cuneiform scripts employed a broader range of signs (syllabic signs, phonemic signs, and also semantic classifying signs), the parent alphabet script was unique in its use of signs that represented a particular phonemic value. Moreover, the phonemic value of each grapheme developed through the process of acrophonic writing, meaning that the sound value of the letter derived from the pictographic and semantic meaning of what it represented.23 Although scholars are still debating about the identities of the people behind this script tradition and the underlying reasons for its use and transmission, the epigraphic evidence indicates that this script spread and was adapted by diverse groups for their own purposes throughout the second millennium bce, presumably by speakers of diverse Semitic language varieties.24 The variation in the forms, number of letters (or better graphemes), and different alphabetic orders also speaks to highly localized uses of this script.25 The material evidence for the linear alphabetic script also speaks to literacies that were highly variable and decentralized, and there is no compelling evidence that it was adopted or used by royal families or state bureaucracies until the first millennium bce (Rollston 2010; Sanders 2009). In the first several hundred years, the linear script is mainly attested on inscribed objects and to create short personal texts, many with seemingly ritual importance. The use of this script in graffiti—or in inscriptions set in tombs and temples—suggests that this script played an important role and was used as a marker of identity. The one clear exception is the adaption of the principle of this script to cuneiform technologies and literacy practices. Scribes in the kingdom of Ugarit developed a cuneiform alphabet, harnessing extant literacy practices involving cuneiform writing, to write in their own language, and to create texts that reflect local religious, economic, political, and interpersonal communicative needs (Hawley et al., 2012; Boyes 2021b). At the end of the second millennium bce, there is a change in literacy practices corresponding to the break down in the institutions that promulgated and supported cuneiform scribal communities: the linear alphabetic script becomes the dominant script used in the Levant, whereas the cuneiform scripts are no longer used locally. This phase of the script, which becomes more standardized, is connected to the adoption of the script by elites in the Levant. It is accordingly classified in various ways, as a Phoenician script (due to the location of the earliest standardized inscriptions) (Rollston 2010, p. 19), but also as a “transnational (koine-) alphabetic script standard” (Lehmann 2020, p. 76) to describe its use among diverse speech and script communities. 21 22

For third millennium evidence for the origins of this script, see Puech (2015). See also Goldwasser (2011), Hamilton (2014), Koller (2018), Mandell (2020), Rolston (2010), and Sass (2005).

For example, the name of the letter β in Greek βετα (beta) starts with β. This grapheme and its sound value derive from an earlier form, used first by West Semitic speaking people who developed this script. In their writing system, they used the image of a structure or ‘house’ to represent the word ‘house’ in West Semitic (*baytu); this word in Semitic begins with the consonant /b/, so this sign was then used to represent the sound /b/ and to spell words with the phoneme /b/. 24 For a summary of critical debates and new approaches see Mandell (2020). See also Koller (2018, 2021). 23

There were at least two alphabetic orders (hl ḥm and abgd); and there was variation in the number of graphemes in both the linear and cuneiform scripts (40+ letters in Egypt; 29 in the Old South Arabian script; 27 and 30 in the cuneiform alphabet used at Ugarit) (Lehmann 2012).

25

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Throughout the first millennium bce, the period of the alphabetization of the Near East and Mediterranean, diverse script communities developed their own local derivations of this script and their own orthographic conventions to write local languages (for example, to write texts in written forms of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Phoenician, as well as written Transjordanian languages) (Rollston 2010, pp. 20–46). Regional writing systems derived from the early linear alphabetic script also became interconnected to geo-political, linguistic, religious, but also to scribal identities (Schniedewind 2013, 2019). The linear, alphabetic script also gained currency outside of the Levant, crossing linguistic, geo-political and cultural boundaries. For example, the Aramaic script and written Aramaic language were adopted by the Neo-Assyrian empire for administration in its western empire, which led to the spread and standardization of this specific script tradition. The linear script was also adopted in the Greek-speaking world by the eighth century bce, with localized variations, and emerged as a more standardized script by the fifth century bce (Parker and Steele 2021; Sass 2005). This script family, with its innovation of adapting certain graphemes to represent vowels, is the ancestor of the Roman alphabetic script still used today. Unfortunately, we do not have as clear-cut archaeological evidence for scribal training or the educational practices of script communities using the linear alphabet in the second and even the first millennium bce in the same way that we have for other contemporary scripts. Scholars use the variation in the language varieties, orthographies, scribal marks and metadiscursive devices, but also the ideological positions reflected in ancient texts written in this script to reconstruct ancient speech and script communities. Scholars also reconstruct alphabetic literacies from textual artifacts, increasingly evaluating the media, form, and design of ancient inscriptions to better understand shared literacies practices in text-making and written language use. Evidence for the literacies of neighboring script communities, but also of scribal communities dating to later periods, can also be used to fill in the gaps in our understanding of alphabetic literacies and literacy practices.26 We can complement this historical and language based approach with the approaches outlined above, which are particularly helpful in reconstructing the script communities behind early alphabetic inscriptions. The following analysis of the multimodality of an inscribed and decorated vessel from the site of Lachish demonstrates how even short and broken inscriptions can be used to better understand the literacies and script communities behind early alphabetic inscriptions. The Lachish Ewer dates to the thirteenth century bce, a period of heightened Egyptian activity in the southern Levant, and at Lachish. This vessel is inscribed with an early alphabetic inscription and there are several scenes that depict a procession of animals and at least three depictions of a tree framed by two horned animals, iconography that many associate with the goddess Asherah (Figure 9.4). This vessel was found broken in a pit just outside of the eastern wall of the Fosse Temple III (1350–1200 bce).27 One sherd of this vessel was discovered inside the temple on the sanctuary floor, which suggests that the vessel was originally placed inside the temple (Phase III). What is left of this inscription is a dedicatory formula that references a gift and a goddess: mtn . šy [xxx]ty ʾlt: ‘A gift of tribute’ (or ‘Gift: A Tribute’) [for the La]dy the goddess of […].28 The text is a short one, and we know little about the people behind this vessel. Yet,

26

See for example Carr (2005, 2011); Koller (2021); Milstein (2016); Rollson (2010); Sanders (2016); Schniedewind (2013, 2019); Tov (2012); van der Toorn (2009); and Zahn (2020). 27 See Hestrin (1987) and Koch (2017). 28 See Mandell (2018, pp. 266–275) for a summary of interpretations.

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Figure 9.4  The Lachish Ewer. Courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Image from R. Hestrin, “The Lachish Ewer and the ’Asherah,” IEJ 37.4 (1987): 213.

we can still analyze this text in a way that gives us insight into the role of writing in the local, linear script in the southern Levant. This inscription was painted with a red-brown ink, before the vessel was fired, which indicates that it was a planned text designed specifically for the dedicatory function of this vessel. The layout of the text also suggests that its inscription was an intrinsic part of the vessel’s design and its purpose. The inscription floats slightly above animal and plant images. The term ʾlt, ‘goddess’ is inscribed above the tree and the two ibexes, operating as a linguistic and iconographic composite that signifies the deity. The vessel’s text and image decoration and the fact that it was inscribed pre-firing are also informative about the literacy practices of the people involved in crafting this vessel. They: (1) suggest deliberate coordination between the design of the text and iconography; and (2) suggest that there was a close working relationship between the potter and the text maker; another possibility is that the person who made and painted the figures on the vessel was the person who composed and painted this inscription. This inscription on this vessel also speaks to a script community at this site that used the linear alphabet for dedications in display objects for a local goddess. Scripts are not merely vehicles of language, but can be visual signifiers of identity (Unseth 2005). The script environment at Lachish was saturated with Egyptian writing; cuneiform was also a script used in the southern Levant during this period. And yet, the vessel maker (with the vessel owner) decided to write this dedicatory formula in the linear alphabetic script. The placement of the reference to the goddess above the tree and ibex image further suggests that this script and written local language were used to visually and linguistically connect this goddess to a local script community that used the linear alphabet (Mandell 2018, pp. 268–270). Once the Ewer was placed in the Fosse Temple, its very presence in this ritual space tells us that this

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script was deemed appropriate to stand as a visual signifier of the goddess, the worshiper that this vessel represented, and the script community associated with this script. All of this suggests that the linear alphabetic script operated as an in-group script at Lachish, one that worked to materialize dedications on ritual objects, but that also served as an icon of Canaanite identity.

Conclusions Ancient Near Eastern texts offer us a portal into the embodied, technological, material, and sociolinguistic knowledge that was a critical part of how literacy was used in the ancient Near East. Ancient literacies were interconnected to a range of engagement with the form, media, design, and linguistic modes of texts, but also with their contexts of creation, display, and use. Three approaches, namely, New Literacy Studies, the community of practice as an analytic tool, and a multimodal perspective, have paved the way for a reassessment of ancient literacies as socially situated practices involving diverse written media. Relocating the study of texts from the search for ancient speech communities to the examination of script communities allows us to consider a broader range of the people engaged in literacy practices and their diverse skills and uses for writing as reflected in the inscriptional record. Ancient Near Eastern script communities absorbed received traditions regarding written language use and its media through their membership and participation in practices connected to the making and use of texts; and they, in turn, left their imprint on written language practices and on the function and meaning of texts. This knowledge was local, specific, and ultimately passed down through the professional but also interpersonal relationships of diverse script communities, which included, but were not limited to, scribes.

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Moran, W.L. (1992). The Amarna Letters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University. Mynářová, J. (2007). Language of Amarna—Language of Diplomacy. Perspectives on the Amarna Letters. Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology. Olson, D.R. (1996). The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olson, D.R. (2016). The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness and Rationality. Cambridge University Press. Parker, R. and Steele, P.M. (eds.) (2021). The Early Greek Alphabets. Origin, Diffusion, Uses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinarello, M.S. (2015). An Archaeological Discussion of Writing Practice. Deconstruction of the Ancient Egyptian Scribe. London: Golden House. Piquette, K.E. and Whitehouse, R.D. (eds.) (2013). Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface and Medium. London: Ubiquity. Puech, É. (2015). Aux sources de l’alphabet: De quelques anciens témoignages en écriture alphabétique. In: Origins of the Alphabet: Proceedings of the First Polis Institute Interdisciplinary Conference (eds. C. Rico and C. Attucci), 73–123. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Radner, K. and Robson, E. (eds.) (2011). The Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ragazzoli, C. (2019). Scribes: Les artisans du Texte en Égypte Ancienne (1550-1000). Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Rainey, A.F. (1996). Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets. A Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by Scribes from Canaan, 1-4. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Rainey, A.F. (2015). The El-Amarna Correspondence: A New Edition of the Cuneiform Letters from the Site of El-Amarna Based on Collations of All Extant Tablets, 1 (ed. W.M. Schniedewind). Brill: Leiden. Richey, M. (2021). The media and materiality of Southern Levantine inscriptions: Production and reception contexts. In: Scribes and Scribalism (ed. M. Leuchter), 29–39. The Hebrew Bible in Social Perspective 1. London: T&T Clark. Robson, E. (2001). The tablet house: A scribal school in Old Babylonian Nippur. Revue d'Assyriologie et d’Archéologie Orientale 95: 39–66. Robson, E. (2011). The production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (eds. K. Radner and E. Robson), 557–576. Oxford: Oxford University. Rollston, C.A. (2010). Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel: Epigraphic Evidence from the Iron Age. Atlanta: SBL. Ryholt, K. and Barjamovic, G. (eds.) (2019). Libraries Before Alexandria: Ancient Near Eastern Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University. Sanders, S.L. (2009). The Invention of Hebrew. Chicago: University of Illinois. Sanders, S.L. (2016). From Adapa to Enoch: Scribal Culture and Religious Vision in Judea and Babylon. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sass, B. (2005). The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium: The West Semitic Alphabet Ca. 1150–850 BC. The Antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian Alphabets. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University. Schniedewind, W.M. (2013). A Social History of Hebrew: Its Origins through the Rabbinic Period. New Haven: Yale University. Schniedewind, W.M. (2019). The Finger of the Scribe: How Scribes Learned to Write the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University. Scribner, S. and Cole, M. (1981). The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard University. Sebba, M. (2007). Spelling as a Social Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. Sebba, M. (2013). Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts. International Journal of Bilingualism 17 (2013): 97–118. Sebba, M. (2015). Iconisation, attribution and branding in orthography. Written Language and Literacy 18: 208–227. Sebba, M., Mahootian, S., and Jonsson, C. (eds.) (2012). Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing: Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. New York: Routledge.

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Sjöberg, Å.W. (1976). The Old Babylonian eduba. In: Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth Birthday June 7, 1974 Assyriologial Studies 20, (ed. S.J. Lieberman), 159–179. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smoak, J. and Mandell, A. (2019). Texts in the city: Monumental inscriptions in Jerusalem’s urban landscape. In: Size Matters - Understanding Monumentality Across Ancient Civilizations (eds. F. Buccellati, S. Hageneuer, S. van der Heyden, and F. Levenson), 309–345. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag. Smoak, J.D. (2019). Wearing divine words: In life and death. Material Religion 5 (4): 433–455. Steele, P.M. and Boyes, P.J. (eds.) (2022). Writing around the Mediterranean: Practices and Adaptations. Contexts of and Relations Between Early Writing Systems 6. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Street, B.V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Taylor, J.H. (2011). Tablets as artefacts, scribes as artisans. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (eds. K. Radner and E. Robson), 5–31. Oxford: Oxford University. Tov, E. (2012). Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3e. Minneapolis: Fortress. Unseth, P. (2005). Sociolinguistic parallels between choosing scripts and languages. Written Language and Literacy 8: 19–42. van den Hout, Th. (2021). A History of Hittite Literacy: Writing and Reading in Late Bronze Age Anatolia (1650–1200 BC). Cambridge: Cambridge University. van der Toorn, K. (2009). Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. Cambridge: Harvard University. Veldhuis, N.C. (2011). Levels of literacy. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (eds. K. Radner and E. Robson), 68–89. Oxford: Oxford University. Veldhuis, N.C. (2014). History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition. Münster, Germany: Ugarit-Verlag. Vita, J.P. (2015). Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. von Dassow, E. (2004). Canaanite in Cuneiform. Journal of the American Oriental Society 124 (4): 641–674. Waal, W. (2015). Hittite Diplomatics. Studies in Ancient Document Format and Record Management. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Watts, J.W. (ed.) (2013). Iconic Books and Texts. London: Equinox Publications. Zahn, M. (2020). Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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10

Rethinking Translation and Transduction

Susan Gal Introduction Translating renders in one language-system what has been said or written in another. That, at least, is the most familiar definition. But virtually every aspect of that definition has been extended and re-thought. Language systems, in fact, need not be involved for the word translation to be used, as in the “translation of DNA to RNA to protein.” When languages are involved, their boundaries and unity are problematized, since there is also “translation” among different ways of speaking or writing, that is, different registers and genres of a single language, which are intertwined with translation between languages. Nor is translation a disembodied abstraction, as the common definition implies. Socially situated people translate, for specific purposes, in particular events and historical eras. How should one define the “what” that is translated? Sayings and writings are translated, but so are objects and practices: turning a book into a play; a gesture, such as a smile, into words; making academic medical research available for clinical use—the term “translation” has been applied in all these cases. We are dealing, most generally, with the myriad ways in which it is possible to change a cultural object, while keeping some aspect of it somewhat the same, and maintaining some connection to its previous form. This often produces an image or metaphor of movement. In English, movement is embedded in the term’s etymology: translatus from Latin meaning “carry across.” In other languages—e.g., Hungarian, Finnish, Latin, Tok Pisin, and sometimes English too—a word meaning turning or causing-to-turn is used, as in the above example of a book being “turned into” a play. Here too movement is implied. But no physical movement occurs in translating. Though metaphors in general are indispensable for understanding, the movement metaphor, in this case, leads us in the wrong direction. While attempting to capture simultaneous similarity and difference—the change that translating produces—it nevertheless hides the communicative processes involved. Dispensing with that metaphor, this chapter discusses the linguistic anthropological concepts and examples through which we can understand how the various aspects of translating are actually accomplished.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Analyzing translation as a communicative practice starts with comparison: In what ways is this a translation of that? For whom? And how mediated? What enables us to interpret a smile as similar to a description of it? Or to see the drama of Romeo and Juliet as somewhat the same as the ballet of that name? What is transformed and how is seeming similarity maintained? Any two texts (or utterances, objects, practices) have innumerable qualities and properties, many of which can be picked out as similar in some way, different in others. Indeed, similarity and difference do not inhere in the “things” themselves but are matters of judgment, based on comparison, and relative to those who judge, to their roles, particular situations, presumptions and projects (Goodman 1972). It is language ideologies that guide the interpretation of similarity and difference in semiotic (i.e., communicative) practices. Language ideologies are regimes of value, cultural principles, and tacit presumptions about signs. Language ideologies are partial in two senses: Partial because there are always other ideologies, always more than one way to translate. And partial—rather than impartial—in that they are the viewpoint of a social position, which they index, that is, allude to, evoke, or entail (the ways in which the use of “uprising” vs. “riots” may index two speakers’ different perspective on the same social events). They constrain what properties are in focus for interpreters in a social group, and in what ways signs of various kinds are seen to be changed (or not) by a new framing (Gal and Irvine 2019, pp. 85–111). Framings—the social construction of a phenomenon, providing an aid in interpretation—may unify otherwise disparate expressions as the “same.” Or, reframings may differentiate signs, depending on situational, institutional or historical context: For a child at play, a stick at one moment can be reframed as a sword at another; for adults, a compliment can be reframed, in retrospect, as having been ironic and hence really an insult. As we will see, the specifics of language ideologies vary across social groups. As part of such ideologies, understandings of what translation is also vary—often with high stakes for participants. A long-standing view of translation in the Western tradition follows John Locke’s Enlightenment philosophy. He thought of language—as do many today—as separate from the material world that it names and about which it makes statements that differ in grammatical organization across languages. Some of the most famous philosophical and literary discussions of translation have taken this abstract view, worrying about the fit between words and the world, and attempting exact matches of namings and grammar in translation. Despairing about the obvious lack of fit between categories across languages, they often came to the conclusion that translation is very difficult, or indeterminate, even impossible in principle (Benjamin [1923] 2004; Quine 1960). Yet, people who are multilingual in the most diverse languages do it all the time. Linguistic anthropologists explore this everyday accomplishment by focusing not only on grammar but on situated practice and assuming translation to be—like all other communicative activity—part of the social and material world and action in it, not separated from it. Naming and denotation always co-occur with, and rely on, further aspects of linguistic practice to establish meanings and effects: indexicality, poetic organization, genre conventions, registers in diverse domains (healing, bureaucracy, law), ritual performance, gestures, visual cues and material exchange accompanying speech, and the social consequences of talk, rather than only its denotation (Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Gumperz and Hymes 1972). Considered from this socially-embedded perspective, translation is less daunting. In the social study of language, it has become a truism that any utterance, indeed any piece of ongoing real-time, discursive practice, whether written or oral, may be endlessly quoted, cited, recited, imitated, parodied and otherwise reported or repeated in whole or in part. Each such citation picks out the segment as a chunk, making it a recognizable unit (technically called a text), as well as constructing its (re)framing and recontextualization (Bauman

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and Briggs 1990; Silverstein and Urban 1996). This potential to frame, chunk, and reframe expressive signs is a design feature of all communicative form. It has been dubbed citationality or intertextuality.1 Translation is a version of this potential. Thus, any translation—like any quotation—is simultaneously imitative and novel: an event-based and real-time iteration that is the same-but-different. But in what respects? Language ideologies enable participants to discern what features to focus on, in order to note what has changed about the segment and the new context, or to erase/ignore such difference. Put another way, translations are examples of Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981, p. 419) notion of dialogicality, that is, a way in which texts or segments of text echo or point to (index) other texts as presumed sources, while also anticipating (even partial) future repetitions. It is important that framing, paraphrasing, and translation are all metacommunicative processes, since they all act on and re-analyze communicative practices. As the American Pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce suggested in his theory of signs, this is part of all interpretation, and each case of interpretation (also called uptake) has its own agenda. Indeed, some have said that “understanding [itself] is translation” (Steiner 1975). Roman Jakobson (1959), inspired by Peirce, noted this deep connection, yet, he emphasized the difference between glossing (paraphrasing) of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language, and translation, as the rewording of verbal signs by means of some other language. Here I am emphasizing the similarities. The two are not only connected as similar meta-devices, but closely linked through the phenomenon often called “register,” which is also a metacommunicative device. Registers are styles of speaking—assemblages of speech variants—that are associated with types of persons and their typical tasks or practices, such as doctors, lawyers, politicians, preachers, jocks. In interaction, speakers use registers or register-fragments to enact (index) the roles and styles of such person-types (Agha 2007). In addition to styles of speaking, the notion of register can also be applied to multi-media signs—clothing, embodied stance, specific practices—and these, like linguistic forms, can also be reframed. With labels like “legalese” or “mother-in-law talk,”2 or “bureaucratic,” or “Valley Girl,” a register indexes a task or activity-type, a person-type, a social positionality, and what Bakhtin called a “form of thinking,” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 289). This leads to a key insight: We do not translate between languages, but rather among registers or genres of speech, writing, and other expressive practices. When a genre or register of a text is not matched or cannot be matched in the new context (linguistic or cultural), then translating creates new registers and genres in the receiving language-and-culture that index (or even echo) the source language and its knowledge categories, creating similarities between source and target.3 The boundaries of languages then seem to shift. English medical registers, imitated over centuries from Latin and Greek, are heard now as English, yet sometimes require cross-register re-translation into colloquial English for patients. 1

  An early discussion of this potential for iteration in language was presented by Jacques Derrida (1988 [1972]); it was clarified and extended by Bauman and Briggs (1990), in Silverstein and Urban (1996) and in Agha and Wortham (2005) who all showed how it works in social life, adding to Derrida’s point—as I do here—that each iteration is contextually motivated, with goals that are different from the previous iteration. The ubiquity of this process makes it very difficult to identify “originals.” Richard Bauman (2004), John Lucy (1993) and Constantine Nakassis (2013) show the various versions of this potential that have long been part of the linguistic anthropological tradition. 2   “Mother-in-law language” is a subset of the lexicon used by men in Dyrbal and other Australian aboriginal languages to show respect when speaking in the presence of their mother-in-law (Dixon 1971). 3   This view rejects and replaces an old and confusing distinction in translation studies between “domesticating” a text and “foreiginizing” it.

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If translation works through registers, then the understanding of translation should not be limited to denotation, as in word-for-word or exact grammatical equivalences. These are, in any case, fairly rare. Instead, Michael Silverstein (2003) introduced the notion of transduction to capture the analogical transfer of social meanings—i.e. metacommunicative ones—rather than only denotational, that is, lexical and semantico-grammatical ones, across languages and media. Social meanings are ones that are not explicitly stated, but nevertheless identify—with indexical signals like accent, style of talk (i.e. register), gesture or even clothing—the speaker’s identity or stance, the relationship among participants, and often the nature of the situation. Silverstein likened the transfer of social meaning to the conversion of electrical energy into mechanical energy. One starts by identifying a system of indexical signaling in one cultural-linguistic site (one kind of energy) and finds a way of “doing” a signaling of roughly the same sort in another language or medium (another kind of energy). Perfect conversion is never possible, but some transfer of indexical meaning (energy) occurs. Film dubbing provides a narrowly linguistic example. How should an American Southerner, talking to Northerners in a Civil War movie sound in Turkish dubbing? The stereotyped American identities and the speech registers that signal them would have to be reproduced by a different set of signs indicating (somewhat) analogous relationships in Turkish language-culture. Deference and politeness are other examples where analogical solutions can reproduce, with different linguistic materials, similar social interactional and cultural effects. However, this presumes that the goal of transduction is to find existing materials in the target language in order to reach (partial) equivalence in social meanings between culturallinguistic systems. That is rarely the case. Rather, the process is enormously generative and inventive, as my extended examples in the section on “Transduction of Practices and Knowledges: Ethnographic Examples” will show. It often changes the receiving language. And it always involves cultural practices as well as linguistic ones. One kind of practice is taken as a model for creating/inventing another one, achieving similar effects in a different linguistic system or organizational realm, which is thereby transformed. I suggest we call this a transduction of practices, including knowledge practices, created in target registers by analogy to ideas/effects in source languages-cultures. Transductions sometimes incite struggles for authority over their creation and the far-reaching social and epistemological transformations that result. This becomes clear if we ask: What are the purposes of the transductions, what institutions and person-types create them, in what historical moment, for whose value or benefit? What is the social, cultural or epistemological effect? This holds for transductions that occur across registers and institutions within a single language-system—legal vs. spiritual effects, for instance—but also across languages (Gal 2015), as the detailed examples in the following sections will show. The goal of this chapter is to rethink translation as a situated, everyday activity, for monolingual speakers as well as for multilinguals; one that is never only about language. It is a multi-modal practice that changes epistemologies—ways of knowing—as it transforms languages and other expressive forms, while very often seeming to leave them the same as ever. Similar-yet-different. It only rarely creates exact equivalences; most often it generates new meanings and new social arrangements for the receiving expressive forms. Like many other metacommunicative practices, translation and transduction occur as much within what are normatively defined as “languages,” as across them. Most often, transductions occur in circumstances of asymmetrical power-relations: in colonialism, or transnational movements; or in universalizing projects such as Christian missionizing, biomedicine, and humanitarian aid. In these sites, translations/transductions are part of speakers’ struggles about authoritative communication and ways of knowing. The section below on “Complementary

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Languages and Registers Intertwined: Ethnographic Examples” takes up the complementary relationships between languages and registers with shifting boundaries. The section entitled “Transduction of Practices and Knowledges: Ethnographic Examples” explores how transductions (analogies) produce new meanings across languages, registers and modalities. The section “Future Directions” suggests just that: future directions. It notes as well that anthropology and linguistics are unavoidably translational in the doing of fieldwork and the presentation of results. They are so in another sense too: we aim to turn other people’s practices into our own ways of analyzing them, into our analytical metadiscourses.

Complementary Languages and Registers Intertwined: Ethnographic Examples The familiar image of someone translating a text between two languages already presumes that there are self-evident boundaries between internally unified languages. Jakobson’s distinction between intra-lingual paraphrasing and inter-lingual translation works best on the presumption of closed linguistic systems each serving monolingual communities for all expressive purposes. But comparative evidence shows that there is much variation in language boundaries and ideologies about them. This section provides a set of examples showing several ways in which registers are created by translations and act as mediators across language boundaries, transforming languages and their social functions, while the languages seem to stay the same. Boundaries between linguistic systems are not simply the results of grammatical differences between languages. Often, boundaries are created and maintained by centralizing ethnonational institutions like standardization, which is likely to be enforced in schools, on radio or television, and in various public institutions (Woolard 1999). In Europe, for instance, sets of villages on either side of today’s Germany/Netherlands border understand each other very well, speak nearly identical dialects, yet orient to different standard languages. One side is said to speak a dialect of Dutch; the other a dialect of German. The exact location of that border is not a linguistic but a political matter and has changed historically. There are such dialect continua in many places around the globe. The practices of translation, in combination with the ideology of standardization, presume and help create the internal unity and equivalences that standardizers seek. As Naoki Sakai (1977, p. 2) put it: “[I]t is not because two different language unities are given that we have to translate (or interpret) one text into another; it is because translation articulates languages … that we may postulate the two unities of the translating and the translated languages as if they were autonomous closed entities,” (emphasis in original). For Sakai, standardized languages are “unities.” He stresses that ideology projects unity and bounded equivalence between languages as though these features pre-existed the translation projects that in part create them. But what if languages in a region are not “autonomous” in social function? What if they are complementary to each other, each one used for separate purposes, rather than each one covering all possible uses? This was not unusual in many world regions in the nineteenth century, before widespread standardization of languages. For instance, the Indian subcontinent is a highly multilingual and multiethnic region that has been politically united as a federal republic since 1950, but has never had a single language. There are, instead, at least twenty-two languages, each with many millions of speakers, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. Historically, however, these languages did not all serve the same social purposes.

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182  susan gal

Lisa Mitchell (2009) provides a thought-provoking historical vignette from that region: “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, depending on where they lived, someone in southern India might have found it perfectly natural to compose an official letter in Persian, record a land transaction in Marathi, study music in Telugu, send a personal note to a relative in Tamil and perform religious ablutions in Sanskrit, all in the course of a single day,” (2005, p. 449). Those not comfortable with the language required for the specific task could engage a specialist to perform the function—whether religious, administrative or personal, as in the writing of a letter to a friend or relative. Languages were recognized as distinct, and one learned different languages for different functions. In Sakai’s terms the languages were not “articulated” with respect to each other, not commensurated, but ­complementary. Also, the choice of language was governed by the task rather than the identity of the interlocutors. Although everyone was multilingual in some combination of the region’s languages, no one used any single language for all social functions. Nor were they able to do so. Education was not universal, but those who went to school learned several languages, their scripts, and acquired some limited knowledge—musical, ceremonial, commercial—conventionally enacted and taught in that language. You learned how to do a task in one language, not in all of them. Languages were not tied to communities of speakers. Rather, multilingual communities of, say, one religion settled upon what language would be used in their ceremonies. The multiple languages—organized by task, or knowledge and context—worked as co-existing registers do for monolingual communities of speakers. Educational practices and ideologies changed over the course of the nineteenth century, with the introduction of the ideology of inter-translateability, that is, the idea that coexisting languages should serve identical social functions. A shift occurred away from lexicons arranged by topic and written in verse for easy memorization. In the new alphabetized lexicons, languages were presented as discrete and separable objects. They were arranged as word lists, showing three, six or sometimes as many as a dozen different languages lined up parallel to one another. Each language was allotted its own column, and each column was expected to contain a unique term for each idea that could be expressed in any of the other languages. This was a vivid form—a kind of a diagram—of the new ideal. Translation was one of the practices by which this parallelism was created and achieved, replacing complementarity. Ideas about what constituted “knowing” a language changed too. As recently as the early twentieth century, in India, it was accepted that the style of music today known as Carnatic music could only be learned through the Telugu language. But the Tamil music movement advocated learning music in Tamil, and the Tamil worship movement challenged the existing use of Sanskrit for rituals in temples. This of course would mean developing in Tamil registers that had not existed in it for teaching music and doing rituals. Intra- and inter-lingual processes were entwined, over time. Along the way, Tamil and later Telugu movements made languages signal the ethnolinguistic identities of speakers, rather than the nature of the task being accomplished. The role of English and colonialism were important in these transformations. South Indian literati and British colonial administrators, Mitchell notes, understood translation in very different ways. The term South Indians used for “translation” was more akin to adaptation, repetition, corroboration. In practice, it was re-tellings of tales in literary genres that people already knew well. The British bureaucracy, by contrast, was confused by lexicons that presented languages as complementary registers. They presumed inter-translateability, and they aimed to introduce new ideas and information from one language (English) into all the others, in which these same ideas and topics were usually not already named or expressed. Some south Asian scholars contributed by using English as a model for their own

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writings. Lisa Mitchell (2009, p. 185) shows how a distinguished Telugu writer in 1933 was “remaking Telugu into a more suitable medium for the direct and singular translation of English, and more generally European, ideas and concepts.” He gave the appearance of translating ideas that were already expressed in Telugu, but in fact, they were not. The process Mitchell describes among South Asian languages is familiar in many other regions, at least in broad outlines. The so-called “awakening” of ethnolinguistic national movements in nineteenth century eastern Europe, for instance, inspired writers there— those identifying as Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs and Serbs, for instance—to use the materials of their own languages to create scientific, literary and journalistic registers and genres, based closely on models from Latin, German, French and English, languages they had until then used for those purposes. A good example is the way Hungarian (bilingual) journalists created the genre of newspaper writing in nineteenth century Hungary based mostly on German examples (Gal 2014 [2001]). This required introducing new ideas about how to present information in headlines and articles. It required massive amounts of borrowing (e.g. Hungarian “sláger” from German ‘Schlager’ meaning hit song), invented words (Hungarian “alak” meaning ‘form,’ invented in the early nineteenth century), calques (word-for-word equivalents such as Hungarian “csendélet” meaning ‘still life’ from German “Stilleben” where “csend/Still” means ‘quiet’ and “élet/Leben” means ‘life’) and recastings of the semantic range of existing lexicon. This was not seen as an imposition, but rather a patriotic act that adopted the ideology of inter-translateability and laboriously made it a fact through practices: expanding and nationalizing languages, with the aim of making them functionally commensurate with the languages of globally more prestigious countries and empires (Pollock 2000). This was done by scholars and journalists who were multilingual, often in task-specific ways, as in Mitchell’s example. Registers historically derived by such intertextual transfers from one language to another were later perceived as “languageinternal,” creating connections between languages, or sometimes blurring boundaries between them, as the sources of lexicon and genre conventions were forgotten. Introducing a novel register is often only the first step in a series of further interpretive uses, each by speakers with somewhat different goals and projects; each re-use and reinterpretation of the register or genre changing it somewhat. In the medical domain, which is today a globalized expertise, intertextual practices involve such translational chains. For instance, workers in a Nepali AIDS program, in the 1990s, learning “internationally established knowledge” about the disease, learned it in English from a medical NGO with global reach, (Pigg 2001). In order to be effective throughout the country, however, many more people had to be taught about safety measures. Those who learned directly from the NGO were tasked with teaching more Nepali people to be health workers. Nepali teachers created a new register, consisting of English technical words they had learned from the NGO and they added Sanskritized neologisms. The foreign sources of the new terms were highlighted, providing authority for the information and objects distributed. However, in creating the new register, Nepali teachers were careful to avoid vernacular Nepali terms related to sex and health because to use these in the Nepali countryside would have embarrassed or even stigmatized the health workers. The sources of linguistic registers and related practices have been centers of attention in Tanzanian health care as well. But in this case there were heated debates about the medical terms and related practices. Biomedical practitioners, with high-tech testing, enact the diagnosis of a disease they call “malaria.” Traditional healers, working with a different set of careful procedures and ideas about bodies and illness, identify a disease they call “degedege.” As Stacey Langwick (2011) recounts, biomedical practitioners claim that these are the same; traditional healers insist they are not. The stakes are high for patients who wish to

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recover, and for practitioners and healers whose way of life will only survive if people continue to consult them. Central to both are epistemological struggles: conflicts about knowledge and whether or not there is a difference between the two names and their referents (the objects in the world that they name). Those names are embedded in registers that are both linguistic as well as material practices; they enact contrasting and competing knowledges. Moreover, such disputes are also embedded in political struggles about the authority to decide sameness and difference in medical translation. Much more is involved in translation, however, than careful choice of sources for new words or calques. Notice that in Carnatic music learned in Tamil, or German conventions of journalism turned into Hungarian, the knowledge practices were familiar to translators, while in Nepali AIDS prevention and Tanzanian diagnoses, new ideas and practices were at issue. That is why there was a focus on authority in both the latter cases. The unfamiliarity of translated material is even more striking in another global phenomenon, Christian missionary activity. A close look at one ethnographic example of Bible translation in the recent past is revealing about its ideological, linguistic and cultural–epistemological processes. I draw on the work of Bambi B. Schieffelin (1996, 2007, 2014) who tracked for twenty years (1975– 1995) the encounter between Protestant missionaries and Bosavi people living in the rainforest of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The small scattered communities practicing shifting cultivation were mostly egalitarian, monolingual in the Bosavi language, and non-literate, when engaged by a few white Australian missionaries. Bosavi people and these evangelical Protestants came to their interactions with strikingly different ideas about translation, language and its relation to thought, truth, and social relations. As Schieffelin’s richly detailed discussions reveal, the ideology of the missionaries—as of Christian missionaries for centuries—was focused on content. For them, as for other Protestant missionaries, everything one needed to know was already in the Bible, which had to be translated into the Bosavi language because the missionaries viewed the local language as the “shrine of the people’s soul” and the only route to converting them. Yet, the missionaries knew only Tok Pisin, the New Guinea lingua franca, and seemed uninterested in the Bosavi language and culture. As for the Bosavi people, there was no ideology of linguistic purism; they viewed language as malleable. Innovations were routine; they had historically incorporated into their language new words, songs and ideas from other groups. Since the missionaries could only convert directly those few men who understood Tok Pisin, they authorized the first converts to be pastors and to baptize others. Within a few years, the village was divided into Christian and non-Christian people and living places. The authorization from missionaries, along with the converts’ access to missionary goods and the literacy in Tok Pisin that the missionaries taught, introduced social hierarchy. This was also enacted in interactional form, as converts and potential converts listened passively at monologic sermons, a form of engagement quite different from the earlier preference for dialogic talk, simultaneity and overlap. It was during sermons that Bosavi converts/pastors, once they were able to read Tok Pisin, orally translated the Tok Pisin Bible into Bosavi. The translating of terms in some domains such as clothing was relatively easy, with linguistic borrowing from Tok Pisin, semantic expansion of existing lexicon and compounding Tok Pisin and Bosavi terms. Overall, this style of spontaneous translating continued for many years. The missionaries had acted on their policy that local language, which was valued, is separate from local culture, which was not, so Bosavi people could and should change their culture and transform themselves while still speaking the vernacular. Although innovations, additions and losses attributable to the influence of Tok Pisin and Christian styles of speaking were evident to outside observers over the years, Bosavi people “d[id] not describe

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their language as changing or different,” (Schieffelin 2014, p. S236, n.29). Yet, as Schieffelin remarks: “Without anyone talking about it, they [Bosavi translators] gave rise to a new speech register, which indirectly indexed a new Christian identity and new ways of knowing … . While language used in sermons and Christian settings still sounded like the vernacular and used a vernacular lexicon, it differed from the pre-mission-contact Bosavi language.” (2007, p. 148). As more people took up the identity it signaled, the ­register spread. This is a striking translational change: same-yet-different—continuity and discontinuity—via registers. Equally important, Schieffelin’s analyses allow us to see how the situation differed from pre-mission Bosavi not only in making a register, but in the ways it handled the novel concepts that had to be translated from the Tok Pisin Bible. As we will see in the next section, the translation was not simply between Tok Pisin and Bosavi, but between the register and genre of the Bible and of the missionaries on the one hand, and the new (Christian) Bosavi register on the other. Transduction seems the appropriate term for this aspect of the process.

Transduction of Practices and Knowledges: Ethnographic Examples Recall that in transduction, a system of social indexicality in one language-culture is mapped onto a social indexical system in another language-culture. Before returning to Bosavi, consider a simpler example: Japanese translation of speech in the American novel, Gone with the Wind. As Miyako Inoue (2003) explains, gender stereotyping of speech within Japanese national language ideology identifies a set of final particles as typical of women’s speech. Most women in Japan do not use these particles; they are evident rather in idealized representations, including in translations. The speech of the main women characters in the English-language novel is translated with lots of final particles that Inoue judges as both “feminine” and “grammatical.” However, the speech of Black women characters in the novel, servants to the protagonists, is not given gender-based final particles. In this and other ways, Inoue shows, their speech is represented as “ungrammatical,” a vague, unspecified “regional dialect.” As Inoue summarizes: “Whiteness is translated … by assigning women’s language exclusively to white women, while blackness … is represented in Japanese not only by non-standard variations [which signal race in the English text] but, more critically, by canceling gender marking … . the fantasy of ‘women’s language’ is sustained only in so far as it has an (indexical) exchangeability with whiteness,” (Inoue 2003, pp. 328–329 italics in original). The binary system of signaling race in the English text is transduced by imposing on it another and different binary system that, in Japanese, indexes gender. The lack of gender particles in the speech of Black women in the Japanese version is part of what signals their blackness. The indexical marking of one binary (gender) is used in the Japanese version of the text to mark a different binary (race). But, as I noted earlier, transduction is rarely simply an equation of existing—even if different—indexical systems. Especially when there are significant power imbalances and epistemological/cultural differences between the social groups in contact, greater transformations are common. Let us look at some Bosavi examples, where the existing Bosavi indexical systems at issue were those of social relationships in space-time; linguistic encoding of speaker’s direct or indirect knowledge of mentioned events (technically called evidentiality); and subjectivity (interiority and knowing of other minds), as I detail later. These were backed by Bosavi ideologies about language and speaking that were radically distinct from Western ones, as these appeared in the Tok Pisin Bible. Schieffelin shows that

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translating was not simply lexical or grammatical borrowing or calquing. Following what has been called the “literalist” orientation of the missionaries, the Bosavi pastor/translators tried to make sure nothing was changed by their translation. As a result, they were transforming their existing system (Bosavi) by attempting analogies (transductions) with its materials to make its categories resemble, as closely as possible, those in the Tok Pisin Bible stories. With time, not only the language, but much of the sociocultural system and village life were drastically transformed. To give a taste of the detailed analyses, I sketch a few brief examples which focus on language. First, space/time: In traditional Bosavi, places and their names served as mnemonic anchors for people’s identities and shared significant events. Social relationships were memorialized in poetic listings of names for places in the rainforest (Bosavi: hena usa ‘forest, bush,’ but within that sululib, ‘spring of the Sulu stream’). Thus, the forest was a finely differentiated place, positively valued, encoding people’s life events, and their differences from each other and their neighbors. To render the missionaries’ distinction between those who were converted and those who were not, Bosavi pastors drew on the spatial term us ‘center,’ contrasted it with ‘ha:la:ya ‘periphery,’ (as inside/outside) and projected this distinction— which had marked village vs. forest in local physical place—onto a different and morally charged imagined space: Christians (wherever they were) at the center and the non-converted as peripheral and stigmatized. Moreover, the forest was conflated with “things of the earth,” a very negative Christian category. It was homogenized with no internal distinctions and demonized as evil. If the project of missionization is to transform persons, then this recasting of the forest did its job, by stigmatizing practices of Bosavi personhood. Most significantly, the new center/periphery axis of differentiation invoked a scale of worldwide Christian communities, a disembodied moral space vs. the periphery as those excluded from that space, so that the use of the Christian register erased local places. Second, providing evidence for how one claims to know is a central focus in ideas about language among Bosavi people, with well-elaborated notions of how truth is constituted, proven and linguistically marked (Schieffelin 1996). The Bosavi language provides a large range of obligatory evidentials—particles and morphological means for indicating whether a claim is based on direct experience, visual, verbal or sonic information, or reported speech, common knowledge or inference from secondary evidence. These indicate epistemological issues: how one knows. In pre-mission days, cultural knowledge was orally represented, and authority and responsibility for it could be argued, and often was, in part with the use of these evidentials. Missionaries introduced new facts about the world, in the form of books: the Bible and books with health information. Missionaries were sure of the truth of ideas in these books, and committed to persuading Bosavi people of the backwardness and falsity of Bosavi ideas. To express missionary claims in Bosavi, translator-converts were creative within the Bosavi evidential system. A newly invented evidential entered the new Christian register. This was not a borrowing from Tok Pisin, which has no evidentials, but rather a novel form that marked assertions taken from literacy materials with the indexical meaning “we now know from this source, we did not know before.” It marks information that is new, true and only known from the written word. In effect, books became an authoritative source, classified as speaking subjects, but speakers with which one cannot argue. Bosavi cultural epistemology was extended and transformed. Finally, Bible translation brings to the fore a widely-observed distinction between Protestant ideologies of language and those common elsewhere, including in Bosavi villages (Keane 2002; Schieffelin 2007). For missionaries in this case and many others, “sincerity” is a key concept, a requirement to match interior, private feeling and external public talk: a correspondence between saying something and believing it. By contrast, among

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Bosavi speakers, before missionization, people did not express concern that one’s private feelings could be different from what one expressed, nor did they verbally speculate on what others might think. In fact, there was a strong dis-preference for speculating about other people’s intentions and mental states, about which no reliable evidence was possible. Only experiencers should talk about their own experience. To speculate was regarded as “gossip” and was among the most negatively sanctioned speech acts in Bosavi society. Yet Bible stories often hinge on just such internal matters of thought, motivation and belief. Bosavi expressions had to be created to do that work. In some cases, explicit and bodily location was invented for the location of private, affective and cognitive states by term-forterm translation of Tok Pisin expressions. Where one had said “I was worried” and “I thought,” in Bosavi, the Christian register adds: “I regretted, was worried in my heart” and “I thought in my heart.” Bosavi translators showed particular discomfort, difficulty and uncertainty in expressing, in Bosavi language, the hidden thoughts and feelings of Bible figures. For some stories, unspoken thoughts were translated with quotatives and evidentials, suggesting they were not thought but said; they were repeatedly re-translated, and hedged about with hesitations. This strongly suggests a difficulty that was not strictly linguistic—since calquing was available—but rather a strong disinclination to overstep an underlying principle of cultural ways of knowing. In all three of the examples from Bosavi, it is not mainly lexical or grammatical materials that are at issue. Rather, direct translations are made from Tok Pisin’s tacit categories in order to transform the underlying cultural categories that organize Bosavi indexicality of space, evidence, and subjectivity. Or, put another way, new categories are embedded in Bosavi linguistic and social expression, ones modeled on analogies of those that Bosavi translators detect in Tok Pisin indexical frameworks. The resulting Bosavi expressions are not much like Tok Pisin. Nor are the cultural categories entirely parallel. Yet, much fundamental cultural material has changed, between traditional Bosavi and the ever-expanding Christian register. Scholars writing about missionization elsewhere have reported ­similarly dramatic shifts, especially in the realm of mental interiority and converted-speakers’ theorization of other minds (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). For example, through Bible translation, Samoan terms for the public acts of displaying (e.g. a mat) or announcing (e.g. a gift) were re-signified—analogically projected, transduced—into a posited mental interior as the speech act of promising (Duranti 2015, Chapter 4). And across pre-Christian New Guinea, communal speech acts that were public admissions of offenses to those who had been harmed were analogically transformed, with Christianization, to private acts of confession directed to God (Rumsey 2008). Perhaps the most striking and complete study of the linguistic and cultural effects of missionization is William Hanks’s work (2010) on Catholic missionizing among the Maya peoples of the Yucatan peninsula as part of Spanish colonization, starting in the 1540s. Spanish conquest—its war, famine, disease—devastated the Maya population. The colonial policy was a planned radical re-making of Maya life by reconfiguring space, personhood, and language. The entire policy was called reducción—from Spanish reducir meaning to convince, reorganize, or subjugate. The missionaries tried to eradicate Maya ritual speech and destroyed the written texts that seemed to record it. Conversion was accomplished through translation of Spanish and Latin texts into Maya language by missionaries, with the assistance of Maya converts. The lengua reducida that resulted was a “neologistic register of Maya, purged and realigned to suit the needs of Christian practice, governance, and civility.” Hanks emphasizes the multi-modality of what was done: “The project of reducción aimed at coordinated transformations of social space, conduct and language—all concurrent and all designed to work together: the new language would both describe and

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be spoken in the new spaces by the new Indians” (2012, p. 456). In anticipation of the example of Christian Bosavi, the register the Franciscans created looked and likely sounded like ordinary Maya, even though it contained many innovations. And Maya reducido eventually became native to Maya people. The sheer scale of the Yucatan effort, involving an entire region, many written documents, a coordinated and all-embracing totality, and the profound difference between Catholic theology and ritual practice on the one hand and Maya ritual practices on the other, justify Hanks’s characterization of the process as a commensuration of “worlds.” Even when transductions are not quite so radical as in missionization, they are still socially and culturally consequential. Transductions among registers within what is recognized as a single language also make analogies among social practices and achieve novel social effects. One kind of practice, in one institutional site, is taken as a model for creating another practice, achieving similar effects in a different organizational/institutional or knowledge realm. Because forms of expertise always have special registers that index the knowledge of experts, formulate that knowledge, enact it, and also provide credentials for practitioners and institutions, speech registers remain central in the transduction of practices. A historical example is the analogy proposed by John Locke in the 1690s. He argued that authority grounded in old writings would never lead to true knowledge. He proposed an experiential warrant for knowledge, based on the legal model of testimony. When knowledge relied on “assent in matters wherein testimony is made use of …” he suggested that “it may not be amiss to take notice of a rule observed in the law of England … though the attested copy of a record be good proof, yet the copy of a copy ever so well attested … will not be admitted as proof in judicature” (Locke 1823 [1690] IV xvi 10). For Locke, truth claims had to rely on “original” perception. He proposed dispensing with truth claims that relied on “copies,” that is on the authority of ancient writings. Making the transductive argument from law, Locke based the credibility of science on witnesses’ “original” perception of experimental results, in contrast to the claims of old texts. This transduction of practices provided the epistemological foundation for empirical science, once it was adopted by Boyle and other members of the Royal Society in London (Shapin 1984). Cost-benefit analysis is another and more contemporary example. Invented in the nineteenth century as an informal mode of accounting for the cost of bridges built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, it was routinized in the twentieth century, and incorporated into flood control legislation. Later, the standardization of its calculations gave it what Porter (1995) calls a “mechanical objectivity.” That is, it relied on rules of procedure and numbers, so it seemed independent of human will and thus seemed free of political interest. Economists then took it up and provided a philosophical grounding for it in economic theory. It is now part of virtually all government regulations and their judicial review. One could say that an informal practice of commensuration, created for one quite limited activity and context has been formalized and transduced (repeatedly analogized, i.e. used as a model), lending another kind of authority—persuasiveness—to modes of decision-making. Other inter-register transductions have been equally significant between American social science and law, for instance (Mertz et al. 2016) or between science and religion in the US, as when fundamentalist Christians use the paraphernalia of biological science—test tubes, skeletons, DNA-analysis—as evidence for the story in Genesis (Gal 2016). Notice that in these examples, the participants proposing and instituting the imitation locate the model in a distant expertise and perform or enact some subset of its parts in their own realm, reframing (and thus changing) it as their own. This is in contrast to missionizing and colonizing in which there is a strong element of imposition, even when converts are actively involved. Another issue highlighted in these examples is the repeated

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re-contextualizations, re-translation/transductions of cultural and linguistic models—as in cost–benefit analysis. This has often been called “circulation” in social science writings. Circulation is yet another metaphor of movement which, like those at the start of this chapter, is better set aside in favor of the semiotic analyses advocated here (Gal 2018). By recognizing repeated uptakes—and reframings—by different forms and institutions of expertise, one can see how they each use the model for their own purposes. As Bruno Latour (1988, pp. 15–16) has said: “an idea [or practice] never moves of its own accord. It requires a force to fetch it, seize upon it for its own motives, move it and often transform it.” A final example suggests what can be gained by being alert to such reframings. Eastern European and Western economists collaborated for many years across Cold War boundaries. Each side reframed its own contributions and was reframed by the other, for their own purposes. Thus, Eastern economists’ criticism of their own eastern socialist economies was transduced by Western economists as evidence when they made arguments against social welfare in the West. Western valorization of the efficiency of markets was used (transduced) by Eastern economists, for their own purposes, as they argued with their own governments and colleagues to justify the introduction of markets and privatization in the east. Between them, as Johanna Bockman and Gil Eyal (2002) show, their conferences were one of the sites at which “neoliberalism” in economics was developed as a concept that was differently interpreted and differently advantageous as politics for each side. One could hardly find a more generative example of transduction, with consequences for the world economy.

Future Directions How are these concepts of translation and transduction relevant to new communicative contexts, media and genres? One direction would seek out inter-lingual translators in institutions of various kinds and see how they work; what are their social, political and linguistic commitments and agendas? Their understandings about language? Mass media agencies— Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and social media as well—are venues where descriptions of events, often in multi-media presentations, are made available to viewers around the world in ways edited and shaped in accordance with ideologies of language, publics and politics (Moll 2017). The point is not to search for the (impossible) unpositioned description, but rather to figure out how the framings—in both sociolinguistic and cultural terms—are accomplished, by whom and with/for what audiences and uptakes; with what effects. For instance, how are social movements both incited and stopped through these media? How does the transduction of genres across social media influence affective participation in politics? Despite the promises and successes of machine translation and “Google translate,” the political stakes at these venues, as also in diplomacy and international governance, are too high and national interests too evident for the parties to do without human translators, planners and interpreters (Bellos 2011). As another problematic, there are many cases of encounter—asylum seeking (Jacquemet 2013), migration, clandestine trade—where interactants do not share a language, perhaps only interactional conventions, or not even those. It is a theoretically interesting question how such encounters are managed, because it alerts us to differences in language ideologies, and to spontaneous and improvisational aspects of sign-use. There are many other theoretical issues to develop. As the examples of transduced practices in the previous section suggest, translation/transduction, understood as a process across forms of expertise and institutions is—and has long been—generative in making

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knowledge. It is, as many have pointed out, ubiquitous in social life, indeed it is the basis for understanding. Because anthropology and linguistics are fundamentally comparative research enterprises, translation is also the tool for what we—as anthropologists and linguists—can know, “how we can know it, and how we can make it known,” (Hanks and Severi 2015, p. 3). That is, anthropological and linguistic fieldwork would be impossible without translation, but translation is also indispensable for explication of unfamiliar concepts whether close at hand or in other cultural venues (Hanks 2015). In this chapter, I have argued that “translation” embraces a family of semiotic processes, with its same-yet-different logic. While some have thought translation “impossible,” the term “translation” has also been used in intellectual life to imply or claim seamless transfer. In contrast to both, a close look at translation practices shows that, although translation is frequent, even ubiquitous, impressive imaginative effort is necessary to make it happen. Although exact equivalence is rare, that is often not the goal. The translations and transductions made in social life are inventive and productive of novel practices, person-types and knowledge. The semiotic processes are also devices for creating persistence and social connection over time and space. They are as much constitutive of anthropology itself as they are salient components of the worlds we study. Indeed, my own re-analyses of other scholars’ work, in this chapter, are also translations, taking up evidence for somewhat different purposes than that of the detailed original reports. Nor can the creation of such analytical metadiscourses (translations/transductions) in anthropology or in any scholarly endeavor be avoided. There is no sharp divide in semiotic process between the transductions we enact and those we observe. Nevertheless, projects and stakes will differ because social scientists and those we study are differently located in the social world. Those different stakes, and the power asymmetries they often represent, point to moral questions for social science. Translations/transductions rely on ideological framings of comparison. And comparison— as many thinkers have noted—is always positioned, never politically neutral, never innocent.

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Gal, S. (2015). Politics of translation. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 225–240. Gal, S. (2016). Processes of translation and demarcation in legal worlds. In: Translating the Social World for Law (ed. E. Mertz, W. Ford, and G. Matoesian), 216–236. New York: Oxford University Press. Gal, S. (2018). Registers in circulation. Signs and Society 6 (1): 1–24. Gal, S. and Irvine, J.T. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, N. (1972). Seven strictures on similarity. In: Problems and Projects, 437–446. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Gumperz, J.J. and Hymes, D. (eds.) (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt. Hanks, W. (2010). Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hanks, W. (2012). The birth of a language. Journal of Anthropological Research 68 (4): 449–471. Hanks, W. (2015). The space of translation. In: Translating Worlds: The Epistemological Space of Translation (eds. C. Severi and W. Hanks). HAU Books. Hanks, W. and Severi, C. (2015). Introduction. In: Translating Worlds (eds. C. Severi and W. Hanks). HAU Books. Inoue, M. (2003). Speech without a speaking body: “Japanese women’s speech” in translation. Language and Communication 23: 315–330. Jacquemet, M. (2013). Transidioma and asylum. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23 (3): 199–212. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In: On Translation (ed. R. Brower), 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press. Keane, W. (2002). Sincerity, modernity and the Protestants. Cultural Anthropology 17 (1): 65–92. Langwick, S. (2011). Bodies, Politics and African Healing. Bloomington: U of Indiana Press. Latour, B. (1988). The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press. Locke, J. (1823 [1690]). Essay in Human Understanding. Book Four. London: Tho. Bassett. Lucy, J. (1993). Reflexive language and the human disciplines. In: Reflexive Language (ed. J. Lucy), 9–32. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mertz, E., Ford, W.K., and Matoesian, G. (eds.) (2016). Translating the Social World for Law. New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, L. (2005). Parallel languages, parallel Cultures: language as a new foundation for the reorganization of knowledge practice in southern India. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 42 (4): 445–467. Mitchell, L. (2009). Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moll, Y. (2017). Subtitling Islam: Translation, mediation, critique. Public Culture 29 (2): 333–361. Nakassis, C. (2013). Citation and citationality. Signs and Society 1 (1): 51–77. Pigg, S.L. (2001). Languages of sex and AIDS in Nepal. Cultural Anthropology 16 (4): 481–541. Pollock, S. (2000). Cosmopolitan and vernacular in history. Public Culture 12 (3): 591–626. Porter, T. (1995). Trust in Numbers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Quine, W.v.O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Robbins, J. and Rumsey, A. (2008). Introduction: cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rumsey, A. (2008). Confession, anger and cross-cultural articulation in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Sakai, N. (1977). Translation and Subjectivity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schieffelin, B.B. (1996). Creating evidence: Making sense of written words in Bosavi. In: Interaction and Grammar (ed. E. Ochs, E. Schegloff, and S. Thomson), 435–460. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B.B. (2007). Found in translating. In: Consequences of Contact (eds. M. Makihara and B.B. Schieffelin), 140–166. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B.B. (2014). Christianizing language and the dis-placement of culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. Current Anthropology 55 (S10): S226–S237.

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Shapin, S. (1984). Pump and circumstance: Robert Boyle’s literary technology. Social Studies of Science 14 (4): 481–520. Silverstein, M. (2003). Translation, transduction, transformation. In: Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology (ed. P. Rubel and A. Rosman), 75–108. Oxford: Berg. Silverstein, M. and Urban, G. (eds.) (1996). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. Steiner, G. (1975). After Babel. New York: Oxford U Press. Woolard, K.A. (1999). Simultaneity and bivalency in strategies of bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8 (1): 3–29.

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11

Social Dramas: A Semiotic Approach

Kristina Wirtz Introduction Social conflicts that erupt into public view and interrupt ordinary life can be riveting. Whether protests, fights, competitions, or other breaches of norms, participants at the time and observers after the fact readily identify them as noteworthy events. Ethnographers and discourse analysts too can sense their import in overtly displaying social tensions that may usually be left implicit. Victor Turner coined the term “social drama” to describe any such “objectively isolable sequence of interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type” (Turner 1986, p. 33), and he sought to account for their palpable feel of eventfulness as they unfold, their ready uptake in retellings, re-enactments, and, ultimately, their (latent or overt) potential to provoke political change (Turner 1957, 1974). In this chapter, I develop Turner’s (1957, p. 91) insight that an analytical focus on social drama, as moments of “marked disturbance,” can reveal the dynamics through which implicit and often longstanding social tensions emerge into public awareness and political potentiality. I describe semiotic approaches to textualizing and historicizing processes that can account for the distinctive qualities and social impact of social dramas. And I emphasize the importance of ethnographic and historical work to ground the study of textualizing and historicizing processes. One of the defining events of Carnival in in the eastern Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba, which I studied during ethnographic fieldwork in the city (Wirtz 2014, 2017), will serve as an example to illustrate a semiotic approach to social drama. Consider the following: thousands of city residents pour into the streets to accompany one of several carnival ensembles called Congas in a day-long procession that takes one prominent Conga from the Los Hoyos neighborhood through the neighborhoods of other Congas. Between the loud, joyful music of the Conga and the singing, dancing, and lively sociality of so many people, it is easy to get swept up in the excitement of “rolling along,” as Cubans describe the characteristic dance step of moving along with the Conga. There is also the added frisson of danger because the crowding can quickly shift to jostling, shoving—even fighting. The heavy law

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

enforcement presence reinforces the palpable sense of danger, in part by adding a potential for conflict between citizens and the law. Turner (1974) emphasized that social dramas produce this kind of publicly visible, ­collectively experienced moment of liminality, an ambivalent state of “betwixtness” that holds both disruptive and transformative social potential (see van Gennep 1961[1908]). One kind of liminality evident in my example is what Bakhtin (1968) described as the ­“carnivalesque,” a time and space in which the social order is temporarily subverted and open to parody and critique. Turner characterized such time-spaces as manifesting “communitas,” in which social solidarity levels ordinary social hierarchies (1974). To understand how these spatiotemporal frames of liminality can take shape around moments of conflict, it is important to attend to the ways in which social dramas unfold in time and space and manifest spatio-temporal structures that contrast with ordinary life. That is, rather than take an “event” as a given, the ethnographic and semiotic approach I describe examines how “events” are produced as “eventful.” So what makes an event a social drama? In my Carnival example, alongside the unpredictability of large crowds of revelers (and the police officers who surveil them) there is the competition that erupts each time the Conga de los Hoyos and its crowd of supporters approaches another Conga and its supporters in their neighborhood: when they meet, Congas and supporters will engage in fiercely competitive performances to see which Conga ensemble wins bragging rights as superior. These ritualized competitions punctuate the long afternoon of procession, giving the day a palpable temporal structure as an “objectively isolable” event experienced as it happens, while also facilitating retelling, re-enactment, and other kinds of intertextual circulation and comparison through which social dramas accrue historical significance. As one might imagine for competitions judged by popular opinion, claims about what happened and who won each encounter are hotly debated long afterward. In addition to retellings and re-enactments, other kinds of textual artifacts can circulate long after the events they describe. One example of these artifacts is a song lyric, such as the following couplet from a spontaneous carnival song that spread during Carnival one year, after the police dispersed a crowd gathered in the street around a Conga: policía, déjame arrollar / ese blanquito arrolla ‘police, let me roll / this white boy rolls’

Texts, like events, should be approached as dynamic products of ongoing textualizing processes. Linguistic anthropological approaches to processes such as entextualization and contextualization are key tools for insight into the persuasive power and social impact of social dramas, including how they gain recognition as eventful events that can be connected to other historical and future events. As Bauman and Briggs (1990, p. 73) describe, entextualization is a process of “making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text— that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.” When aspects of participation are entextualized, they can model social categories and relationships, including the fault lines producing conflict. Textualizing processes are fundamental to how particular interactions can be connected to other moments and types of interaction. The complaint embedded in the song couplet, in which an altercation between police and citizens has been entextualized in a Carnival song of mild critique, presents a social encounter between two figures: a “white boy” rolling along and the police. And here contextualization matters, because the Congas, their neighborhoods, and, indeed, much of

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Carnival itself are widely understood to be traditionally Black Cuban locations and practices. A “white boy” rolling along to the Conga is a marked identity, so that the couplet poses a playful but ironic contradiction to lived realities of race in Cuba. In Cuba as elsewhere in the African Diaspora, whiteness is normatively associated with law-abiding innocence in contrast to an association between Blackness and lawless criminality. Black Cubans are acutely aware of how their neighborhoods, activities, and bodies are racialized as socially dangerous (de la Fuente 2007; Fernández Robaina 2009; Quiñones 2017; Zurbano 2014). “Traditional” Black music and dance forms in Cuba, such as the Conga, are also normatively categorized as “folklore” and therefore national patrimony, so that Carnival is riven with contradictory interpretations of Black sociality and festivity as both “folkloric” and potentially “lawless.” The couplet is couched in a subtle Cuban political pragmatics of indirectness and inversion that signifies on the racialization of festivity and disorder alike as normatively Black (see Gates 1988; Morgan 2002). Entextualized bits such as this carnival song hint that the unfolding, annual social drama in Carnival involves not only the obvious neighborly competition of Congas, but also tensions over racial citizenship between Black city residents and their government. In short, a social drama involves participants in enacting a particular historically-grounded figuration of conflict, competition, or grievance that demonstrates the historical frame’s salience to everyday social relationalities and may also open possibilities for social transformations. Simultaneously, in being highly reflexive, a social drama gives cues regarding its own event-structure as a dramatic rupture from everyday life. In the next section, I will show how a social drama can be analyzed as presenting some conflictual aspect of social relationships in a process that Michael Silverstein (2004, 2014) calls “dynamic figuration.” Even when analyzing established annual events (like Carnival) and entextualized representations of those events (like song lyrics), the emphasis is on their dynamic qualities, including how they can be taken up, repeated, and repurposed in the ongoing flow of social life. Textualizing processes provide the space-time parameters, as it were, of “chunks” of social life (including their representation e.g., in songs, ethnographic, and historical accounts, and other narratives), allowing us to compare them and note differences and connections. The spatio-temporal configurations that emerge through the pragmatic and reflexive processes of contextualization and entextualization allow the very recognition of “events” and undergird the forms of historical subjectivity—meaning one’s sense of history’s flow and one’s positionality in that flow—that interpret some events as social dramas (see the section on “Calibration of Chronotopes”). Also attuned to temporality and historicity, Turner’s concept of social drama, initially developed in his 1957 ethnographic monograph Schism and Continuity in an African Society (Turner 1996), is one of several strands of twentieth-century social theory that apply a dramaturgical metaphor to explain social life. Relying on Kenneth Burke’s (1945) influential “dramatism” approach to language as social action, Turner (1980, p. 149) borrows Burke’s phrase “dramas of living” to describe how agonistic and political conflicts play out as dramas. Turner was interested in how the temporal structure of social dramas provided a frame for their uptake into narratives and other kinds of performances, such as rituals (Turner 1980). Turner (1986) drew, albeit loosely, on Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach to social interaction, and on Gregory Bateson’s (1972) attention to the metacommunicative cues that frame social action, which Goffman (1974) further developed. And Turner (1982) shared Clifford Geertz’s interest in the ludic as a source of insight into cultural dynamics. Geertz (1973) influentially proposed “deep play” to capture how particular events (such as Balinese cockfights) serve to dramatize wider social dynamics in

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condensed form, making those dynamics more reflexively visible. The central insight shared across these approaches and further developed by Turner is to liken social interactions—in their unfolding and their retelling—to theatrical performances whose “actors” mobilize existing social typifications, fields of action, and narrative frames to give order and significance to their participation in social life. Turner particularly emphasized the transformational potential of conflict. Turner defined social dramas as “units of aharmonic or disharmonic process, arising in conflict situations” (1974, p. 17). He suggested that, as events or event-series, they conform to a temporal structure beginning with a breach of social norms (as a “symbolic trigger”), a phase of escalating crisis, then another of redressive action characterized by acute self-consciousness of social identifications, and finally a reintegration phase, in which the community returns to ordinary life, perhaps with a transformed understanding of the schism that produced the conflict. Turner saw in reintegration the potential for new alliances, rifts, or other shifts in social relations and orientations to political possibility. To account for the potentially transformative social impact of this four-phase structure of social dramas, which he understood to be a human universal, Turner borrowed from psychoanalytic theory. He suggested that the breach and escalating crisis phases provoke participants to release strong emotions that may have been repressed for the sake of social tranquility, in a process of catharsis (Turner 1957). But despite his ongoing exploration of connections between social and psychological (even neurological) domains of theory (e.g. Turner 1986), his account does not explain the workings of social dramas as historicallysituated social interactions, nor does it attend to the particularities of a given social drama in its sociohistorical context.

Dynamic Figuration in Social Dramas A complementary approach is made possible by semiotic analysis of social dramas, which seeks to identify what models of and for social action (Geertz 1973) emerge out of dynamic figuration—that is, the ongoing production of figures—in the event’s unfolding structure (Silverstein 2004, 2014). A “figure” is a compound discursive (or semiotic) representation—a metasign constructed out of multiple sign relations and reflexively offering an interpretation of itself (whether as a novel or familiar kind of social thing). A figure can be something relatively concrete, like a particular person or type of person, or something more abstract, like a diagram of social or cosmological relationships (e.g., kinship relations or ritual transformations). In the song couplet described above, the Carnival participant “rolling along” and the police are figures of social types. A different kind of figure emergent in the couplet is the implied relationship between (racialized) citizen-in-the-streets and police, poised to intervene. To speak of figuration instead of its product, figures, is to highlight its unfolding, open-ended and contingent—“dynamic” rather than fixed—quality. The dynamic figuration of an encounter between police and Carnival revelers in the couplet is no more than a fleeting glimpse of a potential source of social tension that suggests a direction for further investigation. Dynamic figuration in social dramas can best be understood from the point of view of C.S. Peirce’s tripartite typology of signs into icon, index, and symbol, where iconic relations are based on similarity between sign and object and indexical relations are based on contiguity or co-presence, so that a linguistic index (just like the index finger) points to a coexisting object, and symbolic relations are based on social conventions or “laws,” that is, community-shared conventions (see Parmentier 1997; see also Chapter 33, Duranti).

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  197

Peirce defines the diagram as a kind of iconic sign, based on similarity to its referent, but where its iconicity depends upon some set of social conventions that afford recognition of how the diagram’s elements index their objects and therefore how the diagram can be interpreted (Silverstein 2004, p. 626 f.n. 8).1 For example, the dynamic figuration of Carnival reveler asking the police to “let me roll” in the song couplet produces a diagram of fraught relations between police, charged with keeping public order, and Carnival revelers trying to enjoy dancing to the Conga in the streets. These are recognizable social types in a familiar interaction, for most Cubans. Moreover, when the song is sung in the street while accompanying a Conga, there is an alignment—an iconic relationship—between the singer(s) and the first-person figure addressing the police in the song (who may also be present in the street). Those familiar with racial dynamics in Cuba will also recognize the likely lack of shared racial identification (non-iconicity) between the song’s figuration of a “white boy” and the normative Blackness of Carnival revelers, suggesting race as yet another level of dynamic figuration produced by performing the couplet. As the example shows, sign relations can be organized at increasing levels of abstraction to produce—and naturalize—some ideological perspective on the world (Gal and Irvine 2019; Silverstein 1992, 2003). Figuration produces multiple figures diagrammed in relation to one another. In doing so, a model of (some aspect of) the world emerges at the scale of the interaction and directs reflexive attention to that aspect of the world. Whatever figures are diagrammed through dynamic figuration are thus meta-signs: signs offering an interpretation of themselves and other signs. One detailed example Silverstein (2004) provides of this process is the chiasmus or “crossing” that emerges during the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, in which believers partake in a ritual re-enactment of the historical event of Jesus of Nazareth’s “Last Supper,” and in consuming bread and wine (as “the Christ’s” body) are brought into the Christian ecumene (see also Tomlinson 2014 on ritual pattern and motion). Diagrams, in the specialized sense of dynamic figurations of social relationships and actions, are akin to rituals in being enactments of some conventionalized configuration of signs that unfolds in time and space. In my next example, I compare one kind of diagram, a physical map as a static image of a place, to another kind of diagram performed by people purposefully walking a route, for example in a Carnival procession. The latter diagram emerges and the former takes on significance as an object only through dynamic figuration as an active process of semiosis unfolding in real-time interaction. Both examples can be understood, as Silverstein says, as “a picture made real in the here-and-now—of that which it accomplishes” (2004, p. 627). As an example of dynamic figuration in social drama, I return to Carnival in Santiago de Cuba and compare its two central events. The opening event of Santiago’s carnival in midJuly, introduced previously, is called “the Invasion” and is a massive procession of thousands of people through the streets that is unusual in being grassroots in a restrictive political context where such processions are generally only organized by and for the government. The Invasion is organized and led by the city’s most illustrious Conga, which is based in the city’s most prototypically Black neighborhood, Los Hoyos, and travels through other Black neighborhoods ringing the historic city center to compete against those neighborhoods’ Congas.

1

  In Peirce’s later terminology, not entered into here, a diagram is a rhematic indexical legisign (Peirce 1933: CP 2.258–259 and 3.419; see also; Lee 1997, pp. 122–123).

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198  kristina wirtz

In route, character, and sheer scale of participation, the Invasion contrasts vividly with the choreographed performances of official carnival that the Conga de los Hoyos and other carnival ensembles also participate in. While the same kind of ensembles play the same kind of music, eliciting the same basic kind of bodily movements and drawing on a similarly competitive spirit between ensembles and neighborhoods, the stakes feel quite different. Whereas the official competitive performances for carnival are choreographed and rehearsed for months, then carefully stage-managed for presentation before stands of judges, spectators, and TV audiences, the Invasion is a grassroots mobilization of thousands, and conflict is implied in its name and its enactment: invasion and defense are carried out bodily and musically, as each Conga mobilizes its neighborhood to fill the streets in playful/serious “battle.” In Figure 11.1, I present a top–down view of the Invasion’s route on a simplified city streetmap on which I have labeled the relevant neighborhoods (many of whose names, incidentally, did not appear on tourist maps available for purchase in the city, although every resident knows them). Arrows indicate the Invasion’s route and stars mark locations where the Conga de los Hoyos encountered another ensemble (in 2011 and 2014, the years in which I participated). The map, as a diagram (recall: a conventionalized icon), represents a shift in perspective away from any participant’s actual experience of the Invasion. It is thus an abstraction (albeit hopefully a useful one in showing the route) of the principal dynamic figuration that unfolds in the Invasion: Black-identified communities’ peripheral location but interconnection in a ring encompassing the city’s historic core. One useful aspect of the map is that it affords a sharp contrast with the overall centralizing route of movement of “official” Carnival spectacle (see Figure 11.2). In 2011, during

Figure 11.1  Author’s map of the route of the 2011 “Invasion” (with arrows) indicating names of major streets and neighborhoods, and with stars representing locations where the Conga de los Hoyos encountered other ensembles.

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  199

Figure 11.2  Author’s map of the centralizing route of “official” Carnival, in which ensembles assemble on a route from the historic city center to an intersection at the top of the central commercial avenue, proceeding in a controlled and organized procession to present choreographed spectacles to the judges, spectators, and television cameras along a narrow stretch of the avenue lined by viewing stands that limit access (location indicated by star).

each day of official processions, carnival ensembles moved through the historic city center to assemble at a major intersection on the main commercial thoroughfare, Garzón Avenue. Carnival officials organized them in an orderly sequence to be channeled down between stands holding the carnival judges, paying spectators, and television cameras. As each wellrehearsed, costumed ensemble, organized into corps of musicians, blocks of dancers, and other performers, processes into the tightly-controlled space between the stands, they perform an energetic, highly choreographed spectacle to compete for first prize. Figure 11.2, thus, presents a top–down view and abstraction of the state’s consolidation of ensembles from all over the city and surrounding areas to present a spectacle of and for state power. Official carnival mobilizes the Congas and other emblematically Black, popular cultural forms for their folkloric value as traditions that scale from neighborhood to city to nation in order to represent the popular base of support and deep historical origins of Cuba’s current revolutionary government, in power since the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In creating these maps, I have produced new “texts” that abstract the dynamic figuration enacted by masses of moving people and add a layer of interpretation—an example of entextualization (discussed in the section on “The Role of Textualizing Processes and Calibration of Chronotopes in Producing Social Dramas”). The Invasion’s map diagrams a circuit of grassroots peripheral encounters that encompass the historic city center, whereas the map of official carnival’s competitive displays diagrams a centralized spectacle as a vector of state power. During the years of my fieldwork, between 1998 and 2014, it was clear to me that city residents did not use—and did not need—maps like those I created. Their occasional interactions with me and my maps, especially early in my fieldwork when I was unfamiliar

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with the city, revealed that they did not share my preference for an overview from above. Gradually, they socialized me into a street-level orientation to the city and a shared understanding of the racial and socioeconomic class histories and character of its neighborhoods, as well as everyday encounters between citizens and the apparatuses of the state. The Invasion emphasizes just this kind of bodily experience of moving through the city, in a kind of heightening and concentration of everyday mobilities across the city—home, work, school, shopping, socializing—into one ritualized mass mobilization. And official Carnival’s vector of controlled, choreographed performance and spectatorship heightens and concentrates everyday Cubans’ experiences with their powerful, pervasive, centralized Socialist state. Both examples illustrate how the social drama as an event enacts a model— scaled to the immediate interaction and its participants—that allows for greater reflexivity about broader social dynamics. Participating in these events, even as an outside observer, draws one into enacting the diagram of social roles and relationships as it unfolds, providing an embodied experience of the unfolding dynamic figuration. Dynamic figurations may not be “visible” to participants as a totality that they could fully describe (as is done here and represented in my maps) or would articulate according to the same interpretations, but are felt in their unfolding structure. That bodily, emotionally-charged experience—the excitement, the competitiveness, the dangers of crowds and security/threat of police seeking to control the crowds—makes the stakes of the conflicts that drive the social drama vividly, deeply felt. So how does an anthropologist make sense of moments of social drama when we encounter them? We can feel their importance, but how do we demonstrate what they do? It should be apparent that the dynamic figuration arising in any given interactional moment relies on processes of recognition and comparison that reach beyond that moment if the figures are to have any lasting significance. The next section elaborates on additional concepts to develop a linguistic anthropological approach to dynamic figuration in social dramas that allows us to better understand their stakes and potential to galvanize social action.

The Role of Textualizing Processes and Calibration of Chronotopes in Producing Social Dramas In addition to the concept of dynamic figuration in how social drama diagrams aspects of society itself, two analytical tools are key to the work of interpreting social life through dramatic events: textualizing processes and calibration of chronotopes. Together, they describe the processes that produce “eventfulness” in the stream of ongoing social life. They organize the internal structuring of an event and its uptake. This is not to say that an “event” must feel organized or structured. These semiotic processes can produce the chaos, surprise, liminality, and conflict that characterize social drama as much as orderliness and faithful repetition. And they do so by generating iconic and indexical connections beyond an event to other moments and aspects of social life, so as to allow for the metacultural processes of recognition, comparison, and reflection that infuse events with social significance.

Textualizing Processes

The concept of textuality provides a way to track the discursive processes that organize interactions into events and embed those events into contexts that infuse both with meaning

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and consequentiality. Entextualization describes processes of demarcating and chunking some sequence in the ongoing flow of social life into an extractable and thus replicable unit that can be compared to other instances and to types. It is through entextualization that types or genres of events emerge to be recognized and perhaps even named (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Contextualization describes processes of situating communications in socially meaningful space-time context, so as to grasp the significance of the flow of signs. Contextualization involves distinguishing a focal event and the relevant aspects of the immediate context (Goodwin and Duranti 1992) as well as situating moments of interaction in longer discourse histories (Silverstein and Urban 1996). Entextualization and contextualization are, to some extent, countervailing tendencies of setting apart versus embedding, but they also work together as we seek to understand our unfolding social lives. Both also involve spatio-temporal operations and thus mobilize chronotopes, as I explore in the subsection on “Calibration of Chronotopes.” Textualization as a process replaces an outdated notion of static and determinate “text” and “context” with a sensitivity to the emergent and open-ended character of semiosis through which participants and observers alike interpret social interactions. In analyzing textualization processes, we can trace how an interaction, like the Invasion of Carnival described previously, can become an object of discourse, represented in some other “event of speaking,” such as its appearance as an example in this chapter. During fieldwork, I heard frequent discussions of past years’ Invasions and upcoming Invasions as soon as word began to spread of their planned date. These discussions mobilized the concept of tradition in relation to past, present, and future Invasions. Analyzing the internal workings of and connections between stretches of interaction always takes us beyond that event, as we—whether as participants or analysts or both— follow a metapragmatic process that Wortham and Reyes (2015) describe as selecting, construing, and configuring indexes (Wortham and Reyes use the synonymous term “indexicals”). People’s metapragmatic activity—the many ways in which they frame and interpret the pragmatics of social life—also gives shape to “events” and their significance. Metapragmatic cues are endless and varied; they include linguistic and nonlinguistic modalities. They may accompany the event but may also anticipate it (e.g., announcements) or follow it (e.g., reports, commentaries). Naming an event is a particularly salient entextualizing move that, in the case of the Invasion, indexes the agonistic quality of “eventfulness” that makes it a social drama. There is a deceptively facile denotational transparency to an event named “Invasion” as if it were an enemy’s hostile takeover. In my fieldwork, I kept an ear open to the meanings and uses of “invasion,” as well as why people described this particular event of carnival as “the Invasion.” I learned that the name of this event of Carnival is also used to refer to an historical event from the second of Cuba’s wars for independence from Spain from 1895 to 1898, in which predominantly Black Cuban independence fighters known as the Mambí army successfully routed the Spanish imperial forces in a series of decisive battles moving from Eastern to Western Cuba. While I never heard anyone explicitly link the annual carnival Invasion to the historical event, I will present evidence in the next section that the historical resonance is significant for understanding the stakes of the carnival Invasion as a social drama. It is not only through linguistic signs that “eventfulness” emerges. As Charles Goodwin (2000) and Marjorie Harness Goodwin (2006) argue, social action involves the mobilization of semiotic resources across numerous modalities that include speech, gesture, and other embodied practices through which “the human body is made publicly visible as the site for a range of structurally different kinds of displays” and actions (Goodwin 2000,

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p. 1). These practices include the ways in which physical spaces are arranged as well as how people gather and move through those spaces. Such practices help demarcate events. In the case of the Invasion, it is the Conga’s audible motion that most clearly demarcates the formal beginning and ending of the event. That is, the distinctive sonic and embodied elements of the Invasion serve to contextualize it by linking it to perduring forms of social organization—the Congas and neighborhoods—and to recognized genres of music, dance, and carnival procession. Let us consider a few of these generic aspects and their effect on participation and thus embodied experience of the Invasion. Congas are, first and foremost, neighborhood-based community musical ensembles steeped in the centuries of history of Carnival in Santiago de Cuba. Several contemporary Congas were founded more than a century ago and are recognized national cultural patrimony. Conga music conforms to certain genre conventions: each song opens with a break from the Conga’s single wind instrument, a doublereed uniquely used in Congas and therefore emblematic of Conga music. Called the Chinese cornet, its piercing sonority is answered by a break from the many percussion instruments of the Conga—drums of skin, wood, and metal. Conga music is loud enough to be heard for several city blocks. When a Conga plays, it hails all those within earshot to respond not only by coming out into the street, but also by joining in the procession, singing and dancing along, thereby creating a participatory performance. The quality of bodily movements during the procession is also an important aspect of its textuality: the most distinctive and characteristic movement to accompany a Conga is to arrollarse, or ‘roll (along).’ Groups of people rolling along together produce a joyous, erotically-charged energy (Figure 11.3). Overall, the Invasion has a participatory structure that rejects sharp distinctions between performer and audience, in contrast to the glitzy, carefully choreographed and rehearsed, virtuosic performances by Congas and other carnival ensembles before the judges, stands, and television cameras during the official carnival competition. In that case, performers and audiences are more sharply delineated. The contrasting participation frameworks—to use

Figure 11.3  A young musician plays a bell made of a repurposed brake shoe in the Conga de los Hoyos, with one of the group’s choreographers dancing in the street behind him.

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  203

Goffman’s (1974) terminology—of the Invasion and official carnival offer different contextualizations of ostensibly the “same” genres of Conga music and dance, as my discussion of the route maps in Figures 11.1 and 11.2 illustrates. In the course of any given event, people assume and shift between interactional roles through an often-subtle choreography of metapragmatic cues, according to what Gregory Bateson (1972) calls metacommunicative frames. Like the concept of genre, a metacommunicative frame is an entextualized type that can be recognized in or applied to particular instances to guide and interpret some unfolding configuration of signs as a particular kind of communicative event. The sounds of Conga music echoing through the streets are metacommunicative cues that the type of event underway is a Conga procession, which affords a particular array of options for participation. There are also shifts in participation that further structure the interaction, including in relationship to other layers of textuality, such as the denotational text. Songs begin and end; the size and energy of the crowd waxes and wanes. The Invasion’s length and distance, in the humid heat of Caribbean midsummer, mean that most participants spend most of the route simply walking. Moments of breaking into singing and rolling and of intense crowding and surging of bodies punctuate cycles of excitement in the crowd. When the Invasion’s procession reaches junctures in its route that bring the Conga de los Hoyos into proximity with another Conga arrayed in the street to sonically “defend its territory,” the competing auditory claims of the two Congas are amplified by crowds of supporters accompanying each of them, who not only sing and dance but crowd together and may start shoving as the moving Conga passes the stationary one. If tempers flare, fueled by heat, excitement, and alcohol consumption, the ritualized play of conflict can break into actual physical confrontations. Some participants seek that out; others, like the group of friends I joined for the 2011 Invasion, carefully monitor the density and agitation of those around them to avoid the most crowded and disorderly moments, even if this means moving out of the acoustic range of the Conga music. In commenting on the need to hurry along and in reacting to crowd-interactions unfolding around us, my friends offered a metapragmatic framing of the Invasion as involving moments of potential social danger, as well as strategies for mitigating those effects. Participant roles are locally constructed in and enacted or “inhabited” through interaction (Goffman 1974; Irvine 1996) and, as such, can help us understand the temporal and spatial textures of the Invasion as an interaction, as well as its metapragmatic interpretation at the time of occurrence and in subsequent discourse about it. People’s positioning as participants may presuppose more durable social identifications—for example, the recognized musical expertise of Conga musicians and the danger of crowds of alcohol-fueled and agitated Conga supporters, where both of these groups are overwhelmingly male and strongly affiliated with a particular neighborhood, albeit enacting their neighborhood loyalty in contrasting ways (tight polyrhythmic coordination versus disorderly conduct). Both are racialized as Black, enacting the two different but interdependent framings of carnival Blackness, as folkloric patrimony and as potentially criminal social disruption. Participation also entails perspectives on the action, because participants’ experiences afford different epistemic and affective understandings, as evidenced by my small group’s efforts to stay well ahead of the crowds throughout the Invasion’s long route. One additional, important corporate participant in the Invasion, which heightens its eventfulness as a social drama oriented around enacting social tensions, is the large law enforcement presence. Santiago’s police force, despite its racial composition that matches the city overall, participates in the Invasion in ways that reinforce the racialized connection between Blackness and social danger. At the start of the event, as soon as the Conga de los Hoyos

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emerges from the community center where the musicians gather and warm up, several dozen stony-faced, uniformed officers form a cordon around the Conga and a small group of invited VIPs. As the Conga and its cordon begin to move along its route, the rigid alertness of the police escorts contrasts to the rolling mass of bodies, with the boundaries marked by crowding and forceful shoving: in this interactional space, it seems that the Conga needs to be protected from the crowd it has itself incited. All along the route, police cars with flashing lights block off the cross-streets to control vehicle traffic. For those of us up ahead of the Conga, their screaming sirens could be heard as they rushed ahead to the next intersection of the Invasion’s route. Most strikingly, in 2011, I witnessed a massive police cordon forming across the wide avenue of la Trocha, about halfway along the route, and just after my small group had passed. Looking back uphill, we could see the crowd of thousands across the full width and length of the street moving down the hill, where they had to pass through the narrow gaps between officers, as if through a sieve. My friends nervously pulled me along—it was not a scene to linger in. On other occasions, I saw how Conga crowds reacted to police aggressively running into them, sirens and whistles blaring, by scattering in all directions—a panic I joined into on one occasion as I strove to keep myself and my young daughter from being trampled. These modes of police participation metapragmatically framed the violent or criminal potential of such a crowd while, ironically, creating their own moments of pandemonium by provoking panicked crowd responses. It is not just petty, individual criminality that the heavy police presence presupposes. After all, such a massive mobilization of people, processing along a route circling the city and connecting its Black neighborhoods, looks a lot like a political mobilization (see Figure 11.4), and in Revolutionary Cuba, the only permissible political mobilizations are those orchestrated by the state in support of its institutionalized revolutionary regime. Attending

Figure 11.4  Video-still of masses of people filling a wide street ahead of the Conga de los Hoyos during the 2011 Invasion.

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  205

to the laminations of textualities and forms of participation reveals this latent political potential of the Invasion as grassroots mobilization of dissent that Cuban participants are reticent to point out too explicitly, especially in the context of other mobilizations of Black popular culture to express dissent.2 The revolutionary government has not welcomed Black critiques of ongoing racism and persistent inequities, whether expressed by intellectuals or embedded in contemporary pop culture. Nor has the government permitted independent organizing along the lines of the US Civil Rights, Black Power, or more recent Black Lives Matter movements. As is evident throughout the African Diaspora, Black bodies, communities, and cultural forms are especially vulnerable to being criminalized. Therein lies a palpable if unstated social tension that makes Conga performances and especially the Invasion ripe to become social dramas: they enact just the kind of “disorderly” and potentially socially disruptive “crowds” of Black folk in the street that the Cuban state readily criminalizes as potentially counterrevolutionary. To summarize: the Invasion is a potent social drama because it enacts several dimensions of conflict. Peripheral Black neighborhoods claim the streets for their Congas in a competition styled as an “invasion” by the Conga de los Hoyos. The Blackness of these neighborhoods, emblematized by their Congas, is mobilized during the Invasion. To join the Invasion is to take on what Jennifer Roth-Gordon (2017) calls a “situational” racial identification, a momentary inhabiting of Blackness by virtue of participating in the rolling, roiling crowd accompanying the Conga, as a quintessentially Black, neighborhood-based social practice. The Invasion’s route links those neighborhoods, highlighting them as sites of concentrated Blackness, in contrast to the rest of the city. The genres of music and movement and participation frameworks enacted in the Invasion pit two interpretations of Blackness against one another: folklore and disorderly threat. What the mass participatory structure of the Invasion promotes is a collective alignment of participants with what my Black Cuban interlocutors describe as a Black, popular subject position, contesting marginalization and claiming public space to roll along a route of belonging. The analysis thus far lays bare a key aspect of the Invasion as a social drama that “everyone”—every local participant—probably recognizes but won’t say, and that might not otherwise be apparent to an outside ethnographer. It skirts the line of what the Cuban government forbids: organized, overt, grassroots protest. My analysis of textualizing processes underscores that the Invasion’s association with the traditional, folkloric Black festive sociality of the Conga protects the Invasion from being shut down as subversive and counterrevolutionary. Another protection, to be explored in the next section, comes from the “carnivalesque” chronotope of the event and the historical narratives invoked by the event that also reveal its political potential.

Calibration of Chronotopes

To speak of connections being made between moments of “here-and-now” and other times or places and to map historical or hypothetical trajectories is to speak of temporal and spatial formations, what Bakhtin (1981) called chronotopes. For him, chronotope describes our holistic experience of time-spaces, which is not captured by the understanding of time and

2

 Popular music, from timba and reggae to rap and reggaetón and the 2021 Latin Grammy-award-winning protest song “Patria y Vida” (‘Homeland and Life’), continues to be a site of struggle over the politics of race and the limits of protest in Cuba, including in the July 11, 2021 protests that swept the island and the arrests and crackdowns that have followed. Saunders (2015) provides an excellent grounding in a very dynamic field of “arts-based activism.”

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space as coordinates. Bakhtin identified chronotopes in novels based on how spatial and temporal indicators are aesthetically and systematically organized such that “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84). Bakhtin identified distinctive chronotopes by examining the way in which characters were located and could act in the novel’s imagined spatiotemporal world. He described how particular configurations of place, movement, and timescale afford particular kinds of character development, perspective, and plot trajectories through chronotopic motifs, such as “adventure time” in epics and “the road” in tales of journeys, that could be contrasted with others, such as “the castle” of gothic novels and “the drawing room” of novels of manners. These different chronotopes, he argued, characterized distinct stylistic periods across the history of the novel. As configurations of time and space—history and place—chronotopes also emerge in social interactions through the very textualizing processes and resulting dynamic figurations traced in the previous sections. I have already mentioned the chronotope of the “carnivalesque” that materializes through carnival practices such as the Invasion. Carnival processions and protest marches alike not only take place in the streets but mobilize “the street” as a chronotopic motif of public, communal activity—of Turner’s “communitas” that challenges normal social structures. Like Bakhtin’s chronotope of “the road,” “the street” mixes social types and allows for spontanteous encounters. Whereas “the road” implies longer journeys (as in Bakhtin’s example of pilgrims traveling together in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), “the street” during “carnival time” produces a chronotope affording loud, public, convivial engagement in crowds, with an element of unpredictability, critique and overturning of social norms, and corresponding danger. Each chronotope—the “road” versus “the street”; “the carnivalesque” or even “revolution”—affords different possibilities for subjectivity, relationality, and trajectories of action. Indeed, the idea of time-space coordinates is itself a chronotopic motif, one of many possible formations for imagining ourselves relative to others and for situating units of interaction into broader social contexts. A chronotope of universal space–time, imagined as a vector of linear time across a three-dimensional spatial grid, may afford a view that seems objective—recall my top–down maps diagramming the routes of Carnival—but the very concept of chronotope, inspired by space-time relativity theory in physics, reminds us that even this view is one of many possible perspectives. Any given stretch of discourse includes indexical signs anchoring temporal and spatial locations and relationships across its various layers of texts. These are built into tense and aspect markers of verbs (e.g., past, present, future; conditional, perfective, imperfective) and signaled by demonstrative pronouns that permit contrasts of here and there, now and then. Any such stretch of discourse, then, presents a particular configuration of space and time. Some stretches of interaction are experienced as “events” precisely because they fit the event chronotope (as coherent units of experience set off from what precedes and follows them). But the larger social significance of chronotope in any given event depends upon what chronotopic juxtapositions—shifts and contrasts across different chronotopes—are mobilized, and with what effects on the always open-ended process of producing subjectivities and social worlds. Asif Agha (2007) and Sabina Perrino (2007) describe “cross-chronotopic alignments” as one productive avenue for analysis, in which persons, events, and actions situated in different chronotopes are brought into connection with one another. Alaina Lemon (2009) and I (Wirtz 2016) provide accounts of how chronotopes can alternate in the course of even a single interaction, thereby juxtaposing distinct social perspectives representing different

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  207

lifeworlds. Alignments and juxtapositions are examples of chronotopic calibration (Silverstein 1993), meaning that different space-time configurations can be compared to one another, as when a biographical chronotope of one person’s life experience is brought into relationship with a chronotope capturing some aspect of history (such as “Soviet times” or “revolution,” in Lemon and Wirtz’s examples). For example, each annual event of the Invasion mobilizes masses to occupy the streets and justifies their disruption of the normal social order by invoking a tradition of Santiago’s historic Black neighborhoods. The Invasion’s route also has significance as a chronotope connecting Black, peripheral neighborhoods in a temporality of tradition, as evidenced in another reference to “invasion” in the title and lyrics of a song called “la Invasión” that was a staple of the repertoire of the Carabalí Carnival ensembles based in two of the traditionally Black neighborhoods (Wirtz 2016). Both of the city’s Carabalí traditional societies, Isuama and Olugo, included this song in most performances I was able to observe on my trips between 2008 and 2011. One folklorist described it as “the national hymn of the Carabalí,” which are themselves centenary Black institutions (see also Pérez et al. 1982). Consider chronotopic alignments that emerge between the Carabalí singers and the narrated events in the song’s opening stanza: 1

Me mires en diferente

You look at me differently

2

porque soy carabalí

because I am Carabalí

3

Me mires en diferente

You look at me differently

4

porque soy carabalí

because I am Carabalí

5

Y en la guerra en ’68

And in the war of ’68

6

yo fui mambí

I was a mambí

7

Y en la del ’95 a la invasión

And in the war of ’95, on the invasion

8

también yo fui

I also went

9

A defender a mi patria

to defend my fatherland

la tierra donde nací

the land where I was born

10

The “invasion” referenced in the denotational text (line 7) is the series of battles in 1895. The first-person present-tense perspective of the song positions those who sing it as staking a claim to being Carabalí: “I am Carabalí.” The lyrics shift to the past tense to claim veteran status as a mambí, the term for the mostly Black independence fighters, many of whom were ex-slaves wielding machetes against the Spanish imperial army. The song is attributed to Simon Napolés, a founder of the Carabalí Isuama Society and mambí veteran. The stanza’s lyrics present a dynamic figuration of the patriotic Black independence fighter who fiercely defends their territory, aligning this racialized figure with the Carabalí ensemble who sing in the first person as if recounting their own, firsthand experience. The rest of the song’s verses recount the liberation army’s famous 1895 march across Cuba to rout the Spanish, from the perspective of a participant experiencing the victories and hardships of the journey. Each stanza describes the narrator’s hardships in a series of locations moving from east to west, from Baraguá in eastern Cuba, through Camagüey, Santa Clara, Matanzas, and Havana until reaching far-western Pinar del Río and Mantua, at “the edge of the nation” where “the Spanish Empire fell,” as the lyrics go on to say. That is, the song performs an aural map, where the “Invasion” is not an enemy incursion but

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208  kristina wirtz

rather the journey across the national homeland to a victorious, patriotic expulsion of the enemy. The final line of the song makes a significant leap from 1898 (when Cuba won its independence from Spain but at the cost of another half-century of US imperial interference) to the next historical moment of declaring independence: “And in the year fifty-nine the Revolution triumphed.” The song’s lyrics narrate events from over a hundred years ago as if they had only just happened, and from a perspective after the 1959 triumph of the Revolution that links the two events—the nineteenth-century struggles for independence and the mid-twenieth century inauguration of the current regime. The lyrics also center the Carabalí societies as key participants in the rebellious history that brought freedom, independence, and sovereignty to the Cuban nation. Not coincidentally, the east-to-west route of the 1895 “invasion” was repeated by Fidel Castro and his victorious “July 26 movement” when they entered Havana to take power in 1959. For the Carabalí societies, today, to perform this song during Carnival (complete with historically resonant costumes and roles, including “slaves,” an “overseer,” and a corps of “libertos” or freedmen wielding cardboard machetes) is to enact a chronotopic alignment between a heroic national history and a proud, if marginalized, institution based in Santiago’s Black neighborhoods (Figure 11.5). Although the song is unique to the Carabalí and there are no direct references between it and the Conga Invasion, we can trace the indirect connections in the shared name, “Invasion” and in how both dynamically figure a mass mobilization of Black Cubans who claim historical belonging in the places they traverse, whether the several-mile circuit of neighborhoods that starts and ends in Los Hoyos or east to west along the spine of a 700mile long island. Teasing out these connections between entextualizations and events, using the tools of chronotope, provides a more profound analysis of what is at stake in the social drama of the Invasion. The historical event of the Invasion is narrated in the song as a military victory achieved by patriotic Black independence fighters. The song, in entextualizing this historical event, recontextualizes the annual route of the carnival Invasion as a historically-grounded claim

Figure 11.5  Photo of Carabalí “liberto” performance, waving cardboard machetes, during the 2011 children’s Carnival in Santiago de Cuba.

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social dramas: a semiotic approach  209

of belonging that is also ripe with political potential in the present. The carnival Invasion, recall, is a mass mobilization of Black Cubans in a context where such grassroots mass movements are perceived as an existential threat by the state. But because Santiago’s carnival is so tightly associated with patriotic revolutionary commemorations that culminate in the July 26 national holiday, and the Congas and similar Black organizations are so firmly folkloricized as the popular base of the revolutionary regime itself, a certain carnivalesque rebelliousness—a Black critical restiveness with the racial status quo—can be enacted. Through chronotopic calibrations within each event and across them, the Invasions—historical and annual—enact a dynamic figuration of Blackness as rebellious patriotism, integral to revolutionary Cuban society and history. Analyzing chronotopes as emergent products of textualizing processes allows us to understand the stakes of the social drama as a dynamic figuration of conflict that indexes an alignment with particular historical chronotopes, in this case involving race and nation. As a grassroots mobilization, the Invasion recenters Black neighborhood traditions at the heart of the city, calibrating the here-and-now of bodies rolling through the streets to the sound of the Conga to a historical recentering of Black Cuban contributions in the patriotic narrative of the Cuban Revolution.

Conclusions and Implications Social dramas are highly participatory events or event-series that make long-term, durable social dynamics visible by enacting social conflicts or tensions in condensed, highly reflexive form. While drawing upon participants’ lived experiences, they are set apart from the flow of everyday life as taking place in an event chronotope that is calibrated with historical or mythic chronotopes—the road, the street, the carnivalesque, the revolution—that make the event dramatic, so that it presents a dynamic figuration of tensions arising in some key set of social and historical relationships. In my extended example of the Invasion as a social drama, I have used the tools of textualizing processes and calibration of chronotopes to show how a social drama enacts a dynamic figuration of social conflicts, tensions, and grievances that may usually be left implicit. Tracing the dynamic figurations involving, for example, competing visions of race, place, and citizenship that unfold to make an event memorable helps the ethnographer to reach a deeper understanding of what is at stake for participants. Durable identifications, such as of race and citizenship, exceed any particular performance event. Their durability results from longer-term iterative accumulations across many interactions, rather than emerging whole-cloth from any particular event, where, for example, racial identifications are more likely to be treated as presupposed, even obvious sedimentations of biographical histories. But the question for any given social drama is which identity claims and conflicts are mobilized? How? These questions address the impact and implications of the event. I have argued that an analysis of chronotope is necessary to address these questions, because it is chronotopic calibrations between events and particular historical perspectives that produce social dramas. In his original conceptualization, symbolic anthropologist Victor Turner (1957, 1974) provided a universalizing scheme of the phases of social drama and applied a psychoanalytic language of “catharsis” to describe the impact of social dramas on participants. He was especially interested in the transformative potential of social dramas, for example, in producing social schisms, and he also pointed out the temporally-unfolding trajectories through which social dramas enact disruptions of social life-as-usual. It is these analyses, rather than

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his schema of phases, that I have reworked according to principles of a semiotic approach. His application of universalizing schemata and borrowed psychanalytic language do not actually explain the workings of social dramas or their effects. The kind of semiotic analysis I describe permits us to seek evidence and test claims regarding what conflicts are being played out, and with what stakes for differently-positioned participants, whether or not society is measurably transformed as a result. I suggest a more open-ended investigation of what are almost always more varied and complexly laminated effects than a diagram of phases would suggest. I ask what dynamic figurations of conflict make a particular event or series of events stand out as “eventful.” It should be clear that the analysis of social dramas requires a triangulation between many, overlapping textualizing processes, the dynamic figurations that result, and the indexes of time and place that connect an event to other aspects of the society and its history. Ethnographic and historical work are required, and tracing different aspects of the social drama might reveal additional insights about its stakes. In my examples here, I said little about how neighborhood allegiances and boundaries are dynamically figured during Carnival, and I did not touch on identifications of gender and sexuality at all, although there are abundant indexical clues that these too are dramatized in events such as the Invasion. While my extended example involves annual events with thousands of participants that speak to larger political and historical issues of racial belonging and citizenship in revolutionary Cuba, the concept and approach I have outlined is potentially relevant to a wider range of cases, including what Richard Werbner (2016) calls “microdramatic” miniatures such as divination rituals, in which the poetics of casting divination lots displays the field of social forces—kin, allies, foes—of an individual’s life, so that the diviner can diagnose problems and offer solutions. The concept of social drama can describe events of any scale, from interpersonal dramas—such as in Turner’s (1957) account of a villager’s ill-fated attempt to become headman—to mass mobilizations involving the state and its citizens. And, indeed, the scalability of social dramas, to enact (some aspect of) society in condensed form and to catalyze a “big” response, is key to their productivity as an analytical category (see Carr and Lempert 2016). While the scales can vary, the same textualizing processes are at work, with the same need to examine how the dramatic event calibrates chronotopes of lived experience to social dynamics and historical perspectives. It is not the scale or scope, then, that defines an event as a social drama, but rather its uptake as a dramatization of issues of wider import. When the dynamic figuration evident in an event points outward to reinforce its political and historical significance in enacting those very tensions, we can productively analyze how the social drama is produced and what political potentials it can enact.

REFERENCES Agha, A. (2007). Recombinant selves in mass-mediated spacetime. Language & Communication 27 (3): 320–335. Bakhtin, M.M. (1968). Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Forms of time and chronotope in the novel. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bateson, G. (1972). A theory of play and fantasy. In: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 177–200. New York: Ballantine Books. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (1990). Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88.

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Burke, K. (1945). A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Carr, E.S. and Lempert, M. (eds.) (2016). Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. de la Fuente, A. (2007). Racism, Culture, and Mobilization. CubaInfo: A Project of the Cuban Research Institute. Florida International University. Fernández Robaina, T. (2009). Identidad Afrocubana, Cultura y Nacionalidad. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. Gal, S. and Irvine, J.T. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gates, H.L. (1988). The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). Deep play: notes on a Balinese cockfight. In: The Interpretation of Cultures, 412–456. New York: Harper Collins BasicBooks. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1489–1522. Goodwin, C. and Duranti, A. (1992). Rethinking context: An introduction. In: Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (A. Duranti and C. Goodwin), 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, M.H. (2006). The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion. Malden: Blackwell. Irvine, J. (1996). Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles. In: Natural Histories of Discourse (M. Silverstein and G. Urban), 131–159. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lee, B. (1997). Talking Heads. Durham: Duke University Press. Lemon, A. (2009). Sympathy for the weary state? Cold War chronotypes and Moscow others. Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (4): 832–864. Morgan, M. (2002). Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Parmentier, R. (1997). The pragmatic semiotics of cultures. Semiotica 116: 1–42. Peirce, C.S. (1933). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pérez, N., Domínguez, C., Rodríguez, R., Silva, O., and Terry, D. (1982). El Cabildo Carabalí Isuama. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente. Perrino, S. (2007). Cross-chronotopic alignment in Senegalese oral narrative. Language & Communication 27 (3): 227–244. Quiñones, S. (2017). Afrodescendencias. Ciudad de Panamá: Ediciones Aurelia. Roth-Gordon, J. (2017). Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press. Saunders, T.L. (2015). Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity. Austin: University of Texas Press. Silverstein, M. (1992). The uses and utility of ideology: Some reflections. Pragmatics 2 (3): 311–323. Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metapragmatic function. In: Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics (J.A. Lucy), 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23 (3–4): 193–229. Silverstein, M. (2004). ‘Cultural’ concepts and the language-culture nexus. Current Anthropology 45 (5): 621–652. Silverstein, M. (2014). The voice of Jacob: Entextualization, contextualization, and identity. ELH English Literary History 81 (2): 483–520. Silverstein, M. and Urban, G. (1996). The natural history of discourse. In: Natural Histories of Discourse (M. Silverstein and G. Urban), 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tomlinson, M. (2014). Ritual Textuality: Pattern and Motion in Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Turner, V. (1957). Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Oxford: Berg. Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Turner, V. (1980). Social dramas and stories about them. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 141–168. Turner, V. (1982). From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. Performing Arts Journal Publications. Turner, V. (1986). Anthropology of Performance. New York: Paj Publishers. Turner, V. (1996). Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Oxford: Berg. van Gennep, A. (1961 [1908]). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Werbner, R. (2016). Divination’s Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wirtz, K. (2014). Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wirtz, K. (2016). The living, the dead, and the immanent: Dialogue across chronotopes. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 69–91. Wirtz, K. (2017). Mobilizations of race, place, and history in Santiago de Cuba’s carnivalesque. American Anthropologist 119 (1): 58–72. Wortham, S. and Reyes, A. (2015). Discourse Analysis: Beyond the Speech Event. New York: Routledge. Zurbano, R. (2014). Soy un negro más: Zurbano par lui-même. Afro-Hispanic Review 33 (1): 13–60.

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12

Digital Literacies

Rachel Flamenbaum and Rachel George Introduction In the past several decades, digital literacies have come to the forefront of popular and academic discussions about educational equity and so-called “twenty-first century skills.” Such discussions tend to focus on discrete, portable, and ostensibly universal technical skills1; in this chapter, we outline a broader, anthropologically informed notion of digital literacies. Drawing from existing scholarship on literacies (digital and otherwise), linguistic anthropological work on digitally mediated interactions not explicitly labeled as literacies, and our own online and offline ethnographic research in Belgrade, Serbia and Greater Accra, Ghana, we propose an approach to digital literacies that: ● ● ●

●

Emphasizes practices and dispositions over discrete skills and abilities; Foregrounds the communicative and affective aspects of such practices; Highlights the participatory, interactional nature of digital literacies rather than foregrounding individualized capabilities; and Recognizes the larger ideological landscapes and hierarchies in which literacies are situated.

In this perspective, digital literacies are best characterized as communicative competencies2 situated within specific regimes of participation (see the section on “Digital Literacies in Regimes of Participation”). Digital literacies refer to a constellation of skills, practices, roles, and dispositions; even the most seemingly technical skills (e.g., turning on a computer, controlling a mouse, launching an application, or coding) are used in the service of interacting and participating in ongoing projects with others. Further, as shown by existing literature and our own research, digital literacies can include the ability to produce and recognize genres of emotions (Ochs and Garro 2013) that are often specific to a particular medium.

1 2

www.battelleforkids/networks/p21.org. Hymes (1972); Basso (1974); and Flamenbaum (2016).

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

We analyze digital literacies in terms of the regimes of participation (George 2018) in which they occur. Regimes of Participation refers to the social and physical organization, cultural norms and expectations, and broader power dynamics that structure (and are affected by) specific activities. Applied to digital literacies, the notion of regimes of participation brings together analyses of (1) micro-interactional practices as they occur in various physical and virtual configurations; (2) the affordances (Gibson 1986) of both digital and physical design; (3) expectations for appropriate participation in such practices, informed by both local norms and the digital affordances mentioned above; and (4) broader ideologies, hierarchies, and inequalities that enable, constrain, and organize participation both in specific digital projects and in communities and societies more generally. As used in this chapter, regimes of participation is a notion that allows for an examination of the social, distributed, and political aspects of digital literacies at various levels of analysis. In using it, we mean to invoke interactional and other anthropological perspectives on participation, including the detailed, multimodal ways that parties inhabiting different roles contribute to ongoing interactions, activities, and/or projects (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2004) and the culturally-organized “participant structures”—that is, the formats and expectations for participation—that dominate in certain situations or among particular groups (Philips 1972). We also want to invoke linguistic anthropological uses of regimes—e.g., “of language” (Kroskrity 2000), of “time” (Eisenlohr 2007), and of “literacies” (Blommaert 2008)—to draw attention to the layers of ideology and value that both organize participation and structure its accompanying expectations and norms. Emphasizing regimes of participation underscores the multiscalar nature of literacies, wherein “each act of reading and writing potentially re-enacts in a moment-by-moment (‘microscopic’) fashion the macroscopic structures in which it takes place” (Besnier 2001, p. 137). In what follows, we present case studies in two domains—keyboards and memes—to clarify different aspects of a linguistic anthropological approach to digital literacies. We examine keyboards to highlight that using even the most basic piece of hardware appropriately is often informed by ideological and economic considerations. In Belgrade, the use of a computer keyboard is inextricable from politically charged orthographic and other linguistic choices that students make elsewhere. Across Ghana, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) assessments focusing on keyboards are often theoretical rather than practical, and blind to the educational routines and material realities of most Ghanaian classrooms. An examination of memes demonstrates the inherently participatory and affective aspects of digital literacies: in both the Serbian and Ghanaian contexts, the “skills” of creating, editing, sharing, liking, and commenting on memes are ultimately inseparable from a suite of broader communicative competencies. These include designing content for various real and imagined audiences; producing and recognizing internet-specific genres, stances, and affect (particularly humor); engaging in complex acts of (dis)affiliation, (re)animation, and recontextualization; and asserting, reorganizing and/or ascribing to multiple social formations. In contrast to scholarship and popular initiatives that position digital literacy (singular) as a universal and portable “set of basic skills,” that exists primarily to “improve employability” (Karpati 2001), a linguistic anthropologically informed approach to digital literacies (plural) (1) centers language and interaction in conceptions of digital literacies; (2) questions the assumption that digital technology and the training required for it will resolve structural global and domestic inequalities; and (3) moves beyond conceptions of digital practices as encounters between individuals and particular hardware and software, to emphasize instead modes of participation in projects with (digitally or physically)

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co-present others. The perspective presented in this chapter stresses situated competencies, embodied and affective practices, and participation in ongoing activities. As shown later, the emphasis on these features is consistent with both contemporary scholarship on print literacies and linguistic anthropological treatments of digital practices more broadly.

Print Literacies, Digital Literacies, and Linguistic Anthropology in the Digital Age Widespread popular (and to a lesser degree, scholarly) notions of “digital literacy” rely primarily on the term “literacy” as a kind of metaphor for “skills” (Buckingham 2015, p. 22), equating them with technological aptitude while sidelining actual considerations of language that the use of the “literacy” metaphor suggests. The much-vaunted “Twenty-First Century Skills” making the rounds in K-12 and Higher Ed circles in the United States and its global development programs—which tout Information and Communication Technology (ICT), media, and internet “literacies” as ostensible key prerequisites for student success in and beyond school—represent one high profile example (P21, 2019). Despite the shift to viewing literacies as multiple and ideological in the interdisciplinary New Literacy Studies (NLS) turn (cf Gee 1990; Street 1984) and in the New London Group’s work on multiliteracies pedagogies (cf Cope and Kalantzis 2009), most mainstream treatments of digital literacy define it as a singular, universal, and inherently transformative skillset. Setting such functional and technologically determined understandings of digital literacy to one side, we propose an approach to digital literacies that emphasizes continuities between emerging digitally mediated literacies and pre-existing inscriptive practices (Debenport and Webster 2019); builds on the insights of scholars examining digital literacies outside of anthropology; and considers how recent linguistic anthropological scholarship on digitally mediated interaction that is not explicitly framed as “literacies” might nonetheless inform our perspective on them. Starting from the continuities between digital literacies and extant scholarship on print literacies, we find that so-called “digital literacies” are part and parcel of a given community’s normative engagements with all forms of talk and interaction. While scholars outside linguistic anthropology have long grappled with “orality” and “literacy” as though they are distinct spheres (see Goody and Watt 1962; Ong 1982), Keith Basso (1974) argued early on that a comprehensive view of what “counts” as communicative competence in a given community must take all forms of semiotic meaning-making, including writing and other inscriptive practices (Debenport and Webster 2019), into account. The notion that “the acquisition of communicative competence proceeds through immersion in cultural practices that include oral and written modalities” (Collins and Blot 2003, p. 39) is all the more important in digitally mediated interactions, which often blur boundaries between oral, written, and visual modes (Jones and Schieffelin 2009). Many proponents of bridging the so-called “Digital Divide” tout mere access to computer technologies and/or digital platforms as the path to digital literacies and therefore economic success.3 Interdisciplinary NLS scholarship and linguistic anthropological forays into literacies have shown that “literacy is not a neutral, uni-dimensional technology” which can be plugged into any context with predictable, universal consequences, “but rather a set

3

See, for example, the One Laptop Per Child initiative and critiques thereof, including Warschauer and Ames (2010).

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of lived experiences that will differ from community to community” (Ahearn 2001, p. 7). Across myriad geographic and historical contexts, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated that literacies are plural (Collins 1995), ideologically grounded (Street 1984), socially constructed (Cook-Gumperz 1986), embedded in meaningful everyday practices (Scollon and Scollon 1984), inextricably connected with other “ways of taking knowledge” (Heath 1983) across texts and talk, and situated in, socialized through, and unevenly upheld by institutions of power. Taken together, these contributions remind us that the very definition of literacy, whether print or digital, cannot be considered universal and must be understood in terms of the ideologies and larger social practices through which literacies are introduced (Schieffelin 2000, p. 293). And just as literacy, like language itself,4 is not neutral, neither are the technologies which make digital communication possible (Coleman 2012; Johnson and Jones 2020). Linguistic anthropologists working on literacies also stress the new affective and moral configurations of personhood that are often made possible by emerging literacy practices. What Patricia Baquedano-Lopez wrote about alphabetic literacy, namely, that it “is less a set of acquired skills and more an activity that affords the acquisition and negotiation of new ways of thinking and acting in the world” (2004, p. 246), should be extended to digital communicative practices. Don Kulick and Bambi Schieffelin (2004) recognized that “the ability to display culturally intelligible affective stances is a crucial dimension of the process of becoming a recognizable subject in any social group” (p. 352).5 The examples described below suggest that the ability to recognize and perform affective stances in particular digital contexts is a vital component of communicative competence, and thus a core but underrecognized aspect of “doing” digital literacies. A wealth of linguistic anthropological engagements with digital modes of feeling and becoming can thus be understood as potential explorations of digital literacies. For instance, a number of scholars have examined how the affordances of un-surveilled text messaging have enabled new affective registers and genres of agentive desire, romantic and otherwise.6 Many other studies demonstrate the link between displaying contextappropriate affective stances and performing (or “animating,” per Silvio 2010) digitally mediated identities. For example, teens use orthographic creativity online to display defiantly “girly-girl” identities in Israel (Vaisman 2011) and to invert the stigma associated with certain kiSwahili dialects via “accented” memes in Kenya (Hillewaert 2015); New York college students on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in the early 2000s used the ambiguity of the quotative be + like to produce a socially desirable form of playful detachment (Jones and Schieffelin 2009); the Chinese state social media apparatus and individual users co-produce fandoms centered on “cuteness” via ludic circulation of memes (Wong et al. 2021); members of “Black Twitter” use culturally-recognizable linguistic practices of signifyin’ (Mitchell-Kernan 1972) to draw and reinforce the group’s boundaries (Florini 2014); and activists in and beyond Ferguson, MO use hashtags to co-articulate rage and heartbreak over the police killing of unarmed Black Americans (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). In these works, as elsewhere, basic digital skills are difficult to separate from affect-laden communicative competencies and broader social and ideological considerations, precisely because all are prerequisites to participation in these digital spaces. 4

See Duranti (2011) on the implications of thinking of language as a “non-neutral phenomenon.” See also Ochs and Schieffelin (1989) on the centrality of affect to language socialization processes and communicative competence. 6 de León (2017); Fader (2020); Good (2012); and McIntosh (2010). 5

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In the next section, we describe some locally specific issues around using keyboards and creating, sharing, and (dis)affiliating with memes in our respective field sites. As we will see, each site highlights various aspects of digital literacies, including (1) the overlapping ­technological ideological, affective, and aesthetic concerns that mediate even the most seemingly straightforward skills; and (2) the fundamentally participatory quality of digital literacies.

Ethnographic Background The ethnographic examples in this paper are drawn from research carried out in Serbia beginning in 2008 and Ghana beginning in 2013. Rachel George’s research focused on how high schoolers in Belgrade, Serbia were socialized—in school, with peers, at home, and online—into new and contested notions of ethnicity, citizenship, and language; her more recent research examines the co-articulation of street and social media activism in a new wave of citizen anti-corruption protests. Rachel Flamenbaum’s study explored the slippage between the rhetoric of imminent technological transformation touted by the Ghanaian state, NGOs, and emerging tech hubs and start-ups, and the actual practices through which digital literacies were being taught in schools. Both contexts demonstrate the complex interplay of technical skills, ideological concerns, and material realities that inform participation in global and/or local digital worlds.

(Am)bivalent Belgrade

As young people born during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s were coming of age, Facebook became a crucial site for the articulation and negotiation of political and linguistic attitudes, a place where practical, technological, and political considerations came together and sometimes clashed. Social media—and the computer more broadly—provided resources that students used to engage with multiple cultural, political, and linguistic spheres at once, while maintaining critical (and often ironic and humorous) distance from each. It allowed them to simultaneously show fluency in and poke fun at both global popular culture and Serbian tradition, all while regaining some sense of control over their international image following more than a decade of international isolation and stigma (George 2014, 2020). In the swelling of nationwide anti-corruption protests since 2015, participants have increasingly used digital and linguistic resources to both create semiotic links to past eras of citizen activism and render street and social media protests legible to both hyperlocal and global activist audiences.

The “New Ghana”

The 2010s were a time of great ferment in Ghana. As cheap wireless broadband access spread across the region, young people increasingly saw the horizontal participation afforded by the internet as a metaphor for how the country might otherwise organize itself. This zeitgeist, which some started calling “The New Ghana,” centered around pride in Ghanaian cultural and entrepreneurial innovations, tech-focused solutions to development problems, and a shared frustration with the rigid age-graded hierarchies of the Ghanaian status quo (Flamenbaum 2017). Across social media, youth suggested that such hierarchies enabled abuses of power by those in positions of seniority; many drew additional links to the unchallenged authority of parents and teachers, suggesting that these arrangements

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curtailed critical thinking and innovation from below and limited the very progress of the nation. Flamenbaum (2016) ultimately demonstrated that only elite young people had the access needed to acquire the literacies necessary to participate to the brave new digital world being touted as the solution to the country’s development woes.

Digital Literacies as Communicative Competencies: Keyboards in Serbia and Ghana The keyboard, along with the computer mouse, might well constitute the technical/ material centerpiece of mainstream notions of digital literacy as technical skillsets. Even a cursory look at keyboard use in context shows that such skills are anything but straightforward. In Serbia, for example, understanding keyboard competence requires understanding widespread uses of and attitudes toward English, the associated politics of orthographic choice for writing Serbian, and the dominance of foreign technological products. Most students in Belgrade begin learning English in primary school, and they supplement their formal education by partaking in an English-saturated media landscape. English, in this context, carries a constellation of possible social meanings, most notably playfulness and a cosmopolitan sensibility. Furthermore, there is the ideological weight of choosing between the two officially recognized Serbian writing systems, Cyrillic and Latin (Figure 12.1). Though most citizens use both writing systems, each of them carries different semiotic associations. Cyrillic can be associated with tradition, nationalism, official state business, Eastern Orthodox religion, and distance from the West. Latin script, closely related to English orthography, dominates on social media and can be used to indicate proximity to the West or a global or cosmopolitan sensibility. It is also associated with Croatian, the closely related language of Serbia’s former co-republic and war enemy, and/or with Serbian

Figure 12.1  Serbian Latin alphabet (top) and Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (bottom).7 7

Albatalad, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Serbian_alphabets.png.

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digital literacies  219

regional identities outside of the capital (see Alexander 2006; Greenberg 2004). While both writing systems are officially recognized by the Republic of Serbia, Cyrillic is granted a higher official status and is generally considered the more distinctly Serbian orthography. In Belgrade, storefronts and products often mix writing systems, while street signs are often only in Cyrillic (with the exception of heavily-trafficked thoroughfares and tourist areas). On social media, however, the Latin script dominates to the point that the presence of Cyrillic is usually noteworthy, or at least noticeable. Keyboards labeled with Cyrillic letters are rare in Serbia; instead, people type in Cyrillic by selecting it as a script in their word processing software or using an online keyboard. Keyboards configured for the Serbian Latin script, with its diacritic marks, are also rare. Rather, most keyboards are English-language keyboards with the 26-letter English alphabet, which people use to write (or, more accurately, approximate) the Serbian Latin script (George 2014, 2020). The English alphabet and keyboard stand in complex relation to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, as evidenced from the following details: 1. The majority of the English alphabet keys have obvious Latin script counterparts; a subset of those letters are the same in Cyrillic and Latin (a, e, j, k, m, o, and t). Another subset represent a different sound in Cyrillic than they do in Latin (Cyrillic c = Latin s, Cyrillic p  =  Latin r, Cyrillic B (capital only)  =  Latin v, and Cyrillic H (capital only) = Latin n). 2. Two English keys (x and y) have a Cyrillic counterpart (representing the /h/ and /u/ sounds) but no Latin counterpart. 3. Two English keys (q and w) have no obvious counterparts, in either Latin or Cyrillic. 4. There are no English keys for Latin letters with diacritic marks, (e.g., ć, č, š, ž, and đ). The complex technological affordances described above generated several script innovations (George 2020), including: 1. Using q, an English letter with no Serbian counterpart, as a quasi-iconic standalone marker of crying. 2. Representing Latin letters with diacritic marks by either dropping them altogether or borrowing from English phonology/spelling to approximate them (e.g., using either sh or s for š) (see George 2014, 2020). 3. Using the resources of the English keyboard to substitute Cyrillic letters or whole words into otherwise Latin writing, e.g., using x, which has a Cyrillic but not a Latin counterpart to write laughter (“xaxaxa”) in otherwise Latin social media conversation (Figure 12.2). 4. Substituting w, another English letter with no Serbian counterpart, for v as an index of girly babytalk, such as in the substitution of wolim te and wolim was for volim te (‘I love you (singular)’) and volim vas (‘I love you(plural)’), or, as in Figure 12.3, in the substitution of swe for sve (‘all’) in the affectively-loaded “swe naaaj” (sve najbolje, ‘all the best’):

Figure 12.2  Laughter written with Latin h and its equivalent Cyrillic, x.

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Figure 12.3  W replaces v in “sve naj[bolje]” (‘all the best’).

This trend also appeared in a 2010–11 cartoon depicting a keyboard with all ws, labeled as a Serbian girl blogger’s keyboard. Not only did these substitutions make use of an English letter that does not appear in the Latin script, but they also seemed to gesture to both the frequent substitution of /w/ for /r/ in English baby talk8 and the common hypercorrection of /v/ to /w/ by Serbian learners of English. What does it mean to know how to use a keyboard in this context? Here, the term digital literacies must include understanding the technological and ideological considerations behind script choices, not merely technical keyboarding skills. It also involves a sophisticated understanding of the orthographic and phonological relations between Serbian and English and what those relations mean for one’s options to approximate Serbian—in Latin or Cyrillic scripts, or both—using English language graphemic, phonological, and material resources. Finally, it means understanding the historical and political weight of different options and how they might be interpreted as signaling various local and global group memberships, political positionings, or subcultural styles. Literacy practices, here, involve communicative, co-constructed, and ever-changing processes, which include moral, aesthetic, and affective considerations that cannot be fully cut off from the skills they accompany. Juxtaposing Serbians’ experiences of the keyboard with those of Ghanaians illustrates that, as with the competencies associated with print literacy, what appears functionally the same is configured differently across contexts. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) became a core subject in the Ghanaian national curriculum in 2004, as well as a component of the West African Senior School Certification Exam (WASSCE) that serves as a standardized high school exit exam across the anglophone countries of the region. Through the early 2000s and 2010s, however, the majority of Ghanaian schools did not have enough working computers to use them in instruction. Outside of a handful of wellequipped elite schools, many students accessed the Internet only at internet cafes (Burrell 2012) or, in rare instances, on a shared family computer with pay-as-you-go wireless broadband access. As such, Ghanaian students’ engagement with keyboards to learn the material required to pass the standardized state and regional exams was largely a hypothetical exercise. One telling example of such abstract ICT pedagogy in Ghana comes from a Primary Two (second-grade) class outside of Accra in late 2013, at a school that had just received a donation of twenty laptops from the local branch of a global company. Rather than conduct the class in the computer lab, the teacher passed out textbooks to each shared desk of three students and had them open to an illustration of a keyboard laid out across a double page, each line of keys highlighted with a different color (Figure 12.4). 8

Despite not using English regularly in spoken interaction, most students in my study were highly proficient in both written and spoken English and consumed a wide variety of English-language media; students, thus, were likely familiar with English baby talk and how to represent it in text.

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Figure 12.4  A mockup of the keyboard diagram in the public school textbook.

Figure 12.5  The Primary Two teacher compares the textbook image and the keyboard of her own laptop.

Holding up her own personal laptop as an additional visual aid, the teacher asked the students to identify letters that appeared in each row, referring to them by the colors in the text—the blue row, the pink row, and so on—and listed any letters that students called out on the chalkboard in the order they were suggested for each row, rather than according to the letters’ actual placements relative to one another in the illustration of the keyboard (Figure 12.5). The students diligently copied these strings of letters into their notebooks, and in later lessons, were called upon to reproduce them from memory—W is in the blue row, K is in the pink row, etc. To an outside observer, this might seem odd. Surely this lesson would be more effective if the students could put their hands on the keyboards and learn to type, thus acquiring the kind of embodied practices (e.g., how to hold a book; knowing how and in what contexts books are useful, etc.) that Scollon and Scollon (1984) have, in non-digital contexts, referred to as incipient literacies. Rather than witnessing experts participating in everyday practices, the way Scollon and Scollon note that novices usually acquire incipient literacies, Ghanaian ICT students were involved in an exercise in imagination, unmoored from embodied use. Ultimately, the class was not a lesson in pre-typing, meant to enable a

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student to use a keyboard to achieve particular activities with a computer. Rather, it was a lesson in memorization using the rote pedagogical framework that is the bedrock of Ghanaian public schooling (Flamenbaum 2017), aimed at the standardized state and regional exams which asked students to demonstrate basic knowledge of the layout of a keyboard on paper. Some months later, several representatives of the large tech firm that had initially donated the laptops visited the school to see the fruits of their generosity. They quizzed students on the spot, asking them to demonstrate how to open a word processing application and type a sentence of their choosing. The students were, understandably, quite flummoxed—to be asked to transfer and apply the hypothetical information they had memorized was simply not in keeping with their received understanding of their role as students. The tech firm representatives raised a hue and cry about their donation being wasted and left in outrage. Though they were products of the Ghanaian school system themselves, they were blinded by what Flamenbaum (2017) calls the ideology of technological transformation, which transfers longstanding assumptions about literacy’s inherent transformative potential to digital forms. At the core of this tech-utopian belief is the assumption that computers are designed to be intuitive for all users, who will need only a bit of creative trial-and-error problem-solving to quickly master them. This ignores that such self-starting problem-solving is actively discouraged in Ghanaian schools. Moreover what might have seemed “intuitive” to a designer—for example, a floppy disk icon to metaphorically represent “storage”—in fact relies on a set of shared assumptions and histories unfamiliar to Ghanaian students encountering computers for the first time. Both the standardized ICT exams and the tech representatives’ pop quiz make evident the absurdity and limitations of notions of digital literacy based wholly in discrete, universally transferable skillsets linked to decontextualized hardware use. A mismatch between technological ideologies, digital literacies pedagogy, and students’ real-life access to and experiences with technology is hardly limited to Ghana; as Lisa Schwartz and Kris Gutierrez note, “too often digital tools are considered to be a ‘magic box’ (Warschauer 2006) that can extend learning, without attention to the social context surrounding their use” (2015, p. 590). The authors instead recommend examining the participation trajectories of media use in considering how family members share devices, gather around computers, and otherwise engage with technology and media in real time (see Ito 2010 for an example of tracing genres of digitally mediated participation). With that in mind, we turn next to the notion of regimes of participation and its utility for a linguistic anthropology of digital literacies.

Digital Literacies in Regimes of Participation The previous section demonstrated that digital literacies include a range of competencies that stretch well beyond straightforward technological skills. As detailed below, a deeper look into specific digital practices further shows that individual competencies are only part of a larger system of coordinating activities and sharing resources across digital and physical space. Bringing in theories of participation, a concept explored in detail by linguistic anthropologists,9 helps us move beyond examining an individual’s skills and interactions with a particular technology and toward considering the intricacies of the multimodal projects they undertake with others. 9

cf Duranti (1997); C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin (2004); and Philips (1972).

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The term regimes of participation provides a framework for analyzing the moment-bymoment unfolding of digitally mediated activities, the affordances of the digital and physical environments in which such activities take place, and the social hierarchies enabling, limiting, and/or structuring participation in digitally mediated spaces. Analyzing digital literacies as situated within regimes of participation means analyzing how a wide range of skills, practices, and dispositions exist within and contribute to (1) various arrangements of participants, objects, and technologies in virtual and physical space; (2) available formats and locally- and digitally specific expectations for various kinds of participants; and (3) the larger ideological landscape and power relations that structure who can participate (and how) in various kinds of mediated interactions and more broadly as members of various nested and overlapping communities (i.e., the regimes that structure and organize participation at multiple scales). Regimes of participation thus brings together multiple strands of analysis in linguistic anthropology. A focus on participation as a “situated, multi-party accomplishment” (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2004, p. 231) allows us to examine the “interplay between semiotic resources provided by language on the one hand and tools, documents, and artifacts on the other” (ibid, p. 239). Applied to digital literacies, this means considering the arrangement of participants in virtual and physical space and the expressive affordances of those environments (Keating 2005), the participant roles inhabited and inhabitable in specific digitally mediated activities and platforms, as well as the ways in which technologies, bodies, spaces, and digital literacy practices co-constitute each other (Johnson and Jones 2020; Keating and Sunakawa 2010). We can further apply the notion of participation structures (Philips 1972)—that is, the formats and expectations for who participates and how in various activities—to examine digital literacy practices. In Ghanaian ICT classrooms, this means thinking about how the designed affordances of computer technologies and their associated digital skills fit in (or do not) with expectations for the structure of pedagogical activities e.g., when and how students can ask questions, when they are expected to repeat lessons verbatim, whether and when they can learn by doing, and so on. While some participation structures are tied to deep cultural values and forms of social organization, others are built into—i.e., afforded by—the coding, design, and commodification of platforms themselves (Johnson and Jones 2020; see also Herring 2007). It is well-documented, for instance, that “context collapse,” where a social media user’s many social spheres are aggregated into one undifferentiated audience (Gershon 2014; Marwick and boyd 2010), complicates users’ efforts to manage a “coherent” self across interactions. This can encourage particular kinds of audience design (Bell 1984; Tagg and Seargeant 2014), e.g. when one user creates a public message addressed explicitly to one participant with an eye toward impressing another virtual bystander. As we have noted elsewhere (Flamenbaum and George 2018), a platform’s (perceived) synchronicity can also structure expectations for participation, as when the sense of “ambient affiliation” (Zappavigna 2011), or potential continuous connectedness enabled by mobile phones, affects texters’ perceptions of one another’s silences or absences; or when the sense of shared time created by viral hashtags (Bonilla and Rosa 2015) creates heightened expectations for timely participation. Finally, because of the connection between the unfolding, real-time participation and its accompanying expectations10 on the one hand, and the larger dynamics of participation in a broader society or community, on the other,11 we add the term regimes to our discussion of participation. We use regimes to emphasize the “linkage of microcultural worlds…to 10

Including expectations for specific digital spaces; see Gershon (2010) on “media ideologies.” See Ochs and Taylor (1995) on how the participation structures of family dinner conversations reflect and reinforce broader societal gender dynamics. 11

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macrosocial forces,” and to emphasize that participation in literacy practices operates at multiple scales (Kroskrity 2000, p. 2). In various contexts, this might refer to colonial legacies and neoliberal economic development regimes that inform infrastructural issues, classroom rituals, and/or access to material goods; global flows that flood markets with English-language keyboards; or the geopolitical realities that imbue particular letters or characters with aesthetic or ideological meaning. Thinking of digital literacies as organized by regimes situates expectations for appropriate use of digital tools and platforms within larger, macrosocial realities. The notion of regimes of participation thus brings together analyses at multiple scales— from the moment-by-moment enacting of roles within particular digital and physical environments to the cultural and platform-specific expectations for participants to the dynamic relation of such factors with the array of macro-structural forces described earlier. In so doing, it further illuminates the inextricability of digital literacies from the ongoing flow of activities with others and the larger social worlds in which they occur.

Memes in Belgrade and Accra

Contemporary scholarship on memes generally starts by referencing Richard Dawkins (1976), who coined the term as a cultural analogue to a gene: an abstract component of cultural information, like a clothing trend or a popular melody, that reproduces itself (and often changes) as it moves through social spaces. According to Limor Shifman 2014 (and others), online memes are always a collection of texts, which share structural and stylistic (that is, generic) features, and whose histories of circulation and modification are crucial to their emergent meanings. To cite one well-known example,12 a man in the image below is gesturing and gazing at a butterfly (Figure 12.6). The original text, “Is this a pigeon?” is a direct quote from the

Figure 12.6  Original pigeon/butterfly image. 12

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon.

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anime show from which the image came, where a humanoid character misrecognizes the insect in front of him. Since 2018, social media users have endlessly recaptioned and recirculated this image to illustrate various forms of ignorance, misunderstanding, or undesirable and/or absurd social or political stances. In one instance, the man is labeled “not meteorologists,” the butterfly is labeled “weather,” and the caption reads “Is this climate?” In another, the man is “depressed white guys,” the butterfly “white supremacy,” and the caption “Is this a sense of belonging?” The pigeon/butterfly example illustrates several common features of memes that are relevant to a discussion of digital literacies. First, it has a clear “grammar,” both in the literal sense of the formula “Is this a ___”, and in the relationships between the images and text (i.e., the man is always the person or entity who is wrong, the butterfly the object of confusion, and the caption the misunderstanding itself). Second, the meme operates on a generic “memicintertextual recognizability” (Blommaert and Varis 2015, p. 11), getting its humor from a complex interplay of conventional and innovative elements—not unlike the “format tying” described by Marjorie Goodwin (1990, p. 177), in which participants (dis)align with prior talk by partially recycling its form and adding new, creative elements. Third, as Blommaert and Varis further note, circulating memes like the pigeon/butterfly one can be seen as signaling membership in and/or creating social groupings, whether through conviviality, that is “loose, temporal, and elastic collectives” built by focusing together on objects of interest (ibid, p. 1); through potentially more lasting forms of political reorganization (as discussed in the Ghanaian #tweaa example below); or simply through participating in meme circulation in order to assert desirable social characteristics or identities (e.g., as cosmopolitan, tech-savvy, skeptical, and the like). Debra Spitulnik’s (1996) argument that the “repeating, recycling, and recontextualizing” of radio discourse is a “key constitutive and integrating feature of what can be called a community” (pp. 164, 166) applies to memes as well. Further, as we demonstrate below, memes are a place where the affective aspect of digital literacies—that is, the ability to produce and recognize affect that is (always) genre-specific—is on full display; here, competently reanimating the meme requires “correctly” pairing the misrecognized elements with the appropriate sarcasm. Finally—and perhaps most obviously—any digital practices involving memes are forms of participation, involving “public practices for building action and meaning in concert with others” (C. Goodwin 2004, p. 166). Memes in Belgrade Among Serbian internet users, memes and image macros build on the complex keyboard arrangements described earlier. Many users mix both orthographies and languages, as well as global pop-cultural and Serbian traditional imagery to signal a simultaneous engagement with and ironic detachment from both Serbia and the “West” (see George 2014, 2020). In one example, an iconic Serbian Orthodox image similar to the one shown in Figure 12.713 was altered to show patron saint Sveti Nikola holding a Star Wars light saber. The meme creator altered the Cyrillic text, originally reading Sveti (‘saint’), to read ‘меј ди форс би вид ју’ (mej di fors bi vid ju or ‘may the force be with you’, a catchphrase from the Star Wars franchise), following the custom for rendering foreign names and words according to Serbian spelling rules, but also evoking the sound of someone speaking English with Serbian pronunciation. A research participant shared the meme and added a second caption, St. Arwars (using the Latin script), which is readable as the movie title Star Wars or as the English name of a saint (‘St. Arwars’). 13

I am not including the meme itself because of copyright concerns, as I am unable to determine the original creator of the meme.

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Figure 12.7  An image of St. Nikola, which a Serbian user later re-imagined with a light saber as “St. Arwars.” Source: Lindom/Adobe Stock.

Using Cyrillic next to a picture of Sveti Nikola reinforces the association of the writing system with Serbian religion and tradition; using it to transliterate the catchphrase pokes fun at (and thus distances a user from) both religious and ethnic imagery and Western media. The meme’s elements are likely recognizable to a wide audience, including foreigners who recognize the light sabers or Serb monolinguals who can pronounce, but not translate, the catchphrase. The meme seems tailored, however, to a bilingual, trigraphic audience familiar with images of St. Nikola—and perhaps even familiar with how both Eastern Orthodox and Star Wars images function as tropes in a wide range of local memes. The meme, then, seems to participate in a kind of “indexical selectivity” (Agha 2011) presupposing and targeting a particular imagined audience and asserting membership within it. The digital literacies involved in the social life of this image are fundamentally about the regimes of participation in which they circulate. We cannot understand these memes, for example, without understanding the multimodal affordances that allow the easy downloading, altering, and sharing of images, as well how social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter encourage sharing and (dis)affiliation through “like” buttons, comments, and captions, all of which distribute digital participation and allow for the gradual and shifting accrual of meaning. The person who shared this image and added the caption “St. Arwars,” did not make the meme, but instead used a different writing system to build on and align with a public, evolving joke.

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The digital literacies in play here also include the use of particular technological and linguistic resources to engage irreverently with multiple linguistic, pop-cultural, and political spheres, which fundamentally involve the affective aspects of communicative competence. As shown above and discussed elsewhere (George 2014, 2020), memes circulating in Belgrade were often about producing a witty, ironic detachment, eschewing political categories, exhibiting multiple forms of cultural and political fluency, and/or aiming messages at imagined global audiences. These tendencies are connected to a larger history of linguistic/symbolic play and political participation in Belgrade, which includes nostalgic memories of Yugoslavia’s advantageous liminal position during the Cold War (Jansen 2009) and other examples of engaging with multiple spheres while maintaining defiance; the illicit circulation of global media and products during sanctions; or protesters against the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia literally aiming playful, mixed-language protest signs at fighter jets above. While tracing these histories is impossible here, they all suggest ways in which participation in literacy practices produced under particular social, political, and economic pressures might echo and reinforce broader forms of citizen participation. Memes in Ghana As Flamenbaum 2022 describes in detail, memetic participation in Ghana also invokes many of the forms of participation and socialization referenced above. After a video of an audience member heckling a government official with a bold call of “tweaaa” (a Twi exclamation of derision) went viral on YouTube in 2014, the phrase #tweaa spread quickly on Ghanaian social media, often appended to various recognizable memes and other images. The circulation of the exchange across on- and offline contexts focused on the young h ­ eckler’s interruption and one line in English out of the official’s longer bilingual response: “Am I your co-equal?:” that is, “How dare you interrupt me, person who is clearly not my equal?” This decontextualized slice of the larger interaction captured the “New Ghana” zeitgeist of youthful, technologically savvy challenges to the age-graded hierarchies of the status quo (Flamenbaum 2022), echoing Spitulnik’s discussion of circulating “public words,” or “condensations or extracts from much longer speech events,” which often “function metonymically to index the entire frame or meaning of the earlier speech situation” (Spitulnik 1996, p. 166). In one example, the WWII-era British motivational poster “Keep Calm and Carry On” is rendered instead as “Keep Calm and Tweaa” (Figure 12.8). The image, like many others, frames the encounter as a successful youthful challenge from below, by speaking from a position of solidarity with the heckler to an imagined audience of those who would also say “tweaa,” rather than have “tweaa” directed at them. This meme was not alone in rendering “tweaa” a kind of verb of moral outrage; in wave upon wave of memetic circulation, tweaa underwent an enduring shift from its original meaning as general expression of derision, such that the neologized “to tweaa” came to mean “to protest inept authorities.” In taking local indexes of Ghanaian cultural identity (the use of the Twi language; references to Ghanaian films, shared classroom and other childhood experiences in which moral hierarchies are traditionally invoked, etc.), and rendering them mobile by placing them in globally recognizable image macro formats to be shared in collaborative social networks online, #tweaa memes coalesced with and contributed to the emerging “New Ghana” ethos by rearticulating authentic Ghanaian-ness as non-hierarchical and informed by a profoundly tech-savvy cosmopolitan sensibility. There is a complex set of participant formats and roles to uncover in terms of how individuals (co)authored and (co)animated meaning across this dense, fast-moving network of interactions. Someone had to film the incident and upload it to YouTube. Others had to view it, share it across a broad on-and-offline media ecology, and transfer it to other

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Figure 12.8  Ghanaian memetic rendering of the famous wartime British motivational poster “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

formats. The spoken word was de- and re-contextualized (Briggs and Bauman 1992) as a hashtag to be used on the appropriate social media, and that text was rendered in the common “meme font” (i.e., Impact) and appended to images, which many additional people shared, recreated, or altered. The rhetorical question “Am I your co-equal?” and the hierarchies it invokes are both indexed and called into question not only by the memes themselves, but also by the ways in which they were shared outside the normal channels of power. Yet, this is not an egalitarian utopia by any means, given the unequal access to both technological and symbolic resources needed to participate. In addition to the technological affordances and transformations involved in competent participation, there are the considerations of who did and did not participate in the sharing ecology, to what extent, and why. Though there was a dramatic increase in access to mobile broadband and web-enabled phones at the time, many Ghanaians’ familiarity with the original video and subsequent memes came via devices shared amongst friends, family members, fellow travelers in shared taxis, and even radio DJs’ re-animation of the encounter and subsequent forms of viral re-uptake on-air, thus complicating any straightforward interpretation that these memes were made exclusively by and for youthful “New Ghana” adherents. The subversion of Ghanaian norms for participation—in essence, that young people should not speak up, offer opinions, challenge elders—that flourished in digitally mediated spaces might not translate whole cloth outside of the digital sphere of the “New Ghana,” but frustration with those in power certainly did. Thus, the roles, genres, and stances in this wider sharing ecology were in flux, multiple, and unevenly mobile for overlapping spheres of participants. Moreover, participating in on- and offline sharing or discussion of #tweaa artifacts could be seen to invoke not only participants’ past experiences with being shut down by elders and other authority figures at school and home (indeed, many #tweaa memes directly

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played on such comparisons), but also the spirit of earlier literary forms of angst and resistance dating back to at least the 1968 publication of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel decrying widespread corruption and the resulting stalled promise of Independence. In this context, “doing” #tweaa competently—that is, being a legitimate participant in its multimodal circulation—means drawing on these broader threads to engage in a collaborative, intertextual “act of control” (Bauman and Briggs 1990, p. 76) about how Ghana ought to re-envision itself, or in Shifman’s (2014, p. 120) terms, engaging in a “normative debate about how the world should look and how to get there.” We might also view memetic participation as a collaborative narration of competing moral frames (Ochs and Capps 2001, p. 157) into a larger political story that requires particular types of competencies to produce and understand. For the #tweaa moment, talking about digital literacies means talking about the creation and circulation of emergent meanings, involvement in collaborative, aspirational grappling with the very nature of participation in Ghanaian public life, and the relationship between digital sharing networks and issues of access and power. There is no way to talk about an abstract individual-meets-technology kind of literacy here—only participation in a deeply collaborative, distributed, and unfolding project.

Conclusions Nearly fifty years ago, Keith Basso suggested that the study of writing: should not be conceived of as an autonomous enterprise, divorced and separate from linguistics, kinesics, proxemics, and the like, but as one element in a more encompassing field of inquiry which embraces the totality of human communication skills and seeks to generalize about their operation vis-a-vis one another in different sociocultural settings. (Basso 1974, p. 426)

In this chapter, we have made a similar argument about the study of what many call digital literacies. Like writing, digital practices are “a form of communicative activity” that require attention to “models of performance as well as to models of competence, to the external variables that shape the activity” (ibid). We have suggested that digital literacies are best conceived as a set of communicative competencies that take place within specific regimes of participation, with all of their accompanying affordances, roles, expectations, and inequalities. Digital literacies are fundamentally about how we think, interact, feel, experience, and coordinate projects with others in and across digitally mediated contexts, and how such actions are intimately tied to membership in various overlapping and nested social groupings. Recently, some in the field of literacies pedagogy have shifted away from the label digital literacy and toward another metaphorical extension from language, namely digital fluency.14 Although digital fluency appears at first glance to come closer to ideas presented in this chapter (e.g., it includes “collaborative fluency” and “digital citizenship fluency,”), the fluencies its proponents describe are still, essentially, metaphors for individualized skills, thought to set up students for success in a knowledge economy. “Collaborative fluency,” for example, is basically a set of project management skills, featuring the four e’s: “establish, envision, engineer, and execute.”15 While the rebranding of digital literacies as digital fluencies might give lip service to layered competencies, collaborations, and global 14 15

https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/21st-century-fluencies. Ibid.

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considerations, it still recapitulates the idea of ostensibly universal competencies as a straightforward formula for economic success. The examples presented in this chapter suggest that static models and rigid assessment tools for digital skills16 fall short when they are geared only toward individual learning outcomes and/or future job skills. Such assessments take a narrow set of idealized functional skills from affluent post-industrial contexts and raise them to a universal standard. Given the varying infrastructures, norms, and goals for knowledge production that hold across the globe, such a universal standard is a recipe for finding deficiency at worst and aiming for homogeneity at best. In this way, the problems with digital literacy discourse parallel the problems with discourses around the so-called “language gap”: the supposed 30-million word gap in the language that poor children encounter in their homes prior to starting school (Hart and Risley 1995). As linguistic anthropologists critiquing word gap discourses and interventions have pointed out (Avineri et al. 2015), programs aimed at closing the word gap, like programs aimed at instilling “digital literacies,” often promote simplistic and individualized solutions to structural problems, work with narrow definitions of complex skills, ignore the cultural and material realities of students’ lives, marginalize alternative forms of engagement with literacy practices and events, and promote narrow neoliberal ways of thinking about student skills and their purposes. Although such programs aimed at alleviating global and domestic inequalities are usually well-meaning, they could benefit from the linguistic anthropological approach to digital literacies laid out here: one that considers the nuances of competencies that emerge in digital spaces by starting from the diversity of actual forms of engagement with technologies and draws on long-standing knowledge about literacies, participation, communicative competence, and affective self-making in interaction with others. A linguistic anthropology of digital literacies, framed explicitly as such, belongs in broader conversations about digital pedagogy, policy, development, and design.

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For one such example, see: https://www.iste.org/standards/seal-of-alignment/digital-literacy-assessment.

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13

Digital Religious Discourse

Ayala Fader Introduction Linguistic anthropologists and anthropologists of religion should spend more time together. Each has something to offer the other methodologically and theoretically, pushing us to think comparatively and historically about relationships among religious belief and doubt, language, and the media through which religious belief is practiced and shared. Scholarship on religious language and literacies has focused on sacred languages and practice in explicitly religious genres that connect humans with the divine and to other believers through prayer, ritual, and oratory (Keane 2004; Rosowsky 2013; Stasch 2011). Over the past few decades, anthropologists of religion have also written about the ways that pious subjects cultivate ethical ways of being and a relationship to divinity. Much of this work, has productively explored material and embodied practices (Mahmood 2005), as well as how “lived religion” is experienced by a range of actors in everyday contexts (Orsi 2005). This chapter argues for bringing these approaches to religion and language, especially literacies, into conversation to ask not only about the production or experience of religious piety, but also about religious doubt. Specifically, we will explore what happens to languages in multilingual religious communities when a new medium, in this case digital media, introduces new possibilities for written expression and interaction, particularly for those who are questioning and doubting the theologies and cultures into which they were born and grew up. Some multilingual religious communities with textual traditions have a linguistic repertoire that includes a sacred language, which is considered God given or God’s actual words, along with everyday written and spoken vernaculars (Elster 2003; Haeri 2003). Language ideologies, or cultural beliefs about language and what it is good for (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998), influence relationships among sacred and vernacular language, as well as how and when they are used. For example, Jonathan Boyarin (1993) notes that some Orthodox Jews believe that every linguistic feature of loshn koydesh (a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic) scribed in the Torah was divinely revealed by God, literally God’s words, but those words require human interpretation. Thus, some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States read lines of loshn koydesh from the Torah aloud in pairs and then translate them into the vernaculars (Yiddish and English) to discuss the meaning. A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Ethnography shows us that these same multilingual religious literacy practices are not only about access to divine intention or a relationship with the divine. Religious reading and writing are simultaneously ways that gendered socialities are created and lived. For example, again among ultra-Orthodox Jews, only boys and men may study the Torah and its commentaries, and their reading and subsequent translation to and discussion in the vernaculars is definitive of how to be Orthodox, Jewish, and male (e.g., Boyarin 2020). Since the late 1990s, anthropologists of religion have written about the ways that pious subjects come to participate in gendered ethical subjectivity. Their focus on embodiment and materiality was a direct response to earlier critiques that the anthropology of religion had historically privileged immaterial belief over the material, the “tangible,” and the political (Meyer and Houtman 2012, p. 2). This critique included, for some, less attention to language since many have traced immaterial belief to a Protestant legacy of the word, with its rejection of materiality and its universalizing histories in missionization and colonialism (Asad 1993, 2003). Most recently, attention to everyday gendered religious embodied practice, materiality, and ethics came to reveal the different stakes and investments that people in religious communities can have, including changing religious commitments over time. This insight led to a contemporary and growing interest in religious doubt, uncertainty, and questioning (e.g., Carey and Pederson 2017; Luhrmann 2012; Pelkmans 2013). We can think about doubt as a continuum and distinguish between two kinds of doubt. The first is the doubt that defines and refines religious belief, not necessarily changing religious practice. The second is what I call “life-changing doubt,” or the doubt that disrupts religious practice (Fader 2020). Both forms of doubt are lived by and through media conceptualized broadly, what Ilana Gershon describes as “channels of communication” (2017). Thinking about media as channels of communication moves us beyond the traditional linguistic anthropological bias for face-to-face interaction as unmediated communication. Further, theorizing channels of communication reminds us to pay attention not only to the content that media brings or the physical properties of a medium that shape its uses, its “affordances” (Gibson 1977), but also to cultural beliefs about media, what Gershon has called “media ideologies” (2010). A focus on doubt (and belief) as practice prompts attention less to private interior expressions of doubt and more to its public articulation with others through interaction across channels of communication of many kinds. Insights from recent linguistic anthropological approaches to language and media and anthropological approaches to religion and media have each laid a foundation for understanding how language and media can facilitate the authoritative experience of and a relationship to non-human beings, such as divinities. In this chapter I explore how insights from these literatures might be extended to the undermining of religious authority, that is, the study of religious doubt particularly when a new digital medium is integrated into a multilingual religious context. How do members of a religious community who are questioning their lifeworlds engage communal language ideologies and literacy practices when they begin reading and writing on new digital platforms? Questions we might ask include: What does doubt look like and sound like? Where is doubt audible and where is it silenced? How does writing about religious doubt, digitally “writing oneself into being” (Pappacharissi 2009), for example on a blog, transform persons, languages, and semiotic ideologies, that is, public cultural beliefs about signs, including but not limited to language (Keane 2007)? Most important, how does writing with others on a new medium, such as a digital platform, become a social activity that can create a gendered doubting public, one with the potential to challenge a wider religious public in unexpected ways?

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Religion and Media Religion and media scholarship emerged from several different disciplines at the turn of this millennium: as a subfield of the anthropology of religion, religious studies, anthropology of media, and from a communications studies perspective. The impetus was to account for the ways that new media, particularly the digital, had not only become part of religious life, but in many cases supported religious life, reproducing existing structures and hierarchies of authority despite being online. While much of the research on religion and media has focused on the effect of a new medium, it is important to note the contrasting methodologies and theoretical perspectives that distinguish communication studies from anthropology and religious studies. Communication studies scholarship emphasized the “newness” of digital media and the surprising ways, at least for secular scholars, that religious communities came to integrate these technologies to form “digital religions” or online religions (Campbell 2013). Some scholars working in this framework also studied where the digital was rejected or “domesticated” by religious communities. For example, Tsuriel Rashi conducted a qualitative analysis of op-eds, articles, editorials, and official announcements and advertisements to analyze how ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leadership in Israel exploited its near-total control over print-media (e.g., newspapers), which enabled them to require that their followers adopt exclusively filtered “kosher” cell phones that did not connect to the internet (Rashi 2013). In contrast, an anthropological and religious studies approach is premised on longitudinal participant observation and takes as its object of study a broader media environment, what is called the “media ecology” (McLuhan 1964). This perspective shows that religion can be theorized not only with media but also “as” media (Stolow 2005). This means that we might think about all religious experience as mediated, drawing on a semiotic study of signs including the body, senses, affect, and materiality (see also Engelke 2010). From this approach, digital media is one of many channels of communication for ethnographic investigation. For example, Arsalan Khan (2018) presents research with Tablighi Muslim male preachers in Pakistan, whose rejection of social media like Facebook stemmed from fears that it might disrupt existing institutional religious hierarchies by creating more egalitarian gendered social relationships among believers online. By thinking more broadly about religion as media, anthropologists can engage a semiotic approach to religious life that investigates both language and materiality. For example, Matthew Engelke (2007) describes the Friday Masowe Church of Zimbabwe, whose members are Christians but who do not read the Bible (instead, they use its pages for toilet paper!). They claim that the materiality of the Bible, its ties to colonialism, and institutional hierarchies, distance them from God rather than bring God closer. They receive the Holy Spirit “live and direct” in outdoor spaces through preaching and praying with others, religious language that they never record in any form. This kind of semiotic approach that includes attention to media ecologies has implications not only for religious experience and religious settings, but also for the formation of people or subjectivities. For example, Birgit Meyer (2011) engages with Webb Keane’s concept of semiotic ideology to describe how cultural beliefs about mediation through materiality and embodiment might authorize the experience of the divine. This implies that certain media at particular times and places can make relationships or ways of being a possibility. This is not to suggest that the medium itself creates certain persons, but rather that a newly introduced medium of any sort may authorize certain feelings and experiences, including, as linguistic anthropologists Ilana Gershon and Paul Manning (2014) note, different forms of social interaction and participant structures.

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Religion and media scholarship has foregrounded materiality and embodiment using the concept of semiotic ideology, but it has sidelined language and literacies, even when the topic is text and reading practices. Perhaps this is because language in this framework is considered too interior, too cognitive, too tied to Protestant emphasis on the word. For example, Jeremy Stolow’s (2010) monograph on the Orthodox Jewish publishing house, Artscroll, examines the materiality and the economics of Jewish book publishing. He shows that the affordances of digital media, that is, its physical properties that include translations and explanations of sacred texts, have created new forms of books and magazines for a Jewish Orthodox audience that are both accessible (at least to men) and still feel authentically authoritative (Stolow 2010). His is an important contribution, leading us to further ask what attention to the languages and literacies that are intrinsically part of this new kind of printing for an Orthodox Jewish readership might reveal. Linguistic anthropologists who work within the religion and media framework offer a model for bridging the boundary between semiosis (including language), embodiment, and materiality, especially through attention to the sensory dimension of the voice. For example, Patrick Eisenlohr has written extensively about Muslims in Mauritius and the ways that stored audio-recorded prayer is counter-intuitively perceived as a more direct experience of God than someone reciting the same prayers live due to theological assumptions about mediation in religious settings (2009, 2011). In more recent work, Eisenlohr (2018) and Nicholas Harkness (2013) each focus on the voice, which also brings linguistic practice to scholarship on religion and media (Eisenlohr) and scholarship on semiotics (Harkness) through its sonic materiality. However, especially in Abrahamic traditions, where text, writing, and reading are so central, there is surprisingly little consideration of religious literacies in contexts of old or new media. There is, however, exciting research on language and media to draw on, which offers a range of theoretical approaches to mediation, multilingualism, and language change.

Language and Media Scholarship on language and media emerges from overlapping disciplines: linguistics, linguistic anthropology/sociolinguistics, and communication studies. At the turn of this millennium, scholars in communication studies and linguistics began to work on what they called “computer mediated communication (CMC).” These scholars used discourse analysis for “networked” language to examine digital communication separately from spoken language. Initially, their focus was primarily on English, and the research was exclusively online (Shiffrin et al. 2001). The assumption was that new digital language practices were distinctive and unrelated to other forms of communication (Herring 2004). Linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics joined the conversation soon after but drew on a different conception of language: rather than exclusively a technology or a medium for content, they approach language as an expressive resource for social actors. Further, the commitment to ethnography, especially for linguistic anthropologists, emphasized the importance of not studying digital communication in isolation from other channels of communication (Johnson and Jones 2021, p. 6). This has had theoretical implications, not least among them the inclusion of multilingual digital communications beyond the English-speaking world (Danet and Herring 2007); the recognition that gender needed to be included in studies of digital communication (Lövheim 2013); sociolinguistic theorizing about new media in terms of style, genre, and performance (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011); and linguistic study of how a digital medium may influence the structure of a language (Bleaman 2018).

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An important development in the study of language and media for anthropologists can be traced to the work of Ilana Gershon (Gershon 2010; Gershon and Manning 2014). Building on the idea of language and semiotic ideologies, Gershon developed the concept of “media ideologies,” the ways people understand communication technologies and their users. Gershon studied the romantic break-ups of US college students and the media over which the break-ups occurred. She argued that couples did not always share the same media ideologies, especially which media should be used in a break-up and how, and that this led to conflict and misunderstandings. Acknowledging human agency in relationship to technologies, Gershon showed that choosing to post on Facebook, send a text or even an old-fashioned letter was interpreted by both parties as providing more than referential content (“we are breaking up”). Each medium choice, including “media switching” (switching among media) also provided indexical information, for example, about the seriousness of the relationship, the potential for repair, the emotional involvement, etc. Gershon and others that followed her focus of research showed that a new medium must not only be historicized in the context of other media—e.g., the telephone was once considered a dangerous new medium too (Gershon 2017)—but that cross-cultural comparison of media was essential. Just as people in different places and times have culturally specific ideas about languages, they similarly have culturally specific ideas about media. Linguistic anthropologists who had done long-term ethnography in non-Western multilingual contexts began to include digital writing and reading in their research. Janet McIntosh (2010), for example, in her work on the coast of Kenya, shows how bilingual youth used multiple languages to claim specific identities. When they texted in the global medialect (a language created by digital media) of abbreviated English, they presented a portrait of themselves as cosmopolitan, cool, modern, and sexy. In contrast, their texting in the local vernacular, Kigiriama, referenced social obligations and relationships of respect. Using both languages online with different purposes, argues McIntosh, inflects the global language of English with local concerns, allowing youth to be both modern and local. In contrast to youth, Giriama elders expressed concern that texting was a kind of witchcraft that threatened ethnic ties because of its hypermobility and global connections. Similarly, Sarah Hillewaert (2015) draws on her research in the Lamu Archipelago, Kenya, to analyze the standard and nonstandard varieties of Swahili that youth used on Facebook, which contrasted to their use of the same two varieties in spoken contexts. She notes that youth avoid nonstandard Swahili dialects in everyday talk. However, they add phonological markers, what she calls “writing with an accent,” to their standard Swahili posts on Facebook. Hillewaert argues that social media offers the opportunity for these youth to redefine what speaking the nonstandard variety of Swahili means and the value that speakers attach to these languages (p. 209). Reading and writing on a new medium allows individuals to take stances toward modernity, locality, or social change. But literacies on a new medium can do more too. One of the affordances of digital writing is that it can create a new kind of public.

Language and Publics Linguistic and cultural anthropologists, political theorists, and literary theorists have written about the formation of publics from different perspectives. Some, like Benedict Anderson (1983), describe an imagined public reading the same printed newspapers, which created a sense of shared citizenship in emergent European nation-states. Others, like Jürgen Habermas (1989), described a public sphere created by bourgeois citizens’ rational debates in the coffee houses of Europe. More contemporary theorists think not of one

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dominant public, which is often normatively male, white, and Christian, but of the many publics that make up everyday life. This includes the concept of counterpublics, defined as marginalized groups’ attempts to articulate an alternative discourse parallel to a dominant public (Cody 2011, pp. 39–42; Fraser 1990; Warner 2002). What these notions of publics and counterpublics share is an attention to distinctive discursive styles, which include gendered languages/literacies and the structures of authority they are tied to (Gal and Irvine 2001). For example, linguistic anthropologists have studied the formation of publics by analyzing and historicizing the families of languages that define them (Irvine 2001), or the ways that publics are formed by mass media, such as radio (Spitulnik 2000). Scholarship on religious publics, however, has tended to focus more on the sensory and material dimensions (Hirschkind 2006) rather than the linguistic. Language and media scholarship can add an important perspective by reminding those studying religious publics of the importance of thinking about both communication and media broadly. Gershon (2017, p. 16) writes that people experience a communicative channel as new when “it enables them to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices.” Language and media scholarship can expand the study of publics by attending to literacy practices that can create counterpublics with distinctive multilingual reading and writing practices. I turn now to an example of the introduction of a new digital medium for communication, the blog, which was taken up by multilingual ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in New York who were questioning or who had life-changing doubt. The heretical counterpublic they formed critiqued the religious ultra-Orthodox public even as it reproduced ultra-Orthodox women’s exclusion in both publics.

The Heretical Counterpublic of Ultra-Orthodox Men’s Blogging

In the late 1990s, the internet did not provoke much concern among ultra-Orthodox leadership in the United States. Indeed, ultra-Orthodox Jews do not generally reject technology or new media. Instead, drawing on Jewish theology interpreted by authoritative rabbis, they have regularly infused non-Jewish media with Jewish content or Jewish form and Jewish intention to uplift and transform the original (Fader 2009). However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, ultra-Orthodox men with doubts or even just open-minded intellectuals, those they called in Yiddish, the ‘enlightened’ (oyfgeklerte), began to blog anonymously online in Yiddish and English, and eventually met up in person to secretly create networks of the like-minded. Adam Reed (2005) attributes the surge in blogging in the general population in the early 2000s to the fact that blogs had become much more easily accessible to those without extensive computer skills, especially with the availability of free templates like Blogger or WordPress. For ultra-Orthodox Jews with doubts, this technological development enabled the growth of an anonymous digital public that grew increasingly critical of rabbinic authority, which they called the ‘Jblogosphere’ (the Jewish Blogosphere). This led the leadership to try to control internet access in their communities. Women with doubts were much less prominent online, since men had easier access to computers, were fluent in the Jewish religious scholarship that defined much of the online discourse, and were more comfortable expressing themselves in public. Women on the blogs were unofficially limited to observing and commenting from the sidelines.1 Over the course of a decade, ultra-Orthodox men’s online writing and reading led rabbinic authorities to the conclusion that the medium of the internet itself was to blame for what they began calling a “crisis of emuna (faith).” 1

  I discuss women’s experiences with religious doubting in Fader (2020).

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Attention to multilingual gendered literacies explains why rabbinic leadership reacted so strongly to blogging and later to social media. Digital publics and counterpublics are formed through reading and writing in the broader context of semiotic and media ideologies. In the ultra-Orthodox case, the central meaning of Jewish male literacies is critical. Men’s Torah study is fulfillment of their covenant with God and as such it hastens the coming of the Messiah. However, men who participated in the heretical counterpublic by blogging were engaging in bitl toyre, the Hebrew and Yiddish term for wasting time that could have been spent studying Torah. Worse, they used that wasted time to challenge ultra-Orthodox authority with posts that undermined, criticized, and mocked rabbinic leadership, even while many experimented with new forms of written self-expression about how they were changing. Ultra-Orthodox men’s online Yiddish writing, used exclusively by Hasidic Jews,2 especially troubled the semiotic ideology that a Jewish language with Jewish religious intention would uplift and purify any medium. Hasidic men’s Yiddish, in contrast to women’s Yiddish, has influence from Hebrew/Aramaic and references to religious texts. While men’s Hasidic Yiddish is not considered a divinely inspired language as Hebrew/Aramaic is, it still retains some of its reflected glow for two reasons (Fader 2009; McIntosh 2005). First, Hasidic men use Yiddish to translate and discuss the Hebrew/Aramaic texts they study as I noted above. Second, many Hasidic Jews express a nostalgia for Yiddish, the language of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, a lost time and place that many describe as more moral than today (Fader 2007). Yiddish, through these Hasidic Jewish identifications, should not have been able to become a medium of doubt and questioning. As someone who left his community explained, “(Hasidic Judaism) is supposed to be a culture of purity, and therefore Yiddish is a language that doesn’t express heresy … heymishe (Hasidic) Yiddish isn’t a language that’s supposed to house heresy.” That is, the essentialized purity of Hasidic Judaism should have made Hasidic men’s Yiddish an unlikely medium for heretical ideas. In fact, this Hasidic semiotic ideology has meant that until recently there has been little communal regard for language purism or standardization of Hasidic Yiddish as a spoken or written vernacular because the form (Hebrew orthography) and Jewish Orthodox purity of its speakers would render the common code-switching and borrowings from English “kosher,” that is, acceptably Jewish. Further, until recently there was little printed Hasidic Yiddish other than newspapers, children’s literature, or texts for moral edification, reflecting that Hasidic Yiddish was more of a spoken vernacular with little need for standardization. Note that Hasidic Yiddish language ideologies contrast to other communities where linguistic purism often creates “compartmentalization” between languages, so that code-switching is discouraged, such as the Hopi and English used by Arizona Tewas that Paul Kroskrity discusses (1998, p. 337). The internet, however, provided a platform for enlightened ultra-Orthodox men to invert this semiotic ideology by carving out a new public, a heretical counterpublic, with its own ideologies of language. While many on the Jblogosphere wrote in standard English or a Jewish variety of English, Katle Kanye (an online Yiddish pseudonym, meaning an idiot or dolt), one of the very early Hasidic bloggers, wrote exclusively in Hasidic men’s Yiddish (Figure 13.1).3

2

  European (Ashkenazic) ultra-Orthodox Judaism includes Hasidic and Yeshivish Jews. Hasidic Jews are known for their social structure organized around a rebbe, engagement with mystical religious texts, use of Yiddish among other features. 3   Janet McIntosh (2005) calls this process “linguistic transfer.”

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Figure 13.1  Katle Kanye’s Yiddish blog.

Katle Kanye used men’s Yiddish to experiment with new linguistic expressive possibilities. For example, he often modeled his writing on Jewish religious scholarship even while he parodied it, turning his deep Jewish knowledge inside out to make irreverent fun of the whole system of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. The heretical counterpublic was especially threatening to rabbinic authority because of laytsunis, parody and mockery of leadership, institutions, and ways of life. Laytsunis was not just rude or disrespectful, though. In Psalm 1:1, laytsunis is conflated with sin and wickedness.4 As Katle Kanye wrote, “I like subversion more than anything and for that I have an unfair advantage writing for an easily mocked community.”5 Katle Kanye explained, “My thrill was and is in conveying our life in an authentic yet heretical voice.” And he used the Yiddish of Hasidic men’s religious study to do just that. Katle Kanye had other linguistic aspirations for Yiddish as a language, which tells us about broader issues of how to trouble what often gets essentialized into secular and religious publics. In some posts, he experimented with re-signifying Yiddish, wanting to create a more literary language, one that was not necessarily religious but not necessarily secular either. A language, as he wrote, “by us and for us” (meaning other Hasidic Jews). Most Hasidic Jews are either unaware of or choose not to read the rich secular Yiddish literature from prewar eastern Europe. Katle Kanye did know about this literature and was inspired by it, but he did not necessarily turn to it on his blog because his use of Yiddish was not about embracing secular Judaism. Instead, he experimented with translation of the American literary canon into Yiddish, providing a new aesthetic linguistic experience for male readers in their familiar Jewish vernacular. For example, in one post Katle Kanye translated Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” (‫ ביים וואלד אן א שנייעקער נאכט‬baym vald on a shnayeker nakht) into Yiddish. However, he titled the blog post with the Frost translation not as ‘evening’ but “maariv in vald” (maariv in the woods), where maariv is the time of the Jewish evening prayer service. In effect, Katle Kanye’s post sacralized Robert Frost and secularized the Yiddish language, blurring the boundaries of both. His translation offered Hasidic men the chance to experience Yiddish reading as a leisure activity and Yiddish as an aesthetic 4

  Psalm 1:1: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” 5   Janet McIntosh (2005) describes linguistic essentialism as a linguistic equivalent to religious essentialism. In this case, linguistic essentialism is used to challenge religious essentialism through parody.

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expression of an individual writer rather than an expression of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious public. In making Frost’s poem accessible using a familiar variety of Hasidic men’s Yiddish and translating an American literary classic to express enlightened ideas (about life choices), Katle Kanye offered a way to rethink the very purpose of ultra-Orthodox men’s reading and of Yiddish, too. Two Hasidic men remembered how shocking it had been to read Katle Kanye’s posts, which had such enlightened content but were written in their own Hasidic Yiddish. Gavriel wrote, “When I first read Katle Kanye I was traumatized for a day or two.” Zalman agreed, “KK shook me to the core.” I wrote back asking what it was about Katle Kanye’s Yiddish that had been so disturbing (Fader 2016). Zalman explained, “It’s because we’re trained to dismiss a secular source. … But when it’s written in a heimish [homey, i.e., Hasidic] Yiddish that only a person from within can, someone like me, that gets your attention and it’s disturbing. … It made me think. A lot.”

Religious Literacies and Social Change Linguistic anthropological studies of how gendered religious literacies are learned and performed have been important sites for looking beyond religious institutions and explicitly religious contexts. The language socialization research paradigm directs attention to ethnographically studying repertoires of gendered literacies that cross multiple contexts as community members navigate languages, religions, and practices of many kinds (Avineri and Avni 2017; Lytra et al. 2016; Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986). Recent work in the paradigm has examined multilingual religious contexts with most scholars focusing on marginalized or minoritized communities as they navigate a hegemonic state, implicitly troubling boundaries between secular and religious politics and power. For example, across home and school contexts, Immaculada Garcia-Sanchez (2014) examines how Moroccan children in Spain experience marginalization in Spanish-language schooling in contrast to their experiences in Arab-language religious classes (see also Povedo, Cano and Palomares-Valera 2005; Sarroub 2002). In a different, nonliberal religious community, I have shown (2016) how ultra-Orthodox girls in private Jewish schools in Brooklyn learn to read “Jewishly” no matter the language or content, placing a framework of Jewish religious ethics on all forms of literacies, languages, and bodies of knowledge. These studies emphasize the reproduction of belief. However, we should also ask what happens to those who begin to question or doubt the bases of religious belonging through multilingual literacies on a new medium.

Changing Language Ideologies, Language Purism, and Standardization on a New Medium

Though religion and media scholarship has explored how a new medium might affect ­religious believers and communities, we still do not know much about how the languages and literacies that are part of that new medium might change as well (Rosowsky 2019). There is linguistic anthropological research suggesting it is an important place for further research. For example, Brink-Danan (2011) showed that online speech communities can revitalize an endangered minority language by analyzing Ladino (a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew) used in a chatroom for Sephardic Jewish participants (the Mediterranean Jewish diaspora). Linguistic anthropological perspectives further direct us to the ways that a new channel of communication or a new set of relationships between languages and people can affect language ideologies in unexpected ways. For example, Sonia Das (2008) studied

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Tamil immigrants living in Quebec to show how ideologies of language purism in Quebecois French were applied to the language of Tamil speakers in diaspora. In contrast, Bambi Schieffelin (2014) shows how translation by Christian missionizers in Papua New Guinea changed local categories of persons by analyzing pastors’ language and cultural ideologies about the vernacular for purposes of conversion. These approaches show how sociopolitical relationships of power interact with semiotic ideologies that shape language and communities. I show below how we might extend this attention to changing language and semiotic ideologies to the adoption of multilingual literacies on a new medium to express life-­ changing religious doubt.

Men’s Enlightened Hasidic Yiddish Online

The Hasidic men who blogged had increasing exposure to Standard English through autodidactic reading and writing, online and off. In contrast to blogger Katle Kanye, many Hasidic men chose to write online exclusively in English to be able to interact with other Orthodox Jews who do not use Yiddish and even non-Jews. As these Hasidic men became more competent in English, their ideologies or cultural beliefs about Yiddish began to change too. For example two bloggers, Hasidic Rebel and Shtreimel (their online pseudonyms; a shtreimel is a holiday fur hat for Hasidic married men), each told me that Hasidic Yiddish had inherent linguistic limitations, in addition to reaching a smaller readership. For example, Hasidic Rebel explained, “The Yiddish I was reading was never about ideas, never about critical ideas … the language of critical ideas was English.” Shtreimel told me that in Yiddish, “You can’t transmit ideas. You can’t talk about anything but really, really simple (things).” When I noted that some were indeed blogging in a sophisticated Yiddish, he suggested that they had to rely on Hebrew borrowings, though in fact the Hebrew and Aramaic components of Yiddish have always been part of the language. Men like Shtreimel began talking about language using a discourse of purity that had been previously rejected by Hasidic Jews (Fader 2007). This emerging ideology of language purism from greater exposure to English and its literatures would eventually lead to the emergence of a language variety I call “Enlightened Hasidic Yiddish” (EHY). The variety was further facilitated by the widespread adoption of smartphones, which made writing Yiddish in the Hebrew alphabet much more accessible. Hasidic men developed Enlightened Hasidic Yiddish online, complete with its own standards and aesthetics, and they used it to consider new ideas, explore secular knowledge, and express themselves. EHY looked like the familiar Yiddish of pious Hasidic men on the outside, but its intent and content was often subversive and sometimes heretical. EHY developed as many began to switch from blogging to social media, particularly chatrooms and forums in the mid–later 2000s. In 2012, frustrated that any criticism of rabbinic leadership or the system was routinely censored on more kosher online forums for Hasidic men like iVelt (Yiddishe Velt, Jewish World), a group of enlightened Hasidic men founded Kave Shtibl (coffee room, the break room in a yeshiva or synagogue): an alternative, borderline kosher forum explicitly committed to open-minded debate, including social criticism, secular literature, science, art, politics, and poetry. The homepage shows two (male) figures sitting at a table drinking coffee, with the Yiddish caption, “kave shtibl, a ruig vinkle tse shmuesn un farbrengn” (kave shtibl, a peaceful corner to chat and enjoy) (Figure 13.2). Anyone could sign up for KS, but they had to have a male username and icon, and everyone wrote in Yiddish. When a woman I knew wrote in English with a feminine pseudonym, an active member wrote to her and suggested she use a male username and write in Yiddish, “so everyone would understand her.” Though the administrators of KS drew the

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Figure 13.2  Kave Shtibl homepage.

line at outright heresy, they took a few hours to delete such posts, eventually putting up in its stead, “This post was removed due to heresy.” KS was known to be an unusually tolerant site where diverse ideas, bodies of knowledge, and individual sensibilities could all be expressed in EHY. In fact, a number of Hasidic filters now routinely block KS. Kave Shtibl users spanned linguistic competencies and religiosities, though most were at least interested in open-minded debate. There were some who just read others’ posts because they had trouble writing in Yiddish, a legacy of their yeshiva schooling. Aron, for example, explained, “For me to put together my thoughts on paper is very hard. You never had to articulate your thoughts [in school]. You never had to think even.” Another explained that unless you had gone to kollel (yeshiva for married men) where you might take notes in Yiddish on the Hebrew texts, there was no reason to ever write in Hasidic Yiddish.6 But Kave Shtibl gave enlightened and doubting men a reason to write in Yiddish. Discussion threads (eshkols) encouraged open-minded writing about new topics. For example, there were reactions to secular films, art, music, and literature that only enlightened men would willingly expose themselves to. There were also critical insider political debates about the ultra-Orthodox “system,” discussions over ultra-Orthodox racism, limited secular education for boys, or what one poster claimed were unreasonably stringent takunos (proclamations by rabbis) about girls’ modest clothing.7 Some posters on KS subtly undermined the ultra-Orthodox semiotic ideology that if a linguistic medium looked or sounded ultra-Orthodox, one could assume it contained pious Jewish intention and content. For example, KS writers played with a common North American Hasidic strategy of transliterating English phrases into Yiddish (i.e., making them Jewish), but not to make English kosher; rather, they used English in Yiddish for the purpose of sharing their growing fluency in secular American culture, while also poking fun at ultra-Orthodoxy. For example, one poster translated Taylor Swift’s song, “Shake It Off” into Yiddish (ikh shokel es avek), but wittily replaced the word “date” with b’show, the short visit between a young man and woman that is part of Hasidic matchmaking.8 Perhaps this substitution, along with the Yiddish translation, made Taylor Swift’s song speak to ultra-Orthodox experiences, a kind of conversation with secular American culture, where a b’show was not all that different from a date. 6

  Isaac Bleaman, personal communication, May 10, 2018.  http://www.kaveshtiebel.com/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=8207. 8  http://www.kaveshtiebel.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8086&p=246551#p246551. 7

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On KS, Yiddish itself became a topic worthy of discussion, leading to conscious and explicit talk about how to use language, that is, metapragmatic judgements about language mixing based on a growing ideology of language purism. For example, some used Yiddish transliterations of English idioms to fill in what they perceived to be expressive gaps in Hasidic Yiddish as a language. One poster wrote, “Ey kat above de rest” (a cut above the rest, ‫ ;)עי קאט עבאוו די רעסט‬others used phrases like “who keyrs?” (Who cares? ‫)האו קעירס‬.9 A KS administrator explained to me that these English transliterations filled gaps in Yiddish to indicate certain emotions that only English could provide. This was a new language purism that rejected the common, patterned code-switching between Yiddish and English that is definitive of Hasidic Yiddish. For example, one poster, Shimon, suggested while Yiddish was “juicy” and good for use in “curses, idioms, colloquialisms,” it lacked “words, definitions, synonyms.” Another, Efraim, told me that writing ‘who cares’ in the Hebrew alphabet of Yiddish expressed “a half-serious, half-sarcastic, informal effect” that the Yiddish language just did not have. But, of course, the Yiddish language does have a full range of expressivity. What Efraim and Shimon’s explanations of Yiddish’s deficiencies really speak to is a growing dissatisfaction with the English component of contemporary North American Hasidic Yiddish, which had been unproblematically integrated into what Hasidic Jews affectionately call “Yinglish.” Those writing in English or EHY suggested that an enlightened Yiddish should not have to rely on English or even the Hebrew and Aramaic of sacred texts to express the diversity of human emotion and intellect. Similarly, others on KS criticized grammatical and spelling errors in vernacular written Hasidic Yiddish, defined as it is by its lack of concern with standardization and formal teaching in boys’ schools. One person posted a picture of a letter their children’s Hasidic school sent home to parents reminding them that their children should only speak in Yiddish. The poster pointed out twenty-three spelling and grammatical errors in Yiddish on the very first page. Some KS writers’ own writing practices began to merit discussion. There were explicit conversations about how English words should be incorporated into written Yiddish if they had to be used. For example, a poster on KS introduced the topic of “the creation of new Yiddish words” (dos fabritsirin naye yidishe verter). Take the word “elaborate.” He wondered in his post if the Yiddish should be elaborirn (adding the Yiddish suffix to an English verb stem) or simply the English verb transliterated into Yiddish orthography. The writer prescriptively posted his conclusion that English words should not be i­ncorporated into Yiddish grammatical structure. Instead, English words should simply be transliterated into the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet to visibly mark their English language origin. These kinds of posts suggest a growing interest among the enlightened in standardizing how Hasidic Yiddish incorporates English and making Yiddish a language with shared conventions and patrols along its linguistic borders, like any other national language. Perhaps these are the linguistic seeds that will lead to the flowering of Enlightened Hasidic Yiddish across media.

Aesthetics and the Materiality of Media Crossing While scholarship on language and media has not focused on religion very much, there is ­relevant exciting scholarship on language and religion (Handman 2014). Both bodies of literature share an interest in the aesthetics of language, and by putting them in conversation, 9

 http://kaveshtiebel.com/viewtopic.php?p=129267#p129267.

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we can draw some implications for how to study language, media, and religion. Language and media scholars, as we have seen, theorize the digital in many ways, including from an aesthetic, performative dimension that treats writing as both performative and as a material object. For example, Carmel Vaisman (2014) analyzes Israeli girls’ social media posts, specifically the materiality of online fonts, code-switches in script (English and Hebrew orthographies), or capital letter use. She shows that there is an aspect to online language that uses the aesthetics of print to perform certain emotional stances in addition to print’s referential function. Linguistic anthropologists working within the anthropology of religion offer another theoretical perspective on the aesthetics of language, one which problematizes distinctions between the religious and secular. For example, Bielo (2019) analyzes creationist–evolutionist debates among Fundamentalist Christians in the US. He describes a “system of poetics” as a “key expressive resource” in the struggle to claim authority for biblical fundamentalism against science. Bielo’s theoretical intervention is to show how authority is discursively mediated, something that both religious and political language engage. In another, very different context, one that similarly troubles established categories of analysis, Haeri (2020) studies middle-class Muslim women in Iran. She shows how these women draw mutual inspiration from prayer and classical poetry, which together provide the emotional and intellectual materials for meaningful pious lives. The aesthetics of language across genres of prayer and poetry, the attention to gendered expressivity as culturally particular, and the role of authority and politics all shed light on the ways that men used Enlightened Hasidic Yiddish in their posts on Kave Shtibl.

Changing Aesthetics of Language and Religious Doubt

Writers on KS began to experiment with EHY as a medium for individualized aesthetic expression. This was an innovation from existing ultra-Orthodox expressive Yiddish culture, like Hasidic music, poetry, or art that aimed to inspire, morally uplift, or educate other Jews in a religious idiom. An argument over a poetry contest held on KS, inspired by a rival poetry contest on the kosher forum iVelt, revealed how some were trying to transform Hasidic Yiddish into a medium for aesthetic expression for its own sake. Since the postwar period, Hasidic newspapers and magazines have published Yiddish and Hebrew poetry in the United States. The iVelt poetry contest used shared religious metaphors and textual references to inspire pious feelings in readers, which some of the KS writers mocked. In fact, the KS poems did not differ greatly in form from those on iVelt: they too were either in Hebrew and Aramaic or a formal register of Yiddish without any English code-switching. Like those on iVelt, KS poems almost all rhymed, and writers similarly drew on shared religious metaphors and imagery. However, the content and intent of the poetry on KS was subtly different than iVelt’s, tending to be about individual emotions, for example, romantic love, beauty in the natural world for its own sake, or even disappointment in God. The KS poetry contest was reviewed by Yiddish writer/poet Shalom Bernstein for the secular Yiddishist paper, Der Forverts10 Bernstein described the KS poetry as honest, sincere, and emotional; however, he complained about the uninspired rhyming form of the poetry, which he said was “filled with platitudes.” Mischievously, he then reposted that 10

 This contrasts to the efforts of the (few) other Yiddish-speaking communities, including contemporary Yiddishists, who are proponents of secular Yiddish literature and culture, which is modeled on Lithuanian Yiddish and has been standardized. YIVO, for example, was founded by one of the most prominent Yiddishists and linguists, Max Weinreich.

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article on KS, where in fact he regularly posted his own (non-rhyming) modernist Yiddish poetry. The way that some responded to him hints at an emerging EHY reading public, one with a Hasidic masculine sensibility and aesthetics that draws inspiration from shared religious texts, but which uses Jewish languages for the purpose of individual expression rather than to morally uplift the reader. One frequent writer, “Gefilte,” responded to Bernstein, “My response, Shalom, is that the [KS] poetry campaign caters to Chassidishe [Hasidic] Jews, according to Chassidishe Jews’ flavor in poetry … Classical poets can’t critique rap from Harlem. Both are artful. Each in its own way.”11 Gefilte made a case for tolerance, pluralism, and relativism regarding aesthetic value. There were, Gefilte implied, many ways to produce art, each with its own standard, its own history, and its own value. In fact, this was a radical idea, especially for ultra-Orthodox Jews reared on what many described as “black-and-white” notions of truth. Eventually, EHY, with its own aesthetics, inspired an inner circle of KS writers to create a printed journal, Der Veker (The Awoken) that they sell on Amazon, though a number of rabbis have banned it as heresy. Der Veker editors aim to inform and entertain their readers rather than morally and religiously uplift, and they are also committed to professionalism, itself something of an innovation for Hasidic Yiddish publishing. Unlike Yiddish newspapers, they copyedit for spelling, some grammar,12 and reject code-switching into English when there is a clear Yiddish equivalent. These Hasidic writers are creating a vibrant EHY online and in print with new spaces to read and write, expanding the heretical counterpublic for open-minded Hasidic men. However, though the heretical counterpublic challenged religious authority, those on it rejected necessarily becoming secular. Literacy practices on print-media and digital platforms with their own semiotic and media ideologies were key sites for publicly expressing doubt that contemporary ultra-Orthodox Judaism is authoritative. While religious doubt can be understood as an interior state, there are times when doubt is expressed publicly, even if anonymously, across media through discursive practice. Religious doubt in these contexts is produced in interaction with others. Public expressions of doubt ultimately trouble the very bases by which religious communities constitute and express belief and doubt, including how these may change for individuals and publics.

Bridging Anthropology of Religion and Linguistic Anthropology Analyzing literacies on a new medium can address concerns around religious authority, a central topic in both the anthropology of religion and linguistic anthropological work in religious communities. New media often provoke explicit debates about mediation more generally including possibilities for public struggles over religious authority. Among some ultra-­Orthodox Jews in Israel, for example, Hananel Rosenberg et al. (2019) describe how rabbis initially required that cell phones be filtered from the internet to protect the faithful from secular content, however, later they decided to prohibit texting as well, so that kosher phones were “talk-only.” Rabbis feared that texting would enable the secret, anonymous spread of subversion, gossip, and communal criticism in contrast to audible, individualized telephonic talk. Because rabbis in contemporary Israel have a great deal of control over their communities as I noted, the new talk-only phone policy was easily enforced. Understanding dynamics among

11

 http://www.kaveshtiebel.com/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=8276&hilit8.   One of the founders told me that it would be an “impossible” task to edit for the gendered article for each noun, so Der Veker has grammatical errors for much of their article use. 12

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multilingual literacy practices and media requires consideration of the economic and political structures that contribute to formations of or challenges to religious authority. Further, written expressions of doubt on a new medium or across media can offer insight into the ways that changing language and semiotic ideologies implicate changing religious subjectivities. Hillewaert notes that social media offers the opportunity to redefine the indexical values of languages in multilingual communities (2015, p. 209). For example, enlightened Hasidic men’s reading and writing on a digital platform redefined their Yiddish from an essentialized Jewish vernacular (despite its lack of standardization and openness to mixing with English) to a written Jewish language that could express heretical or open-minded ideas and yet still be authentically Hasidic. Men’s literacy practices on the heretical counterpublic, especially their use of Yiddish, staked out a different kind of religion, one that was “enlightened,” but never became or wanted to become secular, ultimately challenging the separation of the religious and the secular that are definitive of modernity. Digital and print literacies are part of the messy, drawn-out ways that people live religious doubt with others, enacting larger processes of social and religious change. The important scholarship in linguistic anthropology on semiotic, language, and media ideologies addresses cultural beliefs about signs, media, and language. However, the emphasis on cultural beliefs can over-emphasize interior private thoughts, sometimes at the expense of other registers, such as materiality or embodiment. In the anthropology of religion, Talal Asad (1993) famously challenged Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion for overly relying on belief, at the expense of politics and practice. However, if we bring linguistic anthropology’s elaboration of language ideologies into conversation with the anthropology of religion’s attention to publics, we can recuperate belief expressed through interaction, as a form of practice that creates authoritative publics and counterpublics (Fader 2020). We can explore where, how, and for whom systems of signs that cross material and ideological registers come to challenge or affirm religious authority. This has methodological implications too. Attending to religious belief and doubt as practices requires integrating digital ethnography with face-to-face ethnography. Counterpublics and publics are rarely only formed or lived online in digital writing and reading. Changing beliefs about the gendered self, God, or language, for example, are simultaneously experienced on bodies and material objects (such as clothes, or food) and in everyday conversation. Indeed, many of the enlightened Hasidic men who were writing online met together in person to hang out, putting on baseball hats instead of yarmulkes, eating non-kosher food, trying out new English words they had only read, even as they continued to chat in Hasidic men’s Yiddish. This approach to religious belief and doubt across media erases artificial dichotomies between the virtual and the “real” by expanding ideas of what constitutes the field for anthropologists.

Conclusions In a review of contemporary language socialization scholarship, Kulick and Schieffelin (2004) argue for more attention to social change by including “bad subjects,” or those whose “desires” may diverge from cultural expectations. The topic of multilingual literacies, media, and religious doubt focuses on exactly such desires. However, rather than attend to interior forbidden desires, I argue for thinking about religious doubt as emergent with other people, publicly expressed on and through media of many kinds: bodies, technologies, languages, texts. Greater cross-pollination between linguistic anthropology and the

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anthropology of religion can create methodological and theoretical innovations in the study of religious communities. Gendered religious lifeworlds and gendered language and literacy practices constitute each other, changing together. Old media and new create opportunities and restrictions as those struggling with religious doubt grapple with the linguistic resources to express their changing senses of self, understanding of the world, and possibilities for new publics.

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Meyer, B. (2011). Mediation and immediacy: Sensational forms, semiotic ideologies and the question of the medium. Social Anthropology 19 (1): 23–39. Orsi, R. (2005). Between Heaven and Earth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The virtual sphere: the internet as a public sphere. New Media & Society. 9(4):1–24. Pelkmans, M. (ed.) (2013). Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies. London: I.B. Tauris. Poveda, D., Cano, A. and Palomares-Valera, M. (2005). Religious genres, entextualization and literacy in Gitano children. Language in Society 34(1):87–115. Rashi, T. (2013). The kosher cellphone in ultra-Orthodox society: A technological ghetto within a global village? In: Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (ed. H. Campbell), 173–181. New York: Routledge. Reed, A. (2005). “My blog is me”: texts and persons in United Kingdom online journal culture. Ethnos 70 (2): 220–242. Rosenberg, H., Blondheim, M., and Katz, E. (2019). ‘It’s the text, stupid!’ Mobile phones, religious communities, and the silent threat of text messages. New Media & Society 21 (11–12): 2325–2346. Rosowsky, A. (2019). some linguistic implications of transferring rituals online: the case of bay’ah or allegiance pledging in Sufism. Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture 8 (3):382–407. Sarroub, L. (2002). In-betweenness: religion and conflicting visions of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly 37 (2):130–148. Schieffelin, B.B. (2014). Christianizing language and the dis-placement of culture in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. Current Anthropology 55: S226–S237. Schieffelin, B. and Gilmore, P. (1986). The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives. (Advances in Discourse Processes; Vol. 21). New York: Ablex Pub. Schieffelin, B.B., Woolard, K.A., and Kroskrity, P. (1998). Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiffrin, D., Tanen, D., and Hamilton, H. (ed.) (2001). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Spitulnik, D. (2009). The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. In: Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader (pp. 93–113), Duranti, A. (ed.) Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Stasch, R. (2011). Ritual and oratory revisited: the semiotics of effective action. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 159–174. Stolow, J. (2005). Religion as/is media. Theory, Culture and Society 22 (4): 119–145. Stolow, J. (2010). Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thurlow, C. and Mroczec, K. (eds.) (2011). Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaisman, C. (2014). Beautiful script, cute spelling, and glamorous words: doing girlhood through language playfulness on Israeli blogs. Language and Communication 34: 69–80. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.

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14

Linguistic Anthropology of the Visual Jennifer F. Reynolds

Introduction This chapter explores fusions of linguistic anthropological research and method with visual anthropology. Visual anthropology, broadly defined, includes both the ethnographic study of visual representations and visual materials as well as the use of multimodal media in generating and sharing the results of anthropological research. Linguistic anthropology shares many of these interests, as these foci can enable the study of linguistic as well as other semiotic (i.e., sign) form-function relations that are embedded within social relations and perform the work of bridging and constituting social relations. And while historically some topics addressed within visual ethnographic scholarship shared theoretical frameworks with linguistic anthropology, the subfields diverged with regard to which prototypical sign-relations would anchor their studies (Ball et al. 2020). The rest of this introduction provides some background, contextualizing trends within visual anthropology before delving into specific cross-subfield exchanges wherein visual media act as a meta-tool, generating critical commentary on sign forms and sign relations within and across events in different ethnographic studies. The approaches surveyed offer what might be called a linguistic anthropology of the visual. Visual anthropology emerged as a subfield of social anthropology, originally with an emphasis on still photography and ethnographic film. Hand-drawings, however, were an important precursor to those modern mechanical technologies and were used by a broader array of Western scientists who rendered people, other living species, objects, architecture, and the landscape into ethnological subjects for visual scrutiny and comparison (Ballard 2013; Causey 2017). These (photo)graphic visual technologies advanced forms of knowledge production where reality (“the world”) was tantamount to being seen and representable in tandem with language (“the word”), especially when language was construed as an autonomous system (Nakassis 2018). It is also important to note that the visual products of all these technologies can be stored, disseminated, and exhibited via different media and spaces. Therefore, visual anthropologists are equally known for their work curating museum exhibits and installations. Visual anthropology thus appeals to all fields within the

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

discipline. Ethnographic studies center visual culture and material culture, as well as kinesics, proxemics, and other forms of embodied communication. The explicit mission of the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) is to promote the use of images for all phases of research—collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination—without necessarily being historically wedded to any particular theoretical framework. Visual anthropologists are often early adopters and promoters of new, modality-specific technologies. Scholars return time and again to the profound influence of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson for their adoption of camera work in Bali, combining still photography and film as a primary means for generating ethnographic case studies and for theory building (Cool 2020; Jacknis 1988). Before Mead and Bateson, visual materials were used for illustration within case studies (Heider 2006; Jacknis 1988). Also influential are the innovative techniques of ethnographic filmmaking in the work of Jean Rouch. Some are still attracted to Mead’s use of cross-cultural comparisons for public anthropology while others are oriented to Rouch for his camera work, inspired by realist filmmaking techniques, that brings the anthropologist into the frame, sharing the screen and piercing the veil of objectivity. These legacies confirmed camera technologies’ pride of place amongst the broader range of technologies enabling visual display. To date, all of SVA’s professional awards are associated with excellence in ethnographic film and still photography. In 2017, members of SVA renamed the section dedicated to visual anthropology within the flagship journal, American Anthropologist. Visual anthropology was changed to multimodal anthropology to better grapple with technological transformation from analogue to digital media, including new media platforms; renewed experimentation within graphic anthropology and ethnographic theater; and other emerging multimodal and multisensorial forms of engagement (Collins et al. 2017). The initial excitement generated by multimodal anthropology was quickly tempered by a critical assessment to beware the seductions of techno-fetishism. The concept techno-fetishism draws inspiration from a Marxist critique of the modernist, capitalist impulse to fixate on the latest technology and imbue it with a superpower to positively intervene in human activities. Colleagues within SVA urged all visual anthropologists not to lose sight of the fact that there is nothing inherently liberating about use of these new tools in our trade (Takaragawa et al. 2019). This stance parallels the critical turn also taken in linguistic anthropological approaches to language and political economy. Linguistic anthropological research historically used audio-visual methods for data generation and analysis as well as for the study of (audio-)visual culture. Increasingly we are experimenting with multimodal formats to reach different audiences and disseminate results. Current trends in linguistic anthropological work with multimodal visual media moreover center the subfield’s theoretical interests and extend them by reaching out to foster interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary dialog with colleagues in related fields. The next two sections below feature linguistic anthropological contributions to graphic anthropology. They illustrate uses of line drawings and digital forms of graphic art to generate debate as well as graphic transcripts to drive processes of discovery. The topics covered range from language ideologies in processes of revitalization and recognition, socialization to sociality, to Science and Technology Studies. In the third and fourth sections, crosssubfield exchanges are then modeled featuring three other visual media in the production of images, namely through cinema, still photography, and ethnographic film. All sections explore in different ways how scholars use multimodal visual methods reflexively, driving processes of inquiry and discovery, while making clear the choices we make in formulating what Charles Goodwin (1994) termed a professional vision.

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Goodwin defined professional vision as “socially organized ways of seeing and understanding events that are answerable to the distinctive interests of a particular social group” (Goodwin 1994, p. 606). Being answerable surfaces in debates over the roles linguistic anthropologists do play and should play in the social processes we study, taking into account the differential relations of power that shape the particulars of a given project and topic. I thus pair answerability to visibility (making visible our professional visions) in this chapter to provide snapshots of linguistic anthropologists assuming different roles. The “Talking Politics: Anthropologists and Linguistics Analyze the 2020 Election” webinar series, for example, is an excellent example of public anthropology, where linguistic anthropologists added their perspectives to current events. Others undertake applied anthropological work, conducting research and producing “deliverables” for clients or with particular professional groups in mind. Finally, there is activist anthropology, which tackles the ethnographic study of social movements and forms of collective action to imagine alternative, more just worlds. This last approach goes beyond anthropological studies of activism, where the anthropologist remains a firm footing as skeptic, and seeks to be accountable in some way to stakeholders involved in those movements (Hale 2006). In this last group, the collaborative scholarship by and about native anthropologists flourishes (Jacobs-Huey 2002). Hopefully it is clear that all three of these forms of answerability underscore the applied commitments of visual anthropology to serve related (sub)fields, professions and publics. To emphasize this last point, the chapter closes with a focused discussion of a particular use of ethnographic film that has been used to encompass all three roles—academic, applied, and activist visual anthropological work in the linguistic anthropology of education.

Redrawing Linguistic and Visual Modalities, Blurring the Boundaries of Ethno/Graphic Practices With very few exceptions, the first published monographs in the tradition of ethnography of communication were largely dominated by text. Authors of those texts often puzzled through how to get around the constraints imposed by earlier social scientific traditions for rendering multimodal, ephemeral, and contextually oriented exchanges (Tedlock 1983). They also problematically erased the positionality and presence of the ethnographer. If there were illustrations or photographs, they served a supplementary and subordinate role to the text. One example that diverged from this norm was Keith Basso’s 1979 classic ethnographic text on Western Apache forms of humor, Portraits of “The Whiteman.” The monograph contains thick descriptions of Western Apache joke-telling scenes paired with the graphic illustrations by Diné (Navajo) artist and comedian, Vincent Craig. The stock figures of blundering Whites breaking Apache communicative norms are drawn using the conventions of comic illustration to turn the tables on settler colonial forms of portraiture and ethnological photography (see the discussion of Reyes’ work in the section entitled “Cinematic and Photographic Genres Mediating Social Relations in Linguistic Anthropological Analyses across Events”). The metacommunicative commentary that these particular graphic images invite is striking, but Basso does not directly engage this in his text. One portrait of the Whiteman missing among the cast of characters featured in Basso’s book is the anthropologist. Years later, the Zuni artist Phil Hughte (1995) would fill in this gap with a book publication and exhibition of forty-three ink and colored pencil drawings depicting Frank Hamilton Cushing going native at the Pueblo of Zuni between 1879 and

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1884. Ted Jojola’s review of the exhibition described the drawings as adopting an artistic flair similar to the one used by Mort Walker and his Beetle Baily cartoon strip. In particular, Jojola observed how Hughte’s drawings and the exhibition “usurps this medium to his advantage” to stage a trial in the court of Zuni public opinion wherein “the viewer is left trying to ponder if the exhibition represents betrayal or humor on behalf of the Zuni people” (Jojola 1995, p. 54). Here the paradox of play, blurring yet making possible both interpretations, is keyed by the genre and medium, displaying a collective alternative memory in the moment of exhibition. Today ethnographers are increasingly trying their hand at sketching illustrations and they are doing so in ways that use graphic form to generate new insights and reach different audiences. This tradition, newly dubbed “graphic anthropology,” involves all kinds of line drawings, especially through comics and forms of animation, as a method to glean new insights and engage in visual forms of storytelling (Atalay et al. 2019; Causey 2017). It is a hypermediated multimodal approach to doing ethnographic research that some scholars find powerful because it involves the evocative embedding of writing with images. Cultural anthropologists like Rudolf Colloredo-Mansfeld (1994); Carol Hendrickson (2008); Michael Taussig (2009, 2011); and Letizia Bonanno (2019) have all sketched scenes on a page while doing participant observation in combination with field jottings. In one of Colloredo-Mansfeld’s studies (2011) he made drawings that copied and manipulated the imagery depicted within Tiguan paintings to elicit commentary from Andean artists’ aesthetic preferences and techniques that did not all conform to the aesthetics of European perspective drawing. Hendrickson’s (2008) use of drawings and collage drew inspiration from linguistic anthropologists’ elaboration of form-functional relationships within speech situations and how different ethnographic insights come from the interpretation of all sign relations (iconic and indexical ones) and not just symbolic relations that are formed through convention. Linguistic anthropologists use line drawing to depict embodied forms of communication by first reviewing ethnographic audio-video recordings. The process can entail performing the embodied acts themselves along with the recordings, then drawing and redrawing the same illustrations. These enable analysts to zero in on which of the particular features and relations matter, including those that are more difficult to capture with film as the visual field has too much information making it challenging to attend to nuanced sequences in motion; it can also lend different insights into signed languages and other uses of gesture, including pantomime, in depicting particular experiences (Fox Tree 2021; Haviland 2000; Hoffman-Dilloway 2021a, 2021b). Linguistic and visual anthropologist Bernard Perley is known for his autoethnographic and collaborative work in indigenous language revitalization with members of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. He makes regular contributions to the American Anthropological Association’s newsletter, Anthropology News, with his “Going Native” series of cartoons. Perley’s graphic art doubles as political–cultural satire tracking current theoretical trends within our discipline. One of his pieces, “Anthropology … In Theory: From 1969 to 2019,” is a multi-panel display chronicling shifts in anthropological theory over six decades. In this display, Perley assembles and disassembles the “savage slot.” This phrase, originally coined by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991), refers to Western colonial and imperial social categories and epistemologies that the discipline of anthropology inherited and used to define and legitimize notions of “otherness,” of which it became the social scientific arbiter. In the context of the United States, anthropologists turned American Indian peoples into objects of study. The assembly and disassembly of theoretical frameworks generating the savage slot are depicted in many of Perley’s pieces through exchanges

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between two male figures, the oblivious White Lone Ethnographer and Indigenous Native Ethnographer whose double consciousness and analysis are manifested via ironic shifts in footing (Perley 2019).1 Perley closely calibrated his multimodal, mass-mediated, graphic art to the American popular series The Lone Ranger. Generations of Americans listened to this genre of colonial conquest on the radio in the 1930s. It was immensely popular and during that same time period was made into serial books and films. By the late 1940s, The Lone Ranger was being published in comic books and was made into a television show that ran until 1957. It was further adapted to other popular cultural forms from animated cartoons to toys and (video) games. Through “…In Theory: From 1969 to 2019,” Perley visualizes chronotopic (i.e., spacetime-personhood) shifts through a display of competing social voices, inverted social figures, and intertextual and interdiscursive relations. Chronotope, semantic inversions, and social voices are all analytic concepts associated with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s translinguistics, which is now an influential, interdisciplinary approach. Unlike structural linguists, who assume language to be an autonomous ideal system, linguists who espouse a translinguistic approach consider language to be a socially distributed product of collective actions that are ideologically saturated (Bakhtin 1981; Heller and McElhinny 2017). For example, in Perley’s first panel depicting 1969–1979, we see the Lone Ethnographer in an act of appropriation, “discovering” critical reflexivity after reading Vine Deloria Jr’s (1969) Custer Died for Your Sins. When the Lone Ethnographer announces his decision to pursue a decolonizing approach to anthropology (“I figure it’s time someone does anthropology right,”), which misses the point of the Deloria Jr’s critique, Tonto’s rejoinder refracts back: “Kimosabi, you embody ‘White is right’.” Tonto redeploys the same form of humor as Deloria Jr. in his caricature of the Whiteman, and to use Deloria Jr’s phrasing, it is always “the Anthros’” prerogative to establish universal truth through theoretical abstractions which reproduce destructive stereotypes of American Indians as social scientific problems. Perley’s processual use of graphic art draws attention to the form that multimodal signs take, the human connections they forge, and the feelings they evoke. His multimodal text objectifies anthropological theory, anthropological method, and the historical relations of power that have shaped who conducts research, with whom and for whom; where and how research is conducted; which scholarship and theoretical perspectives are authenticated; and how research is disseminated. In objectified, satirical form, published in our professional newsletter, the multimodal text offers anthropologists a chance to laugh at ourselves and the discipline, heed the stinging critique, and consider alternatives. These graphic forms epitomize critical reflexivity, motivating us to be always accountable for the work that we do and why we do it. Erika Hoffman-Dilloway’s (2021a) recent ethno/graphic work with Nepali Sign Language (NSL) instruction is another example of linguistic anthropologists’ forays into graphic anthropology. In her research, she collects the kinds of visual illustrations that NSL activists generate and draws her own illustrations producing multi-panel graphic transcripts from audio-video recordings she made of NSL pedagogy. In fact, the Nepali Sign Language activists she works with preferred to use drawings pedagogically to achieve recognition of NSL as “a language” in addition to increasing older deaf Nepalis’ access to Deaf forms of sociality. She makes drawings to fuse and focus attention to aural–visual–gestural modalities for her ethnographic project. In a separate study with a different research collaborator who 1

https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/anthropology-in-theory/.

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linguistic anthropology of the visual  257

is a Maltese Sign Language specialist, Hoffman-Dilloway acknowledges how drawing sequences of signed exchanges helped her unpack widespread tacit cultural norms for interpreting Deaf communication. For example, experienced signers make conjectures about an interlocuter’s lack of linguistic and communicative competence and future ability to acquire greater fluency in signing when the interlocutor mirrors signs instead of copies signs (Hoffman-Dilloway 2021b). Copying signing requires mastery of viewpoint transposition while mirroring does not. Awareness of the issue of viewpoint transposition emerged though re-drawing an audio-video recording of an interaction, when the Maltese specialist issued a joking metacommentary on her signing. In sum, Hoffman-Dilloway like Perley, generates graphic illustrations as a heuristic device for discovery and reflexive analysis, without falling prey to a virtual-realist fallacy that there is something intrinsically superior about this medium as compared to another for analyzing and representing human lifeworlds (Duranti 2006).

Linguistic Anthropological Refractions of Our Professional Visions As should be clear from the preceding section, linguistic anthropologists take to heart critiques of how we have used our technical training in linguistics or mastery of visual techniques to justify or privilege a particular approach to social science as neutral or superior. We will always have to reckon with the fact that the modalities and media through which we conduct and share our research may have originated or were appropriated as techniques and technologies in the surveillance and management of populations. This reckoning happens in how we manage the reception and circulation of analyses and arguments in many ways. It is especially apparent through the selective, political-aesthetic choices we make regarding translation, transcription, and subtitling; font selection, image/shot selection, and composition; use of graphic design and page-layout; and in some cases animation and movement in all of our multimodal texts, from transcripts to ethnographic films and multimodal installations.2 In this section, I sample the work of a few influential scholars who are especially reflexive about these practices. All revisit conceptual tools from enduring traditions, note their limits, and suggest ways to hone them that (re)engage colleagues from other disciplines. Charles and Marjorie Goodwin are among the first generation of linguistic anthropologists to be avid adopters of audio-visual and graphic forms of data collection and representation (see, for example, C. Goodwin 1986; C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 1996; Goodwin et al. 2002). With their publications and teaching they inspired their students to do so as well. Their work engaged with Erving Goffman’s ethnographically oriented microsociology and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and helped shape conversation analysis. Charles Goodwin’s 1994 publication in American Anthropologist, “Professional Vision,” is exemplary for the ways in which it put on display the power of audio-visual methodologies and analyses for interdisciplinary work. He examined three ways that professional visions are manifest in practice through highlighting, coding schemes, and the production and articulation of material representations (Goodwin 1994, p. 606). The article offers two case studies to illustrate the concept of professional vision, an archaeological field school and the 1992 criminal trial of the police officers who were caught on video repeatedly beating a black man, Rodney King, in Los Angeles. In the latter example, Goodwin tracks 2

See Ochs (1979); Tedlock (1983); Duranti (1997, 2006); Bucholtz (2000); Ayaß (2015); and Murphy (2021).

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the situated ways that anti-Blackness was evident in professional policing coding schemes deployed to highlight behaviors as “escalating” or “de-escalating” in the graphic displays of still shots extracted from video footage of the beating as a form of evidence during the trial. Importantly, Goodwin emphasizes institutionalized asymmetries in who was allowed to provide testimony and how those forms of testimony were differentially authenticated and weighted. Scholars in adjacent fields studying institutional talk were deeply impacted by Goodwin’s article. It opened up avenues of critical engagement with the study of interaction as he openly acknowledged how his own practices of audio-visual display were not outside of critical scrutiny (Ashmore et al. 2004; Ayaß 2015). It also attracted attention from scholars who were interested in social networks. This includes interlocutors in Science and Technology Studies, who likewise are concerned with the socio-ideological and material preconditions and media assemblages for interpreting, contesting, and producing the world (Liegl and Schindler 2013). Recently, semiotically trained linguistic anthropologists, like Jonathan Rosa and colleagues, critically reappraised Goodwin’s work as prescient and useful to debates within raciolinguistics, in that it signals flaws in calls for technological quick-fixes in policing, like the use of body-cameras. Such policies require interpretive processes that are contested within institutionalized systems of thought about being in the world, and in this case are predicated on a biological notion of race used time and again to support state-sanctioned forms of violence against people of color (Rosa and Díaz 2019). This next generation of scholars are thus interrogating the academic archive and drawing Goodwin’s framework into dialog in allyship. Allyship is something current visual and cultural anthropologists actively seek at this new conjuncture of environmental and social justice movements in the midst of a global pandemic with its disproportionate impacts on communities of color on a global scale. These are just a few examples of subsequent areas and studies that have been influenced by the audio-visual and graphic methods established by the collective work of Marjorie and Charles Goodwin. Each and every subsequent interpretation of their work offers a refraction i.e., a new angle and transformed uptake of professional vision within interdisciplinary debates as well as across social fields of professional practice.

Cinematic and Photographic Genres Mediating Social Relations in Linguistic Anthropological Analyses across Events I turn now to a different set of social-semiotic approaches where a fusion of analytic frameworks exists and relies upon Bakhtinian translinguistics, described previously in the section entitled “Redrawing Linguistic and Visual Modalities, Blurring the Boundaries of Ethno/ Graphic Practices,” and the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce (1955), which involves the study of how signs come to stand for objects or referents in the world, generating different interpretations within and across events. This work stems from a longstanding engagement in linguistic anthropology which explores the analytic force of indexical signs in the study of multimodality, ways of speaking, and genres (Chapter 33, Duranti). Genres of visual culture can be glossed as dynamic constellations of co-occurring formal features and corresponding forms of participation. Genres provide interpretive frameworks for how signs are presumed to have a real-world relationship with the objects they point to as well as how they operate within and across social fields of cultural production (Hanks 1996). The aforementioned graphic forms of display paired with professional police coding-schemes (Goodwin 1994)

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constitute a particular visual genre within the forensic sciences. Paying attention to genres as a mediational discourse practice empowers analysts to study them as indexical forms, which have been central to the social semiotic–poetic tradition in linguistic anthropology (Agha 2007; Bauman 2004; Wirtz 2017). As will be clear from my summary of the work of two more colleagues featured in this section, this approach allows for cross-disciplinary conversations with medium- and media-specific studies. In his ethnographic work on a genre of Tamil cinema, Constantine Nakassis (2020) asks what we can learn about a particular subset of indexical signs i.e., deictic signs, across linguistic and visual modalities when we pay more attention to the properties that enable them to continuously lose their contexts of use through graftings to other contexts of use (Nakassis 2020). This runs counter to how linguistic anthropologists typically studied deictic forms, as context-dependent signs. Nakassis argues that groups of fans in South India, when they enjoy different genres of cinema like the popular mass hero film genre in Tamil cinema, interpret the patterns of cross-modal deictic signs (described later) and the forms of action that those patterns are purported to produce in ways that US audiences who are unfamiliar with Hinduism and this genre of film might find surprising. Patterns of cross-modal deictic signs within a scene that make up a visual narrative event include edited sequences of camera shot length, type and camera movement (e.g., switching points of view and reciprocal gazes, action and reaction shots) featuring the embodied actions of characters (i.e., a visual poetics). These co-occur with and feature the actors’ incharacter performances of the scripted dialogue where shifters (e.g., pronouns, demonstrative determiners, etc.) abound and are overlaid by sound-tracks (i.e., an aural poetics). The co-occurrence of audio-visual poetics within the film’s narrated event in the event of screening, might evoke and intensify embodied sensations within the audience as well as invite different kinds of affective participation. Ethnographic and documentary filmmakers call the production of the cross-event experience of visually mediated immediacy haptic visuality (Köhn 2016). Audiences, Nakassis says, may calibrate and regiment these cross-modal form-functional relations in a number of culturally salient, predictable ways, although the associated meanings emerge from an open-ended process always subject to new interpretive links. These can be tracked across different events using multimodal transcripts that have forms of notation to capture the cross-modal poetic threading of deictic signs that might be relevant in an analysis.3 Nakassis (2017) observed, for example, that in screening events youth appropriated Hindu religious visual practices of darsán, where devotees seek an immediate relation with deities through seeing and being seen and transposed them onto the mass hero starring in the film. Fans celebrated the appearance of the mass hero in-character on screen—when they were first in his presence—in ritual fashion shouting praise, leaping out of their seats, clapping and throwing confetti. This cultural-framework in fact infuses the film’s audiovisual poetic structuring; the larger than life mass hero is featured in extreme close-up, directly gazing upon and addressing the camera, which stands for a mass audience depicted within the film narrative. The viewing audience at the event of screening also interprets the character as an avatar for their mass hero; it is just another citational manifestation of the superstar who they see gazing and addressing them. And given that they are drawn into their mass hero’s presence at each and every screening, any affront to their mass hero’s on-screen character is treated as defaming the honor of the superstar persona, with some adoring fans demanding that the actor responsible for the on-screen offensive act make 3

 https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/65/117.

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260  jennifer f. reynolds

amends off-set. This is precisely why Nakassis argues it is more useful to think of deictics as indexical signs that are easy to move or lose their context of use and point to other contexts as functionally relevant. Attention to events, specifically how they are visualized and semiotically signaled within processes of entextualization and enregisterment, is also important in the work of Angela Reyes’ (2020) recent dive into archival work with still photography. The visual images that Reyes analyzes involved the widespread practice of pairing “before” and “after” photographs and captions in sequences from the 1860–1880s to depict the transformation of racialized subjects from “savage” to “civilized.” Namely, these were modernizing makeovers. Reyes draws upon visual anthropological scholarship to examine how colonial agents of the UK and US empires adopted photographic technologies and genres during the nineteenth century to construct and legitimize racial categories and logics in the formation and governance of subjects (Edwards 1992). She argues that the visual practices in medicine and ethnology had become enregistered as a recognizable genre, what she calls the image sequence. Reyes’ engagement with this literature exposes that Philippine elites were simultaneously critical of and complicit in the modernizing visualities at play during that time. These tokens of a visual generic type, moreover, advanced two competing racial logics in the Philippines at the turn of the century (Reyes 2020). One was homogenizing and the other bifurcating. Filipino elites criticized the homogenizing logic on display in Dean Worcester’s government publications which circulated image-sequences of the ontogeneticas-evolutionary transformation of racialized colonial subjects. In three parallel snapshots depicting stages of change in dress, hair style, and bodily demeanor, a Bontoc Igarot man went from being “a head-hunting savage” into a “disciplined,” obedient “constabulary solider.” At issue for the Philippine elite was being identified as occupying the racialized savage slot. To counter being so perceived, elites were complicit in the circulation of a second logic, which presumed parallel lines of evolutionary progress differentiating groups so that the “civilized” elites should not be confused or conflated with “wild” Filipinos. This is what was put on display within the Philippine Exposition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. However, as Reyes demonstrates, spectators largely did not come away with that interpretation. Instead, the first homogenizing racial logic of “uplift” prevailed; it was already enregistered as a dominant visuality in the perceiving American public. Reyes, Nakassis, and other linguistic anthropologists have creatively used existing conceptual tools like indexical forms, genres, social actors, and events as mediating dynamic social relations and historical formations for the study of visual media and culture.

Ethnographic Film in (Linguistic) Anthropology of Education In the anthropology of education, there is a particular use of ethnographic film-making known as the Video-Cued Multivocal Ethnographic method (VCME). Even though it is not well-known in linguistic anthropology, the VCME method it is akin to techniques for eliciting metalinguistic, metapragmatic, and other metasemiotic data through annotating transcripts and re-listening to audio-video materials with key participants. I have adapted it to enable a transnational study to unpack the language ideological assemblage (Kroskrity 2018) i.e., clusters of interacting attitudes about language, shaping the emerging linguistic repertoire of indigenous Guatemalan children (ages four to six) within school districts serving Mam language communities in Guatemala’s Western highlands and the Southeastern

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linguistic anthropology of the visual  261

United States. Since 2016 I have conducted participant observation in two rural school districts, one located in the state of South Carolina and the other in the department of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. I shot and edited two ethnographic films in case study kindergarten classrooms from two schools and then used them to guide interviews with different stakeholders from those schools as well as other rural schools in adjacent districts within the regions of study. Projected through a laptop computer screen, the films have been an effective means to triangulate different perspectives and identify contradictions and points of convergence in underlying ideologies of language acquisition and expected developmental trajectories promoted in literacy instruction within ethnolinguistically diverse communities. Additionally, Guatemalan linguist activists and I have been discussing how these contradictions in turn shape opportunities for expanding and/or contracting mobile indigenous children’s multilingual and multiliterate repertoires in different institutions. Below I sketch what this looks like, extracting still images from a math lesson originally featured in one of the ethnographic films and re-editing the image into a graphic transcript that attends to composition to create a visual scene on the page (Ayaß 2015; Murphy 2021). I also use basic transcript excerpts and verbatim quotes from audio-recorded interviews with different stakeholders holding contrasting professional visions within and across educational fields in both Guatemala and the Southeastern US. The VCME method arose out of a cross-cultural study led by anthropologist Joseph Tobin and colleagues in early childhood development (Tobin et al. 1989). The method has garnered interest within different fields of education (Adair and Kurban 2019; Tobin 2019). In later iterations, it has been referred to in abbreviated form as video-cued ethnography (or VCE). VCME always involves filming and editing some sort of ethnographic short, often including the daily round of school activities. The short is then used to elicit feedback from knowledgeable stakeholders in interviews that require them to evaluate what they observe and compare those observations with their own practices and goals. Interview data are coded to discern patterned variation in cultural beliefs and practices as well as support particular educational policies and social relationships within early childhood education. VCME facilitates drawing critical cross-cultural and intra-cultural comparisons of educational systems across time and place, and need not be restricted to early childhood education. Tobin (2019) notes he was influenced by the public anthropology popularized by Mead in disseminating the findings of her cross-cultural work with Bateson (Mead 1960). Tobin’s early research collaborations followed a strategic realist, unscripted approach in shooting and editing footage. His team followed Bateson’s mobile approach to camera work which anticipates what social actors in the moment take to be socially relevant actions. This contrasts with Mead’s preference for a stationary camera on a tripod which presumes that a long continuous take from a single point of view will “get what happened” and avoid what she feared would be the introduction of unnecessary variation (Bateson and Mead 1976). Tobin and colleagues also used a mix of filmic techniques including close, medium, and long shots taken by two hand-held digital video camcorders. The footage was then edited together to give a sense of coherence and continuity even though an eight-hour day might be telescoped down to 20 minutes. The resulting ethnographic films are like other written ethnographic accounts, analytically selective and fictionalizing multimodal media that could only be produced because the ethnographers relied upon prior work in the field to anticipate as well as track what matters to practitioners. Tobin, moreover, acknowledges that the approach always strives to embed critical reflexivity. Back in the 1980s when first experimenting with how to make ethnographic films, his

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262  jennifer f. reynolds

team was attendant to critiques of ethnographic authority as well as the reflexive techniques used in the ethnographic films of Jean Rouch and those from the research collaboration of Timothy and Patsy Asch and Linda Conner.4 In current iterations, researchers see VCME enabling a form of activist anthropology. They have used it to facilitate professional development within school districts and programs that are working through multilingual and multicultural pedagogies and curriculum. Still others advance decolonizing projects within educational spaces and systems. As a hybridizing genre, the films invite participants during the interviews to co-construct with the anthropologist their professional visions in foregrounding, categorizing, evaluating, and thereby producing what they perceive in the digital multimodal media. As many who have used this method will attest to, the techniques for filming and audiorecording really must attend to the communicative ecologies in classrooms if the multimodal cues are to succeed in generating professional visabilities. Valente (2019) adopted a “d/Deaf lens” for shooting footage which entailed not only wide-angle shots of longer duration to depict the deaf social and spatial forms in the classroom but also required the expertise of deaf teachers to create appropriate translations of home signs as well as students’ interlanguage sign forms. In my study, I too had to work closely with bilingual teachers featured in the film to provide glosses of the variety of Mam that was spoken in that municipality. I italicized subtitles when teachers used bivalent forms as well as other examples of code switching into Spanish to visualize this for English dominant audiences who otherwise might not be as aware that some classroom interactions included more than one language or language variety. Key issues in the classes I filmed included the organization and use of classroom spaces to facilitate participation, the display and use of (bilingual) print and other literacy tools to guide instruction, interpretations of constructivist approaches to kindergarten pedagogy as well as parental involvement. Provocative issues that I predicted would elicit cross-cultural commentary included language(s) of instruction, patterns of code choice and translingual discourse practices, and classroom management. One issue that surprised me was the spatio-temporal partitioning and pacing of instruction which played a major role in how educators envisioned different professional visions of learner-centered forms of support. To give an example, I discuss next how the method evinced different kinds of professional vision that were articulated after recalling scenes depicting math instruction. Different visions were related to anxieties about second language learners and minority youth language and literacy acquisition.5 When I was working on a rough cut of a US typical day of kindergarten instruction for five-year-olds, the teacher urged me to include extended scenes of English Language Art (ELA) instruction to give viewers a sense of how that dominates the curriculum as well as scenes with math and science, where ELA skills were being emphasized. Figures 14.1–14.5 provide a graphic transcript of one of those scenes from that film. Students’ individual responses are portrayed on the left and the relative font size represents volume. Italicized text composition depicts the teacher and children speaking in unison.

4

See Asch et al. (1979, 1983); Rouch (2003). For a fuller accounting of the districts and data from the first years of this study see Reynolds (2019). Note for example that in the US, there is strict age-grading in classroom composition with schools separating out instruction for four-year-old students (4K) from five-year-old students (5K). In Guatemala kindergarten encompasses children ages four to six, and depending on the number of kindergarten-aged students enrolled at the school, all ages can be taught at the same time by a single teacher.

5

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linguistic anthropology of the visual  263

In one of my first interviews with the school principal of the US primary school, I asked her to pick out a scene that she thought demonstrated the successful implementation of a pedagogical goal being advanced for all kindergarten classes serving children ages four and five. Excerpts 14.1 and 14.2 are rendered using simple transcription conventions and

Figures 14.1–14.5  “I Do” and “We Do” phases of measuring Eeyore. Math activity depicted in five graphic images.

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264  jennifer f. reynolds

Figures 14.1–14.5  Continued

feature two instances from the interview when the principal singles out the same math lesson. The first observation the principal makes in Excerpt 14.1 is to praise the teacher for using 3D linking blocks, professionally coded as “manipulatives,” so that children are using their hands to measure real objects in the world. The principal’s praise is qualified by her assessment of the teacher’s management of student participation. Ambivalence is pragmatically manifest in the pausing, sound stretches (e.g, “so::”), and comparison she draws between what is actually more typical of other teachers in the school, who she later disclosed prefer disciplined bodies, active yet quietly engaged in lessons. The principal finally circles back to note that even though the teacher “struggled with managing kids’ behavior,” she acknowledges that in this example the teacher does not treat “movement and noise” as a problem precisely because it was leading to “kids working together to solve problems.” Figure 14.6 juxtaposes graphic images of two boys, one American-born Mam Maya, the other American-born African American. The student on the left is measuring a book on the table whereas the student on the right has just measured the class mascot, a plush penguin. Both were deeply and joyfully absorbed in the activity, linking and counting aloud the number of blocks.

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linguistic anthropology of the visual  265

Excerpt 14.1  Manipulatives, management, movement. Principal:

For primary aged kids using the manipulatives ahm it wasn’t worksheet based.

Researcher:

m hm.

Principal:

Those are huge pushes that we’ve got. It’s real life you’re constantly trying to measure things. ahm So that part’s a real positive.

Researcher:

m hm

Principal:

ahm The management is (.) is so:: different tha::n what is (0.6) Not typical that’s not a fair wo[rd because ahm

Researcher:

[m hm

Principal:

as that particular teacher struggled with managing kids’ behavior. I liked the fact though there was a lot of movement in the class and she didn’t get ruffled by the fact that there was movement and noise because the kids were working together to solve problems.

Figure 14.6  “You Do” phase of the math activity after the “Gradual Release”.

In Excerpt 14.2, the principal cycles back to the same example of how the teacher also mastered the instructional goal of managing the movement of students at work and modeling, professionally coded as “I do” and “we do,” followed by a “gradual release” so that students can “you do” either individually or in groups. Gradual release, not depicted visually in Figures 14.1–14.5, refers to how the teacher calls upon different pre-assigned groups of students, one group at a time, to begin doing the activity as a means to maximize an ordered channeling of children’s bodies when they transition from sitting still to getting up and moving about the room to undertake the activity. A Guatemalan principal of a primary school after screening the ethnographic film of the school in South Carolina, did not take issue with how the American teacher managed her classroom. All she observed was order and discipline. This was in stark contrast to many of the teachers from that US school who were very critical of their peer. Indeed, the US principal in Excerpt 14.1 circled back to the math example to show how the teacher had only partially mastered what she called the “management piece” of the modeling exercise— controlling and directing students’ behavior in ways that teachers consider appropriate for large group learning activities. She later commented how in a similar English Language Arts read aloud modeled activity, the children would interrupt because they were so excited,

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Excerpt 14.2  Modeling sequences, shifting participation. Principal:

It’s the modeling piece

Researcher:

Yeah.

Principal:

Where (.) we’re really pushing ahm The teacher does it first (.) the “I do.”

Researcher:

[yeah]

Principal:

We all practice together that’s the “we do” and the kids work on it independently in math lesson in particular she measured Eeyore.

Researcher:

Yeah.

Principal:

The kids helped measure things and then she turned them loose to do their thing. ahm that gradual release model is something we really worked hard on.

“they’ve got to tell you that minute” instead of letting the teacher direct what should be shared following an explicit instructional goal and when it should be shared. The principal made no mention here of the academic rigor or precision that was modeled by the teacher in measuring and recording the measurement with the students. In fact, as can be seen from the graphic transcript in Figures 14.1–14.5, the teacher invited children to check (i.e., reflect on) their answer by asking students to verify the amount as well as use the correct unit of measurement. Guatemalan teachers trained in bilingual multicultural pedagogy were amazed by the math activity for several reasons. First, they were stunned by the quantity and quality of resources in the case study US rural school, including educational materials and staffing, that supported children’s learning. The reader can see that all children had lots of blocks and objects to work with. As featured in all the figures, stuffed animals were favorite objects (Eeyore, Clifford, and the Penguin) to measure. Scores can be seen more in the film. Note too in Figure 14.7, each US Kindergarten classroom had a teacher’s aide to assist in instruction. During the “You do” phase of the math activity, children could seek out either the teacher or aide for help in counting and writing their math sentence. None of the Guatemalan teachers across three rural school districts I sampled enjoyed the support of additional staff or enough materials to be shared equally. Second, a majority of the Guatemalan teachers I interviewed were flabbergasted that fiveyear-old children in US schools were expected to master reading simple picture books and write fully formed sentences. As depicted in Figure 14.7, the teacher’s aide only provides oral instructions with the expectation that children write down all the words. Figure 14.7 includes three shots from a scene where two boys asked the aide to verify that they counted out the correct number of blocks and then seek her support to write out the sentence on the page. In the top panel, the aide extends the children’s answer, “Clifford is seventeen,” by supplying the correct unit of measurement for them, “… seventeen blocks tall.” When the second boy struggles to identify the correct vowel, she sounds it out and then orally spells it. He then corrects his writing on the page. Guatemalan Ministry of Education specialists in early childhood education were concerned that the expectations were not developmentally appropriate for five-year-old children. They felt pedagogy should be focused on cultivating preliteracy skills through a play-based curriculum where children’s

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Figure 14.7  Students seek teacher’s aide to support writing.

learning is driven by and through their own discovery processes. Teachers were expected to model learning, just like in the US example above, but the emphasis was on exposure, manipulation, and discovery using all senses. Mastery was not the objective for children ages four through six in Guatemala. One Guatemalan administrator of an elementary

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serving a multilingual student population which included emerging Spanish-Mayan language bilinguals (the two Mayan languages were Mam and K’iche’) as well as Spanish dominant students, additionally commented that the play-based curriculum was a key piece of their decolonizing pedagogy so children and teachers could co-create the curriculum to better reflect the multilingual and cultural diversity within their districts. To move too quickly and not ensure comprehension across all languages was to default to the neocolonial policies they had just reformed through the Peace Accords. All Guatemalan participants thus positively evaluated the forms of guided support and play-based dimensions of the math activity because it reflected and affirmed the national educational reforms implemented by Mayan linguist activists and educators. Finally, when the principal of the case study US school was able to screen the film featuring the Guatemalan school, she too noted the differences in pacing and commented how much US expectations for kindergarten had changed over her 30+years as a teacher and administrator. She stated that today, “5K (i.e., kindergarten serving five-year-olds) is what first grade used to be.” A subset of kindergarten teachers in the US whom I interviewed lamented how much the pedagogy had shifted away from the play-based developmentally appropriate ideals that they were first trained in. They commented that the Guatemalan teachers were much more empowered to seize on the creative potential of play-pedagogies, and they lamented that this was no longer their reality under the current state’s punitive accountability measures driven by the examination regime. These lamentations were expressed one year before the COVID-19 pandemic, which paradoxically forced the racial and structural inequalities of urban and rural schooling in the US into public view and required a partial suspension of these policies. An opening, a plot twist to an otherwise hegemonic narrative that blames children and their parents for structural failure, has emerged. In sum, observations generated through VCME served to draw public awareness to how districts are transnationally interconnected, provided practical support to teachers who were excited to discover new approaches in addition to how familiar pedagogical practices might serve different outcomes for language and literacy learning, and emboldened some activisteducators efforts as well as challenged some administrators’ and teachers’ assumptions. My lens will be tightly focused, tracking the next steps taken on both sides of the border to see what future possibilities are imagined and seized upon.

Conclusions Readers will notice that a majority of the scholars that I have highlighted focus on visual media as a meta-tool to think about our own professional practices, while others do so for action and intervention in the professional fields with organizations we enjoy collaborative relations with. Visual media is a tool for producing reflexive commentary on sign forms and sign functions within and across events. There are many pathways and possibilities for doing so. Some veer off in very different directions. Others follow close parallel paths, enabling linguistic anthropologists to straddle fields, disciplines, and roles. Cross-disciplinary engagement with the visual as multimodal-multisensorial methods, as well as the multiple uses for theoretical, public, applied, activist purposes, draws many of us to this subfield and keeps us passionately involved as well as accountable. This chapter thus serves as an invitation to future generations to join in particular cross-field conversations which can feature a particular visual technology for generating and/or displaying research as well as conducting ethnographic research that is oriented to media- and medium-specific genres of visual culture.

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linguistic anthropology of the visual  269

We see this in the work of Perley and Hoffman-Dilloway. Both explore the generative possibilities in graphic anthropology as it pertains to the linguistic vitalities and socialities of minoritized language communities in Canada, Nepal and Malta. My use of VCME, along with the work of Goodwin, Nakassis, and Reyes all bring into sharp relief our professional visions and how they are implicated in and complicate fraught racialized social relations in sociocultural fields. These fields encompass the US criminal justice system, (Social) Science and Technology Studies—including ethnology and anthropological archaeology—as well as cinema and film studies and education. Collectively, this work bridges different generations of scholars connecting and remediating old media with the new. They all push up against and explore the limits of our conceptual and methodological tools that have heretofore united us more than they have divided us. What I find the most exciting is that we keep expanding who our interlocutors could and should be. The next generation’s keen interest in social media platforms should be acknowledged, together with the kinds of media entanglements that those enable. This area is a source of real strength for those who are pursuing these projects. Examples are found in Esra Padgett’s (2021) study of a ban on the social networking website Tumblr, where adult content is deemed “obscene.” She analyzed how users worked around the purge of memes deemed obscene by the algorithm. Wee Yang Soh (2020) published on the playful contestation of the 2017 Singapore presidential election in the seemingly autonomous recirculation of memes. As political critique, these memes exploited the paradox of play and acts of sharing spread the critique while escaping prosecution for sedition. Each generation seems to be finding inspiration in the media and medium that fit the technologically mediated forms of visual sociality that combine image-text-and-sound in ways that are evidence of the power of indexicality for them as well as for the communities within which they work and forge collaborative research. As someone who has spent a lifetime studying peer culture and play, I am not surprised that it is not just the ethno/graphic tools that matter, even though the ethno/graphic tools are important, but the social relations and distributed forms of participation giving rise to both pain and pleasure that enable and are enabled through their use.

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Jacobs-Huey, L. (2002). The natives are gazing and talking back: reviewing the problematics of positionality, voice, and accountability among “native” anthropologists. American Anthropologist 104 (3): 791–804. Jojola, T. (1995). A Zuni artist looks at Frank Hamilton Cushing: cartoons by Phil Hughte. Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Museum Anthropology 19 (1): 54–56. Köhn, S. (2016). Mediating Mobility: Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Kroskrity, P.V. (2018). On recognizing persistence in indigenous language ideologies of multilingualism in two native American communities. Language & Communication 62: 133–144. Liegl, M. and Schindler, L. (2013). Media assemblages, ethnographic visability and the enactment of video in sociological research. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 14 (3): 254–270. Mead, M. (1960). Four Families. National Film Board of Canada. Murphy, K.M. (2021). Transcription aesthetics. Semiotic Review, [S.l.] 9: apr. 2021. Nakassis, C.V. (2017). Rajini’s finger, indexicality, and the metapragmatics of presence. Signs and Society 5 (2): 201–242. Nakassis, C.V. (2018). Indexicality’s ambivalent ground. Signs and Society 6 (1): 281–304. Nakassis, C.V. (2020). Deixis and the linguistic anthropology of cinema. Semiotic Review, [S.l.] 9: nov. 2020. Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory. In: Developmental Pragmatics (eds. E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin), 43–72. New York: Academic Press. Padgett, E. (2021). Dirty pictures: performativity and the obscene image. Semiotic Review [S.l.] 9: Jan. 2021. Peirce, C.S. (1955). Logic as semiotic: the theory of signs. In: Philosophical Writings of Peirce (ed. J. Buchler), 98–119. New York: Dover. Perley, B. (2019). Anthropology … in theory. Anthropology News website, April 8, 2019. Reyes, A. (2020). Image into sequence. Semiotic Review, [S.l.] 9: Jan. 2021. Reynolds, J.F. (2019). A multivocal method modeling cross-cultural research in multilingual educational settings connected through a transborder migratory circuit. Foro de Educación 17 (27): 91–123. Rosa, J. and Díaz, V. (2019). Raciontologies: rethinking anthropological accounts of institutionalized racism and enactments of white supremacy in the United States. American Anthropologist 122 (1): 120–132. Rouch, J. (2003). The camera and the man. In: Principles of Visual Anthropology, 3e (ed. P. Hocking), 79–98. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Soh, W.Y. (2020). Digital protest in Singapore: the pragmatics of political internet memes. Media, Culture & Society 42 (7–8): 1115–1132. Takaragawa, S. et al. (2019). Bad habitus: Anthropology in the age of the multimodal. American Anthropologist 121 (2): 517–524. Taussig, M. (2009). What do drawings want? Culture, Theory & Critique 50 (2–3): 263–274. Taussig, M. (2011). I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, D. (1983). The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tobin, J. (2019). The origins of the video-cued multivocal ethnographic method. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 50 (3): 255–269. Tobin, J., Wu, D., and Davidson, D. (1989). Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. New Have, CT: Yale University Press. Trouillot, M.-R. (1991). Anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness. In: Recapturing Anthropology: Working the Present (eds. R.G. Fox and S. Fe), 17–44. NM: School of American Research Press. Valente, J.M. (2019). A deaf lens: adapting video-cued multivocal ethnography for the kindergarten for the deaf in three countries project. Anthropology & Education 50 (3): 340–347. Wirtz, K. (2017). “With unity we will be victorious!”: A monologic poetic of political “conscientization” within the Cuban revolution. In: The Monologic Imagination (eds. M. Tomlinson and J. Millie), 89–120. New York: Oxford University Press.

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15

Technobodily Literacy in Video Interaction Samira Ibnelkaïd

Introduction With unexpected global events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies are regarded as a panacea; they have been recognized as a safe way to interact, to maintain a sense of belonging (Lipiansky 1993), and to fulfill the human desire for ubiquity i.e., the ability to be in multiple places simultaneously (Gras 1999). Digital screens are complex and multidimensional interfaces that actively take part in shaping human interactions. Human behavior has always been mediated by artifacts insofar as the evolution of humankind is carried out in a logic of what Alfred Lotka (1925) called exosomatization, namely, evolution through both somatic and artificial organs. This process of technical externalization is enabled by the creation of various artifacts (from the most basic tools such as a fork or a hammer to the most complex ones including computers and smartphones) and has become constitutive of humanity. This process has led over time to the digitalization of human life in almost all its aspects, first and foremost in its communicative dimension. Indeed, the exosomatization process allows individuals to both master their environment and enhance their social relations and networks. Digital technologies introduce new forms of actions, knowledge, and communication that empower individuals to cross physical and temporal boundaries. Individuals make use of digital platforms to ubiquitously connect with each other, be it through social media platforms (e.g., Facebook), instant messaging, microblogging, or video calling. The latter proves itself increasingly popular as it allows callers to remotely, yet synchronously, nurture their relationships by making the invisible visible, displaying their affects through facial expressions, and visually sharing their daily life through exhibiting immediate surroundings, ongoing activities, and relevant objects. Though video interaction devices were introduced in the 1960s (Bell Labs Picturephone in the USA), it took a few decades before they became ingrained in social practices. It was not until the end of the twentieth century that the video-conferencing technology began to see widespread adoption. Advances in internet broadband, industry standards, as well as improvements in video codecs made the technology much more practical and affordable for

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

general use (Orr 2020). Even though the research interest in video interactions began in the 1990s (with observations of “videophone” use) (Fornel 1994), it mostly grew in the 2010s when video calling platforms became more accessible and versatile through their integration in lighter and more portable devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones (Mlynár et al. 2018). Since then, a growing body of research, mostly rooted in ethnomethodology, has addressed various interactional practices of video calling such as turn-taking, opening, closing, noticing, showing sequences, and maintenance of the connection in various settings from workplaces1 to medical encounters,2 classroom interactions,3 music lessons,4 interactions in American Sign Language,5 romantic long-distance relationships,6 public services,7 task-oriented interactions,8 and hybrid settings.9 Such work has also tackled the methodological challenges of studying on-screen presence in video interaction and the benefits of a visual ethnographic approach (Ibnelkaïd 2018). These diverse research approaches to video interactions share an interest in the dynamic interconnection between talk, bodies, and artifacts. They lack, however, a common definition of the literacy at play in video calls that allows individuals to enact this intersubjective and technical synergy. This chapter proposes that video interactions are the locus of a technobodily literacy. Indeed, to make their video interaction experience engaging and valuable, individuals employ both embodied resources (verbal utterances, facial expressions, gestures, body postures, etc.) and technical practices (which presuppose a certain degree of ease and familiarity with the possibilities and constraints of digital devices and platforms). Furthermore, video callers rely on each other to monitor their actions, make them intelligible, and collaboratively produce a meaningful experience. To further describe the technobodily literacy at play in video interaction, I will present some excerpts from the data I gathered during periods of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the Smart Communication project.10 The corpus consists in recordings of naturally occurring video calls of recruited participants with their friends or family members from various generations. I have gathered data of video calls amongst French friends and family members from various generations and multiple locations (France, UAE, Canada, Finland). No instructions were given to the participants whose video calls were planned as part of this research project. All participants gave their consent to be recorded. This set of data includes twenty hours of video calls and involves seventeen participants. The focus of this research is on conversational sequences where call-participants share on-screen elements of their surroundings. These specific sequences form a co-constructed participatory activity aimed at involving others in one’s daily life, be it a recent achievement, a joyful event, or even the simple presence of a pet. In these sequences, individuals mobilize technobodily resources leading to the hybridization of verbal, corporeal, and technical

 1

  (Heath and Luff 1991; Ruhleder and Jordan 2001b; Bonu 2007).   (Mondada 2007; Pappas and Seale 2010).  3   (Develotte, Domanchin and Levet 2018; Ibnelkaïd 2018; Guichon and Wigham 2016; Vincent 2016).  4   (Duff and Healy 2014).  5   (Keating 2005).  6   (Rintel 2013).  7   (Velkovska and Zouinar 2007).  8   (Pekarek-Doelher and Balaman 2021).  9   (Develotte et al. 2021). 10   The Smart Communication project is a research project on mobile device use in social interaction conducted at the University of Oulu and funded by the Academy of Finland. https://smartcommunication.blog  2

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modes. The adopted research methodology is non-logocentric and non-technocentric; rather, it focuses on the interplay between verbal, technical, and bodily resources. My research methodology draws on an interdisciplinary approach encompassing visual ethnography11 as a way to apprehend the fieldwork (collecting and processing visual data); multimodal interaction analysis12 observing verbal and nonverbal behavior13 (posture, facial expressions, gestures, actions on artifacts, etc.); and phenomenology14 as a transempirism i.e., a way to go beyond the empirical data and to rethink literacy, intersubjectivity, and corporeality in the digital era. This chapter first highlights the complex dynamics of video interaction and the specific skills needed to develop a technobodily literacy (see the section on “Hybrid Sociabilities in the Digital Era”). The data analysis then documents the embodied and technical methods used by video callers to enact a shared sensory space transcending the physical distance (see the section on “The Enactment of Technobodily Literacy in Video Calls”).

Hybrid Sociabilities in the Digital Era The physical, relational, sensorial, emotional, and aesthetic existence of humankind is deeply involved in technical communication devices (Lévy 2013, p. 17). The digital era is the locus of hybrid sociabilities involving new kinds of perception, intertwined physical and digital systems, and multimodal resources for communication (Stimler and Vial 2014). Both on- and off-screen social interactions are ritualized, embodied, and artifacted in their core. Thus, as mentioned above, video calls require individuals to develop embodied and technical skills defined in the following sections of this chapter.

Video Calls as Embodied and Technical Interactions

Upon meeting one another, individuals collaboratively enact a common linguistic and social world allowing them to share a mutual understanding of the ongoing activity, to interact adequately, to perceive and understand each other, and to enact a joint spatiotemporal framework (Goffman 1959). Indeed, the interactional context is not fixed but rather constitutes a “dynamic, temporally unfolding process accomplished through the ongoing rearrangement of structures in the talk, participants’ bodies, relevant artifacts, spaces and features of the material surround that are the focus of the participants’ scrutiny” (Goodwin 2000, p. 1519). Humans are sentient beings who co-construct themselves in social interactions through talk, embodied conduct, invested space, and appropriate artifacts. In the digital era, they equip themselves with technologies that allow them to go beyond physical distance by making use of the multiple on- and offscreen resources available to them in order to successfully open, maintain, and close the online interaction.

11

  (Banks and Morphy 1997; Ruby 2000; Pink 2007; Dion 2007).   (Cosnier 2007; Goffman 1973; Goodwin 2000; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2010; Mondada 2008; Traverso 2012). 13  We use here the ICOR transcript convention (http://icar.cnrs.fr/ecole_thematique/tranal_i/documents/ Mosaic/ICAR_Conventions_ICOR.pdf). The main elements used are listed at the end of the chapter. We do not resort to a multimodal convention since we work on the video itself as core material to analyze nonverbal communication. In technobodily video interaction it would be laborious and vain to engage in a detailed verbal description of all the relevant multimodal and plurisemiotic actions in a single transcript. 14   (Husserl [1929] [1953] (1980); Merleau-Ponty 1945; Le Breton 2001; Vial 2013). 12

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These resources display three main qualities, namely multimodality, multisensoriality and multisemioticity. The first quality, multimodality, refers to “the diversity of resources that participants mobilize to produce and understand social interaction as publicly intelligible actions, including language, gesture, gaze, body postures, movements, and embodied manipulations of objects” (Mondada 2019, p. 47). The bodily expressions thus produced constitute meaningful symbols serving as a basis of inference in practical reasoning and perform a specific function in the organization of interactions. Social interactions are to be regarded as embodied by nature (Cosnier 2004). The body in interaction is to be understood as a “dynamically unfolding, interactively organized locus for the production and display of meaning and action” (Goodwin 2000, p. 1489). Therefore, video callers make their bodies visible, at least partially, and display visual and mutual orientation in order to give each other access to the multimodal resources they mobilize to convey meaning and exhibit affects. In their digital interactions, participants “learn how to enhance and constrain, extend and transform properties of the human body” (Keating 2005, p. 527). The efficient use of the webcam in video calls, for instance, is of paramount importance insofar as this “visual prosthesis” (ibid) can “enable one to leap over tall buildings in a single bound, but it can’t see very far into the room” (ibid, p. 136). The accuracy and proficiency with which this perceptual extension is operated can either blind or give sight to the interactants (ibid). The second quality, multisensoriality, plays a major role in digital communication since individuals “sensorially engage in the material world, using multimodal resources not only to communicate or make their interactions accountable but also to express, manifest, and display their sensory access to the world” (Mondada 2019). Sensoriality is the means for an individual to become aware of their bodily existence, their relationship to themselves, to others, and to the sensory world. As Michel Foucault stated, “the body is the zero point of the world. […] It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine […]” (Foucault 1966, p. 233). One’s corporeality is to be regarded as the center of human experience. And this experience relies upon other individuals as well as the artifactual environment. This extension of the sensory experience from the self to others forms an “intercorporeality” (Merleau-Ponty 1964), whereby the self and the other coexist in a shared being-in-the-world (ibid, p. 274). When interacting online, in the physical absence of the other’s body, individuals co-construct a hybrid intercorporeality that makes use of both their embodied practices and the technical resources provided by their digital devices. Indeed, the surrounding artifacts participate in this network of intersubjective perception, thus enacting an artifacted intercorporeality (see example in the section on “The Enactment of Technobodily Literacy in Video Calls” where one of the participants demonstrates to the other how to hold an object in her hand towards her front camera in order for him to assess its size). In video calls, multisensoriality constitutes a collaborative, intersubjective, technical, and bodily enactment. Finally, the third quality, multisemioticity, refers to the simultaneous use of multiple semiotic resources in human interaction e.g., “a range of structurally different kinds of sign phenomena in both the stream of speech and body, graphic and socially sedimented structure in the surround, sequential organization, encompassing activity systems, etc.” (Goodwin 2000, p. 1490). Digital medias make a wide range of audiovisual resources (images, videos, gifs, emojis, hyperlinks, hashtags, etc.) available to and shaped by individuals. Those multiple digital resources allow interactants to creatively exist online, manage the flow of interaction, display their affects, and co-construct their relationships with others. Individuals’ creative, adaptive, and innovative online behavior brings about constant novelty in their communicative practices. Indeed, if the physical presence of an individual’s

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body immediately confirms their existence in offline communication, when onscreen, ­individuals must actively build their online presence because if they do not, they remain invisible to others (Georges 2009). Semiotic resources allow individuals to creatively and intersubjectively express themselves online and to find their voice and place in this everchanging world.

From Digital Literacy to Technobodily Literacy

In order to structure and manage their use of digital devices in interaction, users need to be comfortable with the nature and boundaries of the media affordances i.e., the set of possibilities and constraints offered by various media (Hutchby 2001; Lamy 2010). Making use of technologies undoubtedly implies developing an ad hoc literacy. Though the notion of literacy was first narrowly understood as the ability to write and read, it has now become “an interdisciplinary subject of study that draws from theoretical and methodological perspectives in linguistics, anthropology, human development, and education, addressing learning as a lifespan process and across a variety of learning contexts” (Baquedano-López 2004, p. 245). Literacy is to be regarded less as a finite set of skills and more as an experiential process allowing individuals to actively and intelligibly take part in society as competent and reflexive agents. This competence appears to be best acquired and nurtured within interpersonal interactions and is a socially and historically contingent process (ibid). Henceforth, relevant skills are crucial for individuals who wish to interact, operate, and perform adequately and effectively in digital environments (Eshet-Alkalai 2004: 93). There is indeed a growing use, in every aspect of human life, of digital technologies whose ubiquitous and versatile nature reshapes the ways in which individuals communicate and behave. The required digital literacy15 encompasses skills that are complex to grasp and to delineate (see Hadziristic 2017; Spante et. al. 2018; Reddy et. al. 2020 for literature reviews on digital literacy and its multiple dimensions and areas of applications). Digital literacy not only refers to technical skills but also comprises various cognitive, psychological, sociological, and emotional dimensions (ibid). More specifically, EshetAlkalai (2004) distinguishes five types of skills incorporated within digital literacy. First, photovisual literacy is the ability to read visual representation as digital interfaces have become more and more graphic and intuitive with pictures instead of words and buttons to click instead of written commands. Second, reproduction literacy is the ability to recycle existing materials and to adequately and ethically integrate others’ texts, images, etc. to one’s creation insofar as an abundance of intellectual and cultural resources is available to everyone immediately. Third, branching literacy is the ability of multidimensional nonlinear thinking in the hypermedia i.e., the capacity to navigate hyperlinks and scattered pieces of information online and to make sense out of them. Fourth, information literacy refers to developing skepticism and being able to question and assess the veracity and quality of the information found online. Finally, socio-emotional literacy allows users to understand the implicit rules of online conversations and to avoid traps and ill-intentioned users (EshetAlkalai 2004). Though these approaches to digital literacy encompass various cognitive, visual and emotional features, they do not explicitly consider embodied behaviors. Indeed, online practices such as video-calling invoke multimodal and multisensorial resources (use of audiovisual platform, choice of front or rear camera, framing of the body and its actions, mobilization of graphic reactions on the videocall interface (emojis, gifs, etc.)). Therefore, it appears more 15

  (Lanham 1995; Gilster 1997; Inoue et al. 1997; Pool 1997).

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adequate to define digital literacy as a technobodily literacy, namely, the intersubjective and reflexive process of developing and nurturing the technical, cognitive, socio-affective, sensory, and bodily skills required to interact, create, learn, work, and fully partake in the socio-digital world. The notion of technobodily literacy is rooted in a multimodal, multisensorial, and multisemiotic understanding of human artifacted interaction. And it highlights the technobodily ethnomethods16 mobilized by the interactants during their videocalls, namely the embodied artifacted and intersubjective procedures they use to produce, recognize, and make familiar a common hybrid world. In video interactions, these technobodily ethnomethods (e.g., choosing and handling the right equipment, framing their video adequately, shaping their gestures and body postures efficiently, making their actions on- and off-screen intelligible, managing the technical issues, etc.) allow participants to interact successfully.

The Enactment of Technobodily Literacy in Video Calls As mentioned above, my research methodology draws on an interdisciplinary approach encompassing visual ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, and phenomenology. Visual ethnography finds its roots in the idea that social practices are manifested through visible symbols manifested in gestures, ceremonies, rituals and artifacts situated in both natural and constructed environments (Ruby 1996). Insofar as social practices are visible actions, researchers should be able to use (audio)visual technologies (pictures, videos, etc.) in order to constitute data that can be analyzed and disseminated multimodally (ibid.). The visual media constitutes an intrinsic element of the research process in visual ethnography (Dion 2007). In other words, this approach is a heuristic methodology that seeks to “graph” (study and represent) the “ethnos” (culturalities, practices and social relations) through (audio)visual media (ibid.). Visual ethnography constitutes one of the roots of multimodal interaction analysis which is an interdisciplinary method that seeks to investigate interactional practices of human beings with each other and with artifacts in the complex socio-material world within which they operate (Jordan & Henderson 1995). It examines verbal and embodied interactions, and the use of artifacts and technologies, in order to underscore routine practices, common problems and distinct resources used to solve them (ibid.). Multimodal interaction analysis is grounded in ethnography, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and ethology. Video technology has been vital in establishing this field, insofar as it allows researchers to observe in fine-grain detail embodied, multimodal, and artifacted behaviors and practices. Both these fields are related to phenomenology in that they aim at capturing and describing (inter)subjective experience. Indeed, the phenomenological approach consists in a transcendental philosophy that places emphasis on the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon (from the Greek word “φαινεσθαι” meaning “appearing” “manifesting oneself”). It investigates the meaning that our (inter)subjective experience, our perceptual consciousness, gives to the world (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Phenomenology proposes that a phenomenon be described instead of being explained or having its causal relations searched for (Sadala & Adorno 2002). As Husserl underlines, “phenomenological explanation does nothing other - and we can never stress it too much - than to make explicit the meaning that this world has for all of us, prior to all philosophy and that our experience obviously confers on” (Husserl 1980: 129). Therefore, my approach to video-interactional practices 16

  The notion of “ethnomethods” (Garfinkel 1967) refers to the “procedures that the members of a social form use to produce and to recognize their world and to make it familiar as they assemble it” (Coulon 1987).

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draws on these three main disciplines, which share a common interest in further understanding embodied and artifacted interactional practices enacted through humans’ intersubjective experience of their socio-material environment. To further understand the enactment of technobodily literacy in video calls, this section analyzes video from the above-outlined research project. The excerpts presented below consist of dynamic screen captures complemented by in-room video recordings documenting participants’ physical behavior off-screen. This combination of perspectives and the overlay of transcriptions of verbal utterances allows the communicative actions both on and off-screen to be analyzed. This multimodal analysis of video calls helps us see beyond a reductive real/virtual duality (cf. Boellstorff 2008) and to more adequately understand the co-construction of bodily presence enabled by digital technology. In this contribution, I focus on multimodal interactional sequences where call-participants share on screen both animate and inanimate elements of their surroundings. These specific sequences form a co-constructed participatory activity aimed at involving others in one’s daily life. They do not constitute simple showings from an active actor to a passive spectator but rather form coordinated, interactional, collaborative sequences where coparticipants complete each other’s corporeal schemas through artifacted procedures. Within these sequences, perception and action are two faces of the same coin; they are intertwined and consist in the same operation. They constitute a “percepaction”: perception as an action, a gesture, an act of getting out of oneself to see and be seen, perceive and be perceived, look and show (Roquet 2002). In video calls, percepaction is orchestrated collaboratively: each participant guiding the other in their common perception of themselves, their surroundings, and their experience. In this analysis section, I will present two percepaction sequences17 from two different video calls which occurred in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and French lockdown: Sequence 1: Anne-Marie (France) showing the family cat to her daughter Jessica (France) and her son Valentin (Finland). Sequence 2: Betty (France) showing homemade African beignets called mikates to her friend Raphael (Canada).

The presentation of each sequence will begin with a schematic visualization of the sequentiality of the percepaction sequences i.e., sequences where a video call participant engages in the technobodily activity of making an animate or inanimate element of his or her immediate physical surrounding visible onscreen to the other participant(s). The following schematization highlights the intersubjective, multimodal, multisensorial, and multisemiotic nature of the technobodily literacy required for participants to enact those percepaction sequences.

Sequentiality of Percepaction Sequences in Video Interactions

The video interaction excerpts analyzed below—and many others from the corpus that could not be presented here—allow us to schematize the prototypical sequentiality18 of percepaction sequences (PAS). The analysis outlines six main subsequences: the preface, the initiation, the staging, the audit, the object assessment, and the closing. The descriptions of

17

  I am using pseudonyms in order to preserve the participants’ anonymity.   Sequentiality in the domain of interaction analysis refers to the ways in which an utterance or communicative action is constructed so as to display its relation to the immediately preceding utterance or communication action and to make expectable a certain type of utterance or communicative action in the following turn. 18

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Figure 15.1a  Preface and Initiation subsequences of a PAS.

these subsequences highlight how video call participants’ actions are deeply intersubjective (self- and other-initiated sequences, audit, etc.), embodied (use of the body as a resource), and technical (use of various device functions). A preface (Figure 15.1a) is a form of pre-sequence i.e., “a class of utterances characteristically used to preface requests, jokes and stories, news announcements, and invitations” (Goodwin and Heritage 1990, p. 16). It allows a locutor to shift the attention of conversation participants from one topic or focus to another. In video calls, prefaces form a transition between the ongoing talk and the initiation of a new PAS. The preface can be produced by the main percepactor (i.e., the participant engaging in the activity of making an element of his or her immediate surrounding visible to others on screen) or their interlocutor(s). Similarly, the initiation of the PAS is either self- or other-initiated. It can either be nonverbalized (PAS initiated without any verbal comment) or verbalized directly or indirectly. The initiation subsequence leads to the staging of the PAS (Figure 15.1b) which may involve a relocation either of the body or the object of the PAS. The staging can be completed through a camera movement, either a switch from the front camera feed to the rear one or a device turning. The staging is then audited by the co-percepactors. This audit may take the form of a positive feedback or a negative one leading to a restaging. Once the object of the percepaction sequence (Figure 15.1c) is made perceptible to the participants, they may engage in an assessment subsequence. The assessment can take the form of a preferred response or a dispreferred one that possibly leads to a negotiation. Finally, the participants proceed to the closing of the PAS possibly resorting to verbal markers. This closing leads the participants to restage or reframe the focus from the object to the talking individual(s) or switch from one object to another, potentially lining up multiple percepaction sequences.

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Figure 15.1b  Staging and Audit subsequences of a PAS.

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Figure 15.1c  Object assessment and Closing subsequences of a PAS.

Sequence 1—Anne-Marie, Jessica, Valentin, and the Cats

The following transcript reproduces a portion of a video interaction between Anne-Marie (in France), her daughter Jessica (in France), and her son Valentin (in Finland). These participants regularly video call each other to keep in touch despite the lockdowns. The following sequence happens shortly after the opening sequence. Anne-Marie and Valentin talk about administrative paperwork regarding an absent third party, when Jessica suddenly brings her cat to the screen, leading Anne-Marie to open a percepaction sequence focusing on her cats. Subsequence 1.1—Preface to and Initiation of the PAS19 See Figure 15.2a. When Jessica brings her cat Neo to the screen (Figure 15.2b) without any prefacing or initiation, Anne-Marie continues with her speech turn and Valentin is caught between two 19 

In the transcripts, the translation in English is displayed after the end of a turn and after the entirety of an overlap, in order to preserve the sequentiality of the interaction.

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Figure 15.2a  Preface to and initiation of the PAS.

Figure 15.2b  Valentin pointing at Jessica holding her cat to the screen (zoom call). (Valentin on the left, Jessica on the right and Anne-Marie at the bottom).

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parallel interactional activities: his mother’s ongoing talk and his sister’s cat-showing. He uses a nonverbal method that allows him to acknowledge Jessica’s action without interrupting Anne-Marie’s turn to which he will respond verbally “uh yes that’s it.” Valentin’s nonverbal ethnomethod—pointing at the cat on the screen—brings Anne-Marie’s attention towards Jessica, leading to a shift in the interactional focus “ah it’s neo.” However, Valentin’s gesture is designed for his own Umwelt (i.e., the sensorial environment specific to and subjectively perceived by a species or an individual (Uexküll 2010)), and not for those of the other participants since his sensory access to the interaction is different from those of the other video callers. What Valentin physically points at is his own screen with its own display—each of the participants having a different subjective video feed display on Zoom. Therefore, the result here is a pointing towards the edge of the screen opposite of Jessica’s image (Figure 15.2b). Nonetheless, Anne-Marie orients to this gesture as a means to bring attention to a new element in the video call and by looking to its direction she is able to see the new participant. To make her cat visible to the call participants, Jessica brought him to the screen instead of moving the camera towards him. However, the cat does not cooperate. When Jessica calls out her cat for not complying (“oh what a stupid CAT”), AnneMarie sides with her, “oh:: he’s nasty this o:ne,” while Valentin points out the inadequacy of her percepaction method: “but you go bothering him and then you say he’s an idiot.” Jessica’s attempted percepaction, not taking the cat’s agency into account, fails. In addition, the absence of prefacing and initiation does not offer the possibility of embedding the PAS within the ongoing conversation or facilitating the transition to a new topic. Following Jessica’s showing of her cat, Anne-Marie cuts her conversation with Valentin short and transitions to a self-prefaced percepaction sequence: “eh but and my pablo where is my pa-.” When almost immediately finding him, “ah here he is,” Anne-Marie verbally and explicitly self-initiates the PAS, “wait I’m gonna show you my pablo huh I’m going to show him to you both.” Subsequence 1.2—Staging and Audit of the PAS  See Figure 15.2c. Anne-Marie engages in the staging of the PAS by getting out of her sofa and going towards the cat she intends to make visible (Figure 15.2d). Once facing Pablo, Anne-Marie turns her phone towards him in order to make him perceptible via the front camera. In doing so she is not able to monitor the sensory access of the call participants. Anne-Marie’s lack of digital skills prevents her from using the camera switch option insofar as she does not fully grasp the media affordances. Consequently, Anne-Marie requires the audit of her interlocutors, asking them explicitly, “do you see him/.” Valentin’s comment in an overlap, “ah here he is,” acts as a positive feedback to Anne-Marie’s staging and framing that she makes accountable through a repetition, “here he i:s.”

Figure 15.2c  Staging and audit of the PAS.

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Figure 15.2d  Anne-Marie auditing her PAS (zoom call). (Valentin on the left, Jessica on the right and Pablo at the bottom).

Subsequence 1.3—Assessment and Closing of the PAS  See Figure 15.2e. When Valentin sees his cat (Figure 15.2f), he greets him through nonverbal vocalizations and repeats his name and nickname multiple times. Simultaneously, Anne-Marie addresses the cat and gives him a verbal description of the call participant, “pablo: it’s your dad.” Jessica gives an assessment of the perceptible, “oh he seems VERY SLIM.” Valentin joins in this assessment which is explicitly “dispreferred” (Schegloff 2007) by Anne-Marie

Figure 15.2e  Assessment and closing of the PAS.

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Figure 15.2f  VAL and JES assessing the cat’s appearance (zoom call). (Valentin on the left, Jessica on the right and Pablo at the bottom).

who rejects it by giving a sensory explanation to what is framed as a wrong assessment: “because you’re only seeing his fa:ce.” Jessica dismisses this sensory description, “ah no we’re also seeing his body.” This disagreement over the call participants’ sensory access to the perceptible occurs only insofar as Anne-Marie’s technobodily staging does not allow her to monitor it. Still opposed to the given assessment, she closes both the argument and this specific PAS by providing another justification related this time to the perceptible’s bodily posture “but because he’s laid down.” She then engages in other percepaction sequences featuring her other cats, after which Jessica will open a conversation about her own cat’s health issues, leading to Anne-Marie’s restaging and reframing from the cats to herself. Anne-Marie’s percepaction sequence follows the technobodily structure we previously identified, including: A preface (self-initiated by Anne-Marie “eh but and my pablo where is my pa-”). An initiation (self-initiated and explicitly verbalized “wait I’m gonna show you my pablo”). A technobodily staging (a displacement of the main percepactor towards the perceptible without switching the camera i.e., Anne-Marie walking towards the cat). An audit (self-initiated and with positive feedback: Anne-Marie asking “do you see him/” and her son commenting “ah here he is”). An assessment of the element made perceptible (other-initiated, dispreferred and negotiated because of the lack of sensory audit due to the limited digital skills and affordances knowledge from the main percepactor i.e., Jessica assessing the cat’s physical appearance “oh he seems VERY SLIM”). A closing (implicitly other-initiated, transitioning to a related topic; Jessica talking about her cat’s health issues). A restaging (Anne-Marie later goes back to her couch and turns the phone back towards her face). This sequence (Figure 15.2g) reveals that the limited nature of Anne-Marie’s technobodily literacy brings negative affects in the interaction. She displays disappointment in her

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Figure 15.2g  Sequentiality of Anne-Marie’s percepaction sequence.

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children’s assessment of the cat’s appearance. Her lack of knowledge as regards to the media affordances prevents her from designing her action in a way that would allow her to monitor the sensory access of her interlocutors (shifting the video feed from the front camera to the back camera in order to monitor what her addressees can see). However, in later video calls with her children, she will learn progressively to use the camera shift option and better manage this resource allowing her to enact a more positive affect.

Sequence 2—Betty, Raphael, and the Mikatés

The following sequence is an excerpt of a video call between Betty (in France) and her friend Raphael (in Canada) which also occurred during a French lockdown related to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. They have previously discussed, through messages and phone calls, Betty preparing homemade African beignets, i.e., mikates. They now engage in a video interaction allowing Betty to show Raphael the results of her baking activity. Subsequence 2.1—Initiation and Postponing of the PAS  See Figure 15.3a. The opening sequence of this video call is rather unusual insofar as Raphael, seemingly engaged in another offline activity, does not warmly greet Betty when picking up; her “hello”: is answered by a “msk. yeah” with no immediate follow up, after which Betty expresses her confusion through a head shake not visible to Raphael who is not looking at the screen (Figure 15.3b). After a short pause, however, Raphael suddenly initiates the PAS through an immediate order “you need to show that NOW,” injecting a playful dramatic character into the following PAS (Figure 15.3c). Raphael’s mischievous call opening and PAS initiation provokes Betty’s laugh and cheerful behavior continuing the suspense initiated by Raphael. Indeed, Betty postpones the staging of the PAS through verbal delay, “are you looking forward to seeing the WORK/,” reaching for the bowl containing the mikates but not bringing it to the screen yet, to which Raphael answers with an emphasized reiteration of the PAS initiation, “show me the miKAte han” (han here is an emphasis particle) (Figure 15.3d). This technobodily co-enacted suspense, rooted in the PAS postponing, allows the interactants to develop positive socio-affects in their video call despite the ongoing difficult

Figure 15.3a  Initiation and postponing of the PAS.

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Figure 15.3b  Betty waiting for Raphaël to greet her (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

Figure 15.3c  Raphaël initiating the PAS (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

Figure 15.3d  Betty postponing the PAS -1/2—(FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

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context of the pandemic. Indeed, Betty expresses her pride of her home cooking product “I’m so proud now” holding the bowl close to the phone, still waiting before making the invisible visible to her interlocutor. Raphael takes part in this technobodily postponing by announcing the future assessment “we’ll see we’ll see if we grant you the visa or not hey hey are you gonna pass customs/.” In this subsequence, both participants make use of technobodily ethnomethods acknowledging the presence of an imperceptible element soon to be made perceptible. Betty blocks Raphael’s sensory access to the topical object, she controls his umwelt, while they collaboratively build up a suspense (Figure 15.3e). Subsequence 2.2—Staging and Audit of the PAS  See Figure 15.3f. Betty makes this PAS particularly playful by turning her phone’s front camera towards the bowl of mikates and moving it back and forth multiple times (Figure 15.3g). However, Raphael does not adhere to this staging and operates a shift in the interactional frame20 (Goffman 1974). Indeed, he switches from a mischievous PAS to a formal

Figure 15.3e  Betty postponing the PAS -2/2—(FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

Figure 15.3f  Staging and audit of the PAS. 20   Frames maybe defined as “organizational principles that govern events and our subjective involvement in them.” They are “schemata of interpretation” that allow individuals or groups “to locate, perceive, identify, and label” events and adjust their behavior accordingly (Goffman 1974).

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Figure 15.3g  Playful staging of the PAS (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

one by asking Betty, in a more serious tone, for a restaging. He thus guides her technobodily ethnomethods to make the mikates more visible to himself, “tsk. s- take a beignet in your hand” and “p- put it like that,” simultaneously demonstrating the way he wants her to put her hand. Betty follows Raphael’s guidance, modifying her staging and displaying the perceptible element in the requested manner. The interactants co-enact an artifacted intercorporeality (see the section entitled “Video Calls as Embodied and Technical Interactions”) that allows them to extend their sensory access from afar (Figure 15.3h). However, after this sudden shift in the interactional frame and this very specific staging request, Betty explicitly questions Raphaël’s summon (“why”). To this interrogation

Figure 15.3h  Audit and restaging of the PAS (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

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Raphaël replies with an expert perspective, altering the symmetry of the interaction, and offers intercultural explanations and knowledge, “tsk. no because some- sometimes the size uh like cameroonians I find that they make it very small compared to us.”21 Subsequence 2.3—Assessment of the Perceptible  See Figure 15.3i. Following Raphaël’s intercultural account, Betty explicitly self-initiates an assessment sequence whose design follows Raphaël’s focus (“what size is this/”) (Figure 15.3j). However, the latter does not engage in an immediate assessment but furthers his intercultural explanation regarding the art and traditions of mikate-making. Thus, Betty offers with pride a self-initiated assessment, “that is the CONGOLESE size,” accompanied by a smile and an obvious display of the mikate close to her face (Figure 15.3k).

Figure 15.3i  Assessment of the perceptible.

Figure 15.3j  Betty asking for an assessment (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

21

  Raphäel here compares the cultural background and practice of the recipe blog author (Cameroonian) to his own (Congolese).

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Figure 15.3k  Betty offers a self-initiated assessment (FaceTime call). (Betty on the left and right, Raphaël at the center).

Nonetheless, Raphaël still does not proceed with the assessment but rather continues with the intercultural teaching sequence. They then proceed with a long conversation about the recipe and the techniques and slide progressively to a different topic. Betty’s percepaction sequence unfolds as follows: An initiation (other-initiated by Raphael and explicitly verbalized “you need to show that NOW”). A technobodily staging (first a playfully delay then a displacement of the object towards the phone ‑camera without switching the camera feed but with a movement back and forth creating a playful zoom-in zoom-out). An audit (other-initiated by Raphael requesting Betty to display the mikate differently in order to better asses its size). An assessment of the element is requested by Betty asking “what size is this/” but is not explicitly answered by Raphael who engages in an intercultural explanation. A closing (implicitly other-initiated, transitioning to a related topic; Raphael elaborates on the diverse traditions of mikate-making). A restaging (Betty turns her phone back towards her face). This sequence (Figure 15.3l) shows us that keeping an object invisible while making it verbally the focus of the conversation may also be a way for call participants to cheerfully entertain each other and develop positive affect despite the physical distance and the pandemic context. Furthermore, Betty’s technobodily literacy allows her to play with the media affordances and to purposely limit her interlocutor’s sensory access. She also uses a creative artifacted gesture (manual zoo-in zoom-out) to semiotically enrich the showing. However, a frame shift may be operated at the staging phase in order to offer an expert assessment. This shift involves an other-initiated guiding in the restaging where the interlocutor assumes the role of co-percepactor insofar has he fully takes part in the percepaction choosing the appropriate technobodily ethnomethods for the projected assessment (requesting her to bodily present the object in a particular way).

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Figure 15.3l  Sequentiality of Betty’s percepaction sequence.

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294  samira ibnelkaïd

Conclusions Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach—visual ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, phenomenology—this chapter has focused on the multimodally coordinated nature of video interactions. Video calls have been shown to be intersubjective, collaborative, and sequentially organized activities emerging from co-enacted hybrid Umwelten (Uexküll 2010). These intersubjective sensory environments do not exist ex nihilo but are rather technically, verbally, and bodily built and shaped moment-to-moment by call participants. Furthermore, as much as digital technologies seem to constitute a panacea, they still form imperfect tools that require experience and skills from their users. Video call participants make use of technobodily ethnomethods i.e., embodied artifacted and intersubjective procedures interactants use to produce and recognize a common hybrid world. Through these technobodily ethnomethods, individuals co-create a hybrid space propitious for sharing their daily experiences and affects, and for crossing physical boundaries (long-distance relationships, restrictions due to a pandemic, etc.). In video interactions, percepaction sequences emerge within which perception and action are intertwined so that participants can see and be seen, perceive and be perceived, look and show. Sensory access is performed collaboratively: each participant, or co-percepactor, guides the other in their perception of each other, their surroundings and their experience. Percepaction sequences allow individuals to share intimacy, foster their social relationships, and prevent social exclusion. Any shift in the interactional frame (Goffman 1974) during percepaction sequences may be operated deliberately, indicating the participant’s intention and expectation (playful sequence, intercultural teaching, assessment seeking, etc.). However, frame shifting may also reveal a lack of skills on the main percepactor’s part that will hinder their intent at intimacy-sharing (failure at embedding the percepaction sequence in the ongoing talk in interaction or at monitoring the interlocutors’ sensory access). Playing with the framing—both interactional and video—is achievable only if video call participants develop the necessary skills. Indeed, individuals need to grasp the affordances of the digital device and platform in order to technobodily frame, shape and design communicative actions in accordance with specific digital tools and the interactants’ intentions and expectations. Moreover, harmonious video interactions require individuals be aware of the asymmetry of the onscreen sensory access to subjects and objects and to build a mental representation of the network of scattered sensory organs, both biological and artifacted (eyes and cameras, ears and speakers, own screen display, other’s screen display, etc.). Through these skills and experience, individuals foster a technobodily literacy understood here as a multimodal, multisensorial, and multisemiotic competence. Coming to grips with the various socio-historically contingent semiotic resources (the printing press, the telephone, the Internet, video call platforms and apps, etc.) requires individuals to develop a reflexive awareness and adaptation to ever-changing forms of communication (Goodwin 2000). When learning to use digital artifacts, individuals “are not only negotiating new embodied knowledges, but transcending conventional boundaries of human experience” (Keating 2005, p. 530). Individuals are indeed sentient beings who co-construct themselves in embodied situated social interactions by cooperating. They build together a hybrid interworld (Merleau-Ponty 1945), intertwining physical and digital dimensions, by making use of digital tools in their own coordinated and ritualized way, only when necessary and desirable.

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technobodily literacy in video interaction  295

Transcript Convention

/ rising intonation [ beginning of overlapping talk ] end of overlapping talk (inaud.) inaudible utterance (.) silence less than 0.2 seconds (0.0) elapsed time by tenths of seconds & single speaker turn expanding on multiple lines SO talk in louder volume th- cut-off so: lengthened sound = latching—no perceptible pause between two speakers’ turns

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Pekarek Doehler, S. and Balaman, U. (2021). The routinization of grammar as a social action format: A longitudinal study of Video-mediated interactions. Research on Language and Social Interaction 54 (2): 183–202. Pink, S. (2007). Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage Publications. Pool, C.R. (1997). A new digital literacy: A conversation with Paul Gilster. Educational Leadership 55 (3): 6–11. Reddy, P., Sharma, B., and Chaudhary, K. (2020). Digital literacy: a review of literature. International Journal of Technoethics 11: 65–94. Rintel, S. (2013). Video calling in long-distance relationships: the opportunistic use of audio/video distortions as a relational resource. The Electronic Journal of Communication, Special Issue on Videoconferencing in Practice: 21st Century Challenges 23 (1&2): http://www.cios.org/ EJCPUBLIC/023/1/023123.HTML (July 2021). Roquet, C. (2002). La scène amoureuse en danse. Codes, modes et normes de l’intercorporéité dans le duo chorégraphique. Thèse de Doctorat en Danse, Université Paris 8. Ruby, J. (1996). Visual anthropology. In: Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, 4 (ed. D. Levinson and M. Ember), 1345–1351. New York: H. Holt. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing Culture: Exploration of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruhleder, K. and Jordan, B. (2001) Managing complex, distributed environments: remote meeting technologies at the ‘chaotic fringe’. First Monday, 6. http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/ article/view/857/766 [30 March 2017]. Sadala, M.L. and Adorno, R.D. (2002). Phenomenology as a method to investigate the experience lived: a perspective from Husserl and Merleau Ponty’s thought. Journal of advanced nursing 37 (3): 282–293. Schegloff, E.A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press. Spante, M., Sofkova Hashemi, S., Lundin, M., Algers, A., and Wang, S. ((Reviewing editor)) (2018). Digital competence and digital literacy in higher education research: Systematic review of concept use. Cogent Education 5:: 1. Stéphane, V. (2013). L’être et l’écran, comment le numérique change la perception. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Stimler N. and Vial S. (2014). Digital monism: our mode of being at the nexus of life, digital media and art. Theorizing the Web 2014, New York, USA, 26 avril 2014. @nealstimler & @svial #TtW14 #c4. Uexküll, J.V. (2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. With a Theory of Meaning (Translated by J.D. O’Neil), Introduction by Dorion Sagan. Afterward by Geoggrey WintrhopYoung. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Véronique, T. (2012). Analyses de l’interaction et linguistique: état actuel des recherches en français. Langue française 175: 53–73. Vincent, C. (2016). Une approche d’inspiration éthologique pour analyser les interactions pédagogiques visiophoniques synchrones Potolia Anthippi et Jamborova Lemay Diana (coord.). Enseignement/Apprentissage des langues et pratiques numériques émergentes, EAC Press.

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16

Ethics and Language Steven P. Black

Introduction While research on ethics and morality has a long history in anthropology and a much longer one in philosophy, it is only within the past twenty years that anthropologists have turned their full attention to how ethnographic fieldwork in distinct cultural contexts can inform theories on this topic. Earlier perspectives, which can be traced to the work of Ruth Benedict (e.g., 1934), worked against the prevailing views of the time to argue for a limited form of moral relativity—she argued that moralities are specific to cultural and historical contexts and cannot easily be evaluated with respect to one another (Zigon 2008). Still, full consideration of morality was hampered by deterministic understandings of human actions that left little room for the study of how persons engage with and respond to moral codes. In-depth examination of ethics—from here onward I use this term to encompass the study of both ethics and morality—began in the mid-2000s with what has been called the “ethical turn in anthropology” (Fassin 2014). In linguistic anthropology, certain aspects of this topic were explored (in the 1980s and 1990s) in scholarship on language socialization and language ideologies, including analysis of speakers’ attitudes and feelings about how one could or should speak (e.g. Ochs 1996; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). However, it was not until around 2010 that a body of anthropological research oriented toward the intersection of language and ethics emerged (Fleming and Lempert 2011; Keane 2016; Lambek 2010). In this chapter, I discuss the central role that language plays in the reproduction and transformation of ethics, as well as how a focus on ethics can enrich the anthropological study of language. Here, ethics and morality are identified as operating within types of discourse that prototypically appear in the conditional mood, which in English includes modal auxiliaries such as can, could, would, should, may, might, and ought (Quirk et al. 1985, pp. 219–221), and provide valuation of what one could, should, must, or might do. What people come to describe as ethics usually first appears as social actions in the realm of everyday encounters; then, these actions are sometimes disambiguated through reflection and commentary.1 I begin with an overview of the role of reflection and reflexive language 1

  For more on this topic, see Fader 2006; Garcia 2014; Sterponi 2003; Zigon 2009.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

in ethics. I link this discussion to the theories of affordances and heteroglossia, focusing on how language—in particular the constant process of conventionalization of linguistic patterns—provides particular possibilities and constraints (in other words, affordances) that are ethico-moral in nature (see below on this double formulation). Next, I draw on two ethnographic examples about HIV/AIDS disclosure and activism in South Africa, using the concept of transposition to further examine the role of language in the constitution of ethics. Finally, I discuss recent work and emerging topics in the study of ethics and language, describing what an ethics-centered approach can contribute to the study of (1) language and communicable diseases (especially in the wake of COVID-19); (2) the use of communicative technologies in ethnographic research; and (3) online communication through apps/ platforms. I conclude with a brief consideration of scholarship on language and social justice, arguing that research on ethics and research on justice should be placed in dialogue with one another.

Ethics and Reflexivity

Many anthropologists who study ethics draw from the writings of Foucault (e.g., 1986, 1993) to argue for a distinction between “morality” and “ethics.” In that tradition, morality refers to taken-for-granted prescriptions and principles that are embedded in institutional routines and embodied dispositions; ethics, on the other hand, refers to the processes through which persons reflect and comment on the received, embodied, habitual wisdom of morality (see Robbins 2009, p. 278; Zigon 2009, p. 261). This scholarly dichotomy between reenactment of precepts (morality) versus reflection upon them (ethics) has been useful for certain purposes, but it can be difficult to distinguish between these in the analysis of actual human social life (Lambek 2015, p. 5 fn 8). This has led some to argue for the use of the combined adjective ethico-moral, a naming practice that I employ in this chapter in order to indicate a continuum that ranges from non-reflexive habitual moral action to ethical commentary that is clearly reflexive (cf. Zigon and Throop 2014, p. 12 fn1). The scholarship reviewed in this section suggests that ethics is reproduced and transformed in everyday encounters and moments of linguistic reflection as people implicitly draw from and sometimes confront understandings of what is possible and what is controllable in human action. This anthropological scholarship draws from but also critiques the philosophy of ethics. Philosophical approaches include virtue ethics (with a focus on one’s moral character), deontology (with a focus on duties or rules), and consequentialism (with a focus on the consequences of actions) (Robbins 2007b).2 These three philosophical approaches differ in their rationalization of why people act ethically: because one has cultivated a deeply habituated sense of right and wrong (virtue ethics), because one has an obligation to other relevant social entities to act in certain ways (deontology), or because one’s actions will lead to outcomes that are defined as good or bad (consequentialism). Still, the three approaches share an attention to culturally specific notions of what one ought to do. This focus on “ought” is too narrow to accommodate cross-cultural analysis of ethics; instead, anthropological approaches focus on “the acting individual’s process of moral 2

  I say “eurocentric” because there are many other cultural traditions of ethical reflection that are often ignored in scholarly discussions of ethics, as well as numerous non-European scholarly traditions (e.g. Vedic, Confucian). Nonetheless, I start with these three core eurocentric approaches because they are the ones that most researchers draw from, explicitly or implicitly, in their work.

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reasoning during which choices are made between alternative possible actions” (Zigon 2008, p. 7; see also Howell 1997, pp. 14–16). Such research is rooted in the analysis of how different cultural and linguistic traditions conceptualize possibility, intentionality, and agency. That is, this work examines (a) what one could do, and by implication, what one did or did not do; (b) whether or not (and subsequently how?) an intention can be ascribed to an actor; and (c) and thus whether or not that actor can be held responsible for what one should do (Duranti 2004, 2015). Grammatically, this may be represented by conditionals.3 People draw upon culturally specific ideas about the degree of control one has or could have over one’s (linguistic) actions when reflecting on those actions, and the ethico-moral import of one’s actions may change depending on the posited amount of control or intention one is thought to have (Duranti 2015; Keane 2014). Here, there is an overlap but also a distinction between reflection in the sense of thinking about what one has said or done (or should say or do) and reflexive language in the sense of talking about what one has said or done (or should say or do) (Lucy 1993). While the capacity of language to report, characterize, and comment on itself is a function of all languages, the genres in which and degree to which people actually engage in linguistic reflexivity are culturally organized and variable (Schieffelin 2007, pp. 141–142). Since language is social action, linguistic reflexivity is a type of reflection on one’s linguistic actions. When explicit ethical reflection does become available for analysis, this is usually because it occurs discursively. There are also many social activities and speech genres within which communicative social actions yield intermediate, not-fully-coherent moments of linguistic reflexivity and reflective experience (Throop 2003, p. 135). These moments of partial reflectivity occur especially during verbal performances, whether in formally delineated activities on stage or in moments that emerge in everyday life, in genres of joking, storytelling, singing, et cetera (Berger and Del Negro 2002; Black 2019; Fox 2004).

Ethical Affordances and Heteroglossia

In addition to reflexivity, another concept of particular importance for the study of ethics is ethical affordance (Keane 2014, 2016). The theory of affordances, as developed by James Gibson (1986 [1979]) in the field of psychology, describes an environment or object in terms of how it facilitates particular types of actions and relationships for an animal (or person). Originally introduced to talk about the relation between the animal and its environment, anthropologists have extended the concept of affordance to reflect on relationships between humans and objects, including artifacts and tools, as well as how social and communicative conventions provide possibilities and constraints for people (Ingold 1992). Theorizing an object’s affordances means recognizing that that object has particular physical properties and, especially in the case of artifacts and tools, intended uses; but it also means understanding that the physical properties of an object might lend themselves to a range of non-intended uses and engagements while limiting or prohibiting others. For instance, a T-shirt is made to cover a human’s torso and

3

 In other scholarship on morality/ethics, “mood” has been used in its phenomenological sense, where it is defined as “halfway between moments of explicit ethical reflection and habitual embodied forms of morality” (Throop 2014, p. 65). In this chapter, I use mood in the grammatical sense of verbal mood, which is distinct from its phenomenological sense. To avoid confusion, I simply refer to this verbal mood as the conditional.

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shoulders, but its physical properties also afford its usage by a human as a rag, a way to tie two objects together, or a space for writing messages and advertisements. Broadening this idea from human-object relations to human-human ones, the social dynamics of conversation and even grammar itself provide numerous ethical affordances for human encounters (Keane 2014). Second and third person pronouns and verbal forms facilitate consideration of socially relevant categories of Others (Rumsey 2010); the sequential organization of conversation offers opportunities to evaluate and comment upon previous conversational moves (Sidnell 2010); and pauses/silences in conversation make space for the reconsideration of one’s stance or stated position (Duranti 2009). Notably, many of these and other ethical affordances of communication involve linguistic reflexivity. Less discussed but also significant are the ethical affordances of particular communicative technologies (Black 2017; Hutchby 2001, 2014; discussed here in the section on Implications for Future Research). The communicative possibilities and limitations of particular technologies, platforms, and apps have become apparent with the rise of video conferencing (Zooming) (see Chapter 15, Ibnelkaïd). Many of the ways that these technological affordances shape interpersonal encounters are still being explored (eg. De Fina and Gore 2017; Ferguson 2021; Morganstern 2020). The concept of heteroglossia also has broad significance for scholarship on ethics. Heteroglossia (from Greek “hetero” other/different, “glossia” tongue/ language) is the English rendition of a term introduced by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) to describes the presence of multiple “voices” in a single unit of text (see also Ivanov 2001). Bakhtin argues that the novel, as a literary form, encapsulates the voices of multiple characters and thus contains (or encompasses) multiple layers of authorship, including narrator and author (who may or may not be framed as being the same voice). Extrapolating further, Bakhtin (1981, 1986) suggests that heteroglossia is present in all human language, whether spoken or written, in the sense that all words and phrases are repetitions and transformations of past utterances. Linguistic anthropologists apply this theoretical standpoint to the analysis of reported speech, codeswitching, and discourse genres, among other topics (eg. Hanks 1987; Hill 1995; Woolard 1998). Heteroglossia models how language is inherently and thoroughly social and cannot be reduced to the individual bounded speaker. Webb Keane (2011) explores what could be termed the ethical affordances of heteroglossia in an article in which he re-analyzes Jane Hill’s (1995) canonical book chapter titled, “The Voices of Don Gabriel.” In her chapter, Hill writes that her work “explores the practices by which a speaker of modern Mexicano claims a moral position among conflicting ways of speaking, weighted with contradictory ideologies, by distributing these across a complex of ‘voices’ through which he constructs a narrative about the murder of his son” (Hill 1995, p. 98). Don Gabriel—the speaker featured in Hill’s chapter—masterfully draws from multiple languages, registers, and semiotic resources (e.g. prosody, intonation, stress) to perform “voices” that both invoke dominant moral frameworks and simultaneously critique them. In his reinterpretation, Keane (2011) emphasizes that Don Gabriel is not only engaging in heteroglossic performance but also discovering something about himself in the process. Here, heteroglossia affords linguistic reflexivity, which is tied to self-reflection. Keane describes a simultaneous experiencing of communication while communicating experience (Ochs 2012), discussing the culturally-specific ethico-moral frameworks that are reproduced and transformed through Don Gabriel’s performance. Similar attention to the communication–experience nexus also guides other recent research on ethics and language (e.g. Black 2018; Lambek 2015; Shohet 2013).

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Multilingualism and Ethico-Moral Frameworks: The Case of Transposition Though multilingual contexts are statistically more common than monolingual contexts worldwide, few scholars have examined the significance of multilingualism for the study of ethics. While contemporary cultural anthropology discusses what happens when multiple ethico-moral “spheres” or frameworks come into contact with one another (Robbins 2007a; Zigon 2010), these discussions do not examine how the distinct properties of language or multilingualism impact such situations of ethico-moral contact. Similarly, while some linguistic anthropology does link multilingualism to ethics, especially in the guise of language socialization and language ideologies (eg. Dick 2017; Schieffelin 2007), this work tends to employ ethics and morality as unmarked terms without defining or theorizing them. In this section I use the concept of transposition to bring these two approaches into conversation with one another. The relationship between ethics and language is especially clear when multiple codes are involved which are clearly ideologically demarcated as distinct languages.4 While similar dynamics may also be involved in monolingual and multi-dialectal contexts, the distinctiveness of ideologically differentiated languages allows for a sharper analysis of the linguistic aspects of ethico-moral processes. In the section on “Disclosure on a T-Shirt: Materializing Rights and Responsibilities” below, I discuss South African discourses about HIV disclosure among AIDS activists in the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000–2010), examining the interplay between languages (isiZulu and English) and ethico-moral frameworks (duties/respect and rights/responsibilities). Activists transposed a framework of rights/responsibilities from scientific medical contexts into other contexts associated with Zulu tradition. Discussed in more detail below, transposition is here understood as a special type of heteroglossia in which a clearly defined cultural framework is shifted from one communicative context into a distinct communicative context (Eisenlohr 2017; Haviland 1996). While transposition may involve translation (i.e., a shift of equated terms from one language to another), it may also occur within a single language variety or may involve borrowing terms and concepts from one language while speaking another. The concept of transposition is useful for theorizing how linguistic reflexivity and communicative experience contribute to the reproduction and transformation of ethico-moral frameworks.

Disclosure on a T-Shirt: Materializing Rights and Responsibilities

In South Africa in the early 2000s, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) was a key group involved in HIV/AIDS activism in the country. A grassroots organization established in 1998 in Cape Town, South Africa, the TAC’s initial focus on demanding medical treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS quickly morphed into a legal confrontation with pharmaceutical companies from high-income nations about drug patents. Newly created anti-retroviral medications (ARVs) were being sold to South Africans at a price that was prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest residents, and the TAC argued that pharmaceutical companies had an obligation to allow low- and middle-income countries’ pharmaceutical industries to create generic versions of the life-saving drugs (Robins and von Lieres 2004). 4

 Scholars who study codeswitching, codemixing, and multilingualism use the terms “code” and “language variety” rather than “language” to indicate that the same linguistic and language ideological processes may occur whether a speaker is moving between languages, dialects, registers, or speech styles (Woolard 2004, p. 74).

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In South Africa at that time, HIV/AIDS was highly stigmatized, a social and psychological condition that was constituted in part through avoidance of talk about the virus (Niehaus 2007; Simbayi et al. 2007; Squire 2007). To counter this linguistic avoidance, the TAC pushed its members to vocally and visibly share their HIV positive statuses. This push toward HIV disclosure was central to the TAC socializing its new members into an individual rights and responsibilities-focused ethico-moral discourse. The organization emphasized the right to dignity and the right to HIV treatment, and it did so through a process that pushed group members to embody an individual responsibility to disclose their HIV positive status widely and publicly (Robins 2006, 2008). TAC T-shirts were sold and circulated that had the words “HIV positive” written in large, visible letters across the chest of the shirts (Figure 16.1). These shirts provided for public displays of the ethico-moral discourse of rights and responsibilities. As Steven Robins (2006) explains, “Whereas public health practitioners report that most of their HIV/AIDS patients wish to retain anonymity and invisibility, TAC successfully advocates the transformation of the stigma of HIV/AIDS into a ‘badge of pride’ that is publicly displayed on T-shirts at township funerals, demonstrations, workshops, and other public spaces” (p. 314). This was a highly visible materialization of discourse (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012). Interactions with texts allow for different types of stances to be enacted and materialized (Murphy 2017, p. 66). While the labeling of one’s HIV status on a T-shirt was available for all to see, the public display also meant that people living with HIV could disclose without needing to speak about the virus. This may have helped some to navigate the difficulties of enacting a rights/responsibilities framework amid pervasive stigma. The heteroglossic materialization (the words HIV positive on the T-shirt) afforded a distinct engagement with the ethico-moral framework of rights and responsibilities—in that it provided the ability for people living with HIV to disclose widely without speaking. Still, in some cases the T-shirts may have encouraged people to talk about the shirt’s message, thus also affording linguistic reflexivity and reflection. The T-shirts’ English-language declaration was not directly tied to use of English in discussions about HIV, whether speakers wore the T-shirt or not. During ethnographic

Figure 16.1  International AIDS Conference, 18–22 July 2016. Source: Picture taken by GovernmentZA. GCIS/Government of South Africa.

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fieldwork I conducted in Durban, South Africa in 2008, I observed HIV activists wearing similar T-shirts while going about their everyday lives in the city and nearby townships while speaking primarily in isiZulu. There did not seem to be any particular correlation between this attire and social activities focused on HIV support or activism, though there were activities where it might be thought of as inappropriate attire—for instance, in rural areas, which were generally thought of as more conservative than urban areas. Indeed, conservative Zulu outlooks were linked to a distinct ethico-moral framework: a Zulu framework of social duties and respect to one’s family and elders (see below in section on “Transposition and Codemixing”). Still, in many contexts, the T-shirt was itself a declaration of one’s participation in social activities of HIV activism and to wear it was an enactment of the discourse of rights and responsibilities.

Transposition and Codemixing

By wearing the shirt we can say that activists transposed the ethico-moral framework of rights and responsibilities into distinct social and cultural contexts where it might take on new valences and meanings. The concept of transposition is here drawn from a variety of sources. One is Roman Jakobson’s (1959) description of the creative aspects of translation, especially the translation of poetry and verbal art. Jakobson argues that word-for-word translation of poetry is impossible and only creative transposition can result in a faithful transfer of the meaning of a phrase from one language to another (ibid, p. 238). More recent scholarship argues (1) that all translation necessarily involves the recontextualization and transformation of meaning; and (2) that the notion of translation can be applied to a wide range of communicative practices beyond the shifting of meaning from one recognized language to another (Gal 2015; Silverstein 2003). In other contemporary writings, transposition has been defined as “the creative insertion of a text into a new context in a way indicating the former’s origin in another spatial and temporal setting” (Eisenlohr 2017, p. 149; see also Shoaps 1999). Here, transposition may occur within a single language variety and is more akin to heteroglossia. Other definitions emphasize the cognitive aspects of bringing other voices and perspectives into one’s speech (Haviland 1996; see also Levinson et al. 2002). In this way, transposition may be synthesized with research on cultural models, especially in the study of health and illness, that describes how persons draw from established, often well-defined cultural models (a.k.a. frameworks) to construct their own explanations of illness.5 In this chapter, “transposition” is reserved for those shifts that bring a clearly defined cultural framework into a distinct social context. My ethnographic fieldwork in Durban, South Africa documented the activities of a Zulu gospel choir that was an HIV support group and AIDS activist organization. Members of this choir were living with a chronic illness at the margins of global health organizations and interventions amid fears of stigma. Group members and their acquaintances also living with HIV engaged with the two dominant South African ethico-moral frameworks about HIV disclosure mentioned above: (1) a framework that aligned with ideologies of Zulu tradition,

5

  See Buchbinder 2015; Farmer 1994; Garro 2002; Quinn and Holland 1987. In some ways, this is similar to the now-common linguistic anthropological concept of transduction (Silverstein 2003). However, transduction already had a long-standing meaning in the study of sound—as the conversion of sonic variation into an electrical signal, or vice versa (Helmreich 2015). Furthermore, transduction is sometimes used in a way that is so broad that it has become less useful as a theoretical tool—a piece of jargon that primarily indexes oneself as a proponent of a particular theoretical paradigm.

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focused on respect for one’s elders and duties to family, which, for the most part, precluded disclosure (Finlayson 2002; Rudwick 2008; Van Hollen 2018); and (2) a framework that aligned with global health perspectives from high-income regions (e.g., the US, Europe) and emphasized an individual responsibility to disclose widely as part of educating the public about and destigmatizing the virus (Seidel 1993). Group members regularly used English terminology to talk about HIV/AIDS and to invoke disclosure even in the midst of isiZulu conversations. Excerpt 1 (Figure 16.2) provides an example of this discursive pattern.6 The excerpt is taken from an interview conducted by a research assistant named Amahle.7 Amahle was a member of the choir and a vocal AIDS activist who had disclosed her HIV positive status to many family members, friends, and neighbors and was a pillar of support in her community. That community— Umlazi township near Durban—had once been segregated by law as a Black (primarily Zulu) neighborhood. In 2008 the neighborhood was still almost entirely comprised of Black isiZulu-speaking residents from low- and middle-income households. Amahle invited three neighbors (Black isiZulu-speakers), named Nombuso, Thabile, and Zandile, to her Participants: A = Amahle, N = Nombuso, T = Thabile, Z = Zandile English terminology indicated in bold 01 A: okay. so ipartner yakho iyazi nge HIV status sakho? okay, so your partner knows about your HIV status? 02 Z: yebo iyazi yes he knows 03 A: yaze emva kwesikhathi esingakanani so wena wazile? so, how long after you knew did he find out? 04 Z: ngathi ngibuya nje. nama result ngabe ngiqonda kuyona ((laughing)). Ngabe when I had just returned with the results I was compelled to go straight to him ((laughing)). I was compelled 05 ngiyinika wase eyasho ukuthi futhi ukuthi bese ngivele sengibona nje indlela to give it to him, he was saying, ‘moreover that, I already merely just was seeing the way 06 ebesesikuhlupha ngayo lesisu that you already were worried by this diarrhea’ 07 ((others laugh)) 08 A: kwakuwubupepepe nje it was just the runs 09 ((more laughter)) 10 Z: kwakuwubupepepe nje kwakuyikuthi bese ngivele sengibona kodwa vele nje well it was just the runs. ‘it was because I already merely saw but merely just well 11 anginankinga ke I don’t have a problem then’ 12 A: uh huh 13 Z: naye wase eyahamba wayotsheka ke And then he went for a check-up Figure 16.2  Excerpt 1—Interview 09-11-2008, 02 min 52 sec. 6

  This example is also analyzed in Black 2013, 2019.   All names of research participants are pseudonyms, in accordance with IRB guidelines and in agreement with the wishes of research participants.

7

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home for an audio-recorded interview. I was also present (a white American English speaker with some isiZulu competency) in the living room while Amahle conducted the interview. In the exchange represented in this excerpt, Amahle begins with codemixing (line 01), incorporating the terms “partner” (as in romantic partner) and “HIV status” into her isiZulu question. IsiZulu/English codemixing was common among township residents (de Kadt 2005; Slabbert and Finlayson 2002), so it is not surprising that English words appear in this conversation. What is notable, though, is that other than the discourse markers “so” and “well,” only English words linked to global health discourses about HIV/AIDS appear in the excerpt. Following Amahle’s lead, Zandile uses “result” (line 04) and the verb “to check” (as in check-up) (line 13). This can be described as heteroglossia, in which “voices” of global health are brought into the conversation. Amahle asks a question about when Zandile’s partner found out (line 03), pointing toward but not explicitly invoking global health understandings of disclosure. In response, Zandile explains that as soon as she got the result of her HIV test, she was compelled (ngabe) to go straight to her partner (line 04). Ngabe is an isiZulu conjunction often translated as ‘ought’ or ‘should’ (Dent and Nyembezi 1995). Zandile’s repeated use of ngabe indicates that she felt a moral obligation to share her HIV positive status with her romantic partner. She then voices her partner’s response with a humorous and critical tone (lines 05–06) (this is also heteroglossia). Zandile uses two discourse markers (bese ‘moreover’ and nje ‘just’) and the adverb vele ‘merely’ to indicate the ways that her partner was minimizing the significance of her illness (line 05). She reinforces this minimization when she voices her partner trying to reframe HIV with reference to diarrhea, which is a symptom of some of the opportunistic infections that often impact people near the outset of HIV infection (line 06). Amahle reinforces the joke with an onomatopoetic term for diarrhea (pepepe) (line 08), which leads to more laughter among the women. In the larger cultural contexts in which the epidemic was often framed as gendered and women were sometimes inaccurately blamed for the spread of the virus (Susser 2009), this humor can be interpreted as an enactment of women’s support and solidarity and a counter-blaming of men who they viewed as avoiding responsibility. Zandile repeats her voicing of her partner’s response, adding that he claimed, “I don’t have a problem, then” (line 11). Amahle’s incredulous, “uh huh” is followed by the somewhat morbid closing of the joke, “and then he went for a check-up.” Zandile left unsaid the fact that her partner then found out that he was also HIV positive. While almost the entirety of excerpt 1 is in isiZulu, the key idea—the responsibility to disclose to one’s partner—will be recognizable to audiences who are familiar with public and global health discourses. Amahle and Zandile invoke a scientific medical cultural framework for HIV while enacting the associated ethico-moral framework that emphasizes the responsibility to disclose. Using English terminology, they transpose these cultural frameworks into the context of their interview in isiZulu in a Zulu township. In this context, this ethicomoral framework becomes oppositional to the gendered and racialized stigmatization that the two women have experienced (often but not exclusively in the township in isiZulu conversations and Zulu contexts). We can then say that this codemixing utilizing English terminology was a transposition of the ethico-moral framework of rights and responsibilities.

A Complex Relationship between Language Varieties and Ethico-Moral Frameworks

In excerpt 1, codemixing with English terms and phrases yields a reflexive commentary about disclosure and about the discursive practices of Zandile’s romantic partner. Zandile’s

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discussion of feeling compelled to share her HIV test results provides an explicit conversation about the implications of an HIV positive diagnosis. Other aspects of ethico-moral positioning and evaluation remain implicit, including Amahle and Zandile’s use of English terminology, their shared laughter, and Zandile’s embodied performance of her partner’s voice. The transposition of the ethico-moral framework of rights and responsibilities is accomplished here not only through the heteroglossia of English language codemixing about check-ups, results, partners, and HIV status, but also through the subtle and embodied valences of the isiZulu conversation. This demonstrates the twofold complexity of ethics in many multilingual settings. First, as previous research attests, more than one ethico-moral framework may be associated with a particular cultural setting and social activity; and participants may think about, draw from, habitually enact, and comment upon these multiple frameworks (Robbins 2004; Zigon 2009). Second, each of these ethicomoral frameworks may be ideologically linked with a particular code or language variety. But there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between language and ethicomoral framework. Close analyses of both codemixing and the pragmatics and metapragmatics of language use during social encounters is needed to evaluate the degree to which participants may be reproducing or transforming ethico-moral frameworks in real-time through one or more language varieties. The example provided by Figure 16.1 (the “HIV Positive” T-shirts) demonstrates an additional level of complexity, namely, the fact that distinct ethico-moral frameworks may be enacted through multiple modalities and materialities with different ethical affordances. The ability to transpose the framework of rights and responsibilities using the material form of the t-shirt may sometimes be limited by cultural understandings of places and built environments. There is no limit to the ways that particular materialities, places, and modalities may become conventionally associated with ethico-moral frameworks; and thus, ethicomoral frameworks may become materialized in objects as well in places (see Agha 2011; Feld and Basso 1996). Though the examples discussed here are of particular significance to the study of multilingualism, ethico-moral frameworks may become associated with dialects, registers, or other ways of speaking that are conceptualized as being within one language. Though multilingual examples provide extra clarity due to the overt ideological work that is necessary to keep language varieties separate, in either case the ethico-lingual processes are much the same.

Implications for Future Research While there is room for a wide array of future research projects on multilingualism and ethics, there are also a number of other new and emerging topics that deserve further exploration. Two important ones are (1) language and health, with a focus on communicable diseases; and (2) communication through Internet platforms and applications. Current explorations of these two topics have implications for both engaged anthropology and ethnographic research methods involving communicative technologies. After a brief discussion of each, this chapter ends with a statement about how the relationship between research on ethics and scholarship on equity might change in the future. The discussion of ethics and language with respect to the case of HIV/AIDS in South Africa points toward an important concept in research on language and health, namely that language and health are co-constituted (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2016). The above examples of wearing “HIV positive” T-shirts and discussing HIV disclosure demonstrate

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that such communicative actions shape others’ actions in interpersonal encounters, as well as institutional moves and government policies; and they do so in ways that, in aggregate, may then impact infection rates and patterns and thus change the trajectory of epidemics. For instance, from 2000 to 2010, vocal advocacy for ARVs led more South Africans to have access to this medication, which in turn led to lower viral loads in bodies and less transmission of the virus to others. Transposition of the ethico-moral discourse of rights and responsibilities into Zulu cultural contexts led more people to discuss preventative measures (such as wearing condoms during sex); and more people became aware that not all those living with HIV looked skinny or sick and that healthy-looking people could also be HIV positive, an awareness that changed their risk behaviors in sexual encounters. However, the ability to enact such changes is also greatly shaped by larger political forces, global patterns of economic and discursive circulation, and communicative/health inequities (Briggs 2017). In South Africa, activist efforts from 2000 to 2010 and onward were supported by a dramatic increase in global health spending and the expansion of global health programs (IHME 2019). Many of these were initiated by governments and nonprofit organizations from high-income countries (especially the United States) and focused on HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. Recent examples provided by COVID-19—for instance, politicizing of mask wearing and social distancing, structural inequities in vaccine access, stigmatizing/ xenophobic language (see Black 2021 for an overview)—indicate that communicative efforts to build ethico-moral frameworks to combat an epidemic can be seriously hampered by lack of institutional or governmental support. There is much space within and around the emerging scholarly focus on language and health (Briggs and Faudree 2016) to consider more about how ethico-lingual processes are linked to the constitution of health and the temporal unfolding of epidemics. A second new body of literature examines the ethico-moral affordances of communicative technologies and discusses their impact on subjectivities, focusing especially on Internet platforms and apps. Moving beyond the notion that computers, cell phones, and other communicative technologies simply mediate encounters, earlier scholarship on this topic argued that computers should be understood as prosthetic tools that augment and constrain human communicative capabilities in distinct ways (Keating 2005). Other work explored how different technologies have unique communicative affordances (Hutchby 2014; Hutchby and O’Reilly 2012). One topic to which these theorizations of technological affordances can be applied is the use of recording technologies during ethnographic fieldwork (Black and Riner 2022). Research participants have existing cultural conventions for the use of smartphones and other recorders, and their understandings of communicative technologies may be distinct from those of researchers. This means that researchers should be aware that the mere presence of a recorder may produce particular ethico-moral stances and actions. For instance, in the context of HIV disclosure in South Africa, using a recording device during research activities drew attention to participants in ways that could have threatened their anonymity, such that my careful consideration of when to record displayed to others my understanding of the distinct communicative dynamics of stigmatization. Recording technologies extend a researcher’s ability to see and listen, opening a space for new and sometimes unintended audiences, and research participants recognize and respond to these affordances (Black 2017). On the matter of cultural conventions and understandings of communicative technologies, new and forthcoming research uses state-of-the-art fieldwork methods designed to include screen capture and video of participants’ interactions with apps in real time. For instance, users of the Tumblr app communicate on and through the platform, but they also

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say that they are communicating with Tumblr as an interlocutor. This indicates that people may be increasingly treating particular Internet-based apps as having their own distinct subjectivities (Morganstern 2020). In-depth examination of the ethical affordances of particular platforms (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Parler) promises to yield fascinating insights into the current sociocultural moment. However, innovative methods (such as those employed by Michelle Morganstern in her study of Tumblr) that go beyond simply documenting the content produced on these apps will be needed to uncover these insights. As more of people’s real-life decisions are shaped by their online encounters (e.g., whether or not to wear a mask, get a vaccine, or participate in protest marches), the development of novel theoretical standpoints on ethics, language, and technology are potentially wide-reaching and could be significant for engaging public discourses, policy decisions, and political movements. Before concluding, it would be remiss of me to not mention a difficult ethical issue associated with the body of scholarship reviewed in this chapter, namely, its lack of engagement with research on social justice, equity, and the ethics of fieldwork. Over the past ten years, a wealth of research in both cultural and linguistic anthropology has explored the difficult ethico-moral implications and power dynamics of engagement with marginalized communities in and around ethnographic fieldwork.8 It is true that little of this literature draws from work on ethics or frames itself as being about ethics. But since equity and justice are fundamentally about fairness and responsibility, their theoretical discussions provide places of overlap with and spaces to diversify the voices included in scholarship on ethics, in the sense that equity and justice are fundamentally about fairness and responsibility. Efforts are underway to facilitate conversations between the two literatures (including a panel at the 2021 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting), and this is a promising area for new and forthcoming research.

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Foucault, M. (1993). On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress. In: The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (eds. P. Rabinow and N. Rose), 102–125. New York: The New Press. Fox, A.A. (2004). Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Gal, S. (2015). Politics of translation. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 225–240. Garcia, A. (2014). The promise: on the morality of the marginal and the illicit. Ethos 42 (1): 51–64. García, O. (2009). Education, multilingualism and translanguaging in the 21st century. In: Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local (eds. A. Mohanty, M. Panda, R. Phillipson, and T. Skutnabb-Kangas), 128–145. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Garro, L.C. (2002). Hallowell’s challenge: Explanations of illness and cross-cultural research. Anthropological Theory 2 (1): 77–97. Gibson, J.J. (1986 [1979]). The theory of affordances. In: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127–143. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Hanks, W.F. (1987). Discourse genres in a theory of practice. American Ethnologist 14: 668–692. Haviland, J. (1996). Projections, transpositions, and relativity. In: Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (ed. J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson), 271–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helmreich, S. (2015). Transduction. In: Keywords in Sound (ed. D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny), 222–231. Durham: Duke University Press. Hill, J.H. (1995). The voices of Don Gabriel: responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative. In: The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (ed. D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim), 97–147. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hountondji, P.J. (1983). African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (trans. H. Evans and J. Rée). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Howell, S. (1997). Introduction. In: The Ethnography of Moralities (ed. S. Howell) London: Routledge. Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts, and affordances. Sociology 35 (2): 441–456. Hutchby, I. (2014). Communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 72 (October): 86–89. Hutchby, I. and O’Reilly, M. (2012). Ethics in praxis: Negotiating the presence and functions of a video camera in family therapy. Discourse Studies 14 (6): 675–690. IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) (2019). Financing Global Health Visualization. http://vizhub.healthdata.org/fgh. Ingold, T. (1992). Culture and the perception of the environment. In: Bush Base: Forest Farm: Culture, Environment, and Development (ed. E. Croll and D. Parkin), 39–56. New York: Routledge. Ivanov, V. (2001). Heteroglossia. In: Key Terms in Language and Culture (ed. A. Duranti), 232–239. Malden: Blackwell. Jakobson, R. (1959). Linguistic aspects of translation. In: On Translation (ed. R.A. Brower), 232– 239. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Keane, W. (2011). Indexing voice: A morality tale. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (2): 166–178. Keane, W. (2014). Affordances and reflexivity in ethical life: An ethnographic stance. Anthropological Theory 14 (1): 3–26. Keane, W. (2016). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keating, E. (2005). Homo prostheticus: problematizing the notions of activity and computermediated interaction. Discourse Studies 7 (4–5): 527–545. Lambek, M. (ed.) (2010). Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York: Fordham University Press. Lambek, M. (2015). The ethical condition. In: The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value (ed. M. Lambek), 1–39. Chicago: University of Chicago. Levinson, S.C., Kita, S., Haun, D.B.M., and Rasch, B.H. (2002). Returning the tables: language affects spatial reasoning. Cognition 84 (2): 155–188. Lucy, J. (1993). Reflexive language and the human disciplines. In: Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics (ed. J. Lucy), 9–32. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Morganstern, M. (2020). ‘Tumblr told me…’: the political and methodological significance of conceptualizing social media platforms as living actors. Selected Papers of #AoIR2020: The 21st Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. http://spir.aoir.org. Murphy, K.M. (2017). Fontroversy! Or, how to care about the shape of language. In: Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations (eds. J.R. Cavanaugh and S. Shankar), 63–86. New York: Cambridge University Press. Niehaus, I. (2007). Death before dying: Understanding AIDS stigma in the South African Lowveld. Journal of Southern African Studies 33 (4): 845–860. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In: Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (eds. J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson), 407–437. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. (2012). Experiencing language. Anthropological Theory 12 (2): 142–160. Quinn, N. and Holland, D. (1987). Culture and cognition. In: Cultural Models in Language and Thought (eds. D. Holland and N. Quinn), 3–40. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robbins, J. (2004). Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Essex: Longman Group Limited. Robbins, J. (2007a). Between reproduction and freedom: morality, value, and radical cultural change. Ethnos 72 (2): 293–314. Robbins, J. (2007b). Causality, ethics, and the near future. American Ethnologist 34 (3): 433–436. Robbins, J. (2009). Value, structure, and the range of possibilities: A response to Zigon. Ethnos 74 (2): 277–285. Robins, S. (2006). From ‘rights’ to ‘ritual’: AIDS activism in South Africa. American Anthropologist 108 (2): 312–323. Robins, S. (2008). From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements, NGOs and Popular Politics after Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Robins, S. and von Lieres, B. (2004). Remaking citizenship, unmaking marginalization: The treatment action campaign in post-apartheid South Africa. Canadian Journal of African Studies 38 (3): 575–586. Rudwick, S.I. (2008). Shifting norms of linguistic and cultural respect: Hybrid sociolinguistic Zulu identities. Nordic Journal of African Studies 17 (2): 152–174. Rumsey, A. (2010). Ethics, language, and human sociality. In: Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (ed. M. Lambek), 105–122. New York: Fordham University Press. Schieffelin, B.B. (2007). Found in translating: Reflexive language across time and texts. In: Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Social Transformation in Pacific Societies (eds. M. Makihara and B.B. Schieffelin), 140–165. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seidel, G. (1993). The competing discourses of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa: discourses of rights and empowerment vs. discourses of control and exclusion. Social Science and Medicine 36 (3): 175–194. Shankar, S. and Cavanaugh, J.R. (2012). Language and materiality in global capitalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 355–369. Shoaps, R. (1999). The many voices of Rush Limbaugh: The use of transposition in constructing a rhetoric of common sense. Text 19 (3): 399–437. Shohet, M. (2013). Everyday sacrifice and language socialization in Vietnam: The power of a respect particle. American Anthropologist 115 (2): 203–217. Sidnell, J. (2010). The ordinary ethics of everyday talk. In: Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (ed. M. Lambek), 123–139. New York: Fordham University Press. Silverstein, M. (2003). Translation, transduction, transformation: skating ‘glossando’ on thin semiotic ice. In: Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology (eds. P.G. Rubel and A. Rosman), 75–105. Oxford: Berg. Simbayi, L.C., Kalichman, S., Strebel, A., Cloete, A., Henda, N., and Mqeketo, A. (2007). Internalized stigma, discrimination, and depression among men and women living with HIV/AIDS in Cape Town, South Africa. Social Science & Medicine 64 (9). Slabbert, S. and Finlayson, R. (2002). Code-switching in South African townships. In: Language in South Africa (ed. R. Mesthrie), 235–257. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Squire, C. (2007). HIV in South Africa: Talking about the Big Thing. New York: Routledge. Sterponi, L. (2003). Account episodes in family discourse: the making of morality in everyday interaction. Discourse Studies 5 (1): 79–100. Stoczkowski, W. (2008). The ‘fourth aim’ of anthropology: Between knowledge and ethics. Anthropological Theory 8 (4): 345–356. Susser, I. (2009). AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Throop, C.J. (2003). Articulating experience. Anthropological Theory 3 (2): 219–241. Throop, C.J. (2014). Moral moods. Ethos 42(1): 65–83. Van Hollen, C.C. (2018). Handle with care: rethinking the rights versus culture dichotomy in cancer disclosure in India. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32 (1): 59–84. Woolard, K. (1998). Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in Bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8 (1): 3–29. Woolard, K. (2004). Codeswitching. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (eds. A. Duranti), 73–92. Malden: Blackwell. Woolard, K. and Schieffelin, B.B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 55–82. Zigon, J. (2008). Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berg. Zigon, J. (2009). Within a range of possibilities: Morality and ethics in social life. Ethnos 74 (2): 251–276. Zigon, J. (2010). Moral and ethical assemblages: A response to Fassin and Stoczkowski. Anthropological Theory 10 (3): 3–15. Zigon, J. and Throop, C.J. (2014). Moral experience: introduction. Ethos 42 (1): 1–15.

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Speaking, Sensing, and Sounding

III PART

17

Contested Intentions

Alessandro Duranti

Introduction Within linguistic anthropology, the notion of intention has been a contested ground where philosophical models of meaning as an inner phenomenon available to reflection have been critiqued on the basis of ethnographic and linguistic accounts of how people in different parts of the world talk about their own or others’ inner states or avoid doing it. In this chapter, I start by briefly reviewing the history of the concept of intention (“Intention: A Brief History”), its use in psychology and phenomenology at the beginning of the twentieth century (“Intentional Acts for Brentano and Husserl”), and its adoption by analytic philosophers (“Intentions in Speech Act Theory and Searle’s Theory of Action”). Then, I introduce arguments presented in the 1980s by linguistic anthropologists against the use of intentions in speech act theory (“The Anthropological Critique of Intentions”) and critically engage with a more recent counter-argument in support of intentions as fundamental for meaning-making (“Rethinking the Critique of Intentions”). To illustrate how language complicates the concept of intentional acts, I return to the notion of linguistic relativity in light of the contributions of dialogic and interactional studies of speaking (“Factors Complicating Intentional Acts”). The notion of language as a non-neutral medium proposed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin is applied to the social constraints and obligations that emerge in the give-and-take of conversational interactions. The discussion of these constraints and the habituation that comes with them invites a confrontation with the anti-humanist position most famously embraced by Martin Heidegger, for whom language, as the carrier of historical–cultural meanings, dominates its speakers, threatening the foundations of subjectivity. As a response to any extreme form of linguistic relativity or determinism, I emphasize that in addition to imposing cognitive and behavioral constraints, language also gives us framing devices, reformulations, and narratives about actual or hypothetical scenarios, which open the possibility of alternative ways of being and acting. Habituation and routinization are countered by the improvisational impulse that we are all capable of experiencing in speaking and acting, whereby unplanned, previously unimaginable acts suddenly materialize, exceeding the scope and directions of our alleged intentions. While exposing us to the A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

risk of failure, misunderstandings, and confusion, the reliance on improvisation also grants us access to unexpected creative solutions whereby we, however fleetingly, regain confidence in the positive value of human imagination for human co-existence.

Intention: A Brief History A brief review of the uses of the Latin terms intentio and intendere, from which the English words intention, intent, and intend derived (via Old French), shows that the concept of “intention” as a state of mind was originally only one of its possible original meanings and not the most common one. The use of intentio in the modern sense of intention became dominant over time with the increased interest in the inner life of the individual. The most common meaning of intentio in Latin texts, as listed in Lewis and Short’s (1879) Latin Dictionary, was a physical, embodied ‘stretching out, straining, tension,’ as in the description of the movement of ‘expansion’ (intentio motus) of the heart as opposed to its remissio ‘contraction’ (Aulus Gellius, Actic Nights, 18.10). Other, more specialized, senses of intentio include: (a) ‘charge, accusation,’ (b) the first or major premise of a ‘syllogism’ (in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Book V), and the one closer to the modern everyday use (c) ‘design, purpose, intention,’ found in Panegyricus, 78 by Pliny The Younger (61–ca. 113  ce). The latter meaning coincides with the influence of Stoic philosophy in Rome at that time, as demonstrated for example, in Seneca The Younger’s De tranquillitate animi ‘Of Peace of Mind’ (ca. 60 ce). The semantic reduction of intentio to eventually mean almost exclusively an inner disposition or design (as in bona intentio ‘good intention’), a key criterion in Peter Abelard’s Ethics for determining sinful behavior, coincides with the introduction, in the twelfth century of the practice of private confession, which, according to D.E. Luscombe (1971, p. xxxii) “brought into sharper relief the importance of taking into account the psychology of the individual sinner or penitent.” This semantic change of intentio from an embodied practice to an inner state of mind anticipates more recent cultural changes documented in the anthropological literature about the effects of the introduction of the Christian practice of confession (Robbins 2004, 2008; Rumsey 2008) and the translation of the Bible (Duranti 2015, Chapter 4; Schieffelin 2008a, 2008b).

Intentional Acts for Brentano and Husserl

In modern philosophy, the use of intention as explicitly referring to something internal, existing in the consciousness of the experiencing subject is usually attributed to the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who credited Aristotle and the Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas in particular, for what he called intentional in-existence (to be read as the “in-habiting” of intentions) (Brentano 1874/1973, p. 88n). Brentano use the adjective intentional to characterize psychic (or mental) phenomena from the physical ones. Most importantly, for him, intentionality is a property shared by the most varied experiences from “hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, feeling warmth or cold” to judgment, recollections, expectations, inferences, convictions or opinion, doubts, etc. (Brentano 1973, p. 79). For Brentano, each of these experiences are to be distinguished from external, physical “objects” for the fact that they share the property of having “something as object within itself” (ibid p. 88).1 In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (Brentano 1973, p. 88) 1

  Brentano’s use of the term ‘in-existence’ (German Inexistenz) to capture the fact that the “object” of a mental phenomenon existed “in” the mind created confusion among some interpreters who understood the “in-” as a negation instead of a locative marker (Bartok 2005, p. 384).

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After attending Brentano’s lectures, Husserl (1900–01/1970) adopted (with some modifications) Brentano’s notion of intentionality as ‘consciousness of.’ Across his writings, Husserl can be found also using metaphors that invoke some of the earlier embodied meanings of intentio mentioned above. Thus, he sometimes defined an intentional act as “the directed glance [Blick] of the mind” or a “turning towards [Zuwendung]” something (Husserl 1913/1931, p. 110). In every wakeful cogitation a “glancing” ray from the pure Ego is directed upon the “object” of the correlate of consciousness for the time being, the thing, the fact, and so forth, and enjoys the typically varied consciousness of it. (Husserl 1931, p. 223)

Husserl, like Brentano before him, was using “intentional act” as a general description for any act whereby a Subject’s consciousness in “turning toward,” or attending to some Object,2 whether real or imagined, constitutes it into a particular kind of entity among the many possible ones. For example, the same physical object could be seen as a book, a gift, or a door-stopper—this is what years later Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) will call aspect seeing. The Object, in turn, manifests qualities (e.g., for a book, these would include weight, colors, binding, cover image, font, and size of print) that may give it “a gradation of affection,” that is, a prominence that may “exercise an allure on the ego” (Husserl 2001, p. 197), thereby resulting in “the awakening of an intention toward it” (ibid, p. 198). Borrowing from James Gibson’s (1986) ecological approach, we could rephrase Husserl’s claim by saying that any Object offers particular affordances to particular Subjects. For example, once we assign individual ringtones to specific phone contacts, some of those ringtones acquire an attentional pull (Throop and Duranti 2015) that makes it difficult to resist answering the phone regardless of where we are or what we are doing. This interpretation of the relation between Subject and Object of intentional acts is here schematically illustrated in Figure 17.1.

Figure 17.1  Subject–object relation in intentional acts.

2

 I am following here the philosophical tradition, in English, that capitalizes Subject and Object as a way of indicating that they are particular theoretical constructs, referring, respectively, to a human agent and to an entity that may coincide with a ‘thing’ but could also be another human, a feeling, or an idea.

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contested intentions  319

As we shall see in the next section, this general model of intentional acts was not adopted by speech act theorists, who preferred to use intention (and intentional) to describe a speakers’ will or commitment to perform a particular act in the future or to achieve a particular effect. As we shall see, this specific sense of intention as design, purpose, or will introduced by J.L. Austin for speech acts (e.g., Austin 1962, p. 101) was extended by John Searle to general condition for defining human action.

Intentions in Speech Act Theory and Searle’s Theory of Action

In his 1955 Harvard Lectures on how words (or, rather, utterances) “do things,” Austin (1962) acknowledged the specificity of English intention, intentional, and intend to refer to one particular state of mind among others e.g., to be distinguished from “thoughts” and “feelings” (1962, p. 15n). This suggests that differently from Brentano and Husserl, Austin did not think of intentions as a general property of mental acts. But in a later lecture (contained in the 1962 book), Austin used “intention” as a universal condition for any kind of commitment, as shown by his statement that in acts like promise, vow, swear, agree, etc., that is, commissives (read “commitments”) there is “an assuming of an obligation or declaring of an intention” (ibid, p. 162). Searle also used intention and intend as commonly used in English to define the sincerity conditions of commissives. Thus, he wrote that a person who promises, vows, threatens, or pledges to do action a expresses an intention to do a (Searle 1976, p. 4). Later, in his book Intentionality, Searle started out by acknowledging a distinction between “intentionality” (with a small “i”) represented by the English word intention and the general property of Intentionality (with the capital “I”) as a “feature of directness or aboutness” (Searle 1983, p. 1). But in the rest of the book, the English sense of intending to do (with the small “i”) was raised to the status of a universal condition for a general definition of “agent” and “basic action” (Searle 1983, p. 100). To provide an example of how his definition can be put to work, Searle used the example of Oedipus’ incest, from Sophocles’ famous play Oedipus Tyrannus (more commonly known as Oedipus Rex). For Searle, Oedipus’ “action was intentional under the description ‘marrying Jocasta,’ but it was not intentional under the description ‘marrying his mother’” (1983, p. 101). This analysis is telling in at least two respects. First, Searle failed to acknowledge that both acts would (in his own terms) be “Intentional” (with the capital “I”), with the difference between them having to do with how the “Object” of the marrying is being “constituted” in the act (e.g., as a woman called Jocasta, the Queen, Laius’ wife, Oedipus’ mother), an element of intentionality that was captured by Husserl (1931) in his distinction between noesis, the intentional act and noema, the Object that it is constituted through that act.3 Second, if Searle was in fact meaning “intentional” as he wrote it, that is, with the small “i,” he ignored or forgot that in Sophocles’ play the marriage between Oedipus and Jocasta had tragic consequences for the city of Thebes and for Oedipus himself because the act was incestuous in the eyes of the gods, regardless of what Oedipus “intended” (with the small “i”). As we shall see, a similar disregard for individual intentions in assigning responsibility to a person’s actions was documented by linguistic anthropologists who worked in communities where speakers showed reluctance to engage in reading other minds. 3  Husserl’s noema resembles Gottlob Frege’s (1892/1975) ‘sense’ (Sinn), as opposed to ‘reference’ (Bedeutung), and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of ‘aspect.’ For a discussion of the similarities and differences among these concepts, see Føllesdal (1990).

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The Anthropological Critique of Intentions In an article published posthumously in Language and Society, Michelle Rosaldo (1982) rejected the centrality of intentions (and sincerity) in Austin’s and Searle’s account of meaningful and felicitous (read “satisfactory”) speech acts. She claimed, among other things, that the Ilongots in the Philippines did not seem to have the same notion of commitment expressed by the English word promise and that this was related to a conceptualization of person and accountability that did not fundamentally rely on the identification of a person’s “intentions” as used by Austin and Searle. In the same year and in the same journal, Elinor Ochs published an article based on a longitudinal study of child language acquisition and socialization in (then Western) Samoa where she showed that clarification questions such as “Oh, you want this one?” or “Are you telling me a story?” found in the recordings of middle-class Anglo caregivers were absent in the speech of Samoan caregivers talking to young children (Ochs 1982). She argued that this difference has to do with differences in cultural values and beliefs about what a child is capable of and what an adult is expected to do. Whereas Anglo caregivers routinely use such clarification sequences with the assumption that there are intentions behind a child’s unclear utterance and that it is possible to guess what they are, their Samoan counterparts think that young children, not being yet fully formed as social persons, do not have full control of their actions and their meaning. Hence, in many cases, it makes little sense to try to guess what they might be thinking or aiming for. On the basis of this comparison, Ochs questioned the universality of the language practice of mind-guessing that is so frequently found in middle class interactions recorded by students of language acquisition in the US or in Europe. During the same fieldwork period in Samoa (1978–79), I documented a lengthy discussion in a meeting of the village council (fono) where a member of the council, the orator Loa, was accused of having damaged the reputation of the village by having announced a visit (with accompanying gifts) by the newly re-elected Member of Parliament in their district that never happened. According to the senior orator acting as prosecutor in the case, once it was clear that the MP was not coming, Loa should have taken upon himself the responsibility of feeding the village. Having failed to do so, the other members of the council were asked to impose on Loa a heavy fine and consider his expulsion from the village. What was notable to me was that throughout the formal discussion of the case, no one, including Loa, brought up the issue of his intentions in making the announcement. In my reading of the events, it was not Loa but the MP who offended the fono members by not showing up or sending the gifts. But, to my surprise, the focus of the debate was about the gravity of the consequences of Loa’s announcement, regardless of what he might have had in mind in making it. By combining the details of that case with a number of other observations I made about Samoan language use and with Bradd Shore’s (1982) rich ethnography of Samoan ways of feeling and acting, I argued that speakers’ intentions (in the narrow sense) did not seem to be as important in Samoan interaction as they had been made to be by Austin and Searle (Duranti 1984, 1988, 2015, Chapter 3). Over the last three decades more ethnographers have demonstrated a similar tendency— especially but not exclusively among members of societies in the Pacific—to resist introspection and avoid mind-reading, an attitude that Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey (2008) called the doctrine of the “opacity of mind” (see also Rosen 1995, and Barrett et al. 2016 for a comparative perspective).

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contested intentions  321

Rethinking the Critique of Intentions

Not everyone in linguistic anthropology has been swayed by the “opacity of mind” thesis or the arguments presented by Rosaldo, Ochs, me, and a few others. For example, Jack Sidnell (2014) argued that by eliminating intentions (of the kind employed by Searle), we would not be able to distinguish between speaking and making noises with the mouth (Sidnell 2014, p. 386). At first, this point might seem uncontroversial. Humans can and do interpret actions in terms of goals. But the critique of intentions within linguistic anthropology has not been an attempt to deny planning or goal-directedness. It has been about the almost exclusive reliance on intentions (with the small “i”) to make sense of human action and taken-for-granted accessibility or knowability. To start, Ochs and I did not write in our papers that intentions never matter in Samoa or elsewhere.4 The main issue for us has been to understand the cultural contexts that favor or disfavor an interest in other people’s or one’s own inner states, including so-called intentions. For example, in showing that Samoan caregivers “do not typically conjecture what a child’s unclear utterance could be expressing,” Ochs (1982, p. 93) was suggesting that such behaviors and attitudes are related to local values and beliefs about children’s competence, the hierarchical organization of child care, and the more general tendency to avoid conjectures when one does not have factual knowledge of an event. Such beliefs and values are different from those found in Anglo-American culture, where “it is important to know if a behavior was intentional or unintentional, and if intentional, the extent to which the intention was formulated before the behavior was carried out” (Ochs 1982, p. 99). An example of the hypercognized status of detectable intentions is provided in excerpt (1) below, where General Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the House Armed Services Committee hearings, claims that he felt entitled to reassure his Chinese counterpart that there would be no attack by the United States in the last few weeks of the Trump administration because he knew that the then President Trump did not intend such attack. (Excerpt 1) (General Mark Milley’s testimony to House Armed Services Committee Hearing, September 28, 2021) Milley;  […] the specific purpose of the October and January calls, were generated, by concerning intelligence, which caused us to believe the Chinese, were worried about an attack, by the United States. and last night I briefed that intelligence in detail to the Senate Armed Forces Committee and I’d be happy to brief it to any member, or group of members, at your discretion. in a classified session. and I know, and I am certain, President Trump did not intend on attacking the Chinese, and it is my directed responsibility, by the Secretary of Defense to convey. that intent.

A claim of this kind is unlikely in those communities covered by the “opacity of mind” doctrine (Robbins and Rumsey 2008). Equally unlikely in the same communities is the kind of repeated reference found during the proceedings of the second impeachment trial of then-President Trump to whether he “intended to incite” his supporters on January 6, 2021 to storm the Capitol or that “when he said ‘fight,’ he meant it” (Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 117th Congress, First Session, February 11, 2021,

4

 As shown by the following statement: “My main point in this paper is not to argue that for Samoans the recognition of the speaker’s intentions is not a legitimate route to understanding. … My point is that it is not the only route and that participants seem more eager to act upon conventions, consequences, actions, public image, rather than upon individual intentions” (Duranti 1988, p. 30).

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No. 26, p. S663). The prosecution’s failure to further punish Trump (e.g., by excluding him from running again for political office) has been attributed to the refusal by most Republican senators to vote for the (second) impeachment. This fact-based interpretation conceals the culture-specificity of the line of argumentation presented by the prosecution, which was focused on showing evidence of Trump’s intentions mostly based on what he had said on social media and in person (e.g., on January 6). In a different cultural context, like the Samoan fono I mentioned above, where consequences and lack of remedial actions might matter as much or more than intentions (Duranti 2015, Chapter 3), Trump could have been judged responsible of his supporters’ actions regardless of his intentions e.g., simply on the basis of his lack of adequate response to the unfolding Capitol attack.

Empirical Testing

Sidnell also challenged the anthropological critique of intentions from an empirical point of view. I have also been concerned with empirical validity and suggested the need for “more precise and systematic methods for documenting and analyzing exactly when and how people engage in reading other minds” (Duranti 2008, p. 487). One such method is the examination of everyday conversation, where we may find that people spontaneously do what they seem unable or reluctant to do when prompted in the context of an interview with an ethnographer (Duranti 2008, pp. 487–490). Following a similar logic, Sidnell proposes to investigate “repairs” (see examples in section entitled “Conversational Obligations and Interactional Attunement”) as conversational exchanges in which evidence may be found of “mind reading,” introspection, and speakers’ control of their own intentions. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to adequately pursue this line of research with respect to Samoan conversational data, but earlier research by Niko Besnier (1989) on “information withholding” in another Polynesian society (Tuvalu) identified culture-specific patterns of repair organization that seem to support a general avoidance of guessing what another speaker might be hinting at (see also Schegloff 1987, pp. 211–212).

Factors Complicating Intentional Acts One of the difficulties of connecting the general concept of intentional act represented in Figure 17.1 (under section on Intentional acts for Brentano and Husserl) with the notion of intention as used in speech act theory is that they have a different scope. The phenomenological notion of intentionality as a property of all acts of consciousness directed at some inner or outer Object is meant to represent subjective experiences (e.g., wanting, evaluating, seeing, being afraid, disliking) irrespective of their communicability. The narrower sense of intention used by speech act theorists, instead, is meant to explain how utterances acquire a meaning that is both what speakers want to convey and what the audience can understand as meant. In Logical Investigations, when he introduced the discussion of communication, Husserl himself relied on the notion of communicative “intent” (alternating between the two German nouns Absicht and Intention) to explain how sounds acquire a meaning. Anticipating the position later taken by analytic philosophers, especially H.P. Grice’s (1957), Husserl specified that words can mean something when “a speaker produces it with the intention of ‘expressing himself about something’” and gives it “a sense he desires to share with his auditors. Such sharing becomes a possibility if the auditor also understands the speaker’s intention” (Husserl 1901/1970, pp. 266–267).

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In foregrounding the intention as a prerequisite for an expression to mean something, both Husserl and Searle ignore or gloss over the impact of the medium e.g., spoken language, on the realization of intentional acts and also the role of the audience, whose knowledge, feelings, and (past or future) actions are relevant to and inform, often in unconscious ways, how speakers formulate their thoughts and desires. In using the medium of language to “express meanings” or, as Husserl (1970) put it, to draw someone’s attention to some Object, we are usually acting in response to what someone else has just said/done or with the expectation that they will respond by saying/doing something. By mediating intentional acts, language shapes messages for a particular party in a particular context—a point expressed by the notion of recipient design in conversation analysis (Goodwin 1981; Sacks and Schegloff 1979).

Language as a Non-neutral Medium

Language is a complex bio-historical artifact that amplifies the range of possible intentional acts while shaping them or directing them toward particular configurations of thinking, feeling, and doing (see below). Languages have long been recognized in anthropology and linguistics as rich repositories of all kinds of taxonomies that can be described into logically organized systems of labels for concepts, qualities, and relations encoded in grammatical categories like nouns, adjectives, verbs, particles of various kinds, etc. Languages have also been recognized as providing ways of being and acting in the world that sustain social relations and social identities at the level of everyday interaction e.g., by offering preferred ways of formulating questions, requests, compliments, and ways of responding to them. Whether explained by means of rational principles (e.g., Grice 1975) or by emergent organizational principles regulating turn-taking (see below), the constraints imposed by language (broadly defined) on what is expressible, thinkable, and doable have been said to constrain our agency and authorial inventiveness. The most extreme statements about an independent agency of language have not been made by Whorf or other relativists, however, but by philosophers, the most famous of them being Martin Heidegger, who first in the 1920s, responding to a then widespread sense of a “decline” of European civilization, gave name to the impersonal voice (das Man ‘the One’ or ‘the They’) that leads us to uncritically conform to what “one does” and “one says” (Heidegger 1927/1962, p. §27). Two decades later, Heidegger made his position more radical by claiming that it is language that “speaks” through its speakers (Heidegger 1971). Following George Steiner’s reading (1991, p. xxiv) of Heidegger’s theory of language as “seminal in the modern anti-humanistic movement,” we might consider whether any concession to the thesis of linguistic relativity or the nonneutrality of the medium, including the claims made by linguistic anthropologists (Duranti 2011), is inevitably not only a lessening of human agency, but also a renunciation of responsibility and, ultimately, a negation of human subjectivity, which is entailed by the concept of intentionality. A critical and yet less pessimistic and ultimately more nuanced perspective on the relation between individual speakers and the language they use was developed by Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1981) whose writings have influenced the work of many linguistic anthropologists. One of his key notions is heteroglossia, that is, the simultaneous availability and, thus, potential use of different languages, dialects, styles, registers, genres, pronunciations, voices. This condition, found in novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which each chapter was written in a different style (Ivanov 2001, p. 95), can be easily identified in everyday conversations, especially, but not exclusively, when code switching (e.g., from English to Spanish) gives speakers the feeling of giving voice to “two worlds” (Zentella 1990).

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Another important idea introduced by Bakhtin is the distinction between centripetal and centrifugal forces acting upon our linguistic choices: “alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 272). We experience the centripetal pressure to conform to the “proper” language (e.g., the Standard, the language taught in schools) while also feeling the pull of alternative centrifugal ways of speaking (e.g., non-Standard dialects, the language of our peer-group). Heteroglossia entails that any utterance in any language exists diachronically in the larger context of the history of previous uses (by self and others) and synchronically along with other competing languages, dialects, genres, or registers, to which we as speakers are exposed. This perspective questions the idea that we can freely use any available linguistic expression and for the purpose we had in mind (Searle’s “intention”) before we started to talk, write, or sign. Just like the notion of a unitary language (e.g., English, Italian, Quechua) is an ideological abstraction often made into a concrete medium as a result of wars of military conquest and hegemonic pressure (Gramsci 1971), the matching of a particular utterance with a particular state of mind may be favored by habit or by particular circumstances even though it might be felt as spontaneous individual choice. Bakhtin summarized this condition with what is now one of his most celebrated pronouncements: “[l]anguage is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 294). If this is the case, individual speakers are caught in a bind. To express their ideas and achieve their goals, they depend on established conventions, including what Benjamin Lee Whorf called fashions of speaking, that is, “ways of analyzing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the language” (Whorf 1956, p. 158). Some of these ways are encoded in a multitude of idioms or quasi-idioms that can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory, making it easier for us to encode information in a grammatically appropriate way while in the midst of some other activity (Pawley and Syder 1983). Other ways are produced by the application of general principles like parallelism, which is common in sung or spoken poetry (Jakobson 1966, 1968) as well as in conversation (Silverstein 1984). Rather than mere conduits for the realization of a system of meanings that they do not control, we can recognize, with Bakhtin, that all speakers (or writers, signers, etc.) experience a tension between conventionality and creativity, the known and the unknown, the scripted and the improvised (Duranti and McCoy 2021). In narrative activity, this tension is at the basis of the conflict that speakers feel “between the desire for coherence and the desire for authenticity of life experience” (Ochs and Capps 2001, p. 278). This tension manifests itself in the construction of a linear story line guided by the goal of matching a sequence of events as they happened and its opposite, that is, a nonlinear, often more chaotic and less predictable mix of recounted actions, alternative scenarios, and disagreements (Ochs 2004, p. 284). A similar tension exists in the semiotic constitution of social identities, whereby the same properties of the routine, normative ways of performing a given identity allow for their contestations. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style. (Butler 1988, pp. 519–520)

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The possibility of breaking the routine way of doing and saying has been occasionally recognized, even though it remains difficult to theorize. In philosophy, it was Gilbert Ryle who half a century ago evoked the concept of improvisation to make sense of “thinking” itself as a process that includes such unforeseen and unplanned actions as “[t]hat impromptu but well-timed joke, that swift, pertinent and unrehearsed reply to a question, that on-thespur-of-the-moment twist of the steering wheel” (1976, p. 71). In the social sciences, it was Pierre Bourdieu (1977, p. 79) who included the “intentionless invention of regulated improvisation” as a necessary ingredient of the habitus. But improvisation is not equally evaluated and tolerated across contexts and communities (Duranti and Black 2012). In everyday social interactions among Black people in the US, improvised creation of new expressions or the modification of standard expressions e.g., through what Arthur Spears (2007) calls augmentation, has been said to be expected and positively evaluated (Heath 1983). But in all communities, there are contexts and activities in which what Paul Kroskrity (2000) and others have called speech regimentation is expected and variation or alteration is inhibited. This is particularly the case in what Judith Irvine (1979) identified as “formal” events (Irvine 1979), which discourage going off the script, thereby making it difficult to execute an impromptu correction of an error (Duranti 2022).

Conversational Obligations and Interactional Attunement

Over the last half a century, the study of spontaneous conversations has demonstrated that speakers, as participants in dialogues, that is, joint activities, are affected by topics, ways of speaking, attitudes, and values emerging through interactions in ways that exceed the individual’s ability to fully control the direction of the talk or other kinds of semiotic activities. Participants’ orientation toward a “social order” has been shown to emerge in several aspects of conversations, starting with the organization of turn-taking (Sacks et al. 1974), which displays both a strong pressure to engage—in the avoidance of gaps—and the respect of the conversational space of the other—in the avoidance of overlaps—, but also a preference for agreement with our interlocutors (e.g., Bilmes 1988; Sacks 1987). In this respect the rules of conversational engagement seem to match the three obligations to give, receive, and return originally identified by Marcel Mauss (1923–1924) in his comparative study of gift exchanges: in everyday interaction, one party will feel obliged to initiate a conversation (“give” some words), which, in turn, will call for the other party to listen (“receive” what is being “given”) and then respond (“return” a different gift). This schematic three-part model suggests in a simple way that in most situations we are not literally free to speak or not speak, listen or not listen, respond or not respond. We feel the weight of obligations, which come with expectations like, for example, the cooperation posited by H.P. Grice (1975) or the accommodation that parents in some communities make to the linguistic and interactional abilities of their infants by engaging in “baby talk” (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). Once we enter a verbal exchange, no matter what we might have “intended” to say, we are likely to end up moving along a conversational–interactional path that in some cases might even feel imposed upon us by the mere presence of others. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is a process of continuous adjustment between parties in interaction. What conversation analysts described as recipient design (see above) is thus one among a number of phenomena contributing to intersubjective attunement (Duranti and La Mattina 2022). This is an adjustment in form and content of talk that, as shown by Ragnar Rommetveit (1998, p. 358), might motivate speakers, in talking to two different people, to give two apparently contradictory statements (e.g., my husband is working this morning and my husband is not working this morning) while in both cases telling the truth.

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What conversation analysts call “repair,” a broader category than the notion of “error correction” (Schegloff et al. 1977, p. 363) is another type of intersubjective attunement (to be distinguished from the more general concept of ‘intersubjectivity,’ see Duranti 2010; Duranti and La Mattina 2022, and under the “Conclusions” section). As shown in excerpts 2 and 3 below, repairs can come in the form of (sometimes pointed) requests for clarification. In line 4 of (2), FM questions the expression to be able to compete used by WC in the immediately prior turn, which is then ‘repaired’ by WC in line 5 by means of the revised to be able to live preceded by I mean, a common framing device in corrections of this kind. (Excerpt 2) (Walter Capps Project; March 2, 1996; recorded in the car, while driv­ ing to a political event with Democratic candidate Walter Capps, WC, and a family member, FM) 1  WC;    (I read somewhere) that you have to make- uh you have to make 2             thirteen dollars an hour forty hours a week to be able to compete in this 3             society. 4  FM;     to be able to compete? 5  WC;    well I mean to be able to live. In (Excerpt 3), the moderator’s pronunciation of the name of the libertarian candidate for a seat in the US House of Representatives, David Bersohn, here reproduced in line 2, is corrected by the candidate himself in line 3 and accepted (by means of an apology) by the moderator in line 4. (Excerpt 3) (Walter Capps Project; August 9, 1996; recorded during a political debate in Santa Maria, California) 1  Audience;      ((clapping, cheers)) 2  Moderator;    Our last speaker- uh- is David Bershon. 3  Bersohn;        uh- the pronunciation is Bersohn but you’re close. 4  Moderator;    oh sorry. Such dialogic adaptations, recalibrations, or modifications are continuously enacted in human interactions, sometimes accompanied by hesitations and restarts, other times resulting in (or sounding like) a flawless continuous utterance where the reshaping of its meaning is barely noticeable (Goodwin 1979). Such attunements of our verbal expressions manifest and are responsive to what the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas recognized as a limit of our intentions understood as a taken-for-granted ability to plan, predict, comprehend, and control what we do and say. The comedy begins with the simplest of our movements, carrying with them every inevitable awkwardness. In putting out my hand to approach a chair, I have creased the sleeve of my jacket, I have scratched the floor, I have dropped the ash from my cigarette. In doing that which I wanted to do, I have done so many things that I did not want to do. The act has not been pure for I have left some traces. In wiping out these traces, I have left others. (Levinas 1951/1989, p. 122)

Levinas used this exceeding of our intentional acting in the world to argue that since we cannot be sure to always smoothly and perfectly execute what we had thought we were doing, we should think of ourselves as always “responsible beyond our intentions”

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(1951/1989, p. 123). By reframing intentionality in ethical terms, Levinas was putting aside rational explanations of individual accountability. I am responsible for your misery regardless of whether I have purposely done anything specific to cause it. This sense of responsibility might emerge in the context of a conversation, when even a one-second pause has been shown to give speakers a chance to reconsider what they have said and, in some cases, as pointed out by Anita Pomerantz (1984, p. 161), lead to “a rapid and complete reversal of position.” It is then no accident that remaining silent after having denied a request from someone might succeed at getting a change of mind by the one who had just done the rejection. Having to further justify a “no” might unexpectedly reveal reasons to say “yes” (Duranti 2009).

Conclusions Despite some attempts to clarify the use of the term intention, a certain ambiguity remains in the literature between the broader sense of intentionality as a generic property of meaningful human action, their aboutness, and the narrower intentionality as willful determination toward a goal, with varying degrees of specificity and complexity. Even though we can safely assume that people the world over are interested in figuring out what others are up to and therefore anticipation of others’ next actions is part of human ways of making sense of reality, we know that there are different ways of anticipating what is about to happen or what a particular individual is likely to do. Even though “reading the mind” of others is a common metaphor to refer to a recognized interpretive practice in the west (or at least in English-speaking countries like the US and the UK where the intentional discourse is dominant), there are alternative metaphors and interpretive paths from which we can rethink our own naïve assumptions, whatever they are. The anthropological literature shows that there is variation across cultural contexts in the conditions under which the possibility of mind reading and introspection are acknowledged, practiced, or sanctioned (Barrett et al. 2016; Richland 2006). The data from Samoa and other places in the Pacific, in fact, suggests that “mind reading” might be a loaded metaphor because anticipation of what is about to happen may not actually call for or be realized as an inquiry into the minds of the specific individuals involved in a given act or event. The reconstruction of past motivations or the anticipation of future actions might be done by means of common-sense knowledge resulting in typifications such as “when someone S does action P, it means that that S wants Q” or “when someone S is in a situation of type T, S is likely to do P next.” This reliance on “typicality” was recognized by Alfred Schutz in passages like the following: only in particular situations, and then only fragmentarily, can I experience the Others’ motives, goals, etc. – briefly, the subjective meanings they bestow upon their actions, in their uniqueness. I can, however, experience them in their typicality. (Schutz 1962, p. 60)

The practice whereby individuals imagine, reconstruct, or anticipate actions by others should also be distinguished by their willingness to make an explicit guess about one’s own or someone else’s original intentions or motivations for doing something, a practice that might be inhibited in certain contexts for a number of reasons, including the fear of being proven wrong or risking being accused of engaging in gossip, lacking respect toward higher status individuals, or claiming knowledge that one could not possibly have.

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A more recent proposal about interpreting others’ actions is offered by neuroscientists who have shown that we have an intuitive, pre-rational, pre-reflective understanding of what someone is about to do. Our neurons “mirror” their actions to give us the feeling of “moving along” with them (Gallese 2006; Iacoboni 2006). This is similar to what philosophers like David Hume, Theodor Lipps, and Max Scheler called “sympathy” or “empathy” (Cohon 2018; Davis and Steinbock 2019; Zahavi 2010), two closely related, partly overlapping concepts that imply the existence of a default, immediate human identification with the actions of others, which precedes inferential processes and leads to the non-instrumental sentiments of pity and compassion (Bergson 1903/2007, p. 182). This is what Husserl tried to capture with the concept of intersubjectivity, a fundamental property of human co-existence that recognizes the fact that the individual agent is never existentially alone and others are implied even when they are not around. The inclusion of artifacts produced by human labor extends this co-being to material objects, whose “thereness-for-everyone” (Husserl 1960, p. 92) indexes past and future practical engagements with the natural, cultural and social world. There is much that linguistic anthropology can contribute to this literature, including the documentation of interactions where the common, shared world hypothesized by phenomenologists is shown to be a culturally differentiated, stratified social world. This means that the “thereness-for-everyone” of cultural objects hypothesized by Husserl as a manifestation of intersubjectivity is not an ontological claim about human experience in general but an ideal of equal accessibility that is continuously challenged, limited, or violated by social forces outside the control of individual agents. Whatever is “natural” about our ability to use material and ideal resources, including the language faculty, is always socially constrained and contextually defined. Some of us are socialized into believing that we have the power to easily access our own and others’ inner thoughts, feelings, and “intentions.” This power includes the ability and right to say “I didn’t mean it” to excuse a wrong move. Others are socialized not to evoke their own intentions to avoid responsibility (Morgan 1991) and to be hesitant and careful about interpreting what others are thinking. Overall, the integration of the phenomenological notion of intentional acts with dialogic and interactional approaches to language discussed in this chapter suggests that in addition to being grounded in intersubjectivity and affected by the affordances of their Object, intentional acts that are realized through language are guided by properties of their medium (e.g., ways of speaking) and of the possible types of verbal interaction between speakers and their addressees–recipients. These properties introduce additional challenges to the understanding of human action as the realization of language-independent individual intentions. The slogan “the audience as co-author” that I offered many years ago (Duranti 1986) must then be qualified to allow for degrees of co-participation and attunement. The recognition of the complexity introduced in intentional acts by the medium of language mitigates the confidence in subjective control over mind and matter without eliminating the continuous struggle for sense-making that defines our humanity.

Acknowledgments Special thanks to Rachel George, Robin Conley Riner, and Nicco La Mattina for providing valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. My understanding of intentions in human interaction has benefitted from conversations with many colleagues, including James Bogen, Marcyliena Morgan, Mike Cole, Peg Griffin, Justin Richland, and from joint projects with Don Brenneis, Kenny Burrell, Charles Goodwin, Matthew McCoy, Elinor Ochs, and Jason Throop.

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Gallese, V. (2006). Intentional attunement: A neurological perspective on social cognition and its disruption in Autism. Brain Research 1079: 15–24. Gibson, J.J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Goodwin, C. (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In: Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (ed. G. Psathas), 97–121. New York: Irvington Publishers. Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith). New York: International Publishers. Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In: Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, Speech Acts (eds. P. Cole and J. Morgan), 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson). New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1971). Language. In: Poetry, Language, Thought. 189–210. New York: Harper & Row. Husserl, E. (1931). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson). New York: Collier. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (trans. D. Cairns). The Hague: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1970). Logical Investigations, vols. 1 and 2 (trans. J.N. Findlay). New Jersey: Humanities Press. Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic. (trans. A.J. Steinbock). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Iacoboni, M. (2006). A neural architecture for imitation and intentional relations. In: Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals (eds. C.L. Nehaniv and K. Dautenhahn), 71–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irvine, J.T. (1979). Formality and informality in communicative events. American Anthropologist 81 (4): 773–790. Ivanov, V. (2001). Heteroglossia. In: Key Terms in Language and Culture (ed. A. Duranti), 95–97. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Jakobson, R. (1966). Grammatical parallelism and its Russian facet. Language 42: 399–429. Jakobson, R. (1968). Poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry. Lingua 21: 597–609. Levinas, E. (1989). Is ontology fundamental? Philosophy Today. 33(2):121–129. Lewis, C.T. and Short, C. (1879). A Latin Dictionary. New York: Harper and Brothers. Luscombe, D.E. (1971). Peter Abelard and twelfth-century ethics. In: Peter Abelard’s Ethics, xii– xxxvii. London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Mauss, M. (1923–1924). Essai sur le Don. Forme et Raison de l’Echange dans le Sociétés Archaïques. Année Sociologique, seconde série 1. Morgan, M. (1991). Indirectness and interpretation in African American Women’s discourse. Pragmatics 1 (4): 421–451. Ochs, E. (1982). Talking to children in Western Samoa. Language in Society 11: 77–104. Ochs, E. (2004). Narrative lessons. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (ed. A. Duranti), 269–289. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B.B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: three developmental stories and their implications. In: Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (ed. R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine), 276–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pawley, A. and Syder, F.H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In: Language and Communication (eds. J.C. Richards and R.W. Schmidt), 191– 226. London: Longman. Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/ dispreferred turn shapes. In: Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (eds. J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage), 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Richland, J. (2006). The multiple calculi of meaning. Discourse Studies 17 (1): 65–97. Robbins, J. (2004). Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Oakland: University of California Press. Robbins, J. (2008). On not knowing other minds: Confession, intention, and linguistic exchange in a Papua New Guinea community. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 421–429. Robbins, J. and Rumsey, A. (2008). Introduction: cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–420. Rommetveit, R. (1998). Intersubjective attunement and linguistically mediated meaning in discourse. In: Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (ed. S. Bräten), 354–371. Cambridge and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Cambridge University Press. Rosaldo, M.Z. (1982). The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11: 203–237. Rosen, L. ed (1995). Other Intentions: Cultural Contexts and the Attribution of Inner States (ed. L. Rosen. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Rumsey, A. (2008). Confession, anger and cross-cultural articulation in Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 455–472. Rumsey, A. and Robbins, J. eds. (2008). Social thought and commentary special section: anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 407–494. Ryle, G. (1976). Improvisation. Mind 85: 69–83. Sacks, H. (1987). On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation. In: Talk and Social Organisation (eds. G. Button and J.R.E. Lee), 54–69. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Sacks, H. and Schegloff, E.A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons and their interaction. In: Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology (ed. G. Psathas), 15–21. New York: Irvington Publishers. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., and Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50: 696–735. Schegloff, E.A. (1987). Between macro and micro: Contexts and other connections. In: The MicroMacro Link (ed. J. Alexander, R. Munch, B. Giesen, and N. Smelser), 207–234. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G., and Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361–382. Schieffelin, B.B. (2008a). Speaking only your own mind: Reflections on talk, gossip and intentionality in Bosavi (PNG). Anthropological Quarterly 81 (2): 431–441. Schieffelin, B.B. (2008b). Tok Bokis, Tok Piksa. Translating parables in Papua New Guinea. In: Social Lives of Language. Sociolinguistics and Multilingual Speech Communities: Celebrating the Work of Gillian Sankoff (eds. M. Meyerhoff and N. Nagy), 111–134. Amstermam: John Benjamins. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers, vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Searle, J.R. (1976). The classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society 5 (1): 1–23. Searle, J.R. (1983). Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, B. (1982). Salaˋilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press. Sidnell, J. (2014). The architecture of intersubjectivity revised. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology (eds. N.J. Enfield, J.J. Kockelman, and J. Sidnell), 364–399. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (1984). On the pragmatic ‘poetry’ of prose: Parallelism, repetition, and cohesive structure in the time course of dyadic conversation. In: Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications (ed. D. Schiffrin), 181–199. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Spears, A.K. (2007). African American Communication Practices: Improvisation, Semantic License, and Augmentation. Talking Black Talk: Teachers College. Steiner, G. (1991). Martin Heidegger. With a New Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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18

Entanglements of Language and Experience in Everyday Life

Elinor Ochs Introduction: Language as a Verb Fusing portraiture with abstract expressionism, postwar artist Elaine de Kooning painted ribbons of color quickly, at times wildly, to “portray subjects in a state of becoming, sometimes with extra limbs … to indicate movement and life” rather than a static figure as a piece of art (Fortune et al. 2015, p. 21; De Kooning 1981). Composing a portrait of President Kennedy in his Palm Beach home shortly before his assassination, she dashed off a succession of dynamic sketches as Kennedy shifted positions of his body.1 For De Kooning, painting was “primarily a verb, not a noun—an event first and only secondarily an image.” (Lintel and Roos 2018, p. 69). In issuing this declaration, De Kooning played on the grammatical possibility that the English term “painting” can be a verb, simple noun, or verb turned into noun (gerund). Like Elaine de Kooning, many writers, performers, and scholars are invested in articulating the experiential potentialities of the medium of language. Yet, unlike “painting,” the term “language” is far less grammatically generous, confined to the category of noun. The nouniness of “language” is compatible with structural accounts of language but less so with accounts that strive to capture lived experiences of producing and apprehending language over interactional and historical time. To be sure, the objective properties of human languages and their variability are dynamic and integral to how language is lived as a temporally evolving (inter) subjective experience (Deetz 1973; Husserl 1969; Kristeva 1980). But the primacy of language as object also elevates language as a rational system of signs (structuralism) over the messier world of language as reflectively experienced (phenomenology). Michel Foucault

1

  “The first day I worked in pencil, pen and ink and charcoal. Charcoal’s great because it enables you to go like lightning. I kept several drawings going on at once. When he’d change his position I’d switch drawings … I kept jumping back and forth” (Moonan 2015).

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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(1973) and Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (2003, p. 6) root this moral asymmetry in early modernity’s mission to rescue language from its perceived, confused entanglement with worldly things to become a precise vehicle of rational thought. But, as Bauman and Briggs point out, language in life does get entangled with worldly things, including language users’ perceptions of power, class interests, resonances of history, embedded voices, poetic sensibilities and much more. In paradigms of early modernity, the blurring of language as object with experiencing language is a step backwards to pre-rational thinking. Alternatively, in the paradigms of phenomenology, poststructuralism, and performativity, language not only posits propositions but also becomes an experiential force among subjects engaged in a communicative moment.2 These paradigms animate language in overlapping ways. Post-structural and performative approaches incorporate phenomenological sensibilities that language, for better or worse, beckons objects into one’s consciousness, to be revealed, encountered, constituted, and otherwise experienced. Considerable philosophical discussion surrounds the extent to which language not only calls things to our attention but also conventionalizes how we experience these things. Is language so potent that no experience escapes its codification (Lacan 1966)? Is the acquisition of language a closed process of experiencing objects through the bidding and directness of a particular language? Is experience outside the confines of conventional language even possible? Or, are there qualities of lived experience that anticipate and transcend language (Bergson 1911; Dilthey 1977; Husserl 1973; Throop 2002)? At a more basic level, has modern science reduced experience to Cartesian reason, favoring the intellect over sensory experience, fantasy (e.g. visions, dreams, magic) and, relatedly, desire (Agamben 1993; Kristeva 1981)? Although there is no consensus surrounding these questions, thinkers who address the relation of language to lived experience generally recognize that human beings have become who they are in the world—thinkers, actors, experiencers—largely through the grace of language, which itself is rooted in history and ever responsive to change. Edmund Husserl, for example, considered language (logos) to be a logical system of signs that organizes how humans know and attend to objects in the world. Yet, he also recognized the limitations of viewing language exclusively as an abstract, formal structure apart from human subjectivity: “In speaking we are continuously performing an internal act of meaning, which fuses with the words and, as it were, animates them” (Husserl 1969, p. 22). Husserl created the terms “the discursive subject” (das redende Subjekt), “the speaking subject,” and “the hearing and understanding subject” to depict the worldly ego actually engaged in present-time enactments of meaning with others (Husserl 1969, p. 23). For Husserl these communicating subjects are also “thinking subjects.” Influenced by Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1960]1964) expanded upon the idea that language lives through the experiential speaking subject in concert with others over historical time (Silverman 1979). Merleau-Ponty ([1960]1964, p. 90) reflected, “For the speaking subject, to express is to become aware of; he does not express just for others, but also to know himself what he intends.”. That is, for the speaking subject, formulating meaning is itself an experience. The beauty of phenomenology is that, unlike psychology’s emphasis on an individual’s internal states, it captures the spontaneity of lived experience in concert with others. For Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 97), the phenomenology of speech illuminates such spontaneity:

2

  See Austin (1962); Bourdieu (1977); Butler (1997); Giddens (1979); Zahavi (2019).

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

When I speak or understand, I experience that presence of others in myself or of myself in others … I experience that presence of what is represented … To the extent that what I say has meaning, I am a different “other” for myself when I am speaking; and to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening.

Here Merleau-Ponty reaches into the spontaneous present of speaking as a site of a plethora of experiences. Note his repeated use of “I experience that presence” to emphasize the vividness and immediacy of the connection. The immanence of “that presence of others in myself or myself in others” merges self with past or present interlocutors. The boundaries between subjectivity and intersubjectivity and then and now become porous. The speaker also experiences “that presence of what is represented.” Here the speaker uses “that presence” to infuse the expressed thoughts—by self, others, or a fusion of authors—with a vividness felt in the present moment. And, as they transpire, experiences of meaning-making reconfigure the “I” into an array of momentary identities. In the course of speaking “a different ‘other’ for myself” emerges. It is as if we become aware of a new identity in the making that is not entirely familiar. Moreover, as “I” begin to understand I become both speaker and listener. This may apply to at least two scenarios: As I am speaking I am also listening to what I am saying and figuring out what I am meaning. And as I am listening, I am also silently reiterating what is being said to myself. Hence, “I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening.” Somewhat overlapping with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) also addressed the existential idea that objects present themselves to us in different ways within the horizons of our everyday life-world (Duranti 2009a; Ricoeur 2014). As Wittgenstein moved from analyzing language as logic to speaking as a form of life and activity in the everyday world, he proposed that people engage in “language games” tied to practices and social situations. Like a painting that creates a field of possible ways of seeing for the viewer, a language game creates a field of possible ways of understanding for interlocutors. Visualizing a scene or understanding an utterance from one “aspect” or another are both experiential, temporally bounded acts. Moreover, just as a scene in a painting may be visually transformed through a viewer’s changing aspect-seeing, so spoken or written discourse can be transformed into a different language game through an interlocutor’s change in aspectseeing: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines for information” (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 214). Here we see how “reading a poem or narrative with feeling” and “skimming the lines for information”—constitute at once two distinct modes of aspect-seeing and two different language games. More broadly, Wittgenstein leaned into the experience of composing a text (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 218): The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning—there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.)—And how are these feelings manifested among us?—By the way we choose and value words. How do I find the “right” word? How do I choose among words? Without doubt it is sometimes as if I were comparing them by fine differences of smell: That is too … … . that is too … … .—this is the right one.—But I do not always have to make judgments, give explanations; often I might only say: “It simply isn’t right yet”. I am dissatisfied, I go on looking. At last a word comes: “That’s it!” Sometimes I can say why. This is simply what searching, this is what finding, is like here.

Here Wittgenstein experiences an attachment to words as objects of heightened value. Composing a text—a language game in itself—becomes a sensuous activity, like discerning just the right perfume for the occasion and a treasure hunt for the elusive right word.

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One of the difficulties in discussing the entanglements of language and experience is that that “language” and “experience” can be interpreted in different ways. Unlike MerleauPonty’s and Wittgenstein’s affinities with Husserl, Martin Heidegger distanced himself by rejecting Husserl’s view of the primacy of language as a logical system of signs to express propositions. Heidegger instead privileged the poetic potential of language to “bring forth beings into Being” (McNeill 2018, p. 6). When Heidegger used the term “experience” (Erfahrung), it privileged a primal openness to essential Being (Dreyfus 1993, p. 34). Heidegger (1971a, 1971b, 1977) held out the possibility that deep thinking can be an aventure that can free language from habit and history and from all that has been already spoken and, instead, allow language to “speak” authentically and imaginatively. That is, Heidegger redirected his focus away from human beings who use language to express meanings to position language itself as a speaking force. Heidegger’s conviction that “language speaks” means that language has the force to lead human beings away from “the monotonous trotting out of something that is always the same” to bid an otherwise silent, undisclosed, authentic world into our being: “to fetch, to gather in, to bring together what is concealed within the old” (Heidegger 1971b, p. 36). The latter implies a rare, breakthrough moment of radiant clearing and unconcealment of meanings that were previously veiled, a state of being that requires one to openly attend and bring the message forward. Language calls mortals capable of deep thought to communicate what they have experienced for the good of the world. Heidegger compelled these thinkers “to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals” (Heidegger 1971a, p. 208).3 We can interpret “peal of stillness” to mean the sounding of a potent, hidden, anterior-to-language, phenomenal state of being that needs to be brought into voice and, thereby, into appearance for mortals (Nowell-Smith 2013). For Heidegger the language of poetry had this force: “Speaking occurs in what is spoken in the poem. It is the speaking of language” (Heidegger 1977, p. 206). In the original German texts Heidegger relied upon the nominalized infinitive verbs Das Sprechen (literally, “the to speak”) and Das Sagen (“the to say”) to convey the communicative moment when a subject gives up trying to be the autonomous author of statements and, instead, freely disappears into a state of being that allows, indeed beckons, language to reveal fresh, as yet unsaid, ways of grasping the world. English translations use roughly equivalent gerunds, e.g. “speaking” (“a speaking long past,” “the speaking of mortals),” and “saying” (“thinking gathers language into simple saying”). The slide towards verbs of communication as agentless topics is more than a stylistic aesthetic. Instead, these and other person-less verb forms pervade Heidegger’s writings to reject modern, Cartesian conceptualizations of “a self-sufficient subject with its intentional content and an independent object” (Dreyfus 1993, p. 19). Heidegger’s perspectives are compatible with certain East Asian philosophical perspectives, as evidenced in his dialogues with both Japanese phenomenologist Shuzo Kuki and Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, on the thrown-ness and involvement of our bodies in the world and the vitality of silence as primordial speech (Heidegger 1971b; Hirsch 1970).

3

  The full text in German is “Solches Ereignen ereignet sich, insofern das Wesen der Sprache, das Geläut der Stille, das Sprechen der Sterblichen braucht, um als Geläut der Stille für das Hören der Sterblichen zu verlauten” (Heidegger 2007, p. 30). A richly annotated translation provided by A. Duranti (personal communication) reads: “Such an appropriating takes place in that the very nature [Wesen, also ‘essence’], the presencing, of language [der Sprache, the noun] needs and uses [the translation of this one word braucht with two English words captures the possible translations of braucht as ‘needs, uses, wants, requires’] the speaking of mortals in order to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals.” This use of the same word (“Ereignen”) as noun (‘an appropriating’) and verb (‘to happen, to occur, to unfold’) as in Solches Ereignen ereignet sich is typical of Heidegger’s language.

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

Despite his claims that “language speaks” and “language is the house of being,” Heidegger struggled with the prevailing tendency of language to ossify the flow of life (“In this way language comes under the dictatorship of the public realm, which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible.”) Heidegger displayed little confidence that most people can open their being to a stilled, as yet unlanguaged world then transform that state of being into thoughtful “saying”: “But the saying that is more fully saying happens only sometimes, because only the more venturesome are capable of it. For it is still hard” (1971a, p. 138). And even heightened sensibilities of poets and deep thinkers, wrenched out of “the peal of stillness,” are not immune to the corruption of language as they become codified. These sentiments are elaborated in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1962) discussion of the pervasiveness of inauthentic, societally conforming “idle talk” that not only masks reality and genuine understanding but also alienates the self from authentic Being, transparency of self, listening to “the peal of silence” of language, and the call of conscience. This perspective is similar to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptions of language as mediating subjective experience and the external world. For Lacan (1966) the language of others (the Id), rooted in history, inscribes the desires of the social world on the body with radical effects from birth, even before speech. A prevailing concern in philosophical considerations of language and experience has been the perceived gap between language as an objective system of signs (what de Saussure (1966) called langue) and speech (parole) as lived meaning-making activity. Many consider language as a prerequisite for speech. Heidegger reinforces the gap between language and speaking in his despair that most speakers passively draw upon language as a readymade resource for communicating habitual thoughts and feelings. Alternatively, Heidegger allows for the possibility that language and speaking can come together in rare moments of deep thinking and creativity. When human beings invite a state of openness (Being), they cede their role as speakers to allow language to speak and enter a liminal territory between language and speech. In so doing humans become vessels rather than agents of creative meaning and find themselves on the path towards transformation. The intellectual dialogue surrounding Husserl’s “speaking subject,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of speakers as listeners/listeners as speakers, Wittgenstein’s “language games,” and Heidegger’s “language speaks” is vast, warranting great depth beyond this overview. The experiential traffic between language and speech, signs and voice, text and dialogue, knowing and being, humans configuring worlds they inhabit and worlds configuring humans—these interfaces, along with the socio-historical constitution of experience itself, continue to fascinate.4 Several scholars, for example, have argued that a theory of language and experience needs to incorporate the exercise of power. Michel Foucault (1988) famously reconsidered the individual subject as historically constituted and argued that the experiential efficacy of language functions in concert with institutions (including medicine and science) and paradigms of knowledge to exert power over one’s consciousness of self, others, objects, and events. Time-and-place-bound “discourses” circumscribe a perspectival point of departure for not only experiencing the world but also distinguishing normality from madness, with disciplinary entailments. As such, routine discursive events are inextricably tied to the imposition of paradigms of knowledge and also existential violence, including psychosis and repression.

4

 Cf. Agamben 1993; Bakhtin 1981; Barthes 1985; Butler 1997; Derrida 2011; Foucault 1988; Jay 2001; Jakobson 1968; Kristeva 1980; Lyotard 1991 (1988); Merleau-Ponty 1964, 1972; Morrison 1994, among other luminaries).

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Judith Butler has also closely considered the power of language, especially names, to inflict psychological violence. Building on Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture on language as oppression, and J.L. Austin’s (1962) account of the performative force of utterances, Butler (1977, p. 16) remarks, “Rhetorically, the assertion that some speech not only communicates hate, but constitutes an injurious act, presumes not only that language acts, but that it acts upon its addressee in an injurious way.” Butler chides philosophers and other scholars of language for not probing ethical dimensions of the effects of speech on human experience. Offensive speech, as it is repeated, reinvigorated, and authorized by speaking subjects, has “discursive transitivity” (Butler 1987, p. 47), bringing the apprehending subject into a certain kind of being. Here hurtful identity-defining speech is imbued with a moral potency that is radically different from Heidegger’s morally infused exaltation that “language speaks” as a rarified, creative force. However, Butler’s discussion of the devastating consequences of the political censoring of non-normative gender identities builds upon Heidegger’s notion that inauthentic talk alienates a human being from their authentic self and Lacan’s (1966) account of the distorted and traumatizing effects that the collective symbolic order of language imposes on subjective lived experience. Can language be a verb? Several attempts include “languaging”—“making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006, p. 89); “translanguaging”—deploying “a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (Ortheguy et al. 2015, p. 283, see also Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Lewis et al. 2012); and “enlanguaging”—“the process by which sociocultural groups create for themselves the medium of their new cultural life” (Jourdan 2006, p. 135). “Languaging” has become a second language classroom heuristic wherein teachers explain grammatical concepts and encourage to “think aloud” about the concepts to enhance their language proficiency. “Translanguaging” transpires in social contexts where speakers freely transcend boundaries of languages, dialects, and speech registers to communicate. Ricardo Ortheguy et al. (2015, p. 293) depict translanguaging as “linguistically unnamed” yet integral to a person’s “mental grammar.” Translanguaging is an anathema to school teachers who insist on monolingualism and prestige dialect in classrooms, The existential consequences of these sanctions for translanguaging bilingual students is that they become “silent and unengaged”(Ortheguy et al. 2015, p. 301). Here the prohibition of translanguaging in favor of standard monolingualism mirrors Heidegger’s view of formal education as perpetuating inauthentic ways of knowing and being in the world. Christine Jourdan and Johanne Angeli (2021) begin their account of “enlanguagement” and “enlanguaging” with a Solomon Islands courtroom scene: As an elderly man begins to speak, his “bush Pijin” prompts a group of young people to burst into giggles. “It was the first time that we had witnessed outspoken criticisms of someone’s way of speaking Pijin,” they note (Jourdan and Angeli 2021, p. 46). For Jourdan and Angeli, the young people’s mocking reaction to “bush Pijin” marks a crucial stepping stone in the process of enlanguagement, wherein “a group of people … appropriate a language and claim it symbolically as theirs.” The sociolinguistic and historical process of enlanguaging seems far from the phenomenological and performative paradigms relating language to experiencing the world. Yet, Jourdan and Angeli (2021, p. 50) come close to Husserl’s “speaking subjects” when they note that as speakers enlanguage Pijin, “they are, in fact, enlanguaging themselves” (Jourdan and Angeli 2021, p. 50). We can view enlanguaging over historical time as bringing speaking subjects to consciously view themselves and other speakers in terms of the registers they use to speak. A Heideggerian perspective would cast enlanguaging as

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beckoning speaking subjects to undergo a shifting experience with the linguistic code. As the linguistic code manifests itself to speaking subjects in a new light, it unsettles their way of being in the world, their consciousness of selves and others. A Heideggerian perspective might see enlanguaging as realizing the potential of language to “say the world anew,” but it would view the increased sociolinguistic normativity that accompanies enlanguaging as drawing beings into inauthentic conventional ways of being-with others in society. All three verbal forms of “language” above implicate subjective experience. Through languaging learners become modern, reflexive Cartesian subjects who verbally objectify and problem-solve the logic of grammatical structures in a foreign language. In “translanguaging,” speaking subjects exercise their own “mental grammar;” which conveys a sense of being at home in a familiar world (“das Heimliche”). In the slow course of enlanguaging, speaking subjects become at once more affiliative with a secondary code (such as a pidgin) and more judgmental of speaking that code. Relatedly, languaging, translanguaging, and enlanguaging all address normativity. “Languaging” accelerates learning of normative grammatical structures in standard varieties of a foreign language. Translanguaging, in contrast, defies normative boundaries of recognized languages, dialects, and registers; substituting a freer mixing of language varieties and, in the process, creating new norms. And normative judgments and feelings go hand in hand with speakers enlanguaging a code and themselves. It may well be that we have to settle with the nouniness of “language,” as its verb-like counterparts clumsily hold on to “language” as a medium to be utilized, amplified, deconstructed, and/or evaluated. In trying to convey its experiential vitality we may be barking up the wrong tree in trying to squeeze a verb out of “language.” The phenomenological alternative, instead, is to focus on our experiential encounters with language as a beacon of meaning. In this perspective, we are vulnerable to language as it beckons us towards sensibilities and realizations—some unwanted, even painful; others insightful, aesthetic, and wondrous. Experiential intimacies with language transpire both in producing language as a speaking/writing/signing/gesturing subject and attending to language as an apprehending subject.

Everyday Experiential Journeys on the Way to Language In reflecting upon experiential encounters with language, Heidegger argues that such encounters involve an existential journey in which one becomes open to language’s veiled meanings. Rather than the strike of a lightening bolt, the presencing of language is an embodied, emergent experience of historically untethered being that “touches the innermost nexus of our existence” (Heidegger 1971b, p. 57). Heidegger points to the Latin expression for ‘experience’ eundo assequi to emphasize that experience itself is a journey “to obtain something along the way, to attain something by going on a way” (Heidegger 1971b, p. 66). Over and over Heidegger uses the expression “on the way to language” to depict the elusiveness of language—that its meanings are always slipping out of our reach ahead of us. We can only enter the neighborhood of and become near to language through listening and quiet consideration, as in pondering great poetry in ways that “let its soundless voice come to us” (Heidegger 1971b, p. 123). Like an aesthetic dance, as we approach language through our openness (our “stillness”), language approaches us with its revelatory Saying. The present essay celebrates the idea that we undergo an experience with language as a journey, in that speaking, writing, and other semiotic activity proceeds ahead of our

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ability to mine potential meanings and develop sensibilities in response. It takes time, reflection, and often interactive collaboration for unexplored messages and existential resonances to seep into our consciousness. Yet, this essay broadens Heidegger’s narrow view that moments of experiential nearness with language are a luxury restricted to heady “real” dialogue with profound thinkers and deep readings of poetic verse. Heidegger abased most ordinary dialogue as an obstacle to experiencing language’s radiance—too much chatter obscures the possibility of silent listening and deep thinking necessary to approach language’s veiled meanings. This essay argues that experiential journeys “on the way to language” transpire in the course of everyday dialogue in informal settings such as households and workplaces. Although naturalized and seemingly predictable, daily lifeworlds—with their institutional practices, moralities, epistemes (Foucault 1973) and other “inauthentic” (Heidegger 1962) ways of being—offer language-mediated experiential adventures whose path is marked by uncertainty, possibility, creativity, joy, relief, fury, rejection, anxiety, and other existential possibilities (Sartre 1992 [1943]). These language-evoked sensibilities are intrinsic to the generativity of self, other, and social life more broadly. In this perspective, even what Heidegger (1962) regards as inauthentic “idle talk” can evoke experiential awakenings, not all of which are welcomed. Consider, for example, John Haviland’s (1977, p. 187) account of Zinacanteco (Chiapas) households, where a heightened desire for privacy can be ruptured by gossip at any moment: “Gossip is a powerful and dangerous weapon … Bad words are like physical blows.” Do these voiced words effect existential moments in which language radiates what Heidegger (1971b, p. 30) calls “the Being of beings”? Probably not. Yet, gossip makes present to interlocutors revelations that, while not earth-shaking, may be experienced as jolting. Moreover, far from Heidegger’s view that idle talk is monotonous, gossip may spur intricate, creative dialogue, as documented in Marjorie Goodwin’s (1980) depiction of Black working class girls’ “he-said-shesaid” exchanges. As the girls initiate gossip, they attempt to bracket an occurrence in the stream of life as a disreputable event of note. Yet, the constitution of such an “event” is not interactionally ratified as a ready-made fact. Following Alain Badiou, for an occurrence to become an “event” depends upon how “the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world” (Badiou 2013, p. 10). In the case of “he-said-she-said” exchanges, accuser and accused launch a dispute about the possibility that an offensive event took place and often end up leaving indeterminate the particulars of what happened in an effort to avoid decimating one another’s moral character. Such exchanges seem far from Heidegger’s rarified dialogic reflections conducted with other phenomenologists on the essential being of language. Yet, the turn-by-turn unfolding of he-said-she-said talk similarly “unconceals” messages that transform the perspectives assumed by attentive interlocutors not only as individuals but also as relational beings. Heidegger posits a chasm between quotidian communication and extraordinary moments in which only deep, silent reflection can disentangle one from monotonous chatter to be able to experience the being of language and the language of being. What Heidegger misses, however, is the lush domain of informal communication, full of possibilities to wonder, speculate, hypothesize, improvise, discover, diverge, disagree, query, hesitate, stumble, repair, conjecture, enter alternative liminal universes, and mercurially time travel. In this domain, unexpected realizations and other experiential encounters with and through language are prevalent, built moment by moment with interlocutors (Duranti 2009b; Ochs 1994, 2012; Sterponi 2019; Sterponi and Chen 2019; Sterponi and Shankey 2013).

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

Temporal Unfolding of Everyday Experiential Encounters That experiencing everyday informal language is temporally unfolding and interactionally accomplished is captured in Alfred Schutz’s view that interlocutors co-experience one another in the course of communicating: I may find as given to my interpretation either the ready-made outcome of the other’s communicating acts or I may attend in simultaneity the ongoing process of his communicating actions as they proceed. … The latter relation prevails, for instance, if I am listening to my partner’s talk … We both, I and the other, experience the ongoing process of communication in a vivid present. (Schutz 1945, p. 542)

Schutz’s perspective draws upon Husserl’s notion that we apprehend others as living subjects like ourselves who experience the world imperfectively but intersubjectively and intercorporeally with us (Duranti 2010, 2013; Husserl [1913] 1982; Laughlin and Throop 2009). Schutz’s idea that interlocutors experience one another’s temporally unfolding meanings “in a vivid present” also echoes Husserl’s idea that we experience a temporal stream of consciousness in which remembered and anticipated experiences flow into the momentary primal “living-present” (Husserl 1991). Schutz (1945, p. 543) similarly emphasizes that speakers endeavor in their “vivid present” to connect their preceding and following speech in a stream of consciousness, while listeners in their “vivid present” move back and forth through “retentions and anticipations” to interpret the speaker’s meanings.5 The relation of time consciousness to subjects’ experience of language unfolding in the course of communication is dauntingly complicated and the object of considerable scholarship. How do interlocutors in the living/vivid present both rely upon and reconstruct past experience? How do interlocutors in the living/vivid present experience the present ongoing communicative encounter itself, including emergent collaborative meaning-making? Heidegger uses the expression “the presencing of language” to capture rare phenomenological moments in which language both makes itself present to us as an object and allows objects (e.g., ideas) to make themselves present to us in creative ways through its capacity as a semiotic medium. For Schutz, however, and for many scholars who document informal communicative exchanges among peers, family, colleagues, professionals, community members, and strangers, everyday language also pulls interlocutors over interactional time, word by word, gesture by gesture, and turn by turn towards sensorial, emotional, and conceptual awakenings.

Experiencing an Unfolding Utterance in Conversation with Friends

Across a remarkable body of writings, Charles Goodwin6 has made evident the intersubjective experience of incrementally building a proposition into a situational appropriate utterance. In the creative effort of formulating a proposition, interlocutors make use of multi-modal semiotic resources, including linguistic forms, gaze, gesture and other corporeal and environmental affordances. Just as ever more precise microscopes unveil a realm of

5

  These perspectives on time consciousness also resonate with Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) idea (discussed above) that as speakers endeavor to express themselves, they listen to what they have been saying and as listeners sift through their interlocutor’s evolving discourse, they speak silently to themselves. 6   Goodwin (1981, 1994, 2004, 2018), among others.

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life otherwise inaccessible, so video footage details micro-second by micro-second experiential encounters “on the way” to language, in this case, on the way to completing an utterance. In this experiential journey, speaking/apprehending subjects may finely but imperfectly and haltingly re-attune their proposition-in-the-making in response to ever-shifting existential conditions: intended interlocutors can become distracted or confused, or anticipate the point; the proposition may suddenly no longer match worldly conditions, and so on. An important point here is that building a single action (e.g., producing an utterance), state of mind (e.g., knowing or not knowing) or affect (e.g., humor)—is a “co-operatively calibrated” activity and experience (Goodwin 2018, p. 147). A well-known example is Goodwin’s 1981 analysis of the exquisitely calibrated co-operative building of a single utterance, “I gave up smoking cigarettes l-uh: one- one week ago toda:y actually.” Two couples, John and Ann and Don and Beth, are eating dinner together. John initially gazes at and designs his utterance as news for Don, “I gave, I gave up smoking cigarettes::.” Midway through the utterance, Don returns his gaze then replies “Yeah.” Not that remarkable thus far, but John has not completed what he wants to say. Turning to Beth he begins to specify the time period of his abstinence, “l-uh: one- one week ago toda:y,” but Beth does not return his gaze, and John is left hanging without recognition. Meanwhile, however, John’s wife Ann looks up and towards Beth just after John fumbles (“l-uh”) and restarts what he wants to say. Ann, being John’s wife, already knows that John “gave up smoking cigarettes.” Goodwin indicates an exquisite transformation in John’s proposition at this precise moment. First, John’s cut-off word “l-uh” suggests he was about to say “last” as in “last week.” Instead, however, John says, “one- one week ago toda:y.” In so doing, he turns the news into a mini-anniversary. Just as he drags out the word “toda:y” to mark the achievement, John shifts his gaze to Ann, who returns his gaze, and he adds “actually” to turn his utterance into a realization to happily share with his wife. What does the evolution of this utterance tell us about everyday experiential encounters “on the way to language”? First off, it offers an incremental model of experiential encounters with language that travels in milliseconds through the intersubjective and co-operative formation of an utterance. The propositional content of the utterance and the meaning it holds for interlocutors develop in relation to interlocutors’ ongoing awareness of one another and the world around them. From a phenomenological perspective, speaking/apprehending subjects, along with objects in the world, make themselves present in the course of uttering a proposition and that presence becomes integral to the building of the proposition itself. Rather than viewing a proposition as a product set in language as an objective representation of the world, the “languaging” of a proposition becomes a moment of human experience of meaning-making. Lastly, Goodwin’s analysis of intersubjectively attuned adjustments and discoveries that transpire in the rollout of propositional content dashes Heidegger’s idiomatic portrayal of everyday communication as experientially unilluminating.

Experiencing the Indeterminate “I” in Science Lab Discussions

The morality of strict objectivity in the modern paradigms of scientific knowledge has been controversial since the dawn of modernity, if not before. Historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (1992, p. 83) record that late nineteenth-century scientists were “required to foreswear judgment, interpretation, and even the testimony of one’s own senses.” Language was vilified as too subjective and too persuasive, and some hoped for a “wordless science” or, at the least, that mathematical graphs could serve as an objective representation (Daston and Galison 1992). Alternatively, Heidegger (1971b, p. 91) pitted poetry against science, with poetry being the ideal gateway to experiencing language and,

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

hence, to knowledge, while science, with its rigid methodology and measurement, is “merely the runoff of a great hidden stream which moves all things along and makes way for everything.” Similarly, Giorgio Agamben (1993, p. 16) despaired that modernity imposed “a form of experience as controlled and manipulated as a laboratory maze for rats” and insisted that it is folly to separate knowledge from speaking language: “Man does not merely know nor merely speak; he is neither Homo sapiens nor Homo loquens, but Homo sapiens loquendi,” and this entwinement constitutes the way in which the West has understood itself and laid the foundation for both its knowledge and its skills (1993 [1978], p. 7). Agamben also takes issue with modern science’s privileging of the ego cogito over Antiquity’s reliance upon the imagination as the gateway to knowledge: “Far from being something unreal, the mundus imaginabilis has its full reality between the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intellegibilis, and is, indeed, the condition of their communication—that is to say, of knowledge” (1993, p. 2). What Agamben conveys here is that our human capacity to imagine possible worlds clears the journey from experiencing the world to making the world intelligible. Indeed, famously, James Watson and Francis Crick took an imaginative journey when they imported the language metaphor of “genetic code” and constructed a visual image of a double helix on their way to conceptualizing the structure of DNA. That is, not only poets but also scientists routinely imagine physical matter as sending signals, exercising agency, and responding to commands, all of which influence the formation of knowledge (Keller 1995). The historicalization of objectivity and sociological insights into laboratory lifeworlds have made evident that language forms and practices inextricably penetrate the construction of knowledge in the sciences. For example, geopolitics orchestrates in which language (e.g., Latin, English) research claims are officially codified (Gordin 2015). And, less formally, scientists routinely come to progressive understandings of research findings through collaborative problem-solving that relies on genres of talk, text, and other semiotic modalities. What is of interest to the present essay is how scientists, as speaking/apprehending subjects, are moved by language in their discursive journeys to knowledge. Can Heidegger’s notion of “language speaks” include the iconoclastic context of science? Can language “speak” to scientists as they interactionally and routinely wrestle with the implications of their research findings? After eight months of participant observation and video-recording (60 hours) of group meetings and research operations in a physics laboratory, Elinor Ochs, Sally Jacoby, and Patrick Gonzales (1996) noticed a recurrent linguistic and existential phenomenon that differed from other reports of subjective involvement in the production of scientific knowledge. The laboratory studied the physics of atomic spins (magnetic moments) in a crystalline lattice, as they are affected by changes in magnetic fields and temperature. Changes in external conditions trigger transitions across a randomly disordered (paramagnetic) state of atomic spins, to a partially ordered (domain) state and a long-range ordered state. As observed in other science laboratories, the physicists’ discussions of experimental findings routinely used “physicist-centered” references that depict their personal involvement as actors in scientific enterprises (e.g., “We did experiments where we (.) we uh: (0.2) brought the system: uh: (0.8) here (pointing to location on diagram)”). They also used “physics-centered discourse” that foregrounded inanimate physical entities e.g., (gesturing high on blackboard) “At h-high fields (i-) or high temperatures, the system is in the paramagnetic regime.” Then, at moments in which the physicists seemed to reach an impasse in their thinking, a third, quasi-Heideggerian referential practice prevailed. This practice needs to be explained step by step, in that it involves grammar, gesture, graphic representation, and intersubjectivity across human and nonhuman domains of existence.

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In this referential practice the physicist and the physical entity under inquiry are blended into a single “indeterminate” referent, neither one nor the other. In the brief excerpt below, the lab director and theoretical physicist, Ron, and a graduate student and experimental physicist, Miguel, are at the blackboard trying to understand the results of an experiment conducted by Miguel. The results are graphically represented on the blackboard. Both Ron and Miguel are trying to understand why the results of Miguel’s experiment do not match the theoretical predictions of a computer-simulated study regarding how atom spins will behave at different temperatures and strength of magnetic fields. The “referentially indeterminate” constructions are highlighted in bold font. Overlapping utterances and corporeal actions are marked by left brackets ([) at the beginning of the overlap. Excerpt # 1 Ron: When I approach a phase transition      line [in different           [((looks at board; points to locus on graph))      [directions. That I understand.      [((looks at Miguel))      (.) Ron: [But what I [(.) tryin to- what I can't      [((looks at board; points to different locus on graph))      [((Miguel looks down; moves away from board))                  [((Miguel looks at board))      figure out is if this is truly      [a phase transition line      [((looks at Miguel))      (0.2) [why [don’t [I [go: [(0.2) to the            [((looks at board))                  [((moves finger to different locus on graph))                               [((moves finger to yet another locus and holds))                                        [((looks at Miguel))      long range ordered phase in the Kleeman experiment.

These utterances are semantically disjunctive, in that they contain a personal pronoun as subject. indicating an animate referent, and a predicate that refers to an event or state associated only with an inanimate referent. Ron formulates two propositions that can never be true as facts, and neither Miguel nor any of the surrounding lab team members blink an eye. Ron, a physicist standing at the blackboard can never in real life “approach a phase transition line in different directions,” where different directions means at different temperatures or magnetic intensity. Nor can he ever possibly (not) “go: [(0.2) to the long range ordered phase in the Kleeman experiment.” To whom, then, is Ron referring when he uses the first person pronoun? Could “I” refer to the matrix of magnetized atomic spins under study? That is, could Ron, like a ventriloquating puppeteer, be animating the voice of the atomic spins? No. Ron does not alter his voice quality nor is there a topic change. The “indeterminate” personal pronouns used by Ron and other members of the research lab are also produced swiftly in the midst of the usual physicist-centered and physics-centered utterances. Indeed, in the brief excerpt above, Ron moves effortlessly between the unmarked, “physicist-centered” pronoun (“That I understand,” “But what I [(.) tryin to- what I can’t figure out”) and the marked, “indeterminate” pronoun “I.”

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

Add to this that all the while that Ron is saying “When I approach a phase transition line in different directions” and “Why don’t I go: [(0.2) to the long range ordered phase in the Kleeman experiment,” he is also gesturing within a blackboard graphic representation of atomic spin phase transitions between parametric, domain state, and long range ordered states. That is, Ron is corporally enacting and experiencing the event/state being predicated. In the physical universe there is no “phase transition line,” or “Kleeman experiment.” In the graph there is such a line, and that line is approached via Ron’s finger point. The graph also begins to represent the Kleeman experiment as Ron’s fingers begin gesturing what did not happen to atomic spins in that experiment. In this manner, Ron’s pronoun “I” combined with his gestures deictically position Ron as inside the symbolic universe of the graph; and, given that the graph symbolically represents hypothetical physical configurations of atomic spins, this “I” also “enters” the universe of atomic spins. It is as if Ron has one presence in the laboratory where he is speaking and gesturing in the first person as physicist and a blurry phantom co-presence with graphically represented atomic spins. It is this liminal “I” that approaches “a phase transition line in different directions” and does not “go to the long range ordered phase in the Kleeman experiment.” Several important phenomenologically relevant implications follow from this routine moment of the lifeworld of a physics lab. First, an experiential encounter occurs with and through a morpheme, namely the first-person pronoun. Second, the experiential encounter occurs with and through embodied communication, especially pointing, touching, and moving the finger. In addition, the entire encounter depends upon a graphic representation that gives meaning to talk and gesture and affords a playing field for the experiential journey towards understanding physics. Moreover, the experiential journey is an interactional achievement that continues far beyond the above excerpt. Miguel had drawn the graph on the board and presented the results of his experiment to lab members prior to Ron’s response, and afterwards Miguel also assumes an indeterminate perspective, using the second personal pronouns “you” and “we” while gesturing within the graph: Excerpt # 2 Miguel: I’m going to throw ideas in the pot.         uh[HEre (.) (when) you reach this point [here (0.5)           [((points to locus on graph))         [((marks ‘X’ at                                                  locus on graph))         [u- prior to cutting the field we are in (the) domain state.         [((with other hand, points to another locus on graph)) Ron:  Yes

Miguel and Ron are co-involved in experiential journeys, shifting across radically differing universes of subjectivity—the lab, the graph, the configuration of atomic spins. Miguel goes so far as to bring Ron along his experiential journey, as he proffers the possibility that “we are in the domain state” and marks indexical loci on the graph. And Ron clearly affirms such a journey, “Yes.” This intersubjective, multimodal, trans-universe dialogue demands attentive listening but not “the peal of silence” that Heidegger celebrated as key to unlocking language’s veiled meanings. In the above excerpts, we do not witness an “Aha” moment of scientific discovery. Instead, we follow the quotidian journey to this end, an emergent, uncertain experience undertaken with the help of grammar, the body, the built environment, and the willing co-participation of others (Goodwin 2018). The physicists’ routine use of indeterminate

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pronouns suggests that scientific thinking is not the banal counterpart to poetry but instead a “blurred genre” (Bakhtin 1986) that oscillates between measurement and imagination.

Experiencing the Language of Panic at Home

We turn now to experiential encounters with language in lifeworlds marked by severe anxiety and recurrent panic attacks in relation to fearing the future. In the case of agoraphobia, the future fear is to be trapped in a place where one experiences heightened fear and anxiety about “not being able to escape to safety” (Rodebaugh et al. 2018, p. 439). Agoraphobia can be debilitating, leading one to circumscribe travel, self-medicate, and ruminate about past and anticipated catastrophes. Over the period of several months clinical psychologist Lisa Capps visited the home of Meg, a woman diagnosed with agoraphobia, to hear her experiences of panic from childhood to her present life as mother in her thirties with two children. Meg and her daughter Beth had already participated in a highly structured clinical study, at the end of which Meg lamented that she had no opportunity to really explain herself. Lisa decided to join forces with a linguistic anthropologist (Elinor Ochs) and return with tape recorder in hand to let Meg talk about her life as she chose. Meg’s accounts in the vivid present brought her right smack in the middle of (re-) experiencing past and projected panic attacks (Capps and Ochs 1995). Her tellings made present experiences of helplessness and anxiety about place, which could be geographical, like a freeway (“I’ve got to get out of here”) or existential (“Here I am with a little girl”). In recounting moments of panic, Meg recurrently deployed grammatical forms that cast her as irrational and past events as out of her control and still uncontained in the present moment. Below (in boldface) are a few recurrent grammatical forms that had palpable experiential effects on Meg as she was narrating: ●

●

●

●

adverbs of the unexpected “All of sudden all of the symptoms all of the worst symptoms I’ve ever had of anxiety just overtook me.” “I mean I had all these attacks that just seemed to come out of the blue.” Place adverbs of close proximity: “I thought, Here I am. I’m so damn mad I could just—storm of here in the car. But- I can’t leave. I’m nine months pre-almost nine months pregnant.” Non-agentive/diminished agentive semantic roles: “When we got to Utah, um the first night the anxiety really got to me.” “I was trying to escape the scary feelings I was having, but the- the more I tried the worse it became.” Intensifiers: “Mama’s really afraid.” “It was so awful, the feeling of that fear was so awful.”

It was not just grammar that carried Meg into states of panic; it was also how Meg structured her narratives. One key feature of Meg’s stories was that they played down or eliminated background circumstances that preceded, or one might say led to, the more immediate events that triggered a panic attack (e.g., Meg did not initiate or approve of trips that ultimately triggered panic but never voiced reservations before leaving). By way of an analogy, it is as if a storyteller recounts what happened in the moments before a tragic event but ignores the earlier or more general circumstances that contributed to the accident. Meg’s continuing focus on the immediate antecedent to panic did not serve her well, as it reinforced her self-image that she reacted irrationally and irrevocably bound panic attacks to the places where the attacks occurred. In these ways, Meg selectively opens herself to language but not to language that induces enlightenment. Instead, she comes close to being psychically devoured by a narrow set of grammatical and narrative structures that eat away at her sense of self-control. Perhaps Meg

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entanglements of language and experience in everyday life

thought that telling her stories to Lisa, a warm-hearted clinician, might set her free, as in formal psychotherapy. And maybe it did: a few months after Lisa’s last visit, Meg called Lisa to report a remarkable event (Capps and Ochs 1995, p. 193). After ten years of fearing airplanes, Meg decided that she must fly home to see her dying father, and, accompanied by her family, she did so. Notably, unlike the other trips recounted in her panic narratives, Meg herself initiated the trip. In striking contrast with her panic narratives, Meg opened her narrative with the self-affirmation: I decided to uh (.4 pause) at least make steps in that direction.

She itemized these steps: going to the airport to watch planes take off, entering empty planes, taking medication, and asking others to pray for her. Meg also voiced self-doubt: I felt a hopelessness, that there was no way I’m—(.4 pause) a person like me can do what I’m proposing to do … And I was thinking to myself thoughts like “Oh why can’t I be normal?”

Then impeded agency gave way to success: Before you knew it we were in Portland… And I knew that I had already endured the worst.

A Hollywood ending would portray Meg triumphantly expanding the periphery of her lifeworld. Meg’s concludes her narrative otherwise. Meg casts the trip as “almost like a fluke or really an act of God in my eyes,” diminishing her human will and clouding her path to other destinations.

Language in Motion This chapter has focused on one facet of the manifold entanglements of language and experience, namely the temporal unfolding of experiential encounters with language. Experiential journeys with language transpire in both clock time and time consciousness. In the realm of clock time, language, in all its multi-modal and semiotic formations, is produced and apprehended across measured units of time. Grammatical, discursive, gestural and other semiotic structures pull our experiential journeys along in clock time—The physicist Ron is experientially pulled along as he progressively utters, “When I approach a phase transition line [in different directions],” and midway through looks at and points to a locus on the blackboard graph. Yet, clock time is always immersed in time consciousness. As Ron uses personal pronoun “I” to “approach a phase transition line” and gazes and gestures in relation to a graph, the entire semiotic complex (grammar + gesture + graph) “presents” itself to Ron and his lab colleagues as a liminal space to enter and experience while also extending their consciousness beyond the here and now to remember how atomic spins responded in past experiments and their yet-to-be determined future implications. Here, in the flow of the lifeworld of the science lab, the physicists enact Husserl’s idea of a dynamic “living present,” wherein consciousness of the present moment is a temporal unity that absorbs the “retention” (present awareness) of something in the past that continues to be an object of awareness and the “protention” of possible futures (Husserl [1928] 1991). Experiential journeys that engulf engaged subjects in a language-mediated “living present” are ubiquitous in everyday life. These journeys can stretch one’s existential present into hypothetically possible states of being that are retained from the past and projected into the future. Not only scientists take these imaginative journeys. Meg, in the confines of her home,

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ruminates about dangerous circumstances that could have trapped her in the past and could trap in an imagined future. Her experiential journeys with language drive her to the point of panic in perpetuity. Recounting life events with Lisa Capps during her visits and with her husband and children on a daily basis sustains and amplifies her anxieties as her quotidian living present. Grammar and discourse go beyond symbolic representation to throw Meg in the living present into moments of felt entrapment. In addition to the panic-inducing language already noted, Meg uses the verb “get” repeatedly, each repetition building her desperation to “get out” of near-and-present danger and “get to” a safe haven like home: ● ●

● ●

“Oh my gosh if I get in my car and ( ) get out there I can’t get home.” “I feel anxious because I can’t ( ) get in my car and quickly speedily get home like I could on a normal day.” “I realized I was feeling anxious about the prospect of getting on this elevator.” “I gotta get out of here. I’m not feeling good.”

“Get” is one of the most frequent and versatile verbs in English and generally conveys a change from one state/location to another, especially with directional prepositions (“in,” “out,” “on”) and focuses on “the final result of the movement” (e.g., “get home”) (Bonneville 2006, p. 24). We can understand why Meg, who labels herself “agoraphobic,” repeats “get” to vivify her panic attacks. Each “get” projects her towards a desired location, which, in turn, stands in for a desired change of mental state that seems always just out of her reach. While all humans are circumscribed by their concerns, Meg’s way of being-in-the-world severely constrains her possible future, and language becomes a handmaiden to this end. Experiential journeys with language do not always end with a discovery, revelation, truth, or cure. Nonetheless, the human project, our way of being-in-the-world, resides in the journey itself. The indeterminate “I” helps physicists to experience the dynamics of atomic spins, but their journeys prompt them to design further experiments to come closer to understanding. Here experiential journeys infuse science’s perennial quest for knowledge. Coming to grips with a debilitating mental disorder seems lightyears away from scientific grappling with experimental results. Yet, Meg’s experiential journeys with language resemble the physicists’ journeys in bringing her into the belly of a conundrum that she strives to resolve. The difference is that Meg’s experiential journeys repeat themselves, although a remarkably successful trip to her dying father allowed a phenomenological clearing (of undetermined duration) to heretofore clouded alternative life experiences. The entanglements of language and experience discussed in this chapter complement a raft of other highly relevant approaches, especially performance-oriented studies (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 1997), the anthropology of voice and sound,7 the anthropology of language and emotion8, and the anthropology of qualia (e.g. Harkness 2015).9 The thread across these studies and this chapter is the resonant point that language is somatically experienced in ordinary life moments and that all communities offer creative possibilities for these experiences, alongside socio-cultural configurations of communicative comportment.

7

  See Feld (1982); Feld et al. (2004); Eisenlohr (2018); Keane (2011).   See Assor (2021); Besnier (1990); Corwin (2021); Ochs and Schieffelin (1989); Rosaldo (1984); Schieffelin (1986, 1990); Shohet (2021); and Wilce (2009). 9   Chumley and Harkness (2013, p. 3) note that anthropology “is fundamentally concerned with the perceptible qualities of the world: looks, tastes, sounds, smells, and feels. We are interested in qualities insofar as qualities are interesting to people—even if sometimes these interests are not explicitly stated, but remain only obscure points of orientation. We focus not so much on the material properties of things as on people’s reported experiences of and reflections on what they perceive to be their qualities.” 8

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19

Affect, Emotion, and Linguistic Shift

Kathryn E. Graber Introduction Whoever you are, it is likely that you, your parents, or your grandparents are part of one or more communities undergoing linguistic shift. Linguistic shift, also termed language shift, is the process of a community moving from speaking predominantly one language to speaking predominantly another. Warfare, conquest, marriage, migration, religious conversion, and extreme social change are all common conditions promoting linguistic shift. It can proceed swiftly, but more often it happens incrementally, bit by bit and from generation to generation, with periods of bilingualism in which people use both languages—but perhaps for different purposes. In modern times, colonialism and globalization have driven many communities to shift from using predominantly indigenous languages to using mainly one of the so-called “global languages,” such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Russian, Arabic, or Chinese. There can also be a shift to using a lingua franca, that is, a language used for inter-community communication across a large territory, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Swahili, or Indonesian. This is what has prompted so many linguists and language activists to warn of mass linguistic extinction and global linguistic homogenization—although new languages and linguistic varieties are also continually emerging. Scholars have mostly viewed the reasons for linguistic shift in terms of macrosociological conditions, that is, by locating individual interactional choices within the context of broader economic, political, and sociocultural pressures. Indeed, colonialism and globalization produce just such macrosociological conditions. When viewed from the perspective of individual speakers, however, linguistic shift is rarely solely about political economy. Deciding which language or languages to speak with your children, or with your father or grandparent or teacher or employer or friend, might be as simple as taking a cold, hard look at the relative utility of languages (this one will get me a job, this one will not, etc.), but your evaluation of different languages and varieties is likely also colored by emotional attachments. Likewise when your community is giving up a way of speaking, a wide range of emotions can be at play. This chapter provides an introduction to work on emotion and affect in linguistic anthropology (see section entitled “Emotion and Affect in Linguistic Anthropology”) and an overview of emotional responses to linguistic shift (see section entitled “Emotional A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Responses to Linguistic Shift”), followed by an exploration of emotional responses and affective alignments in an ethnographic example of linguistic shift-in-progress in Russia (see section entitled “Two Scenes from Linguistic Shift-in-Progress”). The conclusions address future directions for research in this area.

Emotion and Affect in Linguistic Anthropology In everyday English usage, people use both the words “emotion” and “affect” to describe a feeling, expressed either overtly (e.g., by saying “I feel sad”) or implicitly (e.g., by crying or turning red with embarrassment). In scholarship, however, emotion is increasingly separated from affect. This is a booming field across several disciplines, and due to this interdisciplinarity, and to the volume of scholarship being produced, it can be difficult to pin down which definitions a particular author in the “affective turn” is employing (Clough 2007). Most work on affect tries to capture how feeling is shared and spread, with a focus on “inbetween-ness” and the mesh-work of building resonance across individual experiences and contexts (e.g., Gregg and Seigworth 2010 [eds.]; Massumi 1987, 2002; Stewart 2007). The two are also often distinguished by how we access them, as analysts. They are sometimes conceived of as cognitive (emotion) versus bodily (affect), as interior (emotion) versus exterior (affect), or as biography (emotion) versus biology (affect). For our purposes in linguistic anthropology as a discipline grounded in ethnographic and linguistic description, we can distinguish between emotions as feelings, again expressed either explicitly or implicitly, and affect as the embodied, social alignment of emotion and stance. Because affect, thought of this way, is empirically observable in the course of social practice, it offers a compelling “way in” for those of us seeking to understand emotional commitments. Linguistic anthropologists have investigated emotion and affect primarily in the domains of socialization, aesthetics, and poetry or other verbal art. Since the early twentieth century and working in the lineage of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, linguists have tended to emphasize the referential and denotational functions of language (that is, the use of language in referring to and describing objects in the world) and have tended to view expressive language as less important than grammar. Linguistic anthropologists have taken a different view. Foundational figures such as Edward Sapir argued that, as Judith T. Irvine (1990, p. 127) puts it, “emotional expression is pervasive in linguistic structure, and that the communication of personality and emotional states is culturally organized in a speech community.” In the late 1980s, a group of scholars took up this point in earnest, drawing on Roman Jakobson’s work on poetics and the many non-referential functions of language, and on parallel work in ethnomusicology that was increasingly revealing cultural systems of expressivity (e.g., Feld 1990). Much of this research has focused on registers and how particular ways of speaking evoke affective stances (e.g., Cavanaugh 2009; Haviland 1987; Irvine 1990; Wilce 2009), as well as how children are socialized to recognize and use these markers of affective stance (e.g., Ochs 1986; Ochs and Schieffelin 1989). Early work in this area also drew on Raymond Williams’s discussion of “structures of feeling” and on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of “body hexis” and “habitus” as ways of thinking about how, through repeated interactions, people align their actions and bodies in socially significant ways (Lutz and Abu-Lughod [eds.] 1990). By paying attention to how people stand, laugh, gesture, and otherwise move in an interaction, conversation analysts and other scholars of communication have long focused on action, stance, and embodiment, or how people use their bodies to communicate (e.g., Goodwin 2000, 2007). Meanwhile, research on multilingualism has shown that bilingual speakers often reserve a particular language or variety

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(code) for a particular stance or genre of communicating, such as swearing or baby talk (e.g., Ferguson 2019; Garrett 2005; Muehlmann 2008; Smagulova 2014). Some of this research has shown that when a minority language becomes the main way of expressing negative affect, such as anger (imagine a parent reserving one language for yelling at a child), this can hasten linguistic shift (Kulick 1998).1 Linguistic shift produces a rich context in which to see people expressing and aligning themselves because it generates lots of discussion about language. Language is not only a behavior but also an object of reflection, open to metacommentary and intervention by speakers themselves. A growing body of research has focused on the contradictory, painful, and sometimes subversive ways in which language attrition and shift are interpreted and commented upon by speakers of the contracting language.2

Emotional Responses to Linguistic Shift Emotions of different types suffuse linguistic shift, and in many cases, we can unpack the affective stances that develop and spread those emotions. Here I review four conditions that are common to situations of linguistic shift-in-progress and that are likely to generate emotional responses (see also Graber 2019). 1. When a contracting language—that is, the language being abandoned—symbolizes a nation, place, or time that has been invested with emotional significance, speakers may feel pride in it and happiness for mastering it—or shame for not maintaining the language and anger or despair over the forces conspiring to force linguistic shift. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, India was rocked by violence and dramatic suicides undertaken in the name of “mother tongues” including Telugu, Bengali, and Tamil, which had been increasingly replaced by Hindi and English. Lisa Mitchell (2009) has shown how these events were animated by changing political discourse that elevated these “mother tongues,” and by a discourse of loss that made individuals feel desperate to save what they perceived was being taken from them. This example shows how affect can offer a way to understand emotional commitments. How did Tamil become an object of such strong devotion that individuals would self-immolate in the name of restoring Tamil over Hindi? Sumathi Ramaswamy (1997) argues that the Tamil language took on the character of a “mother” over successive performances of devotional talk, within which the language was figured as “soft” and “sweet,” as a mother-goddess to be loved and worshipped, and also to be protected. She cites the poet Kannadasan, who wrote in 1954, “Even in death, Tamil should be on our lips. Our ashes should burn with the fragrance of Tamil. This is our undying desire” (Ramaswamy 1997, p. 66). Reiterating the appropriate alignment of body with desire across published texts and public performances—including, in this case, literal self-immolations—reflexively set conditions in which the same emotional attachment could reverberate across a wider group of people. Similarly, speakers of a minoritized language or dialect, such as Apache in the face of English (Samuels 2004), or the regional dialect Bergamasco in the face of standard Italian (Cavanaugh 2004, 2009), might treat it as a resource for expressing aesthetic 1

  For more comprehensive reviews of this literature, see Besnier 1990; Pritzker 2020; Pritzker et al. (eds.) 2019; Wilce 2009. 2   Cavanaugh 2004, 2009; Ferguson 2019; Meek 2007, 2010; Muehlmann 2008, 2012.

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sensibilities as well as political stances. When juxtaposed against an English-dominant surrounding culture, speaking Apache becomes a way to evoke the feeling of being Apache; when juxtaposed against an Italian-dominant surrounding culture, speaking Bergamasco becomes a way to feel Bergamasco—and to invoke a proud past that speakers feel is otherwise slipping away. The feeling that something is slipping away might also be attached to one type of language, such as a particular register (a way of speaking associated with some particular context of use) or genre. In the twentieth century, Bengali speakers coping with capitalist modernity focused not only on shifts in language-as-code but also on a changing type of talk called āḍḍā. This genre of comfortable, intellectual conversation or “chatting,” engaged in by Bengalis in Kolkata, involves mostly men and sometimes women discussing politics, current events, arts, and literature, and more, intermixed with rumors and personal affairs. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1999) has argued that āḍḍā became a key sign of Bengali modernity, especially for middle-class Kolkata men, and that its transition from demarcating a space of comfort and rest to denoting a particular type of competitive intellectual banter signaled the emergence of a modern, literate, and capitalist-oriented middle class. As āḍḍā changed in character, it also became the object of intense nostalgia, not least because it was so tightly connected to Bengali identity that for āḍḍā to die seemed to be for Bengali-ness to perish as well. Mourning and nostalgia over linguistic shift here are not about language per se, and perhaps they are not even about Bengali-ness as much as they are about feeling powerless in the face of social change. As Chakrabarty (1999, p. 113) notes, “[T]he apparent nostalgia for adda today occupies the place of another—and unarticulated—anxiety: How does one sing to the ever-changing tunes of capitalist modernization and at the same time retain a comfortable sense of being at home in it?” 2. Linguistic shift not only reflects social change in this way but also produces it. When linguistic shift involves whole languages, it nearly always produces intergenerational “gaps,” in which children or grandchildren cannot communicate fully with their elders. Some communities actively welcome intergenerational language shift as part and parcel of a broader, desirable social change, such as assimilating into the culture of a host country, converting from one religion to another, or becoming more “modern” (e.g., Kulick 1992). Some families are happy to employ non-accommodating bilingualism, in which each party assumes the other has passive comprehension and speaks in the language they prefer. Each language comes to play a different social role within the family and community, with children working out which language to speak to whom (e.g., Zentella 1997). Often, however, speakers experience intergenerational gaps in linguistic knowledge as painful, personal ruptures within families. Among the most common responses to such intergenerational change is to double down on learning or re-learning what has essentially become a “heritage language.” Scholars of heritage language communities sometimes distinguish between heritage learners, who may have some proficiency in the language that has been shifted away from, having heard it as a home language or as a specific caregiver’s language, and learners with a heritage motivation, who may have no proficiency but seek to reconnect with their familial or ethnic heritage (He 2012; van Deusen-Scholl 2003). Striving for reconnection, (new) learners with a heritage motivation can effectively create new metalinguistic communities—communities of like-minded people who are trying to recapture a form of belonging by learning a language and treating it as a particular kind of social object. Netta Avineri (2019) has shown how Jewish women learning Yiddish, for example, feel a strong emotional, personal attachment to Yiddish, connecting

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language study to highly personal endeavors such as romance and weight loss. Even if they do not become full speakers, they effectively create a metalinguistic community within which the language is highly socially valued. Such emotional value can be the basis for staunching linguistic shift—or at least its starting point. 3. Discourses of linguistic loss, endangerment, and death themselves may engender resignation, sadness, apathy, or anger. In what has historically been known as “salvage linguistics” and “salvage ethnography,” linguists and anthropologists have often rushed to study languages that were thought to be on the “brink of death,” with only a few remaining “last speakers”—that is, speakers whom other community members might consider fully competent. But by that point, it is likely too late to “save” the language and to reverse linguistic shift, because there are so few people actively using the language and because the language has likely been denigrated and undervalued over a long period of time, which is hard to make up for. For example, Daniel Suslak was documenting Ayapaneco, an indigenous language of Mexico, when it became the focus of a media storm for having only two aging “last speakers” who would not speak with one another (this was not an accurate portrayal, but blaming two grumpy old men made a good story). “One of the cruel ironies of language death in the twenty-first century,” Suslak (2011, p. 569) observed, “is that languages that have gone unrecognized and unappreciated during their long existence find themselves—in their twilight hour—the objects of intense scrutiny and concern.” In these circumstances, some would-be speakers of indigenous languages understandably react with wariness and apathy to outsiders’ interest (Hill 2002; Muehlmann 2008, 2012). Moreover, some communities have strong ideologies of language ownership or language secrecy, such that outsiders talking about the language at all is a kind of cultural (mis)appropriation that can evoke anger (Debenport 2015; Nevins 2013). 4. When ideologies of purism are at play, the mixing practices that so often accompany linguistic shift may be interpreted as dangerous or “dirty.” For instance, in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s, communities that had once spoken mostly the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl (Mexicano) were shifting to mostly speaking Spanish. Adults were partly or fully bilingual in Spanish, and many children were monolingual in Spanish. Here Jane and Kenneth Hill (1986) found strong ideologies of purism. Even though in practice people codeswitched between Nahuatl and Spanish or intermixed grammatical features and lexical items, they held the two languages to be two discrete codes that should not be mixed. In contexts like this, semi-speakers may feel shame, embarrassment, and anxiety when they are called upon to perform in the native or minoritized language and fear they do not control it well enough to do so. Community leaders and young people alike can be forced into a preservational imperative that is difficult to meet, and that can produce anxiety, shame, and a deep sense of sadness (Graber 2017; McEwan-Fujita 2010). Shame about not being able to produce a disappearing language can paradoxically motivate silence (Graber 2020). It is thus not only that individuals emotionally respond to linguistic shift that would happen anyway. Rather, affect and emotion can be powerful drivers of linguistic shift as well. More than merely providing a context for witnessing affective attachments rent asunder, linguistic shift is, in these ways, a form of social change that forces us to better integrate scales of social analysis. Linguistic shift is always the result of billions of minute decisions made by individual humans in complex interpersonal contexts and scenarios. To better capture the mechanisms behind linguistic shift—and, indeed, behind social change more broadly—we need to move beyond thinking of people’s motivations in exclusively political

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economic terms. We need to better connect geopolitical contexts and power relations to the minute, everyday decisions that make up shift over time. This is not to say that attending to affect and emotion in linguistic shift is antithetical to attending to the very real political economic factors on which researchers have heretofore focused. On the contrary, attending to affect and emotion in individual experiences, interpersonal encounters, and unlikely “non-serious” genres can reveal greater truths about sociopolitical processes.

Two Scenes from Linguistic Shift-in-Progress To see what we can learn by attending to affect and emotion in linguistic shift, I draw here on ethnographic research in the Buryat territories of Russia. In this region, along the Russian-Mongolian border, the Mongolic language Buryat once dominated, even serving as a regional lingua franca. But over the course of 400 years of contact with Russianspeaking fur trappers, exiles, settlers, revolutionaries, and labor migrants, during which Russian has been the language of economic and political power, ethnic Buryats (and nonBuryats who once paid them tribute) have shifted from speaking mostly Buryat to speaking mostly Russian. In the post-Soviet period, receding state support for minority languages, an embattled local economy, and rapid urbanization have brought especially rapid linguistic and cultural change. Between the 2002 and 2010 All-Russian censuses, the percentage of the total Buryat population of the Russian Federation reporting knowledge of Buryat fell from 72 to 45%.3 On the face of it, this might seem like a straightforward problem of language and political economy. Buryat is devalued in workplaces and outside of the Republic of Buryatia, as well as outside of circumscribed Buryat-cultural spaces within the republic, so it appears to lack prestige and the kind of socioeconomic potential that would lead young people to want to use it—or parents to want to speak it with their children. And yet, Buryat is highly valued in some contexts and for some purposes, such as in religious contexts (especially Buddhist and shamanic/animist contexts), Buryat-dominant workplaces, and stage performances, where audiences expect a purist literary standard. In interviews and surveys, many people talk about language shift from Buryat to Russian in terms of sadness and loss. They use affective and emotional words to describe the situation: in Russian pechal’no (‘sad,’ ‘regrettable,’ ‘grievous’), grustno (‘sad,’ ‘sorrowful,’ ‘melancholic’), or zhal’ (‘a pity’ or ‘a shame’); in Buryat uidkhartai (‘sad,’ ‘sorrowful’) or gunigtai (‘sad,’ ‘mournful,’ even ‘anguishing’).4 These are the kinds of words, in Buryat, that people use to describe songs about star-crossed lovers or warriors far from home. What about when people do not name their emotions directly? How can we see these attachments affectively? How and in what contexts do people express those emotions, and what do they imagine are the solutions for staunching their sense of loss—as a practical matter and as one of coping and living? In the two scenes examined here, we see BuryatRussian speakers trying to work out what has happened to their knowledge of Buryat and 3

  This can partially be explained by differences in how census questions were asked, but there is no question that knowledge of Buryat within Russia is declining (Graber 2020). Varieties of Buryat are also spoken in Mongolia and China. 4   Transliteration of Russian and Buryat follows the International Scholarly System for Cyrillic, except for those terms that already have established English-language spellings (e.g., Buryat). Russian appears in italics and Buryat with underlining.

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how they should feel about it. We see, too, how they affectively align themselves with co-participants in emotional interactions of different types.

Mending Ties with the Ancestors

While the ultimate causes of Buryat-Russian linguistic shift are undoubtedly rooted in tectonic socioeconomic and political upheaval, to not speak the language of one’s grandparents, great-grandparents, elders, or ancestors becomes a personal and familial problem, and one that is often (though certainly not always) experienced as loss. As noted above, linguistic shift usually produces such intergenerational “gaps,” in which one generation has a significantly better understanding of the language than the next, or indeed in which a new generation does not know a prior generation’s language at all. How, in these circumstances, do people regain a sense of connection? One of the main answers is language revitalization—or what we might call language reclamation, to better capture the sentiment with which people pursue it. People generally engage in language reclamation as a mode of reclaiming other cultural and social connections, as exemplified by a young Buryat woman named Larisa, who now goes by “Yanzhima.” When Larisa was twenty-two years old, she had a major epiphany. She realized that she had been living “incorrectly,” which she explained to me a couple of years later in both psycho-spiritual and ethnolinguistic terms. She had been “living, speaking, and thinking like an (ethnically) Russian girl [russkaia devushka],” she said, as opposed to “sincerely” as a Buryat. Wishing to rectify this, she began visiting Buddhist lamas and shamans for advice, asked a lama for a traditional Buryat name to replace the Russian “Larisa” that her parents had given her, and set about learning her family’s genealogy. She dragged out her family’s heavy, burgundy-bound hardback dictionary of Buryat, which she claimed she had never before touched or seen anyone else open. And as Yanzhima, her new name, she used her breaks from work at a clothing shop selling Polish and French fashions to begin studying Buryat. At the time, she said, there were no organized classes for adult learners of Buryat, and most of her elderly, Buryat-language-dominant relatives had passed away. She struggled through newspaper articles with the aid of her dictionary and tried to make small talk with Buddhist lamas at the local temple. Her greatest hope was to be able to raise her own children to speak Buryat. Over the past twenty years, I have met many people like Larisa/Yanzhima, who feel either ashamed that they have lost touch with their Buryat roots or angry that they have been cheated out of that possibility by parents who did not teach them Buryat words and traditions. She was somewhat unusual in the zeal with which she pursued her reidentification as “Buryat,” but she was typical in expressing a longing for a kind of cultural reclamation. She was typical, too, in stressing that she was not learning Buryat as a new or foreign language. Rather, she was reclaiming her “own” (svoi) language. While Larisa/Yanzhima had not grown up speaking any Buryat and had never had any active control of the language, she identified it as her “native language.” She is one of the many people in postSoviet Russia who identify their native (rodnoi) language as their heritage or ancestral language, based on their cultural or ethnic identity, without claiming active or even passive knowledge of the language’s grammar or lexicon. Larisa/Yanzhima is a poignant reminder that a person may care deeply about a language that she does not herself speak.5

5

  On the use of “native language” as a descriptor in the post-Soviet context, and on the spatiotemporal ruptures at issue here, see Graber 2020.

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What historical moment was the target of her affection? Yanzhima rarely put her journey of self-discovery in historical terms—it was highly personal—but one afternoon, she showed me how she conceives of a temporal disjuncture between past and present. She had just been telling me about her Buryat studies and she referenced her search for “Buryat self-consciousness” (samosoznanie, also meaning ‘self-awareness’ or ‘self-understanding’). I had previously heard this term used by some philosophically and psychologically minded cultural activists, but Yanzhima was not prone to political activism, so I gingerly asked her what “Buryat self-consciousness” she hoped to reclaim. “You know—” she broke off and jumped up onto the sofa to rummage around on a high shelf for a while, eventually pulling out an old black-and-white photograph and presenting it to me with a flourish. She watched me carefully to see my reaction, her eyes sparkling. It was her great-great-grandparents, she said, of whom she had only this single photograph. In the photograph, a young couple stands in front of a wooden yurt, the woman wearing some of the elaborate silver jewelry typical of the time, studded with semiprecious gemstones like coral and turquoise—very “ethnic” (ėtnicheskii), Yanzhima pointed out to me with a tone of wonder. They both wear Buryat dėgėls, thick robes buttoned on the side and cinched at the waist with a belt, and from the man’s belt hangs a large knife sheath. He also wears a fedora. They stare seriously, straight into the camera, their brows slightly furrowed. The portrait appears to have been posed in the 1910s or 1920s in western Baikal, perhaps for a visiting ethnographer, but the photographer is unknown and the photograph is undated. Yanzhima looked at me expectantly, and despite neither of us having much insight, we pored over the photo for a good hour, mulling over the details of their clothes. The past to which Yanzhima aspires is pre-Soviet—and possibly even predating Russian contact. She assumes that the great-great-grandparents pictured in the photograph spoke Buryat and knew nothing of Russian ways, though it is likely, given their origins near Irkutsk, that they and perhaps even their own great-great-grandparents had plenty of contact with Russians and Russian speakers. But this was not why she showed me the photograph. Over years of doing fieldwork in Buryatia, I have spent uncounted hours poring over hundreds of family photo albums. Why would so many people, upon learning that I am interested in Buryat-language media and hearing my questions about what radio programs they listened to, pull out family photo albums and show me the hairstyles of their great-aunts? They implicitly show, in this way, how inextricable language issues are from the context of their family lives and family history, while also incorporating a visiting ethnographer into their familial narrative. Pulling me in to lean over photo albums, embodying nostalgia and synchronizing our viewing, effectively aligns our emotional responses—to families, to the past, and to linguistic shift. This is affective labor.

Kitchen Language: Comfort, Familiarity, and Ways of Being Off Stage

While Yanzhima was actively trying to learn Buryat, it is common for young people to avoid contexts in which they would have to perform Buryat linguistic competence. Speaking Buryat “well”—especially the literary standard—is highly valued, but few people in this situation of advanced linguistic shift can do it. As the political stakes of preserving Buryat have in recent years increased, so too have the stakes of speaking Buryat, publicly and well. This produces a kind of performance anxiety that would-be speakers are keen to avoid (Graber 2020). How might individuals escape this emotionally charged predicament? Where could they find a release from the preservational imperative pressed upon them and the dilemma of reclamation? In researching the more public spaces of Buryat-language media production, I found

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affect, emotion, and linguistic shift  361

that people were consistently carving out alternative spaces in the domestic sphere—homes, in short, and especially kitchens—where they could feel comfortable not speaking Buryat “well.” This was where they most often engaged in “mixed” bilingual practices that were otherwise stigmatized, and where they commented on them as well. Some of the most heavily circulated humor about language mixing—often humorously called a “Buryat pidgin” consisting of Russian words plugged into Buryat syntax—involves domestic scenes (Graber 2017). Buryat speakers strongly differentiate between a standard literary register and colloquial ways of speaking. When I learned Buryat as an adult doing fieldwork, my tutors focused on the standard literary language, drawing on their expertise in linguistics to explain verb morphology and having me translate long newspaper passages from Buryat into Russian. I memorized the Buryat names of trees, berries, and wildlife of the steppe and taiga, only a small portion of which are still actively used by the region’s increasingly urbanized Buryat population. Outside that narrow pedagogical context, other speakers of Buryat, who were mostly bilingual in Russian and who tended to use much more colloquial forms of Buryat with more Russian influence, assessed my acquisition differently in different instances. After my first appearance on Buryat-language television, acquaintances and strangers alike praised me for speaking what they called “real Buryat” with many Buryat-origin forms that native speakers claimed not to know themselves. One of my older Buryat-speaking friends, Bairma, was particularly proud of my performance, because she felt she had played a part in it, and she delighted in all the “ancient words” I had learned at the university. A few months later, however, chatting over tea in her kitchen, she turned suddenly to her cousin Sėsėgma, visiting from their ancestral village, and switched from Russian into a rapid, colloquial Buryat that I could barely follow. They laughed heartily at a joke Bairma made, and she looked back at me, addressing me in her usual not-quite-native Russian. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” (Ty ponimaesh, chto ia govoriu?) I answered honestly that I had caught only a few words, and did not get the joke. “Ha!” she exclaimed with satisfaction, thumping the table hard and making the teacups and jam jars rattle. “That’s because we speak real Buryat here! Sure, it’s not like… on stage.” She swept her arm out grandly, as though on stage, to the merriment of her cousin. “It’s not like… in the newspaper.” She tapped a copy of a Buryat-language newspaper that was sitting close at hand. “But it’s real Buryat, right?” For confirmation, she turned to Sėsėgma, who tried to nod seriously but was laughing so hard that tears had sprung to her eyes. “You should be learning here, in the kitchen [na kukhne]! Ha ha! That’s where you’ll learn real Buryat!” In the post-Soviet era, the kitchen has become the metaphorical means for discussing the linguistic shift that is plaguing many national minorities of the Russian Federation and independent post-Soviet states. Ongoing linguistic shift to Russian throughout the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods has manifested itself as an intergenerational shift from print literacy in both Buryat and Russian to print literacy in Russian and oral comprehension in Buryat. A similar pattern of shift has been at work to greater and lesser degrees throughout the semiautonomous ethnic territories of the Russian Federation, as Russian is increasingly used in most domains of public life and native regional tongues are relegated to use “in the kitchen.” While still widely spoken, languages like Tatar, Udmurt, and Buryat are often dismissed by their speakers as too poor, too colloquial, or otherwise unfit for life outside the kitchen. As these native languages become restricted to increasingly narrow functional domains, speakers themselves refer to them as “kukhonnye iazyki”—or ‘kitchen languages.’ (Graber 2017) Sometimes these assessments are exaggerations. Buryat, for instance, has a rich tradition of literary production and is taught in local schools and used on the evening news. This should remind us that the category of “kitchen language” is more discursive than analytic: the use of the term does not necessarily correspond to an observable rigorous distinction between linguistic practice inside and outside of kitchens. Speakers, after all, do not always

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do what they describe, let alone pre- and proscribe. What is remarkable—and what we must take seriously as ethnographers—is how strongly speakers like Bairma and Sėsėgma feel the distinction between what happens (or what they think should happen) inside and outside of kitchens. Assessments of kitchen language grant us, as analysts, opportunities to better understand how speakers are experiencing language attrition and shift, as well as what role affect and emotion might play in sociolinguistic processes. Bairma’s laughter about the location of “real Buryat” points us toward the importance of humor in minority language politics. While she is invoking questions of authenticity and linguistic authority that have painful consequences, her laughter frames her commentary as play (Bateson 1955). Just as drunken speech provides a framework within which what would otherwise be “fighting words” can be “laughingly excused” (Hill and Hill 1986, p. 119; see also Harvey 1991), joking provides a framework within which speakers can safely criticize one another’s speech, reaffirming pragmatic rules for the appropriate use of different codes and registers and subtly commenting on linguistic shift. How the kitchen is treated here, as a space to be both inhabited and evoked, also shows us how comfort, familiarity, and solidarity figure in linguistic shift. Some metaphorical uses of home and hearth are positive, drawing on sentimental connections to a space of comfort, relaxation, and maternal care. For instance, there is a sense in which Bairma’s exclamation that “real Buryat” resides in the kitchen can be read as a positive assessment of domestic linguistic practices. Locally, the term “kitchen Buryat” can also refer—like “kitchen Greek” (Cochran 1997)—to the childhood language that a person learned at home before entering school, giving it neutral and sometimes warm, familial connotations. In public appraisals of vernaculars, however, or of the plight of “local” languages in the face of “global” languages like English, the positive connotations of the hearth are frequently elided (e.g., Haberland and Mortensen 2012; Wertheim 2009). Accordingly, speakers themselves are not concerned equally about all possible domains of linguistic shift. When a speaker says, “Buryat is only a kitchen language” (as people often do), they assume that the territory of the kitchen is already somehow lesser than other domains of linguistic action. That inferiority allows a degree of being off stage and a feeling of freedom from the weight of maintaining a language in shift.

Embodying Change, Aligning Priorities

To understand Bairma’s commentary, we first have to interpret her laughter, which provides a good starting point for attending to affect and emotion in the study of linguistic shift. Affect theorists insist on the centrality of non-linguistic modes of communication, whether accompanied by linguistic action or not. Far from tacking on attention to gesture and other embodied action as “paralinguistic” communicative work ancillary to language, affect theorists largely start from the presupposition that the center of communication is social alignment, not words or written or verbal messages. As the scholar of mimetic communication Anna Gibbs (2010, p. 199) puts it, “[S]ympathetic modes of communication not only persist alongside linguistic modes: they also inhabit and actively shape them. These are not rudimentary, infantile, or so-called primitive modes of communication: rather, they are the essential prerequisites for, and working collaborators with, verbal communication. They are not noise in the system: they are part and parcel of it.” Empirically based social scientists, including linguistic anthropologists, have sometimes been cautious about following the affective turn, the work on language and emotion discussed above notwithstanding. This is perhaps because some affect theorists insist on the

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affect, emotion, and linguistic shift  363

ineffability, unconfinability, and uncontainability of affect. If affect is ineffable, unconfineable, uncontainable, and beyond ordinary experience (per e.g., Massumi 2002), then those of us who pursue ethnographic accounts of language use in situ are left no object of analysis.6 But some ethnographers press productively on affect’s supposed ineffability to probe how exactly people interlink different experiences through narratives, through “inbetweenness” and interpersonal or intertextual resonance (e.g., Cassaniti 2015; Lepselter 2016; Stewart 2007). These are approaches that, while not necessarily centered on linguistic form, are consonant with attending to linguistic form and situated language-in-use. Linguistic anthropologists can, and should, build on the prior work on emotion and affect reviewed above and stretch the tools of linguistic and interactional analysis to incorporate the kind of phenomena to which such theorists are now drawing our attention. In particular, linguistic anthropologists are well positioned to describe how individuals affectively align themselves in situ and build or renegotiate their emotional attachments. Better understanding linguistic shift, as one species of social change, will require attending to exactly such moments.

Conclusions Following are three questions and three specific ways this line of research may be fruitfully developed, as suggested by the examples we’ve seen in this chapter: on love; on what’s really at issue in linguistic shift for real, living people; and on the work of affective alignment in interactions.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Loyalty and love routinely inspire people to use, or at least value, a language their community is otherwise shifting away from. This has been demonstrated by Nancy Dorian’s (2014) work on the “language loyalty” of young Scottish fisherfolk who, despite being fluent in higher-prestige English and not speaking the local dialect of Scottish Gaelic well, nonetheless persist in using that dialect as best they can. Just as Larisa/Yanzhima was trying to reclaim a relationship with her ancestors, many Buryats seek to reclaim personal relationships with living relatives in ways that interweave language with other cultural practices that are locally figured as “traditional,” “ethnic,” and “Buryat,” in highly personal ways. Young people living in Ulan-Ude, who might otherwise have little reason to use Buryat, will go out of their way to speak Buryat when accompanying an elderly relative to a Buddhist temple or a shamanic ritual—not necessarily out of respect for gods and spirits, as Buddhist lamas and shamans often do, but out of respect for their elders. Tsypėlma, a college student in UlanUde, mostly avoided environments in which she would have to speak Buryat, because although she had good passive understanding, she—like many other Buryats her age—did not feel she could speak it well. Nonetheless when she made Buryat food with her grandmother, she went out of her way to try. Similarly, Barbra Meek (2007, 2010) describes a Kaska community in the Yukon in which young people’s feelings of respect, tenderness, and protectiveness toward their elders color their feelings for the Kaska language as well—despite strong economic incentives to use English. In these cases, what looks, from the outside, like resistance to linguistic shift is motivated by love from within.

6

 See Clough 2007 for discussion of this problem, presaging affect theory’s uneven uptake across disciplines.

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Yet the role of affect and emotion in linguistic shift, or in language and social change more generally, is not a straightforward matter of positive emotions resulting in positive outcomes (i.e., language maintenance and reclamation) or of negative emotions resulting in negative outcomes (i.e., language contraction and death, or at least slumber). Nostalgia is an example of this complexity. Much as Chakrabarty observed Bengalis’ nostalgia for āḍḍā, linguistic anthropologists who have studied minority languages in contexts of shift have often noted how the minority language becomes an object of nostalgia (e.g., in work by Jillian Cavanaugh, Graber, and Meek reviewed above). The use of the minority language itself can become a way of expressing “positive” emotion and achieving “positive” affective alignment, such as by showing respect to your elders, or by demarcating a safe, comfortable space. But nostalgia is more about wistfully longing for the past than it is about actively trying to recapture a lost past, so being valuable in this way does not preclude continued linguistic shift. The Buryat case furthermore shows how highly valuing a language, especially through public performance of a purist literary standard, can paradoxically lead to silence and further linguistic shift. You can love a language to death.

What is Language Choice Really About?

Buryat-Russian language shift has its own politics and history, but the feelings of historical disruption, longing for belonging, and affective warmth that I have described above will be familiar to many other researchers of linguistic shift. Also common is how, for people overwhelmed by sociocultural change, the choice of one particular language over another functions as a resource for understanding and expressing loss. Their sense of loss is not fundamentally “about” language, but because the language is available to hand as a ready, concrete example of loss, and because language is an expressive system, language shift becomes the lens through which Buryats understand cultural loss and social change more generally. In this context, language choice becomes a matter of leaning into social change or resisting it, and discussing language use explicitly or implicitly, such as Bairma joking about “kitchen language” and “real Buryat,” becomes a form of broader social commentary.

Who Does the Work of Affective Alignment, and Where?

Feelings are associated not just with using languages (e.g., Buryat, Russian, Kaska, English) for their denotational or referential function but also with their different varieties, registers, and genres. Poring over photos with friends, making food with your grandmother, and joking are distinct speech genres associated with particular contexts that prompt different affective stances. Many of the public contexts in which would-be Buryat speakers are called upon to perform “good” Buryat—such as being interviewed for television, reciting poems in front of a class, or performing on a literal stage—are daunting, difficult, and politically loaded. But giggling over an old photo lets a personal form of reclamation stay lighthearted and just that—personal. Joking about how terrible everyone’s Buryat is lets everyone off the hook. These contexts provide a framework for feeling a particular way and expressing particular emotions, due to past ways of using the genre. That wasn’t Bairma’s first joke, after all. But, more important than the fact that different feelings are associated with different speech genres and contexts is the way that different speech genres and contexts affectively align those feelings. This is the enmeshing work that interactions of different types do, and that can be captured by attending more closely to affect. In the cases we saw above, revaluing and revitalizing Buryat might be an ultimate effect, but the proximal goal was something else, such as mending ties with ancestors or building solidarity. Although Yanzhima was

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affect, emotion, and linguistic shift  365

ultimately learning Buryat and participating in efforts to slow or reverse linguistic shift, her proximal goal at twenty-two was completing a journey of self-discovery that will be familiar to many of us. In the act of poring over a photograph of her now-mythic relatives, we were validating the target of her affection and furthering our friendship. Bairma ultimately reinforced a distinction between purist and colloquial Buryat, but her proximal goals in ridiculing “kitchen Buryat” were providing some levity and building solidarity with the people in her kitchen. While these are not tasks in the usual sense of the word, they are the work of real people navigating linguistic shift and determining how to feel about it. In an oft-cited discussion of taskscapes, Tim Ingold (2000, p. 196) observes that “people, in the performance of their tasks,” attend not only to their own behavior but also attend to one another. […] By watching, listening, perhaps even touching, we continually feel each other’s presence in the social environment, at every moment adjusting our movements in response to this ongoing perceptual monitoring. […] Indeed it could be argued that in the resonance of movement and feeling stemming from people’s mutually attentive engagement, in shared contexts of practical activity, lies the very foundation of sociality.

Ingold has in mind a highly physical task (specifically hunting) in this passage, and he does not have very much to say about language. But because language use in situ is also an embodied action, his observations apply to how people align themselves—or don’t—in a communicative act. Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have long made a similar argument about alignment with respect to performance and the way performers imagine, prefigure, and preemptively respond to their audiences, speaking in anticipation of them such that all speech becomes dialogic (for roots of this line of thinking, see especially Bell 1984; Goffman 1981). Across the examples provided in this chapter, we can see how interactions about linguistic shift demand mutually attentive engagement. Or, rather, they are interactions achieving some other proximal task that, in the process, focus collective attention on the shared object of linguistic shift. This is how we can witness and examine change in progress, as individual feelings become concretized into reasons to speak—or not speak—a language in a particular way. Today’s embodied feelings, expressed, shared, and aligned in interactions across different contexts, do not only reflect more widely held “language attitudes” and “language ideologies”; they become tomorrow’s.

Acknowledgments For thoughtful comments that improved this text, I am grateful to the editors as well as to Christina Collins, Ilana Gershon, Colin Halverson, Emily McKee, Sarah Osterhoudt, and Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar.

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Kulick, D. (1992). Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kulick, D. (1998). Anger, gender, language shift and the politics of revelation in a Papua New Guinean village. Pragmatics 2 (3): 281–296. Lepselter, S. (2016). The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lutz, C.A. and Abu-Lughod, L. (eds.) (1990). Language and the Politics of Emotion. New York: Cambridge University Press. Massumi, B. (1987). Notes on the translation and acknowledgments. In: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (G. Deleuze and F. Guattari), xvi–xix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. McEwan-Fujita, E. (2010). Ideology, affect, and socialization in language shift and revitalization: The experiences of adults learning Gaelic in the Western Isles of Scotland. Language in Society 39 (1): 27–64. Meek, B.A. (2007). Respecting the language of elders: Ideological shift and linguistic discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17 (1): 23–43. Meek, B.A. (2010). We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mitchell, L. (2009). Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Muehlmann, S. (2008). ‘Spread your ass cheeks’: And other things that should not be said in indigenous languages. American Ethnologist 35 (1): 34–48. Muehlmann, S. (2012). Von Humboldt’s parrot and the countdown of last speakers in the Colorado Delta. Language & Communication 32 (2): 160–168. Nevins, M.E. (2013). Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Ochs, E. (1986). From feelings to grammar: A Samoan case study. In: Language Socialization across Cultures (eds. B.B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs), 251–272. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B. (1989). Language has a heart. Text 9 (1): 7–25. Pritzker, S.E. (2020). Language, emotion, and the politics of vulnerability. Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 241–256. Pritzker, S.E., Fenigsen, J., and Wilce, J.M. (eds.) (2019). Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ramaswamy, S. (1997). Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley: University of California Press. Samuels, D.W. (2004). Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Smagulova, J. (2014). Early language socialization and language shift: Kazakh as baby talk. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18 (3): 370–387. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Suslak, D.F. (2011). Ayapan echoes: Linguistic persistence and loss in Tabasco, Mexico. American Anthropologist 113 (4): 569–581. van Deusen-Scholl, N. (2003). Toward a definition of heritage language: Sociopolitical and pedagogical considerations. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 2 (3): 211–230. Wertheim, S. (2009). Who’s using who? The fieldworker as documenter and tool of language revitalization. Language and Communication 29 (3): 271–285. Wilce, J.M. (2009). Language and Emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Zentella, A.C. (1997). Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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20

Using the Senses in Animal Communication

Erica A. Cartmill Introduction Animal communication, like human communication, is a multimodal phenomenon. Just as humans entwine speech, gestures, bodily postures, noises, and facial expressions when they talk with one another, non-human animals use multiple modalities and senses when communicating with conspecifics (other individuals of the same species). Some animal species communicate primarily in one modality; others use several. Importantly, the timescales over which animals communicate can differ greatly from human communication. Some things described in the literature as animal signals are immutable traits (e.g., color or pattern), things that cannot be controlled by the individual. Other signals (e.g., pheromones) are deployed by animals and have a clear onset, but fade slowly over time in a way that is determined by the physical constraints of the modality rather than by the actions of the signaler. Animals derive information about others from a wide variety of sources, but only some of these sources have evolved to communicate with others. Biologists studying animal communication make a distinction between signals and cues (Laidre and Johnstone 2013). Signals are traits or behaviors that have been shaped by natural selection to convey particular types of information to a specific kind of audience. The evolution of signals impacts the fitness of both signalers and receivers i.e., how successful these animals are in passing their genes on to the next generation. Cues, by contrast, can be used to gain information about an animal but are byproducts of other behaviors and did not evolve to communicate information. For example, a pigeon with a leg injury might walk with a limp, and other pigeons or predators could use this as a cue to their health. However, this differs from the broken wing display that some species of birds have evolved as a signal to lead predators away from the location of their nests (Humphreys and Ruxton 2020). The distinction between signal and cue bears some resemblance to Erving Goffman’s distinction between the expression a person gives and the expression they give off. The expression given involves a speaker’s purposeful use of symbols to convey their conventionally agreed upon meanings. The expression given off includes many non-symbolic and potentially unconscious actions that others can use to infer things about the speaker (Goffman 1959). While there is no agreed-upon definition of communication used in research with animal, signal typically denotes a behavior that A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

alters the behavior of another and for which both the production and the comprehension have been shaped for that purpose by natural selection (Maynard Smith and Harper 2003). Linguistic anthropologists and scholars of animal communication have little overlap in their theories or literatures. As the example above shows, however, they often play with similar concepts concerning the construction, expression, and interpretation of meaning in spontaneous interactions between the individuals they study. While the biological literature is more likely to cite Darwin and Dawkins than Goffman, Gumperz, and Grice, it is also concerned with questions of reference, relevance, social interaction, and meaning-making. In some ways, the job of the anthropologist is simpler, because we can interview people to gain insight into the meanings, intentions, and uses of unfamiliar expressions. In other ways, the biologist’s job is simpler, because animal communication systems are not as multivalanced and complex as human language. My goal in this chapter is to provide an overview of the ways animals use different sensory channels in their communication. I also introduce the reader (most likely a linguistic or sociocultural anthropologist) to important biological concepts like sexual selection, honest signaling, information theory, and mimicry. Rather than attempt a comprehensive review of animal communication theory (for excellent overviews, see Bradbury and Vehrencamp 2011; Maynard Smith and Harper 2003; Searcy and Nowicki 2010), I provide examples from a wide variety of species to illustrate the different ways animals communicate, their different sensoria, and how different communicative modalities possess unique communicative opportunities and constraints. The chapter is organized according to three themes: core biological concepts in animal communication (e.g., natural selection, honest signaling, information theory, mimicry); perceptual systems used in communication (e.g., sight, hearing, touch, smell/taste), and linguistic concepts as they are applied in animal communication (e.g., reference, intentionality). My hope is that this chapter provides a starting point to empower more anthropological scholars to undertake work on animal communication. Biologists simplify and categorize communicative interactions for the purposes of quantitative analysis and experimental manipulation. This is important in trying to understand the connections between signals, fitness, and selective pressures, but it greatly underestimates the complexity of animal interactions and may lead scholars to characterize animal communication as simpler than it is. Linguistic anthropologists could bring an important lens to studies of animal communication by bringing the features and complexities of interactions into focus. This might lead to a more complex and nuanced view of animals as social beings who can draw on a wide variety of sources in meaning-making.

Natural Selection

Animals and humans face many similar social challenges and use communication to make friends, attract mates, compete with rivals, and otherwise structure their social worlds. However, only humans possess an open-ended linguistic system that allows users to combine a finite set of learned items in new ways to convey an infinite set of meanings (von Humbolt 1836 [1999]). This makes it possible for humans to communicate about things that they, their predecessors, or interlocutors have never encountered or imagined before. Language makes it possible to speak of unicorns tandem-riding Segways or teleporting skylarks with 40-year mortgages. Animal communication systems are much more limited. Signals are typically genetically inherited rather than learned, and the contexts in which signals are given (sometimes called eliciting stimuli by biologists) are often fairly limited. That doesn’t mean that animal signals

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can’t be complex. Animals can perform elaborate displays incorporating many elements and involving multiple senses. However, the forms and deployments of most animal signals are not selected by the communicating animal during the interaction (as a human might decide whether to make and how to structure a request). Instead, they are shaped by natural selection over many generations. There are different kinds of selective pressures that can shape animal signals over evolutionary time. Sexual selection is commonly invoked to explain the presence of complex courtship displays and sexually dimorphic traits. For example, an individual with the most impressive (read: attractive) mating display would win more mating opportunities and thus have more offspring. Assuming the mating display was at least partially heritable, that individual’s offspring would have more attractive displays than the offspring of other individuals and they, in turn, would win more mating opportunities and have more offspring. Thus the trait would spread throughout the population and if there continued to be variation in how attractive the displays were, animals with the most attractive displays would likely have the most offspring and the features of the average display would become more and more pronounced over generations. When a signal is pulled in one direction by sexual selection, it is often pulled in the opposite direction by energetic cost or predation risk. Larger, more ornate features or displays typically incur costs for the signalers, and thus only animals in peak condition can afford to have the showiest versions (Figure 20.1). This tradeoff has been called honest signaling—to convey the idea that the signal produced by an animal is an index (Peirce 1935) of the health, age, size, fertility or other qualities of the signaler (Zahavi 1975). These types of signals are difficult if not impossible to fake (though see Backwell et al. 2000 for a study of fiddler crabs dishonestly signaling fighting ability by re-growing large but weak claws). Human language cannot be called an honest signaling system because there is very little that cannot be faked in human communication. To avoid deception, humans must instead rely on social norms, relationship strength, and reputational costs.

Figure 20.1  Peacocks are a classic example of sexual selection and the ways predation risk limits that selection. Males with the most feather eye spots (biggest tails) attract the most mates and have more offspring, who also have larger tails. However, tail size cannot keep increasing indefinitely because larger tails make it more difficult for peacocks to fly, perch, and avoid predators. These two competing pressures keep tails large but place an upper bound on size. Source: Tezzstock/Adobe Stock.

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“Information”

Animal communication research has been strongly shaped by the model of information transfer formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, now seen as foundational to information theory. In Shannon’s model, “information” is conceptualized as a set of messages that must be encoded, sent over a noisy (or leaky) channel, and then received and decoded at the other end (Shannon 1948). It resembles de Saussure’s (2011 [1916]) concept of a speech circuit, particularly in emphasizing the articulation between a psychological processes (the concept) and a physiological one (the telling). The Shannon model has been applied to certain aspects of human language (e.g., efficiency of encoding information across languages: Coupé et al. 2019), but is generally regarded as being too simple to explain all the complex inferences humans make when communicating. Animal communication, however, is often analyzed through the lens of information. Animals involved in a communicative exchange are described as signalers and receivers or recipients, and much attention is paid to how the signals are transmitted and whether the signals (rather than the contexts) contain the communicative message. When the signal alone is enough to convey the message, it is deemed to be meaningful and context-independent, in the sense that it continues to carry meaning even when separated from its original context. For example, a pointing gesture directed at a dog loses its meaning when it is removed from its physical context (and has nothing to point to). The word “dog” carries at least some of its meaning when used across a wide range of contexts. Human languages can communicate many things in ways that scholars of animal communication would consider “context independent,” for example, by recording things in writing or by retelling an event to another person after it has happened (e.g., “toads emerge after it rains”). However, as many linguistic anthropologists have shown, much of the information in human communication is carried outside of the semantics and syntax of the linguistic system. Speakers convey many kinds of information through extra-linguistic and paralinguistic features of interaction. Vocal elements like accent, pitch, speed, breath, and vocal fry all convey meaning (e.g., Gal 1995; Mendoza-Denton 2011; Sicoli 2015). So do situated bodily movements like gesture, gaze, posture, and facial expression (e.g., Duranti 1992; Müller et al. 2013; Sidnell 2006). The physical and social contexts surrounding a communicative act are also critical in understanding its full meaning (e.g., Goodwin 2018). Gumperz (1992) described these types of extra-linguistic features as “contextualization cues.” He argued that rather than being seen as peripheral to linguistic communication, they should be recognized as necessary for interpreting the content of a speech act and for relating it to what precedes or follows. The distinction in animal communication between the signal alone and the signal plus its social and environmental context can be thought of in terms of de Sausurre’s notions of langue and parole (2011 [1916]1). Here, langue would be the ideal structures and meaning of a signal in the abstract and parole would be the signal as it is used in a natural communicative exchange. Take, for example, a male song sparrow singing to defend his territory against rivals. The species-typical ideal song (estimated from recordings of many individuals), including the pitches of the notes and the patterns of the song phrases, could be considered langue. The way that particular male sings his song on that day, including the small variations, deviations, and other “imperfections” he makes when singing could be considered parole. Additionally, the broader social and environmental contexts of his singing all

1

  Note the Gumperz (1982) argument contra Saussure that we should not label some communicative elements central and some peripheral.

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add to the full meaning. These could include: the way he hops from branch to branch along one side of his territory while singing, to direct his song to a rival neighbor; his individual identity (e.g., Chuck not Henry); his age and fitness; the identity of his neighbor; the size and location of his territory; the time of day and of year; the presence of eavesdroppers; and the threat of predation during his song. All of these factors (and more) could play a role in understanding and interpreting the full meaning of his communicative act, for analysts and fellow sparrows alike. Animal communication researchers tend to search for and privilege signals that can be understood outside of their original context(s). While it is not possible to test contextindependence in all types of signals, many studies of animal communication record and present signals outside of the context in which they were recorded in order to see whether the signal itself carries the full meaning, or whether it is only one of many clues to meaning that occur within the signaling context. Auditory signals are perhaps the easiest to experimentally isolate from their original contexts. They can be recorded and then played back to animals outside of the original context. These so-called “playback” studies form a cornerstone of animal communication research and are the dominant method for testing meaning of animal signals. Because perception of auditory signals does not depend on seeing the signaler, it is possible to fool animals into believing that the signal is made by a conspecific and not a group of researchers crouching in the bushes with a speaker. Acoustic signals also lend themselves to experimentation because it is relatively easy to measure, manipulate, and reproduce them. You can change the pitch, duration, or phrase order in a recording of birdsong using a laptop, but it is much more difficult to identify, let alone manipulate, the volatile compounds in an olfactory signal.

Who’s Who?

Some animal signals are directed towards a particular individual; others are broadcast for detection by any individuals within the perceptible range. This leads to several types of signal recipients, echoing the distinctions Goffman makes between kinds of hearers and other participants in his discussion of footing in human communication (1981). While broadcast signals are not directed at a particular individual, they may have the goal of reaching a particular kind of audience. They might be “designed” (through natural selection) to attract mates, declare ownership over a territory to potential rivals, or raise an alarm for group members when a predator is detected. Directed signals can use the full range of senses, but broadcast signals are typically limited by the range and detectability of the signal medium. For example, it is difficult to broadcast a tactile signal to many others (though it might be possible by vibrating a shared substrate). Broadcast signals are most likely to rely on sound (e.g., songs) or smell/taste (e.g., urine marking). The substrate within which a signal is transmitted can also impact its perceptibility. Sound travels well through the air, but only certain frequencies can travel long distances in the water. Many aquatic animals instead rely on chemical signals to communicate at a distance. For both directed and broadcast signals, the recipient is typically another individual of the same species (i.e., a conspecific). However, there are some cases where the recipient is an animal of another species (i.e., a heterospecific). This can be seen when prey species vocalize in the presence of a cryptic (hidden) predator to indicate that they have been spotted and the animal is no longer an easy meal. Designating a recipient does not imply intentional communication on the part of the signaler, but, rather, that a predator is present when the signal is produced, the animal does not hide when signaling, and the predator responds to the signal by changing its behavior.

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Just as in human language, when an individual other than the targeted audience perceives and acts on a signal, they are said to be eavesdropping (Valone 2007). For example, a male chickadee might eavesdrop on a broadcast song contest between two other males and modify his subsequent behavior to more aggressively defend his territory against the winner of the overheard exchange (Mennill and Ratcliffe 2004). Eavesdropping can also happen between species. There are many examples of animals learning to respond to the alarm calls of another species though they may be quite different from the calls of their own species (Magrath et al. 2015).

Production vs. Perception

Many species have evolved particular features or behaviors that improve their ability to perceive signals. These may be static traits like large ears or better color vision, or they may be postures or behaviors that help an animal use a particular sense more effectively (Figure 20.2). For example, one animal might sweep its head side to side, thereby increasing its perceptual field in sight, electroception, or smell, while another might stop moving and angle its ears, allowing it to better locate the source of a sound. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney detail the different challenges for signal production and comprehension in their 2003 paper “Signalers and receivers in animal communication.”

Mimicry

Some species evolve markings, calls, or displays that resemble (“mimic”) those of other species (see Endler 1981 for an overview). This is often seen when a prey species (A) evolves a signal that resembles a species (B) that preys on their predators (C). When C sees A’s signal, it may mistake A for B (i.e., it might mistake its prey for its predator). Since B preys

Figure 20.2  This male horse is improving its ability to smell by raising its front lip and displaying its teeth in a smelling posture called flehmen. This posture helps animals pull pheromones and other scents into the Jacobson’s organ (also called the vomeronasal organ), a patch of specialized cells located in the nasal cavity that detect liquid organic compounds. The flehmen response is found in many mammals (those with a Jacobson’s organ), but is absent in African primates and great apes (including humans). Source: Kimberley/Adobe Stock.

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Figure 20.3  The caterpillar of the Hemeroplanes triptolemus moth strongly resembles a snake when it raises the front half of its body into the air. The area resembling the top of the snake’s head is actually the underside of the caterpillar. The caterpillar’s mimicry of a snake is effective at deterring its main predators (birds), which are prey for many snake species. Source: Atelopus/Adobe Stock.

on C, C might become fearful and leave A alone. Of course, as the mimicked signal evolves in A, the ability to detect mimicry evolves in C, in what is often referred to as a predatorprey arms race (Dawkins and Krebs 1979; Thompson John 1994). Importantly, none of this is conscious! It evolves very slowly over many generations with no end goal in mind and no intention in the signaler. Figure 20.3 illustrates an example of this type of mimicry. A few species have evolved behavioral mimicry, produced by copying sounds or movements rather than static traits. This is most salient in birds that can replicate the vocalizations of other species (heterospecific signals) as well as other sounds in their environment. Heterospecific vocalizations are learned rather than inherited by mimicking birds, and what has evolved is the ability and tendency to copy rather than the resemblance to another species. The motivations for vocal mimicry are debated. Some studies suggest that birds mimic the calls of other species to elicit their aid in mutual predator defense (Goodale and Kotagama 2006). Others suggest that birds mimic alarm calls of other species to deter competitors (Kelley and Healy 2012). While the ability to mimic by copying sounds may seem familiar to us because many of the bird species kept as pets are vocal mimics, this type of behavioral mimicry is much rarer across species than mimicry in static traits like the caterpillar in Figure 20.3. Heterospecific vocal mimicry is limited to a handful of species: humans, some bird species, cetaceans, pinnipeds, elephants, and bats, species also considered intelligent and flexible in their behaviors (Dalziell et al. 2015; Janik and Knörnschild 2021).

Perceptual Systems We tend to think of there being five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste (Finnegan 2002). This categorization and the way senses are described differs somewhat across societies (Majid and Levinson 2011) and human perception includes other types of sensory behavior like proprioception (knowing where one’s body is in space). However,

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these five senses provide a useful starting point to consider and compare sensory worlds across species. Some animal species have abilities that humans lack (e.g., magnetic perception, echolocation, sensing heat or electricity), while others lack one or more of the “human five.” Though there are many differences between the sensoria of different species, the senses typically used in animal communication can essentially be clustered into these familiar five categories. The definition of each sense, however, has to be broadened to account for abilities of animals that fall outside of human perception (e.g., seeing ultraviolet light, producing bioluminescence, hearing/feeling infrasonic vibrations). Table 20.1 provides a rough overview of the major perceptual channels and gives examples of the types of animal signals that make use of them. Of course, many signals are multimodal and involve more than one sense. Birds often produce visual displays along with their calls. Many kinds of touch also include the exchange of chemical signals perceived through smell or taste. I have tried to organize the examples below according to the dominant sense involved in their perception.

Table 20.1  Comparison of different perceptual senses and the ways they are commonly used in communication across animal species Perceived element

Physical Typical sensing contact organ(s)

Sight (vision)

Light waves

no

Hearing (audition)

Sense

Example(s)

Eyes, photo­ sensitive cells

Visual marking, Gesture, Lumination, Movement

Sound waves no or vibrations in water or ground

Ears, jaw, swim bladder, body

Vocalization, Hitting body part or substrate

Touch (taction)

Pressure or yes temperature changes on body

Body, whiskers

Pushing, Pulling, Fanning, Licking, Embracing

Smell (olfaction)

Chemical signals

no

Nose, antennae, other chemoreceptors

Urine, Sweat, Pheromones

Taste (gustation)

Chemical signals

yes

Tongue, skin, antennae, other chemoreceptors

Urine, Sweat, Pheromones

Sensing Electricity (electroception)

Electrical signals

no

Electroreceptors Weak electrical pulses

Vibrations may be felt with the whole body rather than just the jaw or bones in the ear. These could be considered either hearing or touch. Smell and taste are closely related; animals may sample the signal through either sense. There may be no difference in some substrates (e.g., water).

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Sight

Animal communication relying on sight falls into two broad categories: static traits and dynamic behaviors. Traits are features of the animal itself rather than behaviors the animal produces. They are long lasting and may be permanent. Feather coloration and antler size are examples of traits that serve as signals. Individuals with more brightly colored plumage or larger antlers are typically in better health and are thus more formidable opponents and more attractive mates. Individual animals can’t do much to alter these traits, but the traits might change slowly over time as an individual becomes more or less stressed or well-fed. Traits can be considered passive signals because they are not deployed, displayed, or turned on by the signaling animal; instead they are continuously present. They can be considered broadcast signals in that they aren’t directed at a particular individual, but can be picked up by any recipient within range. As with other types of signals, visual signals can target conspecifics or heterospecifics. One type of static visual signal targeting herterospecifics is bright coloration suggesting that a potential prey species is poisonous or distasteful. Most prey species are “cryptic” (camouflaged against the background), and only the most fit individuals can display bright colors or other noticeable markings since it makes them easier to see and thus incurs an increased risk of predation. However, some prey species have evolved a different strategy by displaying bright colors that make them highly visible to predators. These traits lower predation risk by communicating to would-be predators that the animal would make an unpleasant meal. This type of coloration is called “aposematic” and is sometimes described as warning coloration. Species with aposematic traits evolved their bright markings alongside toxins in their skin or other predator deterrent features (Figure 20.4). Predators quickly learn to avoid those colors or patterns after a few unpleasant encounters with poisonous prey. The bright colors might not help the first animal a predator samples, but they are likely to help its relatives, and thus the trait remains in the population. Some palatable prey species have evolved to mimic the colors or patterns of poisonous or otherwise unpalatable species, though they do not have the predator-deterrent features themselves. This is called Batesian mimicry (Bates 1862) and could be considered an example of dishonest signaling. A classic example is that of the drone fly (Eristalis spp.), which closely resembles the honeybee, though it does not have a stinger (Brower and Brower 1965).

Figure 20.4  Many animals, like this poison dart frog, have evolved bright colors along with toxic or noxious compounds that make them distasteful to predators. This is known as aposematic marking or coloration. Source: Alcuin/Adobe Stock.

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Animal signals relying on vision include many types of dynamic behaviors as well as static traits. Gestures, displays, dances, facial expressions, and postures are all primarily visual signals. Humans typically think of movements and body postures as the main types of dynamic behaviors and bodily coloration and markings as the main types of static signals, but some animals use dynamic visual signals that humans cannot produce. Some insects and fish communicate using light (bioluminescence), broadcasting visual signals to others at long range when there is very little environmental light (Herring 2000; Lloyd 1983). Some cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, and squids) communicate by changing patterns of color on their body using specialized pigment sacs called chromatophores (Mather 2016; Packard 1995). These color changes can be subtle, similar to blushing, or fast-moving bright patterns almost like a wearable video screen. In some cases, the information transmitted in dynamic visual signals are only perceptible during the act itself. Gestures, facial expressions, and some postures and dances have this property. The information they are attempting to convey disappears when the signaler finishes the movement. In other cases, dynamic displays are used to draw attention to a static trait, like the color or size of a part of the body. In these cases, the trait persists after the movement has ended. For example, fiddler crabs wave their large claws above their heads when threatening a rival. This display posture allows both competitors to see and compare the size of their claws. Claw size is a good indicator of fighting ability (Jennions and Blackwell 1996), and so the crab with the smaller claw may retreat rather than risking injury in a fight. Many fight displays have evolved to facilitate comparison of size, strength, or agility and thus allow competitors to avoid risking injury in physical combat (Laidre and Johnstone 2013). Dynamic display of static traits is common in courtship as well. The intensity of blue on the feet of blue-footed boobies is an indicator of health and vigor and is a preferred trait in selecting a mate (Torres and Velando 2003). The mating display of the blue-footed booby is a relatively simple dance in which each foot is lifted and shown off in turn (Nelson and Nelson 1978, Figure 20.5). This movement highlights the brightness of the bird’s feet and allows others to better examine them. Many signals targeting heterospecifics are dynamic behaviors emphasizing static traits. Prey species frequently use heterospecific signaling to deter or deflect predators. In some cases, the prey species will display a conspicuous marking when a predator starts to attack causing the predator to startle and delay, withdraw, miss, or attack a non-vital body part. In other cases, the prey species will burst out of hiding when a predator draws near and display a conspicuous marking while fleeing. Sometimes these anti-predator markings are visible all the time, but may become more salient during an escape maneuver or defensive posture. The sudden change between crypsis and aposematicism is often referred to as a startle display, causing the predator to startle or recoil at the abrupt sensory overload (Umbers et al. 2017). Perhaps the most well-known anti-predator markings are so-called eye spots: bright circular markings commonly found on many insects and fish that stand out from the background colors of the animal (Figure 20.6). Historically, scholars have believed that these markings resemble the eyes of the predator’s predator (Stevens 2005). This would serve as a strong deterrent to attack, and could provide the prey species time to escape, even if the predator only hesitated for a split second. Recent studies, however, have questioned whether these markings really mimic the eyes of dominant predators (Stevens and Ruxton 2014).

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Figure 20.5  The bright blue feet of the blue-footed booby are highlighted during courtship displays. While they have no control over the color of their feet, the birds can make the color more visible by raising and showing off each of their feet in turn. This display illustrates how a dynamic behavior can make a static signal more prominent. Source: Dennis/Adobe Stock.

Figure 20.6  The Io or peacock moth (Automeris io) has large, prominent eye spots on its back wings. Source: Jim and Lynne Weber/Adobe Stock.

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using the senses in animal communication  379

Hearing

Sound is a critical modality in many animal communication systems. It is particularly important for communicating across long distances, in environments with low visibility, and for locating out-of-sight group mates. Much of the research on acoustic communication focuses on vocalization, but animals use many other types of sounds to communicate as well. Insects create sound by rubbing their legs or wings together or by vibrating soundmaking organs (Figure 20.7). Birds are known for their calls and songs, but many also communicate by rhythmically tapping on trees or by clapping their wings together. Primates use a wide range of vocalizations, but also frequently communicate with oral noises that don’t engage the vocal chords (like smacking their lips together) (Fedurek and Slocombe 2011). Many animals also make communicative sounds by striking, shaking, slapping, or scratching objects in their environment. Vocalizations can be directed or broadcast. Directed vocal signals are typically softer and less noticeable at a distance. They may be particularly important in negotiating and strengthening close social bonds (e.g., during nursing, grooming, or comforting). Broadcast vocalizations are designed to be perceptible by many individuals or by certain types of individuals at a distance. These calls are frequently used to mark territory boundaries, advertise for mates, and raise alarms when threats are detected. In a now classic example, researchers found that vervet monkeys produce unique alarm calls in the presence of leopards, eagles, and snakes (Struhsaker 1967). Playback studies

Figure 20.7  Animals produce sounds in many ways, not only through vocalization. Insects, like this Brood X cicada (Magicicada septendecim), often make communicative sounds with specialized organs or by rubbing their legs or wings together. Male cicadas have an organ under each of their wings called a tymbal, which produces a loud sound when it is vibrated. Source: Erica A. Cartmill.

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demonstrated that the calls themselves produced different predator-defense behavior in the listeners. Leopard calls led to monkeys running up into the trees, eagle calls to monkeys crouching low or taking cover, and snake calls to monkeys standing up on their hind legs and scanning the ground (Seyfarth et al. 1980). This finding led some to describe the vervet calls as words for leopard, eagle, and snake. However, it is important not to default to our own linguistic and conceptual categories when describing animal communication. The alarm call system of domestic chickens illustrates this point. Chickens produce different calls for raccoons and raptors (Figure 20.8). In playback studies, these calls elicited different defensive postures (standing tall and looking around vigilantly for raccoons, crouching down for raptors). This might lead to the assumption that chickens have one call that means “raccoon” and one that means “raptor.” However, when the researchers presented chickens with videos of raccoons above their heads, chickens produced the call normally given to raptors. It became clear that chicken alarm calls communicate the direction of likely attack (terrestrial vs. aerial) rather than the type of animal (Evans et al. 1993). Of course, we shouldn’t conclude that chickens have a call that exactly means “terrestrial predator” or one that means “aerial predator,” but these types of clever experiments, combined with detailed observations of animals in the wild, bring us closer to understanding how animals conceptualize and communicate about their worlds. The frequency of an auditory signal presents both affordances and constraints. It is easier to locate the source of a low-pitched sound than a high-pitched sound. So, while low-pitched sounds may be more effective at attracting conspecifics, they also run the risk of allowing eavesdropping predators to more easily discover the signaler. Sexual selection may also influence pitch if one sex (typically females) demonstrates a pitch preference in the calls of the other sex. One classic example of this is found in Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus). Male frogs produce both high-pitched whines and lower-pitched chucks. Females are able to locate males using the whines alone, but prefer males who produce more chucks (Ryan and Rand 1993).

Figure 20.8  Many animals, like this chicken, produce alarm calls when they detect predators or other types of danger. Typically, these are loud “broadcast” type calls that are not directed to a particular individual but instead can be heard by any members of their group who are within range. Chickens have different calls for predators attacking from the ground vs. the air. Source: Shediva/ Adobe Stock.

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Some animals are able to use very high acoustic frequencies to navigate, using echolocation. During echolocation, animals produce very high-pitched sounds in one direction. Some of the sound waves reflect off objects in the environment and are perceived by the echolocating animal. Many animals have evolved specialized organs for producing or sensing these sounds. Echolocation is mostly used to navigate and locate prey, but there is evidence that it can also be used in communication (at least as cues) by some bat species (Knörnschild et al. 2012). When the frequency of a sound is low enough, it is more likely to be perceived through the body as vibration. This blurs the line between hearing and touch. In one such case, elephants communicate with one another using infrasonic (frequency below 20 Hz) “rumble” vocalizations that can be heard up to 10 km away. These vocalizations travel through both the air and the ground, though it is thought that they are perceived most effectively through the ground. Elephants detect these seismic vibrations using special nerve endings in their feet (Bouley et al. 2007).

Touch

All animals perceive touch, which it is critical in navigating social relationships, particularly during intimate interactions like nursing, play, fighting, and mating. Touch is, however, notoriously difficult to study at a distance and without interviewing subjects about their first-hand experiences. It can be hard to tell whether two animals are touching. It is even more difficult to assess the quality and strength of touch at a distance. It is possible to measure the force of touch on inanimate objects by placing pressure sensors on the objects. This is how the strength of animal bites is measured (Anderson et al. 2008). But when touch is directed towards another animal, it is not possible to intercept and measure the strength or quality of touch without disrupting the interaction. The difficulty of studying the communicative role of touch is compounded by the inability to perform experiments in which touch can be manipulated. It is possible (though never easy) to play auditory signals to groups of animals to see how they will respond. It is also possible to manipulate some types of visual signals by painting colors on animals or by augmenting or attenuating ornaments like plumage or antlers (e.g., swallow tail length: Møller et al. 1998). It might be possible to simulate communicative touch in very particular circumstances, but a researcher probably can’t encourage a female kingsnake to mate by biting her on the neck like male snakes do during copulatory behavior (Lewke 1979). Instead, researchers are limited to describing the aspects of tactile communication that they can see at a distance. Since most tactile behaviors also have visual signatures (a poke can be seen as well as felt), it is possible to document them in this way, but there are limitations to what can be inferred about the tactile experiences of the animals involved. For example, elephants touch each other with their trunks in many social interactions (Langbauer 2000; Lee 1986). These trunk touches can be seen by human observes (Figure 20.9). The elephants would be able to receive many kinds of tactile information during these touches that are not accessible to human observers, including pressure, tension, and temperature. They also receive olfactory and auditory information during these interactions, making these highly multisensory signals.

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Figure 20.9  African elephants use their trunks to touch one another in many types of interactions. When greeting one another or affiliating with close contacts, elephants reciprocally entwine their trunks and undoubtedly receive tactile and olfactory information that is not perceptible by human observers. Source: Sichkarenko_com/Adobe Stock.

Smell/Taste

Human communication has not been shown to make much use of smell or taste (see Wyatt 2020 for an analysis of the reproducibility of research on human pheromones). However, chemical communication is a critical communicative channel for most other species. Animals use chemical signals to mark territory, find mates, lay down or follow routes to resources, signal danger, call for help, stimulate lactation, and induce many other behaviors. Chemical signals are perceived as smells or tastes in humans, so I have grouped them in this way here. However, animals detect these signals using many types of sensors, including antennae and receptors in the skin on different parts of the body. Animals have evolved a range of organs, sensors, postures, and behaviors to help them better detect and interpret chemical signals. Jacobson’s organ (described earlier in the chapter) is just one example of a specialized area packed with chemoreceptors for receiving and processing chemical signals. Some chemoreceptors are specially tuned to only detect a particular compound. Other receptors are “broadly tuned” in that they pick up a range of different chemical signals. Chemical signals that have evolved to communicate with conspecifics are called pheromones. Many animals have specialized areas for producing as well as receiving pheromones and other chemical compounds. Chemical compounds can be released into the air or water, deposited onto an environmental substrate, or placed directly onto the sensing organ of another animal. Pheromones and other chemicals decay over time. These signals are strongest when they are first produced; they fade over time. Compounds may decay at different rates and the substrate onto which the compounds are placed will also affect how long they last. Chemical signals can be affected by temperature and exposure to other environmental elements. Unlike auditory and visual signals, chemical signals persist long after the signaler

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using the senses in animal communication  383

Figure 20.10  Dogs, like many other animals, signal using the chemical compounds in urine. These signals are long-lasting but fade over time, so others can use their potency to estimate the time that has elapsed since they were produced. They can be interpreted by multiple audiences, serving both as an advertisement to potential mates and a warning to rivals. Urine can also be used to detect the presence of predators or prey species. Source: Erica A. Cartmill.

has produced them. The rate at which these signal fade can be used by other animals to estimate temporal or physical distance to the signaler. For example, a dog urinating on a patch of grass marks the location with volatile compounds in her urine. Other dogs who pass by the spot will be able to identify not just the sex of the signaler, but also to estimate her health and how much time has passed since she marked the grass (Figure 20.10). Pheromones are critical to insect communication, particularly in hymenoptera (i.e., ants, bees and wasps). Ants famously use pheromones to mark trails from food resources back to their nest. Other ants then follow these trails to the resource, using receptors in their antennae to detect and follow the signal. But ants and other social insects use pheromones to communicate about a broad range of things (Jackson and Ratnieks 2006). Some release pheromones when they encounter danger to marshal support and defend the colony from attackers. Some release a specialized pheromone to attract other foraging ants if they locate a large prey item that they are unable to retrieve themselves. Pheromones can also be combined with signals in other modalities to produce more specialized signals.

Detecting Electricity

The senses discussed above use different organs, mechanisms, or channels to produce and receive signals. A visual gesture is produced by the hands or body but perceived with the eyes. A contact call is produced with the vocal tract but perceived by the ears. Electrical signals are unique in that they are produced and received by the same specially evolved electric

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Figure 20.11  South American knifefish (Order Gymnotiformes) are one of the most well-known examples of animals using electrical signals to communicate. This group of fish (including the infamous “electric eel”) produces electrical pulses that contain information about their species, sex, age, and (at least in some species) social rank (Smith 2013). They produce and perceive electrical signals using electric organs composed of muscle or nerve tissue. Source: Reimar/Adobe Stock.

organ(s). More types of animals can detect electrical signals (electroreceptive species) than can produce them (electrogenic species). Electroreception is found in monotremes (mammals that lay eggs), dolphins, insects, and fish (Bullock et al. 2006). Electrogenesis (producing electricity) is only found in fish. This ability appears in only a few species, but they are not all closely-related and electrogenesis has evolved at least six different times (Gallant et al. 2014). Electrogenic fish species primarily use electroreception to navigate and hunt and electrogenesis to stun their prey, but they can also communicate using weak electrical pulses in different durations and patterns (Figure 20.11). Electric fish typically live in murky water where visual communication is difficult, and so electrocommunication may be efficient, though costly to produce.

Linguistic Concepts Reference

When observing a group of animals interacting spontaneously in their natural environment, it can be very difficult to tell whether a behavior by one and a subsequent action by another are causally related. Is the behavior in the first a signal communicating something about the environment to the other individual who receives the signal and reacts to the information? Or are both the original behavior and the later action independent responses to a shared environmental feature? Experimenters often try to record and isolate the signal and then present it to animals to see how they respond (using the playback method). If the responses in the experiment mirror the responses seen in the original context of the signal, then experimenters conclude that the signal itself communicates information that leads animals to respond in a particular way. This is taken as evidence of the referentiality of the signal. However, it is impossible to fully assess the communicative intent or interpretation of the signal, so many researchers have adopted the term functionally referential to describe signals that function as if they have reference (Blumstein 1999; Macedonia and Evans 1993; Townsend and Manser 2013).

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Intentionality

There is no evidence that most of the signals I discuss in this chapter are produced intentionally by the signaling animal (i.e., with the goal of communicating a specific meaning to a specific audience). In the case of static traits, intention is not a useful concept because animals do not produce the signal, it just exists. However, even for behavioral signals with clear starts, scholars do not typically engage with the question of intentionality, instead asking whether a signal is “under volitional control” of the signaler (i.e., can the signaler choose whether or not to signal). Many animal signals show audience effects, meaning that animals produce signals only when conspecifics are around, and sometimes only when certain types of conspecifics are around. This provides evidence that the signals are directed towards a particular type of audience, but also suggests that the animal does not reflexively produce the signal in response to an internal state like fear, surprise, or hunger. Some argue that the presence of a conspecific audience, even a specialized one, could be merely one of the “eliciting stimuli” for the signal. In this view, a prey animal would need to detect both the presence of a predator and the presence of conspecifics in order to give an alarm call. This perspective views animals as more similar to algorithms than agents, playing different programs when given the right input. Perhaps the best evidence for intentionality in animal communication is found in the gestural communication of great apes (Figure 20.12). Ape gesture researchers have adopted and adapted criteria from developmental psychology used to argue for the presence of intentions in preverbal infants (Bruner 1981). Apes direct gestures to other individuals, adapt their gestures to whether or not the other is looking at them, wait for a response from the other, and demonstrate goal-directedness and flexibility in meeting communicative goals (Call and Tomasello 2020; Cartmill and Byrne 2010). In many ways, ape gestures are flexible, complex signals. Some scholars have used their sophistication to argue for a gestural rather than vocal evolutionary origin of language (e.g., Arbib et al. 2008).

Figure 20.12  An orangutan mother holding an infant directs a manual gesture towards her adolescent daughter, shooing the daughter away with a flick of her fingers. Apes adjust the modality of their gestures to the visual attention of their recipient, so they use visual gestures like this shooing gesture mainly when the recipient is looking at them. When an ape cannot be seen, she is likely to use tactile or auditory gestures, or move to where she can be seen. In this particular exchange, the adolescent daughter was initially looking down; the mother used a manual gesture (tapping the daughter’s hand) when the daughter was not looking, and produced the visual shooing gesture only after the daughter had looked at her. Source: Erica A. Cartmill.

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But ape gesture might not be as unique as previously thought. As the intentionality criteria from ape gesture work find their way into studies of other species and other modalities, more intentional signals are identified (Ben Mocha and Burkart 2021; Schel et al. 2013; Townsend et al. 2017; Vail et al. 2013). For example, Schel et al. (2013) presented chimpanzees with partially-hidden models of pythons (a predator) and examined their subsequent alarm vocalizations. The authors found evidence for multiple markers of intentionality: chimpanzees called more in the presence of friends, their calling involved visual monitoring of the audience, and their calling only stopped when recipients were distant from the predator. Perhaps, in a few years’ time, we will have many examples of intentional communication across animal taxa.

Discussion Linguistic anthropology has only just begun to approach animal communication as an area of study. But this is changing quickly, both within anthropology and across the social sciences and humanities. Scholars are attempting ethnographies of animal groups (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010) and studying the many roles animals and humans play in one another’s lives (Brown and Nading 2019). Philosophers and legal scholars are debating the personhood of animals and the ethics surrounding the way humans treat them (Varner 2012). Humanists are reflecting on the ways humans portray animals, and are bringing a deeper knowledge of animal behavior and ethology to their work (Parrish 2021). The study of animals is having a renaissance across many disciplines. Though linguistic anthropologists have not traditionally engaged with the theory and methods of animal communication, anthropologists have an opportunity to make a substantial contribution to this literature. By combining careful observation of social interaction and nuanced understanding of communicative theories with core ideas from evolutionary biology and ethological data on the social structures and sensoria of animal species, linguistic anthropologists could shed light on the overlooked complexities of quotidian animal life. While animals may lack many of the rich complexities of human language and culture, they face many of the same communicative challenges: meeting strangers, negotiating status, attracting mates, competing with neighbors and rivals, building and maintaining friendships, warning others of danger, and correcting others’ behavior. They do so through a rich tapestry of different signals and sensory modalities. Sensoria vary widely across species. Considering the physical and social environments of animals together with their social goals and available senses brings us one step closer to understanding their umwelten (von Uexküll 2010 [1934]) and lived experiences.

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21

Human Touch

Asta Cekaite and Marjorie Harness Goodwin Introduction: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives Touch is a crucial dimension of human communication and well-being. According to Ashley Montagu (1986, p. 4): The tactile system is the earliest sensory system to become functional in all species thus far studied—human, animal, and bird. Perhaps, next to the brain, the skin is the most important of all our organ systems. The sense most closely associated with the skin, the sense of touch, is the earliest to develop in the human embryo. Touch is multifaceted; it is used for communicative, explorative, and affective purposes. We experience our world through our skin: the feedback from the external environment stimulating the skin results in sensory feedback to the brain. Though the skin is considered the largest sense organ in the body, touch has been the least investigated of the senses (Classen 2012; Howes 2005, p. vii). Vision has been favored in Western philosophy, social sciences and culture. Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been dominated by “a spectator theory of knowledge” in which “the theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision,” connecting vision, mind, and knowledge (Dewey 1960, p. 23). In Aristotle’s hierarchy of the five senses, as elaborated in his De Anima (c. 350 BCE), sight was considered the superior sense, while touch was viewed as the lowest. For the Neoplatonic philosopher Ficino, touch was also equated with the baser, more carnal forms of love, contrasting with the “higher” or spiritual love associated with vision (Paterson 2007, p. 1). Researchers within the so-called “corporeal turn” in the social sciences contend that the lowly position given touch in a hierarchy of the senses is undeserved given its complexity. As a sense it does not correspond to a single organ: “the body as a whole is a tactile field” (Wyschogrod 1981, p. 39). Neuroaffective and cognitive sciences approach touch by examining its physiological and somatic dimensions. In the social sciences, interest lies in the A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

social uses and individual phenomenological experiences of touch, including interpersonal affective communication through touch and individual tactile sensations. Touching allows “qualitative factors such as the feeling of proximity or distance that accompanies touch experiences, the affective charge that prompts cathartic release through therapeutic touching or the empathic component that arises within touching-as-feeling” (Paterson 2007, p. 155). Indeed, through touch, the body interacts with things and knows the world. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s words, (1968, p. 136), “it is the body and it alone … that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but being in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above.” In concert with the growing interest in embodiment of social life, this chapter approaches human touch in social interaction between embodied subjects in relation to the material contexts of social activity, language, and other communicative resources. This perspective on human touch is motivated by social, interactional, and phenomenological approaches that emphasize human action and subjectivity as embodied and experienced through participation in the social and material world (C. Goodwin 2018). As embodied subjects, humans are culturally shaped by being and interacting, adopting practical ways of being in the world (Bourdieu 1977). Such a view contrasts radically with a Cartesian separation between the body and mind. According to a dialogical notion of human sociality and sensemaking, an embodied process of social interaction involves the coordinated production and perception of actions (talk, movements) in time and space i.e., within socioculturally meaningful corporeal units of participation (Cekaite and Mondada 2021; Merleau-Ponty 1962). Participation in social encounters is inextricably related to the perception of the self in relation to others as a part of situated activities. The term “participation framework” refers to forms of involvement which are collaboratively attended to by speakers and hearers in co-occurring action (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2004, p. 222), usually in what Erving Goffman (1963, p. 35) called close “ecological huddles,” where visual mutual monitoring is possible. The perceptual world of embodied subjects entails multiple senses; talk, visual and other sensory resources combine to elaborate on or contradict each other within sociocultural corporeal fields of action (C. Goodwin 2018). Touch, or the haptic sense, has a special significance as a communicative resource and a sensorial experience. It is inherently bi-directional and dialogic: touching the other simultaneously makes one’s own body available to being touched. Letting another touch oneself escalates the balance of intimacy. Human touch is essential for how we demonstrate affection and intimacy, instruct, and socialize, as well as manage, impose, and control the other’s social conduct (M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018) or exert power. The communicative functions of touch can largely be characterized as involving ritualized interaction, such as shaking hands, expressing affect (kissing), control touch (grabbing someone’s arm), and task-related actions, such as a nurse taking a patient’s pulse. Touch can be forceful and related to resistance and power. All these uses of touch, as well as touch taboos, differ in varying degrees according to cultural values, conventions, and practices. This understanding of human touch aligns with a micro-sociological view that human embodied conduct is constituted and constitutive of the social situation and interaction order (Goffman 1983). However, the ways touch is employed in everyday life to create such interaction order can vary considerably cross-culturally. For example, among the Wolof of Senegal, touch is so critical in the organization of copresence, with interlocutors sustaining constant body contact, that Christian Meyer (2010, p. 326) proposes the idea of a “skinto-skin” huddle in alternation to what Goffman (1963, p. 95) terms “eye-to-eye” ecological huddles.

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The social meaning of touch evolves and is calibrated in the unfolding of movements and body orientations, within turns-at-talk and sensory practices, which are consequential for the meaning potentials of actions, and, in turn, for the constitution of social roles, relations and identities in everyday interactions. Biological, neurological and evolutionary characteristics of human touch inform but do not determine the social and moral meanings and appropriateness of human touch. Rather, they are negotiated and appropriated through various “techniques of the body” (techniques du corps) (Mauss 1973 [1935]), that is, cultural and socially appropriate ways of arranging the body within specific activities which are shaped by training and education (i.e., swimming, walking, or sleeping). Deliberate or implicit bodily practices can enforce, monitor, correct, and instruct another’s bodily comportment. Touch conduct is normatively organized and its corporeal orders depend on its social and cultural contexts. Touch in private relations between socially close persons is expected and can involve multiple, even vulnerable bodily areas; in public, institutional encounters, touch can be considered inappropriate. For example, in child educational institutions, in Anglo-Saxon countries, adult–child touch is primarily considered as potentially abusive and its uses are severely restricted (Burke and Duncan 2014). In a society with a highly developed caste system, such as India, touch between specific social groups is forbidden (George 2020). The public–private distinction is usually highlighted in characterizing Japan as a society where touch in public is avoided (Tahhan 2014). Much research on touch utilizes retrospective recall methods or paper–pencil observations. In this chapter, we argue that video-recordings of touch conduct allow researchers to deeply engage in the investigation of touch conduct. Video-recordings facilitate detailed analysis of social encounters where touch is used for communicative purposes. Methodologically, our approach is based on video-ethnographies (Ochs et al. 2006), ethnographic work making extensive use of video recordings of naturally occurring social interactions (Mead 1973). Throughout this chapter we will draw on an extensive archive of video-taped activities in the everyday lives of dual-earner middle class families in the US and Sweden (see Acknowledgements). In the following sections we describe (1) how human touch, language and other modalities are configured in greeting and farewell encounters; (2) how affectionate, compassionate touch is used during soothing, empathetic intertwinings; and (3) how touch accomplishes guidance and instruction across diverse age cohorts. We then discuss how forceful, violent touch can become a target of judgement or neutral assessment.

Touch in Greeting and Farewell Interchanges Touch is used in so-called ritual encounters such as greetings and farewells, which Goffman (1971) deems “supportive interchanges,” in various cultural contexts. Greetings can be used to negotiate social status or one’s expected role in a particular setting (Duranti 1997; Ehrlich 2001), negotiate symmetric or asymmetric social positions (Hillewaert 2016), and indicate cooperativeness and social trust that “affirm and support the social relationship between doer and recipient” (Goffman 1971, p. 63). Alessandro Duranti states that greetings are simultaneously both linguistic and nonlinguistic acts; they exploit semiotic (e.g., speech, gaze, posture) or kinesic acts as well as material features of the location of the encounter. These multiple modalities provide resources “to establish and sustain a particular version of the social world” (Duranti 1992, p. 660). Greetings serve “to clarify and fix the roles that the participants will take during the occasion of talk and to commit participants to those roles” (Goffman 1967, p. 41) and can be viewed as moral acts.

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Raymond Firth, among the first anthropologists to study greetings and partings cross-­ culturally, describes how in announcing one’s presence, the greeting provides statements of pleasure at someone’s arrival and positive acceptance of the person met. Partings imply a recognition that the relationship has been established and could continue, often expressing a form of sadness with the persons going away. The informational or emotional content of supportive rituals “may be highly variable, even minimal,” differing widely across cultural contexts according to age, status, gender, and ethnicity (Firth 1972, p. 1). In general, the degree of spatial distance and the specific surface of bodily contact between persons indexes forms of social distance between people. Various parts of the body (the head, hands, and body trunk) are employed in greetings and parting behavior cross-culturally. Among the Maori when two people greet, saying “There you are,” they may clasp hands and press noses. Throughout Polynesian societies, the nose is the main body part traditionally used in greeting, though nose rubbing has been supplemented by the hand clasp (Firth 1972, p. 18). In Mayan Zinacantan, Chiapas, Tzotzil speakers’ greetings occur with the younger person bowing to the older, presenting the elder the forehead; the older person touches the forehead with the back of her hand, very gently (Haviland 2009). Among speakers of the same age, shaking hands may occur if parties are male. No touching occurs between two females. A distinctive moral order is indeed implied through reciprocal greetings of talk and gesture in Tzotzil culture. As a form of greeting, the handshake is common in a broad range of cultural contexts. It can be calibrated to display intimacy or deference or express reluctance and create distance. While the Chinese view opposite-sex handshakes as permissible, Malays and Arabs view contact by opposite sex handshakes as taboo (Ting-Toomey 1999, p. 130). Sarah Hillewaert (2016) shows how in Lamu, a Muslim community and Kenya’s oldest Swahili settlement, people use different kinds of greetings to negotiate social and economic relationships and understandings of moral personhood. The felt bodily contact, or tactility of a handshake, is an important dimension for the presentation of self and the assessment of others. By manipulating the sensory details of hand greeting, women negotiate their understandings of heshima (respectability). In contrast to restrictions on touch, specific touch practices can be required. For example, in 2018, Denmark passed legislation requiring any new citizens to shake hands at their naturalization ceremony. Critics viewed the legislation “as a way to target Muslims, who might be reluctant to shake hands with members of the opposite sex for religious reasons” (Oxlund 2020, p. 40). Handshakes become political and cultural symbols that provide powerful means for inclusion and exclusion in diverse communities. Greetings and farewells in private can extend to the expression of passionate emotions through touch, depending on the cultural and moral ideas of a given society. Among friends and family members in Western contexts, greetings and farewells provide an opportunity to show and engage in affection and intimacy through forms of haptic sociality (M.H. Goodwin 2017). In general, the greeting hug rather than the greeting kiss is a more common way of demonstrating amity. Where kissing occurs, the cheek provides the site for receiving kisses. Kissing lip to lip occurs primarily among lovers and partners. Greetings and farewells punctuate various parts of the daily round in Western families. As bodies intertwine between parents and their children and between partners, they implicate close emotional attunement and heightened alignment, with coordination among bodily actions, gestures, and in voice, including pitch and voice quality (M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018). Montagu (1986, p. 110) contends that touch is not experienced as a single physical modality, but rather affectively, as emotion. By examining voice quality while people are hugging it is possible to discern the simultaneity of vocal expressions and tactile sensations.

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Voice quality provides a type of prosodic “contextualization cue” (Gumperz 1982) regarding affective expression. A particular form of voice quality, creaky voice, occurs during hugs. Creaky voice quality refers to “pulsed input of energy to the vocal tract … at a very low frequency … usually somewhat irregularly spaced in time” (Laver 1994, p. 195). In Example 21.1, from a middle class African American family living in Los Angeles, different forms of pitch and voice quality occur in distinct stages of the hug encounter. Stephen, age 11, joins his mother and sister in the living room. As he enters, Mom asks “What’s up Baby.” (line 1). Example 21.1  The hug encounter.

When Stephen comes close and puts his hand on her shoulder, Mom uses a softer voice (indicated by °):“°What’s up Stephen°.” A moment later, entering into a hug, with her eyes closed, Mom produces “~What’s up Stephen. Big old boy~”, all in creaky voice (marked by tildes at the beginning and ending of the turn in Example 21.1). Steven’s response to the hug, “Oh that feels good. Havin’ some of that,” articulates on a meta-communicative level his affective and corporeal experiences. When Mom exits from the hug, her creaky voice, accompanied by closed eyes and close body contact, changes to the modal voice (defined as the “vocal register that includes a range of fundamental frequencies that are normally used in speaking a language” (Hollien et al. 1966, p. 126)), which had opened the encounter. Mom’s eyes open, and looking at her daughter, she asks if the children had done their reading assignment (line 10). Facial expression and voice quality align with the embrace to produce heightened affect just at the point all the modalities come together. Multiple modalities build a configuration of intimacy, indexed through lower volume creaky voice in the midst of the hug, which engages only these two participants. The various modalities

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human touch  395

utilized during particular types of haptic encounters express the nuanced emotional stances and corporeal engagement of the participants. Hugs and haptic sociality are not exclusive to the dyad. In families, multiple family members can engage in hugs simultaneously, thus spatially amplifying the displays and experiences of intimacy and affection. In Example 21.2 from a Swedish family, Elin, the little sister (age four), upon seeing Kristin’s (age eight) and Dad’s farewell hug, embraces them, performing a round of hugs. Haptic supportive interchanges are sequentially organized and touch—embrace with arms—is invited and reciprocated. First, Kristin approaches, reaches out toward Dad, simultaneously as she utters her “goodbye” in a high pitch (380 Hz). Dad attunes to her and mirrors Kristin’s talk, responding with a high-pitched goodbye at 300 Hz (compared to men’s common pitch range around 120 Hz) and reciprocates Kristin’s touch by embracing her. Participants attune their voices and choreograph the embrace as the bodily formation to increase their intimate affective co-experience. Example 21.2  A multiparty embrace.

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Similar attunement in pitch is also witnessed between Dad and Elin, when she joins the multiparty embrace (lines 3–5). Dad addresses Elin in a whispered creaky voice (marked using tildes) (line 5); as he exits from the hug, he contextualizes the frame of his post-hug, casual talk, by speaking again with modal voice. We found such forms of frame switches and heightened pitch alignment in greetings between parents and children to be common in families both in the US and in Sweden (M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018, pp. 148–151). Haptic supportive interchanges are not necessarily a collaborative affair. Sometimes, initiating actions are not reciprocated. Lack of involvement in haptic actions such as an embrace indicates reluctance to share closeness and affective attunement. The recipient of a hug can bodily reject it by, for instance, not putting one’s arms around the other, withdrawing, or keeping one’s body “slack.” In Example 21.3 when with outstretched arms a mom in the US data delivers her invitation, “I need a hug,” her daughter does not lift her face toward her mom nor lift her arms to embrace her. Rather than using her body to coordinate with Mom in an embrace, the daughter instead leans her head to the side of her mom so that she can view the television screen. When the son also refuses to give her a hug, Mom comments “You see what’s more important. I have to beg for my kisses and hugs.” Example 21.3  Begging for a hug.

Commenting on reluctance to engage or participate fully in haptic supportive interchanges provides a means of highlighting and bringing up social norms as breaches in the corporeal order of sociocultural settings. Greetings and farewells are therefore best viewed as interactions that evolve from moment to moment rather than being pre-formulated. Haptic greetings and communication through touch generally are important means of communication in atypical conditions. For example, the use of a tactile form of Australian Sign Language along with tactile sensations provide ways of coordinating interaction among the deafblind in Australia (Iwasaki et al. 2019). Tactile signers make extensive use of hand and body contact to achieve mutual orientation, as joint attention is a necessity for participation in greetings. Understanding and alignment are conveyed through the speakers’ embodied formation of next tactile moves. In her ethnography of the DeafBlind community in the US, Terra Edwards shows that the use of protactile language was inextricably linked to social expectations of how “one should or should not touch others” (Edwards 2022, p.104).1 1

  For more general discussion of communication among the DeafBlind in the USA see Edwards (2012).

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human touch  397

Changing conditions for human social interaction, such as the rapid development and extensive use of online technology, generate novel forms of supportive interchanges. Supportive interchanges performed in virtual environments on the digital screen feed off their conventional organization in face-to-face interactions. For instance, Yumei Gan (2020) and Gan et al. (2020), in studies of Chinese video call greetings between migrant parents and their young left-behind children, show that call openings, greetings, and mutual recognition gain crucial importance in sustaining and scaffolding young children’s social bonds with parents. Love is demonstrated and shared “at a distance” through affectionate recognition of each other, kisses, rituals of “eating together,” and even virtual tactile food exchange on the phone’s surface (Gan 2020). During the Covid 19 pandemic, with public restrictions on touch and physical contact, further changes in supportive interchanges developed. Alternative forms of haptic sociality emerged, rather than ceasing to exist during the pandemic with the demands for social distancing. Among politicians worldwide, elbow bumps replaced handshakes (Katila et al. 2020) and became established as acceptable greeting forms (Oxlund 2020). Lorenza Mondada et al. (2020) demonstrate that other novel forms included feet bumps, hugs in the air, and bows and curtsies, treated as quotes and symbolic substitutes for conventional greetings. The reconfiguration rather than complete abandonment of haptic sociality attests to the crucial importance of haptic forms of intersubjective engagement and their place within the interactional order in multiple communities worldwide.

Compassionate Intimate Touch and Talk Practices of haptic sociality are often observable in compassionate acts towards someone in distress. Compassionate acts express one’s understanding of the other’s emotional state. In response to suffering, pain, or sorrow, social actors can offer elaborate, close, and intimate touch contact, reaching out towards the other, lending one’s own bodily comfort and support.2 Similar to hugging embraces used in greetings, in the act of soothing, affectionate embraces can be finely attuned to talk (using distinctive voice quality, non-lexical vocalizations, or singing). For example, caregiver responses to a crying child can be configured by creating a bodily canvas of “soothing” and “comforting.” In compassionate encounters, the provision of amplified bodily contact between the person in distress and the soother is quite significant. It can engage sensitive and vulnerable bodily areas—chest, head, neck, and face—where intimate skin-to-skin contact is established and sustained during the soothing. As in Yapese culture (Throop 2010, p. 282), when witnessing the pain of another, there is transformation in the phenomenal participation on the part of the party who is witness to crying. The crying prompts full engagement in soothing action to compassionately participate in the suffering of another. In Example 21.4, from video-ethnography conducted in a preschool for one-to-five year old children in Sweden (Cekaite and Kvist Holm 2017), in response to a 2.5 year-old boy’s (Gustav’s) crying after having fallen down from a chair, a male preschool teacher starts soothing him by embracing him.

2

 See ethnographic description of acts of compassion between caregivers and children among the following: Tzotzil Mayans (de León 2021); Murrinh-Patha people of Australia (Davidson and Kelly 2021); Swedish and Japanese (Cekaite and Burdelski 2021); Russians (Moore 2021); !Xun San in Namibia (Takada 2021).

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Example 21.4  Soothing action.

The teacher moves the boy’s head to rest on his shoulder, close to his head and cheek—an emotionally intense place for touch (line 5), and a highly sensitive area for corporeal perception. The caregiver solicits the distressed child’s trust in his bodily support and the child reciprocates the adult’s embrace by leaning on his shoulder and adjusting to the form of the adult’s embrace (line 6), relinquishing his bodily control to the adult. Viewed from a ­phenomenological perspective, a soothing embrace is a corporeal formation that involves an extended haptic surface of “compresence” (Merleau-Ponty 1968): the soother and the

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human touch  399

child enter into and sustain an absorbing experience of bodily togetherness where joint sensations become possible. Similar to the interactional organization of affectively intensive greeting hugs (Examples 21.1, 21.2), we find that gaze contact is not necessary; compassionate soothing embrace is configured as a multisensorial hub for bodily and aural copresence and intimacy. Haptic soothing involves the lamination of touch, talk, and movement that affords multisensorial absorbing experience. First, the teacher neatly coordinates his soothing talk so as to fit it to temporary silences in the child’s crying. Then, the caregiver verbally explains the causes of the accident: “Yeah there wasn’t an armrest for you.” When produced with sympathetic intonation, such informing descriptions of the crying party’s trouble explicate the connection between negative events and the person’s negative emotional stance. Generally, diverse forms of compassionate touch or its absence indicate the cause of crying as appropriate or not, and touch is an important way of acknowledging the reasons for crying. In this way, touch contributes to socialization of affective and moral personhood (Burdelski 2020; Cekaite and Burdelski 2021; de León 2021).

Compassion in Health Care Settings Compassionate acts employed as a way of alleviating distress are not limited to adult-child caregiving encounters. While Western professional medical socialization teaches doctors and nurses to distance themselves from patients by making them as objective as possible, simultaneously nurturing behavior is encouraged during invasive or uncomfortable procedures, which often leads to hand holding (Edwards 1998, p. 815). In health care encounters, procedural touch is normatively non-intrusive, as it is used as a utilitarian resource in diagnosis, treatment, and body care (Guzmán 2015; Throop 2012). Compassionate or “expressive” (Cocksedge et al. 2013) touch, on the other hand, implicates relations between body subjects, especially in situations of a patient’s perceived vulnerability manifested as distress, upset, or crying (Gleeson and Timmons 2004; Merlino 2021; Raia et al. 2020). For children in an oncology lab of a children’s hospital, compassionate touch not only provides comfort but also pain alleviation (Blake 2011). Among the elderly, a nurse’s touch provides comfort, warmth, and security while performing routine tasks (Edwards 1998). Caring touch is particularly important when working with patients with heavy dementia or those who cannot communicate verbally. Caretakers provide hugging, patting, rubbing tickling, nuzzling, and massaging for residents (Wright 2018). In a Japanese care facility, caring with one’s own hands human-to-human (ningen tai ningen), as contrasted with employing a robot to assist in lifting a patient, was identified by care staff as perhaps the single most important characteristic of good care, expressed as respecting the elders (Wright 2018). The use of touch in animal-assisted therapy (DeCourcey et al. 2010; Solomon 2010) provides support that has increasingly gained use in a variety of health care settings, including long-care facilities, critical care units, psychiatric inpatient units, and children’s hospitals.

Touch in Embodied Directives Embodied Caregiver–Child Directives

Due to the logocentricity that pervades the canonical Western model of social life, there has been relative neglect of embodiment in research on adult–child socialization. Studies of

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non-Western developmental contexts have shown that the emphasis on talk in caregiver–child interaction overlooks the communicative and socializing significance of embodied resources, including gaze, postural changes, and touch (de León 2012). Recently, video-ethnographies of families in Western contexts have shown the pervasive use of caregiver–child touch as a communicative and affective resource in soliciting and monitoring children’s conduct (M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018). Embodied directives, communicative acts aimed at “getting things done,” feature in the socialization of activities for becoming morally accountable members of a cultural community. Directives can target the child’s participation in the family’s daily round. Various forms of control touch can be used to encourage and secure the child’s transitioning to the next activity e.g., preparing for going to bed, by achieving the child’s compliance with the caregiver’s directive (to brush one’s teeth, to dress, etc.). In families, “shepherding” touch is used to perceptually reorient the child toward the spatial features of the requested activity (Cekaite 2010). Then an adult steers and guides the child, using touch as a means for monitoring the pace and route of the child’s walking. Such embodied directives can be laminated or coordinated with verbal utterances. Talk is used to articulate and inform the recipient child about the requested action (“Alright. Brushing?”, “Come. Go and wee-wee now”). In the routine daily round of Los Angeles families, after dinner children are obligated to begin self-care activities, such as brushing teeth or taking a bath. In Example 21.5, at the end of the meal, Mom states, “Come on,” as she is holding her six-year-old son Mike’s waist. She next puts her hands on Mike’s shoulders and states, “Alright. Brushing?” Example 21.5  Requested action.

The noun phrase “brushing” (brushing teeth), overlaid with question intonation, indexes an activity in the larger trajectory of going to bed that is willingly complied with. Mike smiles and moves with Mom as she shepherds him in the direction towards the bathroom.

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human touch  401

Coordination of touch and talk can allow for different degrees of autonomy of action on the part of the recipient of touch. In Example 21.6a, from a family in Sweden, Mom launches a directive regarding preparing to go to bed. A question format “ska du”/“are you going to” invites, rather than demands, the child’s immediate compliance. The child reluctantly agrees, but she remains immobile (line 3). Example 21.6a  Launching a directive.

As the child’s compliance is not forthcoming, a bit later Mom repeats the directive and uses controlling touch to close down the negotiation space. Example 21.6b  Repeated directive and controlling touch.

Mom prepares a haptic link between herself and her daughter in a facing formation (Kendon 1990). She holds Hanna’s hand and the daughter is positioned to face her when Mom repeats the requested action (lines 6–8) (Example 21.6b). Directives are now upgraded to declarative or imperative forms that reference an action as something that is already known

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to be on the agenda, and compliance is non-negotiable. Simultaneously, as Mom uses a list of imperatives concerning what her daughter has to do, she turns the daughter around in a dancing move and repositions her to face the direction of the requested activity, going upstairs to tidy up the room (line 9). By slightly pushing forward, Mom mildly enforces her daughter’s movement towards the target activity (line 11). Such multimodal organization of language, gesture, and touch suggests that embodied directives are organized so as to affords the child possibilities to exercise (more or less) autonomous embodied compliant action, before adults use controlling touch to propel the child into motion to secure her compliance. Orientation to autonomy of action and bodily integrity on the part of the child is visible when, for instance, controlling touch is not used initially when parents introduce the directive. The coordination of talk and touch modulates the coercive, invasive features of the haptic control act. We suggest that the timing and resources encompassing control touch are closely linked to culturally anchored notions of the child’s rights to autonomy of embodied conduct and cultural understandings of what constitute norms for bodily integrity.

Enforcing Touch and Talk in Directives

In situations when children do not follow through with what they are told to do, directives may become upgraded through using more forceful haptic action, and children’s compliance can be enforced. In Example 21.7a below, Dylan (age 2.5) and Jonah (age 8) have been screaming and chasing one another. Mom has told Jonah four times to read a book to his younger brother in preparation for bedtime. In order to get Jonah’s attention, Mom must grab him by the arms and attempt to position him in a facing formation vis-a-vis her:

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human touch  403

Example 21.7a  Compliance enforced.

When this fails and Jonah runs away from Mom, she tackles him, dragging him next to the couch. An escalation of force occurs. Through pinning him physically against furniture, she is finally able to deliver her directive face to face (Example 21.7b). Example 21.7b  Directive delivered.

It is only through grabbing Jonah’s wrists to disentangle him from his younger brother and making it impossible for him to move by pinning him to the floor that Mom is able to elicit some form of verbal agreement to carry out her directive. Activity contracts (Aronsson and Cekaite 2011), multigenerational verbal agreements that a child will carry forth a particular activity in the future, are common in Swedish culture. Their rarity in American culture means parents cannot depend on a child carrying out activities that need to be done. Accordingly, imperatives can require much embodied effort, including considerable physical force.

Embodied Directives in Adult Caregiving Contexts

In adult caregiving contexts such as elder care, controlling, guiding and assisting touch can be used when care recipients may have cognitive and physical impairments which curtail their abilities to autonomously engage in daily routines such as moving around or dressing. Studies from Western contexts demonstrate numerous corporeal and linguistic routines that shape assistance and guidance through touch so as to pay tribute to the care recipient’s bodily integrity and position the care recipient as a social actor capable of autonomous bodily action. For example, in a study of a care resident with Parkinson’s disease, Marstrand

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and Svennevig (2018) show that when haptic actions are used to instruct and lead the patient’s movements, akin to embodied directives in parent-child interactions, guiding shepherding touch is used only when other verbal actions are exhausted. Such embodied directives indicate preference for non-invasive touch and efforts to ascribe individual autonomy of action to a person with physical impairments.

Touch and Power While touch may be therapeutic, compassionate, and guiding, it can also be used to control in a coercive manner the actions of the other, especially in situations of power differentials. Touch may be forceful and used in an abusive manner across a range of contexts including families, among peers, and in institutional encounters. Touch and physical contact are not neutral; while their meaning can be intuitively invoked, their legitimacy and normative appropriateness can be dependent on those in a more powerful position, including experts, in society. Talk, together with other interactional resources, can be used to interpret the meaning and appropriateness of physical force as “legitimate.” Such a case is vividly demonstrated in the seminal article “Professional Vision” by Charles Goodwin (1994), where he discusses how police touch with metal clubs was interpreted in coding schemes applied to video tape of the 1991 violent beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist who was stopped for a traffic violation. The video recording was so graphic that the public felt a conviction would be almost assured. Instead, the jury found the police officers not guilty and the verdict triggered an uprising in Los Angeles. While the prosecution felt the tape was self-explicating, the jury was convinced by the policemen’s lawyers who argued that the violence on the tape beating Rodney King was the result of careful, systematic police craft work. C. Goodwin shows that the police defense attorneys provided a coding scheme to interpret Rodney King’s actions as threatening and thus entitling police use of force for self-protection against him. The escalation of force was defined as appropriate if the suspect was deemed aggressive. Through the expert frame, the beating was decomposed into ten distinct uses of force; for example, what the prosecution saw as “beating a suspect into submission” was reanalyzed as a demonstration that “de-escalation has ceased” (C. Goodwin 1994, p. 617). Throughout the defense’s testimony passive constructions were used: The force has been again escalated to the level it had been previously, and the de-escalation has ceased. We see a blow being struck and thus the end of the period of de-escalation. Force has now been elevated to the previous level after this period of de-escalation (C. Goodwin 1994, p. 617)

The defense used language to provide normative and moral templates for understanding the events visible on the tape in a particular way. Brutal force, physical actions, and the use of forceful touch by the police were legitimated, within an alternative moral order of the event.

Conclusions Actions involving touch are often omitted from studies of linguistic practices through which activities are achieved. By way of contrast in this chapter we have taken touch to be central to the articulation and choreography of action. Moreover, we have shown how various

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human touch  405

auditory features (pitch and voice quality) in conjunction with touch are central to the affective dimensions of social encounters. In addition to sequential relations between actions, we have considered simultaneous usage of the body and talk in the construction of acts of compassion and care. In particular, we consider affect to be central to the comportment of everyday lives. Increasingly there has been an interest in investigation of embodiment in medical anthropology (Pritzker et al. 2018; Rasmussen 2006; Wilce 2009) as well as psychological anthropology (Csordas 1990). However, in investigations of the experience of the person in society from a phenomenological perspective, Elinor Ochs (2012, p. 152) has commented that there is not nearly enough rigorous bridging of these sub-fields. In part through our attention to the haptic features of interaction, we show how intimacy, care, and concern are conveyed through bodily intertwinings in the midst of interaction. With the layering of voice quality and touch we can understand the affective stances taken during such moments. This strategy for investigation differs from research based on reports about bodily experiences told to the anthropologist. By videotaping naturally occurring interaction in the midst of important events in a person’s life we have access to see, from the perspective of the person at the moment of interaction, how life is being articulated and experienced. The employment of video recording in conjunction with ethnography allows us to document how multiple senses are involved in the simultaneous achievement and intertwining of such actions. Close, empirically grounded analysis of social interaction contributes to our understanding of how touch is deployed as a perceptually salient resource for indexing, renewing, and developing relations between embodied subjects in the socio-material world (Mondada 2021). Culturally and socially inculcated and sedimented bodily dispositions for being, acting, and interacting in the material world can be tracked as they are enskilled through culturally intelligible and recognizable techniques du corps (Mauss 1973 [1935]), calibrated as coordinated configurations of multisensorial resources. The conceptualization of human agency and subjecthood, bound to language use and as “body-in-motion” (Merleau-Ponty 1962), draws our attention to social actors not only as speakers but also as mutually oriented originators of embodied actions. Future research might explore how children learn to touch other humans and how touch features in human–animal encounters in various cultural contexts. Some forms of touch change through the life course; how people experience and use touch across the life span is still an uncharted area.

Acknowledgments Our fieldwork on families draws from an interdisciplinary, collaborative research endeavor conducted by members of the UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) under the direction of Elinor Ochs and the Swedish counterpart under direction of Karin Aronsson. CELF was generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Michael Sean Smith and Felix Fritzell provided the rendering of line drawings.

REFERENCES Aronsson, K. and Cekaite, A. (2011). Activity contracts and directives in everyday family politics. Discourse in Society 22 (2): 1–18.

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Blake, R. (2011). Ethnographies of touch and touching ethnographies: Some prospects for touch in anthropological enquiries. Anthropology Matters, 13(1): 1–12. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burdelski, M. (2020). “Teacher compassionate touch in a Japanese preschool. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 3 (1). doi: 10.7146/si.v3i1.120248. Burke, R.S. and Duncan, J. (2014). Bodies as Sites of Cultural Reflection in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Cekaite, A. (2010). Shepherding the child: Embodied directive sequences in parent-child interactions. Text and Talk 30: 1–25. Cekaite, A. and Burdelski, M. (2021). Crying and crying responses: A comparative exploration of pragmatic socialization in a Swedish and Japanese preschool. Journal of Pragmatics 178: 329–348. Cekaite, A. and Kvist Holm, M. (2017). The comforting touch: Tactile intimacy and talk in managing children’s distress. Research on Language and Social Interaction 50 (2): 109–127. Cekaite, A. and Mondada, L. (eds.) (2021). Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language and Body. New York: Routledge. Classen, C. (2012). The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cocksedge, S., George, B., Renwick, S., and Chew-Graham, C. (2013). Touch in Primary care consultations: Qualitative investigation of doctors’ and patients’ perceptions. British Journal of General Practice 63 (609): 283–290. Csordas, T.J. (1990). Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos 18 (1): 5–47. Davidson, L. and Kelly, B.F. (2021). The pragmatics of managing children’s distress in Murrinhpatha, a traditional Australian language. Journal of Pragmatics 184: 167–184. de León, L. (2012). Language socialization and multiparty participation frameworks. In: The Handbook of Language Socialization (ed. A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B.B. Schieffelin), 81–112. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. de León, L. (2021). The soothing nursing niche: Affective touch, talk, and pragmatic responses to Mayan infants’ crying. Journal of Pragmatics 185: 146–160. DeCourcey, M., Russell, A.C., and Keister, K.J. (2010). Animal-assisted therapy: Evaluation and implementation of a complementary therapy to improve the psychological and physiological health of critically ill patients. Dimensions of Critical Care in Nursing 29 (5): 211–214. Dewey, J. (1960). The Quest for Certainty (Gilford Lectures, 1929). New York: Putnam. Duranti, A. (1992). Language and bodies in social space: Samoan ceremonial greetings. American Anthropologist 94 (3): 657–691. Duranti, A. (1997). Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7 (1): 63–97. Edwards, S.C. (1998). An anthropological interpretation of nurses’ and patients’ perceptions of the use of space and touch. Journal of Advanced Nursing 28 (4): 809–817. Edwards, T. (2012). Sensing the rhythms of everyday life: temporal integration and tactile translation in the Seattle Deaf-Blind community. Language in Society 41: 29–71. Edwards, T. (In Press/2022). Giving up on politeness: The desire for tactile knowledge and the art of finding life lovable. In: Rethinking Politeness with Henri Bergson (ed. A. Duranti), 97–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ehrlich, U. (2001). Verbal and non-verbal rituals of leave-taking in Rabbinic culture — phenomenology and significance. Jewish Studies Quarterly 8 (1): 1–26. Firth, R. (1972). Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting. In: The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A.I. Richards (ed. J.S. La Fontaine), 1–38. London: Tavistock. Gan, Y. (2020). Choreographing Affective Relationships across Distances: Multigenerational Engagement in Video Calls between Migrant Parents and Their Left-behind Children in China. Ph. D Thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Gan, Y., Greiffenhagen, C., and Licoppe, C. (2020). Orchestrated openings in video calls: Getting young left-behind children to greet their migrant parents. Journal of Pragmatics 170: 364–380.

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Gleeson, M. and Timmins, F. (2004). The use of touch to enhance nursing care of older persons in long-term mental health care facilities. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 11: 541–545. Goffman, E. (1963). Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. (1983). The interaction order. American Sociological Association, 1982 Presidential Address. American Sociological Review 48 (1): 1–17. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-Operative Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M.H. (2004). Participation. In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (ed. A. Duranti), 222–243. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Goodwin, M.H. (2017). Haptic sociality: The embodied interactive constitution of intimacy through touch. In: Intercorporeality: Emerging Socialities in Interaction (ed. C. Meyer, J. Streeck, and J. Scott Jordan), 73–102. New York: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, M.H. and Cekaite, A. (2018). Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care, and Mundane Creativity. New York: Routledge. Gumperz, J.J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guzmán, J. (2015). The epistemics of symptom experience and symptom accounts in Mapuche healing and pediatric care in Southern Chile. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (3): 189–198. Haviland, J.B. (2009). Little rituals. In: Ritual Communication (eds. G. Senft and E. Basso), 21–50. Oxford: Berg. Hillewaert, S. (2016). Tactics and tactility: a sensory semiotics of handshakes in Coastal Kenya. American Anthropologist 118 (1): 49–66. Hollien, H., Moore, P., Wendahl, R.W., and Michel, J.F. (1966). On the nature of vocal fry. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 9: 245–247. Howes, D. (2005). Introduction: Empires of the senses. In: Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (ed. D. Howes), 1–20. Oxford: Berg. Iwasaki, S., Bartlett, M., Manns, H., and Willoughby, L. (2019). The challenges of multimodality and multi-sensoriality: Methodological issues in analyzing tactile signed interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 143: 215–227. Jablonski, N.G. (2006). Skin: A Natural History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Katila, J., Gan, Y., and Goodwin, M.H. (2020). Interaction rituals and ‘social distancing’: new haptic trajectories and touching from a distance in the time of Covid-19. Discourse and Society 22 (4): 418–440. Kendon, A. (1990). Behavioral foundations for the process of frame-attunement in face-to-face interaction. In: Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters (ed. A. Kendon), 239–262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laver, J. (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marstrand, A.K. and Svennevig, J. (2018). A preference for non-invasive touch in caregiving contexts. Social Interaction: Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 1 (2). doi: 10.7146/si.v1i2.110019. Mauss, M. (1973 [1935]). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2: 70–88. Mead, M. (1973). The art and technology of field work. In: A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology (eds. R. Naroll and R. Cohen), 246–265. New York: Columbia University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (trans. D.A. Landes). London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merlino, S. (2021). Professional touch in speech and language therapy for the treatment of poststroke aphasia. In: Touch in Social Interaction: Touch, Language and Body (ed. A. Cekaite and L. Mondada), 197–223. New York: Routledge. Meyer, C. (2010). Self, Sequence and the Senses: Universal and Culture-Specific Aspects of Conversational Organization in a Wolof Social Space. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Department of Sociology, Bielefeld University.

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Mondada, L. (2021). Sensing in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mondada, L., J. Banninger, S.A., Bouaouina, L.C., Gauthier, G., Hanggi, P., Koda, M., Svensson, H., and Tekin, B.S. (2020). Human sociality in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic: A systematic examination of change in greeting. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24: 441–468. Montagu, A. (1986). Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper and Row. Moore, E. (2021). Crying in a Russian preschool: Participation, assessments and directive trajectories in teacher discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 183: 192–209. Ochs, E. (2012). Experiencing language. Anthropological Theory 12: 142–160. Ochs, E., Graesch, A.P., Mittmann, A., Bradbury, T., and Repetti, R. (2006). Video ethnography and ethnoarchaeological tracking. In: Work and Family Handbook: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches (eds. M. Pitt-Catsouphes, E.E. Kossek, and S. Sweet), 387–410. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Oxlund, B. (2020). An anthropology of the handshake. Anthropology Now 12 (1): 39–44. Paterson, M. (2007). The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford: Berg. Pritzker, S.E., Guzmán, J., Hui, K.-K., and Tarn, D. (2018). The third speaker: The body as interlocutor in conventional complementary, and integrative medicine encounters. Communication and Medicine 14 (3): 256–267. Raia, F., Goodwin, M.H., and Deng, M. (2020). Forms of touch during medical encounters with an advanced heart failure doctor who practices relational medicine. Social Interaction: Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 3 (1). Rasmussen, S.J. (2006). Those Who Touch: Tuareg Women in Anthropological Perspective. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Solomon, O. (2010). What a dog can do: Children with autism and therapy dogs in social interaction. Ethos 38 (1): 143–166. Tahhan, D.A. (2014). The Japanese Family: Touch, Intimacy, and Feeling. London: Routledge. Takada, A. (2021). Pragmatic reframing from distress to playfulness: !Xun caregiver responses to infant crying. Journal of Pragmatics 181: 180–195. Throop, J. (2010). Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley: UC Press. Throop, J. (2012). On the varieties of empathic experience: Tactility, mental opacity, and pain in Yap. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26 (3): 408–430. Ting-Toomey, S. (1999). Communicating across Cultures. New York: The Guilford Press. Wilce, J.M. (2009). Medical Discourse. Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 199–215. Wright, J. (2018). Tactile care, mechanical hugs: Japanese caregivers and robotic lifting devices. Asian Anthropology, 17(1):24–39. Wyschogrod, E. (1981). Empathy and sympathy as tactile encounter. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 6: 25–43.

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22

Socialization of Attention

Lourdes de León Introduction Joint attention involves the mutual engagement between two or more persons towards a relevant focus of interest. Lying at the intersection of cognition, biology, and culture, it provides the foundations for intersubjective attunement, communication, and human sociality.1 Jerome Bruner was among the first scholars to introduce the concept in his pioneering research on the ontogeny of communication (Bruner 1985; Scaife and Bruner 1975). Bruner’s studies focused on infants’ developing skills for sharing their experiences about objects and events with others while learning word and referent associations. The main strands of research on children’s joint attention come from developmental psychology, sociocultural theory, and linguistic anthropology. Developmental psychologists have explored how attention emerges in infants and how it contributes to language acquisition and social pragmatic development (Bates 1979; Tomasello and Farrar 1986).2 Central to these studies is infants’ pointing as a developmental landmark for language acquisition and social pragmatic skills. Sociocultural theorists have investigated how attention develops in cultural contexts, uncovering variation in children’s third-party attention during learning processes. Barbara Rogoff and colleagues have long demonstrated that Indigenous children’s keen attention is critical to their learning during culturally relevant activities.3

1

See Duranti and La Mattina (2022); Tomasello and Farrar (1986); Trevarthen (1979, 1980). See also Bruner (1985); Masataka (2003); Tomasello (2008); Tomasello et al. (2007); Tomasello and Farrar (1986). 3 See also Chavajay and Rogoff (1999); Rogoff et al. (2003); and Rogoff et al. 2015. Ingold (2001) argues that knowledge is not transmitted but it is learnt through the “education of attention.” 2

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Linguistic anthropologists and ethnomethodologists have stressed the interactional grounding of attention, highlighting its temporally unfolding character as a “practical, and thoroughly social, accomplishment” (Kidwell and Zimmerman 2007, p. 595; see also Duranti 2009). A fundamental aspect of attention is its embodiment in everyday activities through different modalities: talk, gaze, gesture, the senses, and the socio-spatial organization of bodies in the temporal unfolding of interaction (C. Goodwin 2018).4 Early research in developmental pragmatics highlighted the interactional work done by children and caretakers to secure a joint focus of attention in face-to-face interaction ([Ochs] Keenan and Schieffelin 1976). The subsequent establishment of the field of language socialization showed that children’s attentional patterns are guided by cultural preferences within a particular social organization (e.g., egalitarian vs. stratified); Ochs and Schieffelin 1984, Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). Over the last four decades, the cultural prerequisites and implications of the socialization of attention have been included in a number of studies of language-mediated interactions in nonindustrial5 and postindustrial households.6 A central claim of these studies is that socialization ideologies and cultural practices permeate and organize attention, having consequences for the child’s role as a focal participant (i.e. child-centered) or third-party participant (i.e., situationcentered) in processes of language acquisition. The socialization of children into joint attentional episodes, then, will vary cross-culturally. Furthermore, children’s and novices’ attention is mediated through communicative practices that orient them to use multiple modalities—such as talk, gesture, and sense perceptions. Consequently, children’s engagement in joint attention must be understood as anchored in embodied interaction. Studies of children in post-industrial middle-class European/US households have highlighted dyadic face-to-face engagement between caregiver and child as the default locus of joint attention. Yet this does not hold true for many other cultures. In many cultures, children develop participatory competence in multiparty configurations, often as third-party addressees or overhearers. The role of overhearer is significant for preverbal infants, since they develop participatory skills that do not solely depend on being addressed directly. Prompting and teasing routines, for example, embed the child in triadic or multiparty interactions that orient them to jointly attend, listen, and respond, playing different participation roles (Schieffelin 1986, 1989; Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1986). While cross-disciplinary studies have built a case for joint attention serving as a precondition for language, socialization, and learning, more research is needed on the variety of ecologies and embodied practices that adults and peers orchestrate to socialize younger children into joint attention in their everyday lives. Ecologies of attention vary across social groups in connection to activities, communicative practices, participants, socio-spatial habitats, and socialization ideologies—among other factors. The degree of granularity found in ethnographic analyses also influences our understanding of the social organization of attention. Some scholars approach attention at the level of communicative ecologies7 or in connection with children’s participation and learning in

4

See also Goodwin and Cekaite (2018); Kidwell and Zimmerman (2007); Mondada (2014, 2018). See Brown (2012); Ochs and Schieffelin (1984); Schieffelin (1989). 6 See Goodwin and Cekaite (2018); Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik (2013). 7 Ochs et al. 2005 develop a model of child-directed communication lodged in communicative ecologies. 5

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socialization of attention  411

activities.8 Other researchers use multimodal analysis of temporally unfolding trajectories of action and attention based on microanalysis of interactions in everyday activities.9 To this end, in the first part of the chapter I provide a background on studies of joint attention in developmental psychology (section on “Joint Attention in Developmental Studies: The Referential Triangle”). I then focus on different aspects of the interactional organization of joint attention in everyday life, demonstrating that joint attention is multimodal, multisensorial, and multiparty (section on “Everyday Joint Attention”). In the second part of the chapter, I present the case of a Mayan ecology of attention during infancy (section on “The Mayan Ecology of Attentional Engagement and Socialization”). The findings emphasize the importance of culturally specific understandings of practices that contribute to the socialization of attention.

Joint Attention in Developmental Studies: The Referential Triangle Joint attention develops in infants in increasing levels of engagement with others that evolve from dyadic to triadic attention. Researchers found that, as early as 2 months, infants and mothers engage in dyadic joint attention. They mutually regulate each other through rhythmic and multimodal signals, such as taking turns in haptic (e.g., nursing), vocal, and visual exchanges—referred to as “primary intersubjectivity” (Trevarthen 1979, 1980). Between three and eight months, infants gradually develop joint attentional skills by ­orienting themselves in the same visual field with another person and by following the outwardly directed gaze of adults.10 Between 9 to 12 months, they engage in cooperative or “secondary intersubjectivity” (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978), which involves joint attention between two people in connection to a third party or referent (person–person–object awareness). This developmental landmark is related to pointing, referential communication, and pragmatic abilities associated with intentionality and shared understanding (Tomasello 1999). Developmental psychologists have claimed that the emergence of infants’ pointing during the first year of life constitutes a “cognitive revolution,” a critical watershed in language acquisition. According to scholars in this tradition, early joint attention is achieved through gestures (e.g., pointing, showing). These are often accompanied by gaze alternation between the object and another person—the “referential triangle.” Infants’ pointing has been identified as a universal prelinguistic gesture of communication.11 The development of communication is also linked to social referencing—that is, when infants track the gaze of others, recruiting information about how to act on objects or direct others’ attention. From a social-pragmatic perspective, these findings indicate that young infants can use pointing to communicate their desire for exchanging intentions, wishes, and plans. Children most readily understand adult communicative intentions, including those expressed in linguistic utterances, inside the common ground established by frames of joint attention (Tomasello 1999; Morgenstern 2014).

8 Chavajay and Rogoff (1999); de León (2012, 2017); Sperry et al. (2019); and Rogoff (2003) have examined third-party learning through keen attention and listening. 9 See Goodwin (2018); Goodwin and Cekaite (2018); Mondada (2014, 2018). 10 Goswami (2008). 11 See Bates (1979); Liszkowski et al. (2012); Masataka (2003); Tomasello and Farrar (1986).

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Everyday Joint Attention Linguistic anthropologists have scrutinized multiple facets of everyday joint attention in a variety of nonindustrial and postindustrial communities. The studies have covered interactional settings that include everyday conversation, apprenticeship and learning in family and community, infant socialization, toddlers and middle-aged peer groups, and everyday family life. Attention is interactionally achieved through collaborative action, multimodal displays, and the social organization of participants towards a relevant focus of interest.12 Interactional research has shown how attention is anchored in an ecological huddle: “a public, shared focus of visual and cognitive attention that is created by the mutual orientation of the participants’ bodies” (Goffman 1964, p. 135; C. Goodwin 2018). Figure 22.1 shows two Mayan siblings engaging in an ecological huddle in a knitting activity. Sister guides brother to correct his stitches as they mutually orient towards the relevant focus of interest i.e., setting a weaving loom (de León 2017).

Figure 22.1  Mayan sister corrects brother’s knitting with a wooden loom.13

As shown in Figure 22.1, participants also monitor each other in participation frameworks, which consist of a public framework that grounds mutual attention through “actions demonstrating forms of involvement performed by parties within evolving structures of talk” (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2004, p. 222). Recent research on post-industrial families has shown that the flow of everyday life is socially organized around trajectories of action and attention in the unfolding organization of activities. Parents and children work to establish frameworks of mutual cooperation by choreographing attention in embodied directives designed to have someone contribute with the accomplishment of a task: “[T]he ways parents and children decide, negotiate, and implement the boundaries of the children’s current engagement are constitutive of family ethos and child agency” (M.H. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018, p. 49). Attentional choreographies are culturally and biologically shaped, a theme that has permeated studies of attention across disciplines and is embraced in the present chapter. Below, I outline topics that are fundamental for understanding the fuller fabric of joint attention in children’s socialization. These are key elements that enable joint attentional engagements: (i) the role of gaze; (ii) the senses; (iii) pointing, reference and intersubjectivity; and (iv) the multiparty organization of joint attention.

Gaze Coordination

Research on infants’ joint attention has focused primarily on visual/aural domains. Gaze has long been considered central for monitoring participants in conversation and during processes of joint attention, cognitive processing, and production. Bruner’s pioneering 12 13

Goodwin (2018); see also Mondada (2014, 2018). All figures presented in this paper are drawings from video photograms from the author’s archives.

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socialization of attention  413

work on joint attention centered on the joint visual attention found in “social communicative routines” between caregiver and child (Bruner and Sherwood 1976). A strong, intentional communicative resource, gaze aids in the selection of recipients in multiparty interaction (C. Goodwin 1981, 2018). Gaze alternation between object and caregiver is thought to be central for the emergence of referential language and the development of sociality, communication, and learning.14 However, gaze coordination shows cultural variability. Ethnographies on children’s socialization have shown that caregivers from different cultures hold infants differently, affecting how eye contact can function in social engagement. Alessandro Duranti and Elinor Ochs described how Samoan infants are oriented outwardly focusing their gaze on the activities of others (Duranti and Ochs 1997; Ochs et al. 2005). Patterns of gaze aversion away from children exist among the Gusii (LeVine et al. 1988), while infrequent eye contact between caregivers and children has been observed among other groups. Among the Kaluli (Bosavi), who tend to avoid direct eye contact with anyone, attention is not set visually for infants. Staring is interpreted as “begging with the eyes”; children are socialized not to simply look if they want something or want to know about it. The Kaluli preference is for “making one’s desires explicitly known through talk, so that one can be held interactionally responsible for what they say.”15 Among Tzeltal and Tzotzil Mayans, face-to-face interaction is not the default. Dyadic conversation is predominantly done with participants sitting side by side, their talk unfolding through conversational repetition across turns (Brown 2001, p. 220), which indicate engaged recipiency (Rossano 2012). Research also suggests that children affected by autism prefer side by side communication and use sensorial cues and interactional engagements other than making eye contact (Akhtar and Gernsbacher 2008; Ochs et al. 2005). These trends show that eye contact and visual joint attention may be more or less pronounced across situations and across communities showing variation in conversational feedback mechanisms.

The Role of the Senses

The study of human interaction has tended to focus on visual and aural cues, omitting information perceived through the other senses. Recent multimodal analyses, however, have given careful consideration to the whole body as a locus of action (see Chapter 24, Murphy). For example, touch is becoming included as one of the relevant modes of perception in studies of joint attention (see Chapter 21, Cekaite and Goodwin). Children with atypical development that involves sensory or cognitive asymmetries (e.g., blindness, autism) organize joint attention in nonvisual ways. Blind children rely on tactile engagement to elicit attention, while deaf children tend to combine visual and tactile modes to interact with others.16 In some nonindustrial societies, infants who are in constant contact with the caregiver’s body inhabit micro-ecological niches that have consequences for the development of attention. Most intimate are the corporeal niches in which caregivers and infants engage: in front of the chest, on the back or hip, in the arms or lap, standing upright, lying down.

14

Kidwell (2005, 2009); Tomasello et al. (2007). Bambi Schieffelin, personal communication April 2nd, 2021. 16 See Edwards (2015) for the emergence of tactile language among DeafBlind people. Chen and Downing (2006); Goico (2019), Haviland (2021); Lieberman (2015). 15

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These bodily arrangements have consequences for the interactional formations in which participants engage in joint attention.17 With the exception of face-to-face alignment, these arrangements allow for embodied, multiparty, attentional engagements that are multimodally cued through talk, gaze, gesture, touch, body orientation, and posture. Haptic-affective socialization from birth until at least 18 months enables intercorporeal intersubjectivity in these niches. Bodily entanglements in corporeal niches afford attunement to haptic-affective cues and multimodal communication. The constant emotional flow and feedback through the tactile connection between mother and infant leads to less crying than in their postindustrial counterparts.18 Constant physical contact allows the interplay of other sensorial communicative channels. For example, Rogoff claims that “forms of communication other than talk have special importance in many communities where gaze, gesture, posture, taste, smell, and timing of action are used very articulately, playing important roles for social engagement […] moreover, prosody, postural movements, body and head orientation also provide cues for achieving joint attention” (Rogoff 2003, p. 314). In addition to caregiver-child joint attention in which the child is held on the back or positioned in the lap, nested corporeal arrangements orienting children outwards—socializing them to attend to others—have been documented in many cultures.19 For older children’s socialization at home and in schools, adults employ forms of “control touch” that contribute to the “haptic organization of attention” (Cekaite 2016; Goodwin 2017). These experiences are central to learning and for general sociality. All the senses are components of the flow of communication, intersubjectivity, and intercorporeality, 20 suggesting that we must consider the full range of multisensorial organization of attention when discussing embodied communicative experiences.

The “Object” of Attention, Pointing, and Intersubjectivity

Experimental studies of children’s referential practices, such as the use of deictic gestures (e.g., pointing), have largely focused on how referred objects are constituted as common foci of attention through pointing or linguistic labeling and given meaning by participants’ shared visual orientations. Documenting spontaneous interactions has further clarified the ways in which deixis is an embodied accomplishment that requires reciprocal attunement of vocal, visual, gestural, and corporeal modalities. The object of reference can involve actions, absent referents, past events, experiences, sensations, emotions, etc. Objects in interaction can be seen, sensed, and interactionally transformed under many different circumstances. Objects—such as cheese in a cheese shop, a rock encountered by geologists, or a wild mushroom found in the woods by a Mayan boy—are experienced through sensorial practices that become sources of knowledge in social interaction. We share our mutual orientations to objects not just as physical entities,

17 See Kendon (1990) for sociospatial arrangements in human interaction (e.g., F-formations). See de León (2012) and Ochs et al. (2005) for interactional niches in children language socialization. 18 See de León (2021). 19 de León (1998, 2012); Ochs et al. (2005). 20 Merleau-Ponty (1964) defines intercorporeality as the intersubjective reciprocal sharing of bodily experience. Meyer et al. (2017) and Mondada (2014) argue for a phenomenological approach to communication as an embodied practice central to the emergence of sociality.

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but through conversation, collaborative action, and intersubjective engagement (Duranti 2009, p. 491; C. Goodwin 2003, 2018; Kidwell and Zimmerman 2007, p. 594).21 From this perspective, intersubjectivity refers to the knowledge that the world is fundamentally social—not a mere world of facts and affairs, but a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world (Husserl 1931, pp. 92–93).22

The Mayan Ecology of Attentional Engagement and Socialization Social groups construct habitats that organize children’s access to communication in distinct configurations. From nonindustrial to postindustrial families, communication is framed within the household and in the communal spaces around which people organize their lives. Practices that socialize attention are oriented around local parental preferences for the coordination of social action with young children. Local beliefs about infants’ development also affect the socialization of attention. Bambi Schieffelin (1989) reports that, since Kaluli (Bosavi) babies are said to have no understanding, until the age of three “caregivers do not invest efforts in trying to divert them” except through nursing or being carried on the mother’s back.23 In this corporeal niche, children develop fine sound perception from an early age (San Roque and Schieffelin 2019). The overhearer socialization configuration in early communicative development also affords observational and participatory skills that enhance learning in later childhood. As an illustration of these approaches, the following sections rely upon a multimodal ethnography of Tzotzil Mayan infants’ socialization into joint attention in Zinacantán, Chiapas, México.24 Attention will be shown to be multimodal, multiparty, multisensorial, and oriented by local parental theories. Along with Penelope Brown (2012), it is here assumed that an ethnography of the socialization of attention must consider the frequency, sequencing, and coordination of both vocal and nonvocal interactional cues through which caregivers and children participate. Moreover, infants are shown to play different participatory roles in a variety of communicative environments, ranging from dyadic to triadic to multiparty arrangements. The socialization of joint attention for identifying referents in this context displays important differences to the practices described in studies of postindustrial children in laboratory, day-care, or familial settings.

The Role of Interactional Routines in Joint Attention

Jerome Bruner (1985) claimed that children’s language learning is scaffolded by joint attentional episodes in which child and adult engage in a common ground for the embodied

21 Estigarribia and Clark (2007) analyze the contribution of gaze and gesture in joint attentional engagements in American mothers and infants. They suggest that this process may be subject to cultural variability. Also see Mondada (2018); Schegloff (1992); Wootton (1997). Ochs and Schieffelin (2016) explore syntactic topic in conversations of American children and their mothers as an indication of conversationally organized joint attention. 22 See Duranti (2009) for an integration of phenomenological and interactional perspectives on adult and child discourse based on the adaptation of some key concepts introduced originally by Edmund Husserl (1931). 23 Bambi Schieffelin, personal communication April 2, 2021. 24 The data stems from over three decades of linguistic and anthropological research focused on language acquisition, socialization, and learning de León (1998, 1999, 2005, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2021).

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association of language and action in the world. Such ritualized activities provide a framework for socializing the child to engage in exchanges focused on specific actions and responses; these activities include eye contact, gestures (e.g., pointing using the index finger) and vocalizations such as “look over there.” Language socialization studies have documented many situations in which dyadic childdirected speech is not the default mode of interaction. These cross-cultural findings have identified interactional routines as a locus of multiparty socialization into and through joint attention in many cultures. Prompts, teasing, directives, questions, and threats socialize infants’ skills as emergent communicative participants who cooperatively construct meaning with others. These routines involve linguistic, corporeal, and affective performances lodged in interactional frames of mutual orientation. Three-party arrangements for routine activities involving infants are common. Children may be focal addressees in such exchanges—or third-party targets in speech addressed to others. These routines play a central role in the socialization of attention, affect, and participatory competence in multiparty formats. Prompting routines, pervasive in many cultures, help scaffold joint attention. The caregiver engages the child in a sequentially organized multiparty format. Prompting routines in Zinacantán involve gestural and verbal actions, such as asking the child to sleep, shake her head, kick, request food or gifts with an extended hand (de León 2012). These are normally performed in frontal nesting formations with child and caregiver both facing a third party, analogous to exchanges among the Kaluli (Bosavi) described by Schieffelin (1989). In one instance (de León 1998, 2012), a grandfather engages Cande, a 13-month-old child,25 in a prompting routine by positioning her on the ground in a frontal nested formation, asking her to call her mother using the Baby Talk (BT) register and the sentence-final imperative form of the verb “say” (uto): la’ me’ tututon uto (BT) (=la’ me’ kuchon, uto);26 ‘come mother, carry me on your back, say.’ Watching her mother walk towards her in response to the prompt, the baby calls her by saying “Ama!”; the mother approaches and whisks the child away. In another example, the grandfather again stands the child in front of a visitor, shaping her hand with the palm up and prompting her to ask for a toy, “ak’o tsitsi uto”; ‘give me a little toy, say.’ In the next turn the child shapes her hand by herself, facing the third party in front of her. In the data I collected, triadic formats with the child strapped to a caregiver while facing a third party are also common, as shown in Excerpt 22.1, where Cande (13 months), engaged in an interactional routine with a young aunt, is facing another aunt who comes to visit. Before the routine started, the baby was engaged with a visiting aunt, her caregiver and the researcher, who were asking her if she was going to sleep. She answered by shutting her eyes and smiling, which caused everybody to laugh (Figures 22.2 and 22.3). The routine then unfolds into a prompt when her caregiver asks her to shut her eyes; the child responds by shutting her eyes, a gestural action demonstrating her sequentially appropriate attentional engagement with the prompt.

25 Cande was one of the main subjects of my developmental study. Haviland (1998, 2003) analyzed some of her pointing gestures documented in my developmental data. 26 The adult construction appears in parenthesis.

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Excerpt 22.1  ‘Close your eyes.’

1      Aunt and Researcher:                    muts’o [la sate                                                               close your eyes 2      Caregiver: ((holding the baby))                   [muts’o la sate, muts’o                                                                          close your eyes

3      Baby: ((closes eyes))

4      ((caregiver smiles)) 5      ((surrounding participants laugh)) Figures 22.2 and 22.3  Prompting a gestural routine.

Teasing routines present more complex attentional work, since they involve unexpected responses from the caregiver in the giving-and-taking interchange. For example, in an exchange analyzed elsewhere (de León 2005), upon being told “Here is your lolly,” a child extends her hand to grab the candy and the adult repeatedly withdraws the offered candy.27 Across caregivers and situations we find a range of teasing, prompting, rhetorical questions, directives, and referential events playing a variety of socializing goals in multiparty interactions. 28

Joint Attention, Pointing, and the “Referential” Event in Zinacantán

Children’s pointing is considered a universal gesture that emerges through the alignment of two participants focused on one object of interest. However, the pedagogical practices of pointing and labeling that coordinate gaze with word/referent are mostly characteristic of

27 In de León (2005) I analyze teasing routines involving affective prompting such as making the child get angry or scared. 28 Although not encompassed in the present paper, siblings are another important source of socialization into joint attention, mostly by engaging their charges in playful interactional routines.

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post-industrial families. In these families, children’s word learning is enhanced in question– answer sequences relevant to the child’s interests and designed, in some contexts, to support vocabulary development, normally accompanied with books or other objects (Ninio and Bruner 1978). In many nonindustrial societies, however, children’s socialization is situation-centered, oriented by caregivers’ ideologies and priorities. Pointing routines and labeling are significantly less frequent. Several language socialization ethnographies document these situations. Among the Tayap people, in Gapun, Papua New Guinea, for example, there are no labeling routines; children are distracted when showing distress by pointing to ongoing events simply to reframe their attention (Kulick 1992). As suggested earlier, episodes of joint attention are not exclusively visual; they can involve other senses, e.g., sounds, smells, touches. San Roque and Schieffelin (2019) show how the Kaluli (Bosavi) people are strongly oriented toward ambient sounds. In that society, a range of deictics call attention to particular sounds and their sources. They rarely use the verbs “listen” or “hear”; instead, they rely on rich metaphors related to listening to create a joint focus of auditory perception. An example of these sound metaphors in Kaluli would be “gige ‘cracking sound, like breaking a bird eggshell’” (San Roque and Schieffelin 2019, p. 352). Zinacantec children are similarly attentive to ambient sounds, often commenting about them. During my first years of fieldwork on children’s language in Zinacantán with the focal family of my study, it was primarily the grandfather who engaged children in joint attentional episodes. Other caregivers more often engaged them in multiparty interactional routines, such as prompting and teasing.29 Pointing episodes with turn-taking were infrequent, mostly occurring in the frontal nested niche with both participants looking outwards (see Excerpt 22.2). On occasion, the grandfather would use a pointing gesture toward a topic of interest, which he would describe in connection to actions, such as: “(the dog) will bite you,” “look, grandmother is chopping wood.” In other cases, he enacted embodied demonstrations to establish a framework of mutual orientation with the child without making eye contact with her. A tally of the number of times that adults coordinated their gaze with an infant pointing at a referent revealed a sharp contrast between pointing episodes with and without gaze/pointing alignment, the latter being more frequent (de León 2012, p. 97). This case study demonstrates that joint attention in pointing events is not exclusively dependent on face-to-face engagement. Excerpt 22.2 (Figures 22.4 to 22.7) shows an episode of joint attention that unfolds in a nested corporeal arrangement, visually aligning both participants towards an emerging object of attention: the family dog. In line 1, the grandfather engages the 5-month-old granddaughter in joint attention by asking her whether the dog will bite her. He neither points to the dog nor coordinates his gaze with the infant. Even without pointing or eye contact, the embodied nested dyad is visually, corporeally, and affectively attuned, showing mutual engagement towards the object of attention. The sequential unfolding of the infant’s reaching gesture evinces this attunement, suggesting that she is trying to touch the dog (line 2). This is followed by grandfather’s directive, vi ‘look!’ as he raises his arm, opening the visual field for the girl to look at the dog, which now faces both of them. The episode ends with the dog walking away.

29

See de León (2012) for a quantitative profile of interactional routines in a sample of everyday interactions with Mayan infants.

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Excerpt 22.2  Joint attention

1      Grandfather: mi chaxti’, mi chixti’::: (Baby Talk)                              mi chasti’, mi chisti’:::                             Is it going to bite you? Is it going to bite me?

Figure 22.4  Grandfather and child look at dog approaching.

2      Baby:          ((Baby reaches out with open hand)

Figures 22.5 and 22.6  Baby reaches out to touch dog.

3      Grandfather: [vi                              look!                              [((GF raises his arm to let the child look at the dog and engage it))

Figure 22.7  Grandfather lifts arm to engage infant with dog.

This event differs substantially from classical referential events in the developmental literature as discussed in the section on Theoretical and Methodological Implications. There is no eye contact between participants, no pointing, no transparent labeling. In the example presented in Excerpt 22.2 the warning is posed as a question with the verb ti’, “bite, eat meat,” and no mention of the noun “dog” (line 1). Ti’ refers to the action of biting or being bitten/stung associated with the agents that perform such biting, like a dog, a cat, or an insect, without

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specifically mentioning the agent of the action. Before turning two, the child produces the verb ti’ as part of her early vocabulary, along with other verbs for eating specific foods (“eat (chew) meat,” “eat fruit,” “eat crunchy food”), a characteristic feature of Tzotzil semantics. At this age, the child does not yet have the lexicon to refer to meat or insects her vocabulary is composed more of forms to refer to actions than to objects (de León 1998, 2009). Ultimately, coordination of pointing and gaze towards an object of reference in Zinacantán infant socialization is shaped by embodied communicative habitats cued by touch, talk, and body orientation in which visual joint attention is not the default. Furthermore interactional patterns highlight activities rather than objects.30

Children’s Pointing in Zinacantán

#

In a crosscultural study of pointing in an experimental setting, Ulf Liszkowski et al. (2012) showed how both caregivers’ and infants’ pointing was used to initiate interactions. They argued that infants more often follow caregivers’ pointing than vice versa. Moreover, caregivers increase their frequency of pointing a few months before infants begin to point. The authors also claimed that infants and caregivers coordinated their pointing, accompanying it with vocalizations to provide additional communicative cues. Although Zinacantec babies learn to point at the developmentally expected time, they do not seem to be dependent on caregivers’ feedback and point with high frequency around the end of the first year of life, whereas their caregivers infrequently initiate extended interactions with either gestures or talk. Studies of another Mayan agricultural group have had similar findings, reporting low interactional density and low conversational feedback with infants among Tzeltal Mayans.31 Despite differences in interactional density between Tzeltal Mayans and Rossel Islanders, the infants in Brown’s (2012) study began pointing at the same age as other infants reported in developmental studies. Figure 22.8 shows the number of pointing actions by grandfather and Cande (11 months) at the peak of her pointing production. In the three-hour sample, Cande produced 42 pointing gestures directed at objects in the kitchen (a cat, the floor, the cooking fire, her

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Caregiver/infant pointing actions (Child’s age: 11 months) (3 hrs.)

Child’s pointing gestures (total)

Grandpa’s pointing actions

Other’s pointing actions

Family members

Figure 22.8  Caregiver and infant pointing gestures. 30 In de León (1999) I analyze different factors in the linguistic and cultural environment that influence Tzotzil Mayan early verb learning. 31

See Brown (2012) and Casillas et al. (2020) for an analysis of low interaction with Tzeltal Mayan infants.

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socialization of attention  421

aunt). She also produced random pointings with smiles when she looked at the researcher. The aunts who were in the kitchen did not engage in joint attention with the child, even when their positions allowed for face-to-face interaction. This sample also includes scenes from the courtyard, where grandfather engages Cande in joint attentional episodes with pointing. The data show that he used only 3 pointing gestures compared with Cande’s 42—a pronounced asymmetry. Of interest here is how prolific the child’s pointing gestures were, despite minimal pointing input and feedback from caregivers. Excerpt 22.3 shows the temporal unfolding of Cande’s pointing (11 months) while on her mother’s back as the mother was doing laundry in the courtyard. Excerpt 22.3  Cande’s pointing gesture

1      Baby: a[hh                    [((baby points at laundry)) 2      Mother: ((keeps washing))

Figure 22.9  Baby points at laundry.

3      Baby:   ((turns around, looks at researcher and points))

Figure 22.10  Baby turns around and points.

The scene starts with Cande reaching out, accompanied by a vocalization apparently directed at the laundry (Excerpt 22.3). Her mother glimpses the baby’s hand from her side while the child reaches out and points (line 1, Figure 22.9). The child then notices the camera and researcher observing her from a lateral position about three meters away, then suddenly swings her arm 180 degrees, pointing to the space behind the mother in an extended gesture (line 3, Figure 22.10). Cande apparently points to an empty space—not a discernable object or action. “Pure” pointing, without reference to an object, was common at this age. The gesture recruits the other visually available participants’ attention to mutually engage in a participation framework. This pointing gesture contrasts with the one in Figure 22.9, wherein the nested corporeal arrangement does not allow Cande to recruit her mother in joint attention.

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Some pointing gestures effectively prompt feedback from caregivers. These are embodied in displays that reveal infants’ affective stance (Ochs 1996) towards a focus of concern, like distress or pain. One example is a pointing gesture Cande made at 13 months, when she produced a multimodal template involving mock crying and extending her hand to show a place where she had fallen. Her mother then looked to the place shown by the child, asking her where she fell. At this point, the mother exchanged affiliative laughs with surrounding family members, displaying common understanding (de León 2021). To summarize, coordination of pointing and gaze towards an object of reference is infrequent in Zinacantán infant socialization. This seems to be associated with a variety of nested communicative habitats (i.e., baby carried on mother’s back or sitting on caregiver’s lap facing outwards), multiparty participation frameworks, situation-centered socialization, and socialization ideologies. Nonetheless, Zinacantec infants learn to point at the predicted developmental moment. Unlike their caregivers, who point to them in low frequency and provide little feedback, infants actively work to engage others in joint attention. Zinacantan’s ecology of infant socialization with regard to joint attention and pointing therefore reveals that: (i) caregivers’ pointing and labeling are infrequent; (ii) the caregiver focuses the child’s attention on actions or events, rather than objects; (iii) the embedded nested dyad constrains the potential for a classical referential triangle, and (iv) children actively search for creating frames of joint attention with others.

Theoretical and Methodological Implications Infants’ socialization into joint attention varies along lines that create particular attentional ecologies. In the Mayan case study described here, local parental ideologies of child socialization hold that children learn to speak without stimulation, which is consistent with a low profile of interactional feedback.32 This view connects with the ethos of a community in which attention is not centered on children, but on the situations and priorities of adult life to which children have to accommodate. Habitats and corporeal niches affect the interactional formations in which parties engage. Attentional engagements with embodied demonstrations and/or pointing gestures do not depend only on gaze coordination, but on multisensorial entanglements involving intercorporeal communication. Mayan infants frequently engage in multiparty participation frameworks wherein they occupy multiple roles and, in many cases, act to elicit attentional engagement on the part of others. The child leads the initiation of actions through pointing. The scarce feedback that adults provide to infant pointing seems to suggest the biological propensity towards using a pointing gesture around the first year of life. It also reveals the agentive role of the Mayan infant into recruiting others into joint attention. The Mayan case contrasts with descriptions of the socialization of joint attention through pointing in postindustrial families, which usually flows in dialogical interchanges, on many occasions, with explicit pedagogical intent. This style is consistent with socialization ideologies and practices believed to enhance language development, which have been the objects of controversy related to studies of the so-called “language gap.”33

32 See Brown (2012) for a statistical analysis of interactional feedback of caregivers to children in the neighbouring Tzeltal Mayan—referred to as “interactional density.” 33 See de León and García-Sánchez (2021) and Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik (2020) for a discussion on language gap studies and their implications in language socialization.

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Interactional routines do, however, provide the classic ecological huddle for attentional engagements with visual alignment between participants, albeit in triadic and multiparty interactions rather than in dyads. The child’s responses in the sequential organization of actions within these huddles provide evidence of her mutual orientation with others. Ecologies of attention are found in any social group. More ethnographic research, however, is needed to account for the variety of ecologies and embodied practices used to enact frameworks of joint attention. As argued here, a multimodal, multiparty, and multisensorial approach to joint attention allows for an understanding of variation among different populations and social groups. A multisensorial perspective on joint attention can also provide better assessments of the development of atypical children and better resources to enhance the development of attentional skills (Battich et al. 2020). Tactile strategies, for instance, can support social interaction and communication with children who have visual impairments and other disabilities (Chen and Downing 2006; Goico 2019). Interactional engagements and sensorial cues that do not merely rely on face-to-face interaction can benefit the education of autistic children (Akhtar and Gernsbacher 2008; Ochs et al. 2005). In sum, a linguistic anthropological approach to joint attention across societies and contexts can contribute to fostering inclusive and culturally sensitive pedagogies.

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Kidwell, M. (2005). Gaze as social control: How very young children differentiate “the look” from “a mere look” by their adult caregivers. Research on Social Language Interaction 38 (4): 417–449. Kidwell, M. (2009). Gaze shift as an interactional resource for very young children. Discourse Processes 46: 145–160. Kidwell, M. and Zimmerman, D.H. (2007). Joint attention as action. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (3): 592–611. Kulick, D. (1992). Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeVine, R.A., Miller, P.M., and Maxwell, M. (eds.) (1988). Parental Behavior in Diverse Societies. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lieberman, A.M. (2015). Attention-getting skills of deaf children using American sign language in a preschool classroom. Applied Psycholinguistics 36 (4): 855–873. Liszkowski, U., Brown, P., Callaghan, T. et al. (2012). A prelinguistic gestural universal of human communication. Cognitive Science 36: 698–713. Masataka, N. (2003). The Onset of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The philosopher and his shadow. In: Signs (M. Merleau-Ponty), 155– 181. Evanston. IL: Northwestern University Press. Meyer, C., Streeck, J., and Jordan, J.S. (eds.) (2017). Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mondada, L. (2014). Pointing, talk and the bodies: Reference and joint attention as embodied interactional achievements. In: From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Utterance in Action (ed. M. Seyfeddinipur and M. Gullberg), 95–124. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mondada, L. (2018). The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: Practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops. Discourse Studies 20 (6): 743–769. Morgenstern, A. (2014). Shared attention, gaze and pointing gestures in hearing and deaf children. In: Language in Interaction. Studies in honor of Eve. V. Clark. (ed. I. Arnon, M. Casillas, C. Kurumada, and B. Estigarribia), 135–156. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ninio, A. and Bruner, J. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language 5 (1): 1–15. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In: Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (ed. J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson), 407–437. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. and Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2013). Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ochs, E. and Kremer-Sadlik, T. (2020). Ethical blind-spots in ethnographic and psychological approaches to the language gap debate. Langage et Societé 2 (170): 39–67. Ochs, E. and Schieffelin, B.B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In: Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (ed. R.A. Schweder and R.A. LeVine). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E., Solomon, O., and Sterponi, L. (2005). Limitation and transformations of habitus in childdirected communication. Discourse Studies 7: 547–583. Rogoff, B. (2003). The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Mejía-Arauz, R. et al. (2003). Firsthand learning though intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology 54: 175–203. Rogoff B. Mejía-Arauz R. and Correa-Chávez M. (2015). A cultural paradigm-learning by observing and pitching in. In: Children Learn by Observing and Contributing to Family and Community Endeavors: A Cultural Paradigm. Advances in Child Development and Behaviour. Correa-Chávez, M., Mejía-Arauz, R. and Rogoff B. (eds) vol 49 (1–22). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Rossano, F. (2012). Gaze in conversation. In: The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (eds. J. Sidnell and T. Stivers), 308–329. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. San Roque, L. and Schieffelin, B.B. (2019). Perception verbs in context: Perspectives from Kaluli (Bosavi) child–caregiver interaction. In: Perception Metaphors (ed. L.J. Speed, C. O’Meara, L.S. Roque, and A. Majid), 347–368. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Scaife, M. and Bruner, J. (1975). The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant. Nature 253: 265–266.

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Schegloff, E.A. (1992). Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97 (5): 11295–11345. Schieffelin, B.B. (1986). Teasing and shaming in Kaluli children’s interactions. In: Language Socialization Across Cultures (ed. B.B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs), 165–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B.B. (1989). The Give and Take of Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B.B. and Ochs, E. (1986). Language Socialization across Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperry, D.E., Sperry, L.L., and Miller, P.J. (2019). Reexamining the verbal environments of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Child Development 90 (4): 1303–1318. Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, M. (2008). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., and Liszkowski, U. (2007). A new look at infant pointing. Child Development 78 (3): 705–722. Tomasello, M. and Farrar, M.J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development 57 (6): 1454–1463. Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In: Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Cooperation (ed. M. Bullowa), 321– 348. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1980). The foundations of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding of infants. In: The Social Foundations of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of J.S. Bruner (ed. D.R. Olson), 316–342. New York: W. W. Norton. Trevarthen, C. and Hubley, P. (1978). Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In: Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language (ed. A. Lock), 183–229. London: Academic Press. Watson-Gegeo, K.A. and Gegeo, D.W. (1986). Calling-out and repeating routines in Kwaraae children’s language socialization. In: Language Socialization across Cultures (ed. B.B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs), 17–50. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wootton, A.J. (1997). Interaction and the Development of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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23

Sound, Voice, and the Felt Body

Patrick Eisenlohr Introduction As the meeting ground of language, the body, and subjectivity, voice has become a key concept in the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, analyses of the voice that do justice to all these three dimensions are rare. This also applies to linguistic anthropological work on the voice, whose main strength is investigating the interplay of language and subjectivity in the voice. Pioneering exceptions aside (Briggs 1993; Feld 1982), linguistic anthropologists have until recently paid little attention to the embodied voice’s sonic materiality. Departing from the widespread use of voice as a metaphor for self and agency, for several decades linguistic anthropologists have explored alternatives to a logocentric understanding of voice as expression of a unified authorial self. They have been influenced by work such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on polyphony (1981) and Erving Goffman’s (1981) analysis of shifting participant roles, which have prepared the ground for investigating voice as the “linguistic construction of social personae” (Keane 1999, p. 171). Accordingly, speakers can activate their linguistic and performative repertoires in order to inhabit rapidly shifting participant roles in interaction, but also a variety of more enduring social roles, none of which need to stand in a necessary relationship to a speaker’s self.1 Other scholars have more recently expanded this line of research to the embodied and sonic dimensions of the voice, such as in the association between falsetto voice and interactional stances of respect in Zapotec (Sicoli 2014) or “creaky voice” as invoking the social persona of a hardcore Chicano gangster among Latina gang members in California (Mendoza-Denton 2011).2 The tradition of research on voice as enregisterment and the creation of social personae can be combined with a phenomenological approach to the sonic dimensions of the voice 1

  This approach to voice as enregisterment and the creation of social personae includes Agha (2005); Hill (1995); Inoue (2003); Keane (2011); and Peters (2016).

2

 Research on the embodied and sonic dimension of the voice in anthropology includes Eisenlohr (2018a, 2018b); Faudree (2012); Harkness (2014, 2021); Kunreuther (2014, 2018); Webster (2015); Weidman (2021); and Wirtz (2018).

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

as atmosphere (see below) including its felt-bodily qualities understood in neo-phenomenological terms as explained below. In an ethnographic example drawn from my research on the recitation of devotional poetry among Muslims in Mauritius, I will show how such a joining of these approaches can work. In it, the sonic dimensions of such poetic recitations are both discursive and non-denotational, meaning that they are sequentially organized (like “discourse”) but do not have an obvious semantic content (denotation) such that an audience could agree about what they are “about.” Whereas there are sounds that are immediately recognizable as language, there are also those that are not. They are aspects of the “body social that is enunciated in and through the voice” (Feld et al. 2004, p. 341). They interplay as “liminal utterances” (de la Bretèque et al. 2017) in vocal performance in the sense that they combine both language and non-language and this accounts for the recitation’s efficacy as a religious and atmospheric practice that spreads particular pious emotions among its participants. A related instance of this testing of the boundaries of language in vocal performance is glossolalia, that is, speaking in tongues. Distinct from the artful recitation of poetry for its lack of recognizable semantic content, glossolalia is described by Nicholas Harkness as “cultural semiosis—sign behavior—that is said to contain, and therefore can be justified by, an ideological core of language, but in fact is produced at the ideological limits of language” (Harkness 2021, p. 7). In other words, to do justice to the complex phenomenon of voice, it is necessary to pay attention to both its language-related aspects as well as those of its sonic dimensions that go beyond language. In the humanities and social sciences, the human voice, once intellectually freed from its reduction to being synonymous with language, has acquired the status of a topic that is both profound and enigmatic. This is primarily due to two contradictory trends in the literature. On one hand, the voice is often considered to be deeply associated with the body and regarded as its innermost involuntary expression, defying a subject’s intentionality. The “grain of the voice” (Barthes 2012 [1972]) thus marks the embodied voice in all its depth, highlighting the intrinsic link between the voice and the body. On the other hand, some theorists have foregrounded what they consider the voice’s “spectral autonomy” (Žižek 2001, p. 58) or ghostly disconnection from the body and from a speaker’s subjectivity. Such an approach breaks with the established logocentric traditions of viewing the voice as the site of subjectivity that has also motivated the common use of “voice” as a trope for agency and subjectivity in anthropology (Weidman 2014). It also postulates a dissociation of the voice from a speaker’s body, posing the question of the “otherness” of the voice in a striking way. Experiences of listening to one’s own recorded voice may convey a certain uncanny foreignness, thereby introducing a break in the seamless unity of voice and the self. Scholars influenced by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis have in turn analyzed the voice as an autonomous object that escapes the control of subjects and that also bypasses processes of meaning-making that are responsible for the production of the self. Mladen Dolar has argued that the voice is the bodily manifestation of what Lacan called the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire that remains as a trace of the Real understood as an undifferentiated wholeness that is lost in child development and socialization, processes that involve the symbolic apparatus of language superseding the Real. However, according to Lacan 2018 [1973], traces of the Real can nevertheless be felt through gaps in the symbolic order. These gaps point to a deep and irrecoverable loss, and for the same reason also generate intense desires to recover a primal and absolute state of non-separation. From such a Lacanian perspective, the voice is the bodily trace of such objects of desire that are as compelling as they are impossible to define (Dolar 2006, p. 11). Following this approach, the voice is thus not just beyond the control of the human subject, but also lacks a firm

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connection with the subject’s own body. The voice is an uncanny reminder of a primal state of non-separation far transcending the boundaries of a subject and its body. The two perspectives on the voice I have mentioned, the voice as deeply embodied and the voice as the ultimate other, are useful heuristics, but they depend on concrete historical and socio-cultural contexts for their actualization. The significance and effects of human voices can vary enormously across different settings. In contrast to, for example, Dolar’s Lacanian explorations of the voice, it is useful to adopt an empirical approach that situates vocal performance in a defined socio-historical context. This necessitates an analysis of the semiotics of vocal performance as developed in linguistic anthropology (Harkness 2014) with an engagement with vocal sound as a measurable sonic phenomenon that generates bodily sensations. Considering that attempts to overcome the divide between the linguistic aspects of the voice and its non-denotational sonic dimensions are nothing new,3 it is remarkable how enduring this divide in research on the voice has shown itself to be. A key means for overcoming this divide is the analysis of semiotic processes such as iconicity or qualitative likeness (Jakobson and Waugh 1979). Steven Feld, Aaron Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels have paraphrased Roman Jakobson on the centrality of iconicity for linking language and non-denotational vocal performance in the following terms: “… namely, that the whole of language is a field of potentially consummated iconicities, only a small segment of which are ever consummated. But when and where they are consummated they bring sensuous immediacy to the experience of sonic materiality” (2004, p. 340, see also Feld 1988). Qualia, or the ways an experience of something feels, play a key role in the social organization of the voice. This is often evident in what Nicholas Harkness refers to as “qualic tuning,” that is, when the felt qualities, “the qualia of one’s individual voice are tuned and manipulated phonically to align with a sonically experienced framework of value” (Harkness 2014, p. 15). Iconic relationships—relationships established through qualitative likeness between processes in sonic materiality and other aspects of language—are central to the power of vocal linguistic performance. Qualia and iconicity are also central to the example I discuss in this chapter, which revolves around religiously grounded notions about the voice. In particular, the voice’s role in mediating between humans and God in Islamic traditions plays a crucial role in the example below, along with the ways in which religious traditions regulate the transmission and circulation of authoritative religious discourse. As I will explain, the latter theme is highly significant for the regimentation of participant roles in the Mauritian Muslim devotional performances illustrated below, as well as for the manner of de- and recontextualizing discourse as recognizably bounded texts in the performance. The theme of the otherness of the voice is in turn central to the Qur’anic paradigm of the voice as the site where God as a transcendent and therefore ultimate other manifests himself. Media ideologies, or politically charged ideas and beliefs about media technologies and their effects, are very important for the practices of circulating and reproducing the devotional poetry, as the latter are thoroughly intertwined with contemporary media practices. In particular, the notion of sound reproduction technologies as perfectly functioning “vanishing mediators” (Sterne 2003, p. 218) that seem to leave no traces of their own materiality on what they mediate plays a major role in the poetry’s media-enhanced circulation. But the otherness of the voice is also evident in other ways. This becomes clear in the link I draw between the voice in Mauritian Muslim devotional recitation and the analytic of sonic atmospheres as inspired by neo-phenomenological approaches (Böhme 1993, 2017; 3

  See for example Bickford (2007); Bolinger (1986); Graham (1984); and List (1963).

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Schmitz 1969, 2014). Phenomenology studies the conditions of experience, which include the intertwining of humans with the world, and has often emphasized the bodily grounding of such relational existence. Within this tradition, the neo-phenomenological approach of Hermann Schmitz emphasizes pre-reflective bodily experience for which the notion of atmosphere as emotions poured into space that merge with felt-bodies (Schmitz et al. 2011, p. 255) is central. From such a perspective, the voice features as a sonic phenomenon that exerts a compelling force, intermingling with perceiving bodies while enacting and suggesting bodily movements. As voices impact bodies, they also at the same time tend to dissolve distinctions of “own” and “other” that voices might be associated with. The phenomenological notion of the live, felt-body (Leib) plays an important role in this process (Plessner 1982 [1925]; Schmitz 1965) because the intermingling of the sonic and the body can be perceived at this level of feeling one’s body and all that pertains to it.4 In this context, it is useful to draw on recent work on sonic atmospheres.5 Following this line of research, the effects of the voice on those present at performances can be best understood as the workings of sonic atmospheres. This is by no means a reduction of the atmospheric effects of the embodied voice to processes inside a subject. Quite the contrary, atmospheres are quasi-objective entities that are emitted from persons, objects, or their constellations. Atmospheres fill a pre-dimensional space, that is a space sensed by the body that is prior to the scientific abstraction of a three-dimensional space, between their sources and persons perceiving them. Atmospheres thus touch and envelop bodies that feel and perceive them in a manner that exceeds single, definite sensory impressions. According to Hermann Schmitz, atmospheres as spatial phenomena impact sentient bodies, akin to feelings such as being in darkness or warmth (Schmitz 2014; Schmitz et al. 2011).6 Sound as atmosphere provides a vivid concretization of atmospheres as “ecstasies of the thing” (Böhme 1993, p. 110). Sonic events and phenomena have a very distinct and tangible existence, unfold in time, can be measured, and do not require perceiving subjects for their presence. Sound waves propagate through space, intermingling with the bodies of those perceiving them, making singing and listening a “vibrational practice” (Eidsheim 2015). Sound waves do not just act on the sense of hearing in the strict sense of the term, with which I mean that the human ear transduces differences in air pressure into electrical signals sent to the brain, but can potentially be sensed by the entire body. Sound waves act on bodies, even involving, in the terminology of acoustics, “attacks,” providing one of our key modes of material intermingling with the world. According to Böhme, sonic atmospheres modify the felt-body’s (Leib) economy of experienced space (Böhme 2000, p. 11), while for Schmitz, atmospheres, especially sonically generated contain suggestions of bodily movement (Schmitz 2014, p. 85). Leib here refers to the entire felt space of what pertains to the body beyond what are often considered the normal boundaries of the body. The notion of Leib therefore modifies and weakens distinction of inside and outside, which is very appropriate for the analysis of sonic phenomena as the latter demonstrably intermingle with bodies.

4

  The intermingling of the sonic with the felt-body also recalls Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh, with which he describes the body as both sentient and sensible at the same time (1968, p. 148). This happens, for example, when the body utters vocal sound and feels one’s own voice uttering sound. For Merleau-Ponty, the flesh thus points at the overlapping and intermingling between world and the body. 5   Abels 2013, 2017, 2018; Eisenlohr 2018a; Riedel 2015. 6   “Emotions are atmospheres poured out spatially. An atmosphere in the sense intended here is the complete occupation of a surfaceless space in the region of experienced presence. This surfaceless space, apart from emotions, can also be occupied by the weather experienced as enveloping you or by (e.g. festive, pregnant or calm) silence” (Schmitz et al. 2011, p. 255, see also Schmitz 2014).

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sound, voice, and the felt body  431

In order to understand vocal sound as a compelling, deeply affecting phenomenon it is necessary to pay more attention to the particularities of sonic materiality than has so far been common in linguistic anthropology, as well as in anthropology more broadly. We now realize that we should not only study the ways in which humans invest sound with power through, for example, discourses on sound and institutionalized practices of listening, as typically emphasized in studies of auditory culture in anthropology and ethnomusicology (Downey 2002; Erlmann 2004; Weidman 2014). We also need to be attentive to the ways in which the sonic, including vocal sound, can be powerful in itself as a flux of kinetic energy intermingling with sentient bodies, exerting suggestions of motion on the latter. These two perspectives, the study of auditory cultures, and the study of sound as atmospheres that are emotions poured out in space literally moving felt-bodies, do not exclude each other. These two approaches typically address the topic of sound and voice on different ends on a continuum of signification between the diffuse meaningfulness of sonic suggestions of motions and more culturally qualified discourses and techniques of the body. Iconicity is the main unifying bond across such a continuum of meaningfulness from sonic suggestions of motion to discourse. This implies that linguistic anthropological research on sound and voice needs to combine a plurality of methods, not only mainly discourse-based ethnography and linguistic analysis, but also formal analysis of sonic events.

Muslim Devotional Vocal Performance in Mauritius Like many Muslims in South Asia, Mauritian Muslims regularly perform Urdu devotional poetry known as na‘t at collective recitals known as mahfil-e mawlud on occasions such as the Prophet’s birthday, the death anniversaries (‘urs) of Sufi saints, or auspicious events in people’s lives such as weddings, moving into a new house, or passing school exams. The recitation is often conducted collectively but is usually led by performers who have undergone some training in reciting the genre and are recognized for their vocal skills. Often, also, such recognized performers will recite solo, and especially accomplished reciters known as na‘t khwan are widely considered models to be emulated when reciting na‘t in a mahfil-e mawlud. The Urdu na‘t genre expresses love and longing for the Prophet with the goal of a pious transformation of the self. But followers of the reformist Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama‘at tradition, for whom the cultivation of na‘t is especially important, also seek the spiritual presence of the Prophet against the background of the doctrine of hazir-o nazir. According to this doctrine, even long after his death the Prophet continues to be present and observant for those expressing profound devotion to him. For them, the artful recitation of na‘t is one of the chief means to bring about a personal encounter with the Prophet. While the discursive dimensions of the poetry are certainly of great importance, Mauritian Muslims are also mindful of the appropriateness of sonic vocal qualities in the performance. The sonic materiality of the voice and its somatic effects on listeners are in fact crucial for the success of the performance of this poetry, which also in part explains the popularity of audio recordings of the genre. The sonic dimensions of such vocal performances provoke profound sensations among the participants that many describe as the feeling of being moved to another, more desirable place. The poetry often further specifies this place as Madina, the favorite city of the Prophet, and a metaphor for the presence of the Prophet himself. A neo-phenomenological analytic of atmospheres is a promising avenue to do justice to the somatic dimensions of religious experience that often evade discursive rendering. Pointing to the privileged relationship between sonic materiality and the felt-body, the seemingly irrefutable evidence of

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somatic experience undergirds sonic devotional practices that aim to bring about the presence of the Prophet. The example thus explores how the interplay between discursive-poetic, sonic, and media practices generates such felt presence in a South Asian Islamic tradition. A number of authors have remarked on the key role of recitation in Islamic ritual, as more generally on the importance of voice and its sonic dimensions in Islamic traditions.7 The Qur’anic paradigm according to which the reciting voice is the site where God reveals himself has left a deep imprint on Islamic traditions. Written texts are of course important, but as far as the Qur’an as well as diverse genres of Islamic scholarship are concerned, they often only play the role of an aide-memoire that cannot substitute for vocal recitation (Messick 1997). A distinct “recitational logocentrism” (Messick 1993, pp. 21–15), or the prioritizing of the reciting voice over written text, also informs the example I am analyzing here. Mauritian Muslims consider qualities of the voice to be especially important for the success of na‘t performances. These express deep affection for and attachment to the Prophet, showering praise on him by describing his outstanding attributes (the genre’s name derives from Arabic na‘t, “description, qualification, characterization”) and asking for blessing to be bestowed on him. It is thus an act of religious mediation in which the vocal performance of religious language brings Muslims closer to their Prophet, and ultimately God. Performing na‘t shares structural similarities with oratory and poetic genres in which performers seek to align their selves with discursive forms considered to originate from the ancestors, mythical tradition, or even the divine.8 However, unlike in recitation of the Qur’an, na‘t are attributed to human composers, however exalted the position of some among them as revered scholar-saints. What many consider the “right” and appropriate vocal style is of key importance for the success of the performance because it is considered to be essential for the stirring of pious emotions that enable those affected by them to become better Muslims through their love for the Prophet. Those vocal qualities, or “tones,” play such an important role because they indicate a stance in the performance understood to be an interaction between devotees and their Prophet. An analytic of atmospheres can provide a rich account of such alignments of vocal qualities with social and cultural forms of value. Vocal sound as atmosphere affects those within its range through suggestions of movement. Through such somatically felt motion, vocal sound also acts in non-metaphoric ways, that is it is not just an iconic sign but as energetic force literally impacts the body as well. These instances of suggested motion are highly meaningful in a diffuse way, and can, through performance, undergo a process of further specification to align with and thereby undergird particular sociocultural values, such as those of a particular Islamic tradition and its complex of piety centered on the figure of the Prophet Muhammad (Eisenlohr 2018a, 2018b). As shown below, discursive dimensions and sonic atmospheres provide two distinct angles on the voice that are nevertheless closely intertwined.

Entextualization, and Participant Roles

In enouncing poetic praise of the Prophet, na‘t performers enter a complex array of participant roles. The poetry is not spontaneously composed by the na‘t khwan, but animated by them, as they often trace the origins of particular poems to saint-poets whose authority guarantees the poetry’s Islamic appropriateness. The poetry features an array of formal

7

  Gade 2006; Jouili and Moors 2014; Nelson 2001.   Bate 2009; Bloch 1975; Keane 1997.

8

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markers, such as deictic particles including personal pronouns and spatial as well as temporal qualifiers, as well as the poets’ pen names that point to their assumed contexts of creation by divinely inspired Islamic authorities in another setting in the past (see Eisenlohr 2010 for a more detailed analysis). Performing na‘t thus involves acts of what Karl Bühler (1990) called “transposition,” that is, the reinserting of a text into a new context in a manner that indicates its origins in another spatial and temporal context.9 This indicates that the performance of na‘t revolves around what Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman have called entextualization, the lifting of a bounded, replicable chunk of discourse out of a given context and its reinsertion into new contexts. This approach to textuality highlights the dynamic and processual character of texts, in contrast to widespread assumptions about texts as relatively “fixed” entities. Entextualization can be done in ways that highlight the gap between target context and context of origin, such as in parody and in some kinds of reported speech when actors want to stress the difference between their words and the quoted words of others. But processes of entextualization can also minimize such gaps, when actors seek to achieve maximal alignment between themselves and the text they reanimate, for example in order to appropriate the social authority invested in them (Briggs and Bauman 1992). In the performance of na‘t, those reciting the poetry clearly want to enact such an alignment with authority, here the authority of the saint-poets assumed to be the composers of the poetry. In order to do so, na‘t khwan therefore also need to preserve the textual markers pointing at the origin of the poetry in divinely inspired settings, located in other places and times. The discursive “I” in the enunciation of devotional poetry expressing praise of the Prophet is therefore complex (Eisenlohr 2006). Erving Goffman has distinguished between participant roles he called animator/relayer, that is, those actually uttering discourse, composer/ghostor for those who formulated a given text, and sponsor/originator, the actor in whose name the text is uttered and who is ultimately responsible for what is being said (Goffman 1974; Irvine 1996). Na‘t khwan are animators of texts composed by saint poets, who are also considered the responsible originators of the devotional poetry. But they also aim at the merger of these participant roles in performance, in order to appropriate the authority and legitimacy associated with religious authorities. That is, beyond their roles as animators of the poetry, they also seek to inhabit the stance of the devotee personally addressing the Prophet just as the composers did when the Prophet’s felt presence affected them. Na‘t khwan thus also aim to take personal responsibility for what is being said, thereby taking up the role of Goffmanian originators in the interaction. This merger is a delicate performative achievement, always subject to failure.

Sonic Materiality and an Analytic of Atmospheres

Appropriate vocal expression is a salient condition for the success of the performance, as it is closely connected to the processes of entextualization in na‘t performance and the shifts and mergers of participant roles they involve. There is, however, no simple correspondence between single vocally produced tones and a particular pious stance inhabited by the performers. In order to understand how the sonic dimensions of the voice become part of the interactions between devotees and the Prophet, and ultimately the divine, it is important to consider their dynamic movements. Especially recordings of performances by recognized na‘t khwan show a great dynamic of the reciting voice that can be tracked on the dimensions of loudness (perceived volume), pitch (fundamental frequency of a sound) and timbre (the

9

  Bühler 1965 [1934]; Haviland 1996; Shoaps 2002.

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434  patrick eisenlohr

quality or “tone color” of a complex sound as determined by the structure of formants or relative peaks of acoustic energy above the fundamental frequency). In addition, professional recordings by na‘t khwan nowadays also feature a pronounced reverb effect throughout, giving the auditory impression of spatial wideness through its “echo”-effect. In addition, the reverb results in the multiplying of all acoustic events, thereby intensifying their force. Many na‘t feature moments in which the voice suddenly intensifies, often after a short break in the recitation. These moments’ main characteristics are a rise in loudness, coinciding with a rise in pitch. On the dimension of timbre, we find a buildup of acoustic energy in the frequency bins of the 3000–5000  Hz range, resembling the clustering profile of the “singer’ s formant” with marked vibrato.10 As mentioned, all these sonic events are also multiplied by the reverb effect. The reciting voice thereby enacts suggestions of movement in multiple ways. First, in the context of the na‘t performance, the combined intensifications of the voice occurring on all dimensions (in loudness, pitch, and timbre) carry out a movement of spiritual enrapture that my interlocutors described as the sensation of being taken and carried away. On one hand, such movement can enact the transcending of the reciter’s self, as he is literally moved upward and away. On the other hand, the poetry often describes the city of Madina as a destination of such a journey. Madina, considered the Prophet’s favorite city, is a stock textual theme in na‘t, where it frequently features as a sign for the Prophet’s presence. From the poet’s perspective the desire to go to Madina is equal to the wish to personally encounter the Prophet and to be close to him. While the theme of traveling to Madina is an important motif discursively elaborated in the poetry, the vocal dynamics also carry out such a movement of being carried away. This raises the question of how the embodied voice is able to enact such a religiously significant movement in more than a metaphoric way, or beyond functioning as a diagram of such movement. Where does its power to create strong sensations come from, a force my interlocutors sometimes described as truly overwhelming? In the context I discuss here, the voice of the na‘t khwan can generate such power because its sonic dynamics contain suggestions of movement, a key working mechanism of atmospheres as discussed earlier, that act on the felt-bodies of those the recited poetry affects. To illustrate the interplay between the discursive aspects of na‘t poetry and the sonic movements in its recitation, consider the following approximately 59 second long excerpt from a Mauritian na‘t recording.11 This excerpt is from one of the many na‘t that centers on the Madina theme, expressing the wish to personally encounter the Prophet either in terms of travel to Madina or an exuberant description of the wonders of that city. Aap ke qadam jab se aae hain madine mein Ever since your [the Prophet’s] steps have graced Madina Aap ke qadam jab se aae hain madine mein Ever since your [the Prophet’s] steps have graced Madina Aae hain madine mein

10   See Sundberg (1974). Spectrograms show the distribution of acoustic energy of complex sounds, like vocal sounds, across a range of frequencies at given points of time. Complex sounds often display clusters or peaks of energy at certain frequency ranges, these are called “formants.” According to Sundberg, voices of singers of European classical music can stand out over entire orchestras because they display a relative maximum of energy at around 3000Hz or higher (the “singer’s formant”), while orchestras often peak at much lower frequencies. This frequently results in the effect of the singer’s voice being heard as particularly powerful, apparently outperforming the combined acoustic energy of many musical instruments played together. 11

  Chady n.d. (Vol. 7), CD 1, track 11.

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sound, voice, and the felt body  435

Have graced Madina Zarra zarra roshan hai aaj bhi madine kaa Every single particle of it emits a resplendent light even until today Zarra zarra roshan hai aaj bhi madine kaa Every single particle of it emits a resplendent light even until today

Considering the sonic dynamics of the vocal recitation, a view on the spectrogram of this excerpt, shown in Figure 23.1, tells us that the recitation consists of alternations between contracting and relaxing movements, which can be traced as increases and decreases on several sonic dimensions. The x-axis represents linear time, the y-axis the frequency of sound. Beginning on the left of the spectrogram, we can see the recitation of the first line starting with aap ke qadam, with a very brief pause in the middle of the phrase. This is followed by a pause of almost two seconds, after which the voice resumes with the second and third lines. A brief pause separates the recitation of the third from the fourth and fifth lines when the excerpt ends. On the first three lines, interrupted by the long pause between the second and third lines, we can discern relatively high values for loudness and pitch. These are visible in the spectrogram by the coloring towards orange and red in the case of loudness, indicating increased acoustic energy, and by the rise of the fundamental frequency in the case of pitch, visible as the lowest of the wavy colored layers that make up the spectrogram. The spectrogram also tells us about the distribution of the acoustic energy of complex sounds such as those of a voice across a range of frequencies measured in hertz on the scale on the left side of the spectrogram. There, we can also see a concentration of acoustic energy not just along lower frequencies, but also in the range between 4000–5500 Hz, indicating an intensification not just in loudness and pitch but also in a shift of energy towards higher frequencies within the “singer’s formant” range, that is in the overall spread of complex sounds across frequencies known as timbre. As we move to the right side of the spectrogram, the two remaining lines starting with zarra zarra exhibit a decrease of loudness and pitch as well as a drop of overall acoustic energy to lower frequency ranges and a corresponding shift in timbre. A look at the waveform of the

Figure 23.1  Spectrogram of “Aap ke qadam.”

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same excerpt gives us a clear visualization of the dynamics of volume of that excerpt. Like the spectrogram, the waveform measures sonic dynamics over time, in this case the volume of sound (Figure 23.2). The sound waves are represented as oscillating around a 0-axis standing for the hypothetical atmospheric pressure, oscillating between hypothetical 1 and –1 values. The greater the amplitude, the greater, with some qualifications, the loudness of sound. Similar to the patterns of the spectrogram, on the dimension of volume we can discern high intensity on the first three lines, contrasting with lessening intensity in the recitation of the two remaining lines, providing a vivid illustration of sonic motion. What this combined analysis of sonic dynamics in the recitation of na‘t shows us is that the voice acts out shifts between high and low sonic intensities that are literally suggestions of movement felt by sentient bodies. Sound has several obvious parameters such as loudness, pitch, and timbre for carrying out such motions which are at the same time alternations between bodily contraction and relaxation. These movements are meaningful, they establish iconic and indexical relationships not just between sonic event and bodily sensation. In this religious setting they are also icons, or more specifically diagrams, of spiritual travel to Madina, because of the qualitative likeness of the sonic motions sensed by the felt body and a spiritual journey to Madina in order to be in the presence of the Prophet.12 The sonic movements combine such iconic relationships with indexicality, here the causality and contiguity that their impacting of and intermingling with bodies constitutes.

Conclusion and Future Directions of Research What implications does the example discussed have for future linguistic anthropological research on sound and voice? For one, in order to do justice to the sonic as a phenomenon in its own right and not to reduce it to discourse, linguistic anthropology needs to expand

Figure 23.2  Waveform of “Aap ke qadam.” 12

  Diagrams are icons “which represent the relations … of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts” (Peirce 1932, p. 157).

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sound, voice, and the felt body  437

its focus beyond the study of discourses on sound embedded in auditory cultures to the sonic as a powerful force in itself. This also suggests a broadening of approaches to the body in linguistic anthropology, where the body has long been a focus of attention. This has been manifest in the role of coporeal deixis in linguistic interaction (Duranti 1997; Hanks 1990), the body as the site of performative acts and interactional frames (Duranti 1992), and as the site of interactional display and performative generation of emotion (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2001). Also, the entanglement of body, empathy, and attention in broader interactional settings has more recently been featured in linguistic anthropological research (Throop and Duranti 2015). The discussion above suggests expanding this established concern with the body to the sonic as it intermingles with felt-bodies, at the same time providing a key modality of the intermingling of body and world from a phenomenological perspective. Felt-bodies are the site where the sonic as traveling kinetic energy reverberates, exceeding the frequency ranges of the audible. As such, the sonic, including vocal sound, is often perceivable with the entire body, its flesh. This is not a suggestion to study sound with no meaning. On the contrary, as the example of devotional recitation in an Islamic context above has shown, the non-denotational dimensions of vocal sound are also shot through with signification. In contrast to sonic ontologies that take the sonic to be a non-signifying energetic flux (Cox 2011), inspired by Brian Massumi’s thoughts on affect as autonomous from meaning (Massumi 2002, pp. 23–25), linguistic anthropologists need to study the interplay of the bodily felt sonic motion with its indexical and iconic diffuse meaningfulness with discursively generated signification in the voice. In order to do so, future work on sound and voice will have to routinely expand its methodological toolkit, including, but also going beyond, discursive narration of sonic events, paying greater attention to the particularities of sonic materiality. It requires treating audio recording techniques and the analysis of sonic events as analytical modes on a par with discourse and writing, doing justice to sound and the sonic as a mode of knowledge and meaning-making of its own. This implies triangulating between primarily discursive ethnographic methods, linguistic analysis, and the formal analysis of sonic events. Until this practice becomes more common, as Steven Feld pithily remarked some two decades ago, “the anthropology of sound will continue to be mostly about words” (Feld and Brenneis 2004, p. 471). Another possible future direction for linguistic anthropological research that follows from paying greater attention to sonic materiality lies in the overcoming of the divide, mentioned earlier, between work by scholars, often anthropologists, who insist that human actors invest sound with power, and other scholars who argue that sound is powerful in itself. A starting point for bridging this intellectual divide is the realization, as developed in the example above, that discourse and vocal, non-denotational sound are two different, yet interlinked modalities of knowledge and meaning-making. In the example I have discussed, the discursive dimensions of the poetry add to the diffuse meaningfulness of sonic movement, further qualifying the latter along the lines of specifically religious significations. However, unlike the suggestion of the primacy of a “sonic flux” (Cox 2018) that is powerful in itself and prior to enculturation and signification, affection by sound is not an automatic process. Going back to the example I presented, not everyone is equally seized by an atmosphere like the sonic suggestions of motion in na‘t recitation I described. The somatic intermingling of atmospheres and sentient bodies also partially depends on forms of attunement. These are learned techniques of the body, such as particular modes of listening or auditory cultures. Such forms of bodily discipline are a main focus among anthropologists working on sound, including Islamic settings (Hirschkind 2006). Seizure by an atmosphere can also be resisted, and atmospheres can merely be observed, such as is often the case among those Mauritian Muslims who are sectarian opponents of the Ahl-e

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Sunnat and who take a critical view on the Sufist preoccupations with saintly mediators that suffuse the recitation of na‘t. One way to reformulate the opposition mentioned above is to show that those who argue that sound is powerful in itself and those who insist on the importance of culturally embedded discourses on sound address different ends of a continuum of sonic meaningfulness. The latter ranges from the diffuse meaningfulness of feltbodily sonic motion to the more specific and qualified meanings found in discourses of auditory culture, including, as in my example, those that are derived from religious traditions. An analytic of atmospheres as I have argued here is a promising approach to the more diffuse end of the continuum of a meaningfulness that sound, including vocal sound, presents. It rejects the notion that sound acts as a Lacanian Real prior to culture and history.13 This is because in order to somatically seize someone, an atmosphere needs to accomplish a process of resonant bundling of different strands of life that include emotions, memories, discourse (including the discourse of a particular religious tradition as is the case here), and also particular learned techniques of the body like auditory dispositions. More research is needed for studying the ways in which such bringing together of different strands of life unfold in vocal performance, and sonic atmospheres are a useful analytic for understanding such bundling processes. An atmosphere’s power lies in making distinct lines of experience commensurable, such as an emotionally charged desire to apprehend the presence of the Prophet, spiritual travel, and bodily motion, investing them with an overarching, holistic feel. In such a way, sonic suggestions of motion can act as somatic evidence for the claims of a particular religiously grounded auditory culture, corroborating the discursive meanings found in the poetic texts.

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13

  As suggested by, for example, Friedrich Kittler’s writings on the phonograph, which he takes to be a machine that manipulates the Real instead of the symbolic (Kittler 1999 [1986], p. 35).

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24

Multimodality

Keith M. Murphy Introduction—“Language” and “Not Language” Around the turn of the twenty-first century multimodality emerged as a perspective that both staked a claim about the nature of human communication and forwarded a framework for how to analyze it.1 The claim was clear and direct. In the context of face-to-face interaction, embodied “modes” like hand gestures, facial expressions, and eye gaze do not merely supplement the semiotic capacities of verbal language, but instead holistically and fundamentally constitute, among each other and alongside speech, how people communicate in everyday life. The framework stipulated that in order to understand how this claim works, analysts should methodologically account for specific modes on their own terms— that is, not simply as a “context” for speaking—as well as in their collective integration in observable moments of interaction. Among the core tenets of multimodality are multiplicity—that meaning is made from and subsists between more than one semiotic resource, including resources outside of an individual’s own body; and simultaneity—that these resources tend to operate at the same time, or in close proximity to one another. Thus, in a scenario in which one person says to another, “She’s my favorite author,” while pointing to and looking at a book on a nearby shelf, the multimodality perspective would at a minimum treat the utterance, the gesture, the eye-gaze (of both people), and the book, along with the actions that immediately follow, as irreducible elements of the communicative act. While the term multimodality gained currency in the early 2000s, the research behind it traces back to the earliest days of North American anthropology. Since that time, the 1

  To be more precise, two versions of multimodality emerged around the same time, largely distinguished by the disciplines they stemmed from and the regions in which they were developed. In this chapter I’m focusing on a particular anthropological lineage centered on embodied, face-to-face interaction, but the other version deserves some mention here. It may not even be entirely accurate to split them in this way, since notable work in the other version is also focused on interaction (e.g., Norris 2004, following Scollon 2001), but there are a few important differences. First, the other version of multimodality is heavily influenced by the functional linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday (1973), and extensions developed by his student Gunther Kress and Kress’s colleague Theo van Leeuwen, whose early collaborative work (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) sought to find the grammars of non-linguistic semiotic forms. This leads to the second difference: the other version of multimodality is far more overtly formalist than what I’m presenting in this chapter and includes variations like systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA; see O’Halloran 2008), which prioritizes an analytic that generates comparable, objective, abstract categories over rigorous interpretation.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

multimodality claim and the multimodality framework developed through a back-and-forth interplay between two shifting sets of conditions, one intellectual, the other technological. From the intellectual point of view there was a growing recognition that “nonverbal” communicative channels matter to people, and that they are subject to the same social and cultural forces that influence language. This stance unfolded, roughly speaking, in three phases. The first was characterized by researchers tacitly assuming two broad categories, “language” and “not language,” both built from “obvious” criteria and treated as fundamentally distinct.2 Once separated, various phenomena deemed “not language,” including gestures, body postures, and movement in space, were all explored independent of language, in light of their own cultural significance. The second phase mostly retained the “language” and “not language” categories, but rather than studying them separately, researchers began to explore them in parallel—usually language with one other mode, like the co-occurrence of gesture with speech. The third phase is characterized by what can readily be called multimodality, in which researchers de-emphasize (but do not fully abandon) the distinction between “language” and “not language,” opting instead to explore the complex arrangement of multiple semiotic modes all at once, without giving too much priority to any of them. Crucially, this intellectual shift was significantly driven by changes in the technological conditions that shaped how researchers were able to capture or inscribe communicative phenomena (see Duranti 2006). Over the period covering the first two phases, researchers had access to writing, of course, along with photography and, to a limited extent, film- and audiorecording, both of which were expensive and cumbersome. Among the modes of embodied communication, spoken language is easiest to capture because it is “maximally” inscribable through writing and audio-recording.3 Some hand gestures and facial expressions can be inscribed with photography, but only those that involve no movement. Body motions can be inscribed on film, but not with any co-occurring sound (unless sound is captured on a separate device and synched later). Indeed, the analytic separation of “language” and “not language” was certainly enhanced, if not entirely produced, by the distinct capacities of these technologies; that is, until the general availability of video cameras, which capture sound and visual information together, on one device and one tape. With this technology researchers

2

  I recognize that the term “not language” is inartful, but its descriptive bluntness is actually rather accurate. In fact, one minor subplot in the historical narrative of this area of research is that people haven’t ever really agreed on what to call it, or how to name the phenomena under investigation. For example, in a 1970 New York Times profile of the scholars then leading the charge on “body language,” journalist Flora Davis (1970) noted that terminology was a point of disagreement among the group: I talked to four pioneers in the field of body language: Birdwhistell, Scheflen, Goffman and Dr. Adam Kendon, a colleague of Scheflen’s at the Bronx State Hospital. Significantly, none of the four refer to it as nonverbal communication. Kendon prefers the term “visible behavior”; his fellow kinesicists, Scheflen and Birdwhistell, who refuse to segregate words from gestures, define their field simply as “communication.” (Bristling at the phrase nonverbal communication, Birdwhistell cracked: “That’s like saying ‘noncardiac physiology.’ ”) Goffman speaks of his specialty as “face‐to‐face interaction”; he is interested in how the unwritten body codes help people to get along with others in public. Around that time there were also fields called “nonverbal behavior” (Scherer and Ekman 1982) and “interactional sociolinguistics” (Gumperz 1982), and even today, multimodality often falls under several other terms, like “embodied interaction” (Streeck et al. 2011) and “co-operative action” (C. Goodwin 2018). This proliferation of terms, including my own, is mostly entrepreneurial, since all of them are broadly applied to various phenomena that are somehow configured as “not language,” but that also seem to have some relation to language, even if it’s relatively distant. I think “not language” is probably the best term to cover everything at once.

3

  Of course, only some features of language, like syntax, morphology, and imprecise phonology, are captured in standard alphabetic (i.e., mostly Latin script) orthography, at least without using purpose-built notation systems.

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were able for the first time to easily inscribe and repeatedly examine multiple communicative modes operating simultaneously, which in turn provoked the development of the multimodality perspective. Later technical advances in, for example, video resolution, sound fidelity, and size and shape of devices have likewise prompted the incorporation of more information—more semiotic resources, more modes—into the analysis of face-to-face communication.

“Language” and “Not Language”—Cross-Cultural Variation

One of the first “not language” sources of meaning to receive attention in anthropology was the body. In France, Robert Hertz’s 1909 analysis of the symbolic intricacies of right and left hands (Hertz 1960), and especially Marcel Mauss’s 1935 rumination on the cultural differences in body comportment—what he called “techniques of the body” (Mauss 1973)—were particularly influential. In the U.S., Franz Boas (1927) grew interested in how socially shaped body motions—what he called “motor habits”—affect how artisans make objects, and in turn, how cultural “styles” emerge from their habitual movements. He also encouraged several of his students to pursue similar research, like Flora Bailey (1942), who produced a detailed description of embodied actions among Navajo adults, including hand gestures, tool use (say, shearing a sheep), personal grooming, and walking. The most extensive of such studies was David Efron’s 1941 cross-cultural comparison of how Jewish and Italian residents of New York City used gestures while speaking (see Efron 1972). His results, drawn from observations of people in public space and sketches of hands-in-motion, involved close analysis of differences in gesturing between newly arrived immigrants and “Americanized” New Yorkers: as it turns out, people born in the U.S. gestured more like each other than like immigrants from their respective communities. Much of the research during this era fell in line with the more general anti-evolutionist anthropology, especially in North America, that argued against Darwin’s (1872) contention that embodied expressions of emotion, and by extension, other motor habits, are universal in the human species. Students working at Berkeley under Alfred Kroeber (a student of Boas) set to documenting the high degree of variation in bodily comportment among different groups, including hand gestures (Devereux 1949) and “postural habits” (Hewes 1955; see Figure 24.1). Students working at Yale under linguists Edward Sapir (another student of Boas), Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield, turned their anthropological gaze to various other “not language” phenomena, and they, too, were significantly motivated by documenting cultural difference. Describing that period, one of those Yale scholars, Weston La Barre (1947, p. 52), stated that he once “asked a somewhat naive question of a very great anthropologist, the late Edward Sapir ‘Do other tribes cry and laugh as we do?’ In appropriate response, Sapir himself laughed, but with an instant grasping of the point of the question. In which of these things are men alike everywhere, in which different? Where are the international boundaries between physiology and culture? What are the extremes of variability, and what are the scope and range of cultural differences in emotional and gestural expression?”

One notable attempt to synthesize this interest in the cultural variation of verbal and nonverbal communication was spearheaded by Edward T. Hall. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Hall, who had done anthropological fieldwork with Navajo and Hopi groups in Arizona, directed the Point 4 training program at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI)— under the U.S. State Department—which was tasked with providing the American diplomatic corps with support for intercultural communication. The program included a significant research component focused on differences in bodily comportment, and based on that work several Point 4 anthropologists published their findings for social scientific

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multimodality  445

Figure 24.1  The “postural typology” developed and used by Hewes (1955).

audiences (e.g., Birdwhistell 1952) and even the general public, as with Hall’s (1959, 1966) series of popular books on what he called “proxemics”—the strategies, norms, and rules that people use for arranging their bodies in space. Having distinguished bodily modes of communication from language and analyzed them in their own rights, particularly in terms of how they vary cross-culturally, researchers then began investigating these modes in the context of single acts of communication. In 1956, a group consisting of Yale-trained linguists Charles Hockett and Norman A. McQuown, Point 4 researcher Ray Birdwhistell, and British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, along with psychiatrists Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Henry W. Brosin and, eventually, Albert Scheflen, initiated a years-long “fine-grained analysis, transcription and interpretation of the speech and body motion of participants in a sound-filmed (and tape-recorded) family interview” (McQuown 1971b, p. 3). The core analytical tasks of the project were divided among the researchers—in effect, still reproducing the separation of “language” and “not language” modes—focusing on body motion and its relation to the structure of interaction (Birdwhistell and Scheflen), speech (McQuown), and even the maintenance and development of the technology required for this sort of analysis (Brosin). Other researchers, including linguist George L. Trager, would eventually join and participate in the group, each taking his or her own mode to examine. The immediate result of this project was the creation of The Natural History of an Interview (McQuown 1971a), a compilation of unpublished contributions by many of the project’s members. While that collection of texts and data did not receive broad attention at the time, the research conducted by the team would go on to shape a generation of work on human communication. This included, for example, the study of “paralanguage” (Trager 1958), modes of communication that typically accompany phonetic features, but are not themselves exactly phonetic, like loudness, rhythm, tempo, and pitch (which can be grammatically integrated or not), along with meaningful (but non-grammatical) practices like laughing, crying, whistling, and sniffling (cf. Mondada 2020). Studies of body movement also grew more refined in approaches like “kinesics” (Birdwhistell 1970) and “context analysis” (Scheflen 1973), focusing less on describing stereotyped, culture-specific gestures and

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446  keith m. murphy

more on analyzing how human bodies move in socially meaningful ways, especially in the presence of others. This early phase was characterized by a few main themes. First, much of the research was initially motivated by a desire to understand differences in how culture shapes the ordering, accomplishment, and experience of communication, along the lines drawn by Sapir and, more explicitly, by Whorf, through his assertion that languages shape experience for their speakers in specific ways. Hall (1966, p. 2), for instance, plainly stated that the core assumption underlying proxemics was “that the principles laid down by Whorf and his fellow linguists in relation to language apply to the rest of human behavior as well.” Second, borrowing from the model provided by the study of language in culture, this attention to “not language” was deeply invested in the power of systematicity, both to understand how communication works in a particular group, and to compare groups among each other. Drawing from decades of structuralist scholarship in linguistics, the idea that language is a relatively coherent system operating relatively independent of actual speakers shaped how all sorts of cultural phenomena were treated by social scientists, including kinship, religion, politics, and so on. This was extended to other “not language” phenomena, like proxemics, kinesics, eye contact (Argyle and Dean 1965), and eventually gestures and facial expressions (Ekman and Friesen 1969), each of which was given its own complex notational system to capture its features in a standard form. Hall (1963), for instance, devised eight separate proxemic dimensions for cross-cultural comparison, including what he called “touch codes” (measuring physical contact between people), “thermal codes” (measuring the relative heat present during an interaction), and “retinal combinations” (measuring the angles at which people look at each other). However, as much as these researchers emphasized systematicity, most stopped short of fully attributing a language-like structure to other communicative modes in themselves. As Adam Kendon (1972a, p. 443, original emphasis) phrased it, they instead were “adopting the levels of analysis at which linguists operate when they approach speech and seeking for their mode of explanation.”

“Language” and “Not Language”—Inter-Personal Complexity

In the late 1960s a new principle took hold: face-to-face interaction is a primary unit of analysis. While the previous several decades witnessed growing attention to multiplicity in both modes of communication and ways to deploy them across communities, their placement was still firmly centered on individual speakers or social groups. Close observation of communication in action, however, revealed that out “in the wild” individual speakers are almost always talking to each other, and that both—or in some cases, all—sides of an interaction contribute to how meaning is made and interpreted by people themselves. The most notable champion of the interactional perspective was sociologist Erving Goffman who, having taken a course with Birdwhistell at the University of Toronto in the 1940s,4 wrote a series of articles and books in the 1960s arguing that social meaning thrives most profoundly in the prosaic dynamics of the everyday world. In his work he explored, for example, the social formation of “encounters,” face-to-face social gatherings organized around explicit or implicit social activities (Goffman 1961); how encounters changed when performed in public (Goffman 1963); and how people manage embarrassment for themselves and each other (Goffman 1967). Goffman’s oeuvre was capacious and wide-ranging, but one theme consistent throughout is that rules, roles, and goals apply systematically to small moments of social life, and in turn, these all influence exactly how people communicate.

4

  He also received his PhD under Birdwhistell’s graduate advisor, Lloyd Warner, at the University of Chicago.

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multimodality  447

Meanwhile, sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) was developing ideas similar to Goffman’s, though working from a slightly different set of intellectual resources (he had been a student of Talcott Parsons in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, and was deeply influenced by the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz). Garfinkel’s basic insight was that humans do not simply live in social structures or follow rules and norms that are external to them, like “cultural dopes.” Instead, he argued, people actively make, remake, affirm, and transform social structures directly in the context of mundane interactions with others and everyday communicative practices. He called the framework he devised for investigating social interaction “ethnomethodology,” based on the idea that ordinary people tend to use ordinary methodologies to act as sociologists of their own social worlds— and it was with this, he argued, that social science should be most centrally concerned. Also during the 1960s, the community of scholars studying linguistics began to change. This was partially due to the ascendance of the generative-transformational grammar approach among many linguists—inaugurated by the early publications of Noam Chomsky (1957, 1965)—which dramatically elevated syntax as the primary source of meaning in language. This quickly produced a reactive split, spawning several nascent fields, including correlational sociolinguistics (Ervin-Tripp 1969; Labov 1966), which explored links between phonetic forms and demographic traits, like class and gender; functional linguistics, which prioritized the social use of language as the source of meaning (Greenberg 1968; Halliday 1973); and the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1964), which sought to understand language holistically, in cultural context, from the point of view of the communities of speakers who use it. Importantly, none of these alternatives to transformational grammar were interested in denying the significance of syntax or language structure. Instead, where transformational grammar posited that meaning is derived from relations between elements internal to the structure of language, these other perspectives argued, each in a different way, that meaning is derived from relations between those elements and other factors external to the structure of language. This insight was critical for establishing the multimodality perspective. Building on both early research on “not language” and the move in linguistics toward socially situated studies of language, the 1970s marked a period of intense interdisciplinary exploration of the basic dynamics of talk in interaction (Kendon et al. 1975). In 1972, the book Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1972) was published—focused, as the first sentence of the introduction characterizes it, on “the interactional approach to language behavior” (Gumperz 1972, p. 1)—with chapters by Birdwhistell, Garfinkel, William Labov, Susan Ervin-Tripp, and many others. Among those others were two sociologists, Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, who, along with Gail Jefferson (Sacks et al. 1974), initiated the field of Conversation Analysis (CA), with considerable inspiration from both Goffman’s work on face-to-face interaction, and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. The original principles behind CA were elegant and compelling: close attention to the details of actual human behavior, captured in a format that could be shared and repeatedly consulted, would allow analysts to observe with clarity the social actions that people perform in the moment-by-moment realization of their own social worlds (see Heritage 1984). What Sacks (1992) and Schegloff (1972) settled on as ideal kinds of data were tape-recorded telephone conversations, which had the benefit of restricting context to only what is revealed in speech, thereby providing researchers a view of the interaction that was nearly identical to that of the participants themselves. Through precise transcription methods and the collection of instances of specific verbal phenomena across many interactions, CA researchers were able to demonstrate forcefully that—and how— speakers accomplish social action significantly by means of talk in everyday contexts.

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448  keith m. murphy

While conversation analysts turned to audio-recorded telephone conversations as a rigorous source of data, other researchers were lured by the new availability of relatively inexpensive video-recording technology in the mid-1970s (see Keenan 1974 for an early example). Because video recorders captured sound and visuals on a single tape, they vastly improved the ease of recording face-to-face interaction. One of the most fruitful benefits of video technology was the ability to record hand gestures in a re-playable format, including their forms and contexts of use in actual moments of speaking. Earlier perspectives on gesture, like those of Wilhelm Wundt (1973), George Hebert Mead (1934), and even David Efron (1972), were severely limited due to the lack of ways to observe and represent hand movements systematically. By the 1970s it was still common to see studies focused on specific “static” gestures used by particular groups—for instance, John Rickford and Angela Rickford’s (1976) analysis of the “cut eye” and “suck teeth” gestures (cf. Goodwin and Alim 2010) as diasporic embodied “Africanisms;” Roman Jakobson’s (1972) cross-cultural comparison of head nods and head shakes; and Joel Sherzer’s (1972) description of the Cuna “pointed lip” gesture—but the most notable shift was toward closely examining the co-occurrence of gesture and speech in dynamic moments of “natural” interaction (see Kendon 1972b). Psychologists like David McNeill (1992), and slightly later, Susan GoldinMeadow (2003), began exploring gesture as a “window into the mind,” and in particular, the cognitive intersections of verbal language, hand gestures, and thought. Others took a more decidedly social—indeed, interactional—point of view, including Adam Kendon (2004), who had begun his career focused largely on body positions and spatial arrangements (Kendon 1990). And McNeil’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Starkey Duncan—who himself had been a late addition to the Natural History of an Interview team—conducted a massive video-based laboratory study, along with psychologist Donald Fiske, of dyadic conversational interactions (Duncan and Fiske 1977). Notably, the transcripts produced for this study—initially done by hand, in pencil, then transferred to computer (Figure 24.2)—were some of the first to align multiple communicative channels of two participants concurrently, including separate codes for speech, eye gaze, hand positions, intonation, stress, and more.

“Language” and “Not Language”—Multimodality

The multimodality perspective arises from a series of methodological alternatives that develop from this research trajectory: use video (rather than just audio, or relying on observation alone) to record multiparty interactions (rather than individual actions) in their natural contexts (rather than in laboratories). Two of the most influential proponents of this configuration were Charles and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, who were both mentored by, among others, Erving Goffman at the University of Pennsylvania (although for Charles Goodwin the mentorship was informal). Marjorie was a graduate student in anthropology, and Charles was a graduate student in communication studies, and both found an interest in conversation analysis after William Labov provided them copies of lectures recently given by Harvey Sacks in California (C. Goodwin 2018). Marjorie’s work at that time (M. Goodwin 1990) focused on how African American children in Philadelphia used language as a tool for organizing their everyday social worlds. Together, armed with a Sony Portapak video recorder, the Goodwins also captured a large number of familiar gatherings—picnics, block parties, family reunions (see M. Goodwin 2021)—and through close examination of these sorts of events Charles wrote one of the earliest comprehensive, CA-oriented analyses of embodied interaction outside of an experimental setting (Goodwin 1981). Over the next several decades, using a blending of CA methods, ethnographic

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multimodality  449

Figure 24.2  Top: detail (slightly augmented) of hand-made transcript from the research conducted by Duncan and Fiske (1977) in 1973. Bottom: a computerized version of one of those transcripts.

sensibilities, advanced video- and audio-recording technologies, and uniquely detailed multimodal transcription techniques, the Goodwins developed an approach to the study of communication that retained the ambition of the first phase of research on “not language” while infusing it with Goffman’s spirit and accessibility to create something wholly new (see e.g., M. Goodwin 1995, 2002; C. Goodwin 1997, 2000). One of the most productive principles that the Goodwins helped develop was that relevant meaning is not just co-occurring between, say, speech and gesture, but is actually coproduced by speakers and hearers through verbal and nonverbal language (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 1986), the spaces in which interactions take place (M. Goodwin 1995), and through the physical properties of the objects they handle (C. Goodwin 1997). They were not alone in making this argument, and in some respects the 1990s witnessed an efflorescence of what would several years later be labeled “multimodality.” This included studies that focused on the kinds of social action that gestures accomplish more than what their forms represent (Haviland 1993), the manipulation of physical objects for communicative purposes (Streeck 1996), and the embodied production of graphic representations (Ochs et

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450  keith m. murphy

al. 1996, cf. Enfield 2003; Streeck and Kallmeyer 2001). “Interaction” here shifts from referring simply to “face-to-face” communication to a more ecumenical coverage of all kinds of interacting phenomena, including multiple people, embodied actions, utterances, objects, spaces, glances, and so on, all “co-occurring” and “co-producing” either simultaneously or in sequence. As Alessandro Duranti (1992, p. 660) forcefully argued in his video-based analysis of ceremonial greetings in Western Samoa, “multiple channels and modes of interaction (voice, body, body/space) are used not only because they are available, but because they each offer a different solution to the same problem, namely, how to establish and sustain a particular version of the social world.” This formulation contains two important implications for multimodality research. First, that “channels and modes” do not carry meaning in interaction independently, but they overlap, intersect, and reinforce each other, often in irreducible ways. Second, that speakers (and hearers) are at least partially aware of this, and thus able to take advantage of multimodal meaning for their own purposes within specific contextual courses of action. Multimodality coalesced as a named and identifiable perspective in the early 2000s, the offspring of this decades-long attempt to illuminate the intricacies of how humans actually make meaning in the context of living their lives. One of the earliest explicit uses of the term “multimodal” was by anthropologist Sabina Perrino (2002) in her analysis of the “textual” co-occurrence of verbal, paralinguistic, and embodied signs in a video-recorded healing session in Senegal. Within a few years, many researchers would be describing their work in “multimodal” terms. One reason why multimodality research expanded at that specific time was that video cameras became relatively inexpensive to purchase, even for students on a budget. And while presentation software like PowerPoint had been around since the early 1990s, it only became commonplace at the turn of the century, allowing researchers to show audio data and video data to others conveniently and quickly. Video- and imageediting software became widely available then, too, and academic journals grew more amenable to including images and complex transcriptions in published articles. In short, the multimodality perspective emerged precisely when several necessary technologies for data capture, data processing, and data presentation converged in terms of both capabilities and availability to a wide community of researchers. The core prerogative of the multimodality perspective is close attention to embodied, situated, “spontaneously occurring” human communication, both face-to-face and technologically-mediated. While sometimes a researcher will set-up “natural” situations to record and analyze, or perhaps use “found data” from televised events (Goodwin 1994; Matoesian 2018), the strongest emphasis is on what Goffman (1964) referred to as the “neglected situation,” that is, the mundane but implicitly organized scenarios that most social scientists treat as unimportant, but that for ordinary people count as the central stuff of their own social worlds. Everydayness is an understated value in this line of inquiry because it is the condition within which, from an empirical point of view, most human communication takes place. This means that many multimodal analyses often use data collected in familiar locations, like homes (Fasulo et al. 2007) and workplaces (Hindmarsh and Heath 2000), as well as explicitly institutional contexts—with all of their particular constraints on communication—like medical settings (Pasquandrea 2011), courtrooms (Deeb 2013), and classrooms (Wolfgram 2014). While multimodal interaction has been useful for disciplines like anthropology, psychology, and education, a significant amount of work from this perspective has been geared toward transforming conversation analysis through the introduction of video methods, a project started by the Goodwins in the 1970s (though see also Sacks and Schegloff 2002). One issue with this so-called “embodied turn” (Nevile 2015, cf. Mondada 2016) in CA has

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multimodality  451

been that conversation analytic theory was built from a presumption that the verbal is primary in face-to-face interaction. This position was both demonstrable from, and reinforced by, relying on phone conversations as data, since speech was in most cases the only mode available to examine. But by attending to additional modes with an acuity typically reserved only for talk, the possibility emerged that the clarity and cogency of conversation analysis would be muddled by a glut of analyzable features. To prevent that possibility from occurring, multimodal conversation analysts have attempted to remain faithful to the core principles of CA—for instance, the sequential organization of interaction, preference structures, action formation, and accounting practices—but seek them in and across more modes than talk alone. As Lorenza Mondada (2016) has pointed out, from a multimodal perspective, sequentiality becomes more dynamic and distributed across modes, accountability becomes attached to, and extracted from, talk as well as other semiotic forms, and as modes multiply, what counts as “relevant” for speakers—and researchers—can also potentially multiply. Multimodal conversation analysis is certainly more complicated, in some respects, than versions based only on talk, but it has also turned out to be quite productive.

Multimodal Interaction: An Architectural Example

In 2000–2001 I undertook an ethnographic study of an architecture firm in Southern California. I was originally interested in hand gestures, and I decided to study architects because, as Charles Goodwin suggested to me at the time, they were bound to use their hands in interesting ways. I spent six months at a firm I called B+B Architects, observing and video-recording the impromptu meetings of one small 3-person team, and hand gestures were almost always at the literal center of the frame. It quickly became apparent that to understand why and how gestures mattered to the architects, I needed to understand a whole lot more about their practices, ideologies, and the mundane materials of their day-to-day work than I had originally anticipated at the start of the project. Three previous pieces of research critically influenced my view of the architects. First, Duranti’s (1994) analysis of the Samoan fono demonstrated how activities that are more or less culturally recognizable are defined by what is being said just as much as by how bodies are situated in space. Rather than examining something as broad as “talk” or as narrow as “a pointing gesture,” in my research I focused on design discussions as cultural activities, which were common and relatively structured at the architecture firm, but not so ritualized as to be overly routine or predictable. Second, the Goodwins’ earlier study of interactions at the San Jose airport (C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 1996) offered a model for exploring workplaces as socially-, materially-, and technologically-mediated domains whose “work” is reliant upon, if not entirely constituted by, distributed social actors using both simple and complex tools together while attending to some shared goal. Third, Ochs et al.’s (1996) study of a physics lab, and its members’ casual use of drawing to explain difficult concepts, helped me see how architects use their own drawings not just as something to talk about, but as an infrastructure for talk and thinking, particularly in storytelling and problem-solving activities, which, it turned out, were often the same thing at the firm. The results of this project stemmed from a series of interlocking insights I came to over the course of my fieldwork. I initially observed that how the team’s desks were arranged— four desks in a 2 × 2 square—impacted how they interacted. No single person was at the center, but the two senior members were positioned to see and talk to each other and the junior architects easily. When they needed to discuss something as a group, the junior members of the team (including me, to whom they granted that honorary title) would be the ones to move toward the senior members. When group discussions happened, the focus was

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almost always on an architectural drawing. After observing many of these interactions, the first insight I came to was that while eye-gaze moved from architect to architect as they talked, they always returned, regularly and centripetally, to looking at the drawing together. This, in effect, rendered the drawing both an anchor of, and participant in, the design discussions. Further observation produced a second insight: not only did the hands of the architects, too, move regularly and centripetally toward the drawing, but their specific movements were consistently structured by the drawings. The architects would run their fingers along lines representing a wall while they discussed its materials or point to an area of the building that required attention. They would place their hands on or just above the drawing to create new architectural features, like a wall, or a roof, or a hand slightly raising, like a forklift moving into a loading dock. This led to a third insight: the architects’ gestures were not simply made with talk and alongside the drawings; they were activating an in-progress imagined building by transforming the drawings’ two-dimensional forms into embodied yet ephemeral three-dimensional models. Finally, a fourth insight followed: this action was not performed separately by and for individuals, but by everyone on the team, as a collective. Close analysis of these actions over time revealed that the architects consistently acknowledged, either verbally, with gestures, or with eye-gaze (or often all three) various “constructions” the other architects built with talk and gestures on top of a drawing (Figure 24.3). They also rarely violated them, by, for example, performing a different gesture over something another architect had just highlighted, but instead tended to contribute their own “additions” to what others had built. By video-recording many design discussions over several months, watching them repeatedly and sharing them with other researchers, and also by transcribing them in a way that attempted to account for all of their complexity, the multimodal nature of architectural interaction became apparent, persuasive and, ultimately, very ethnographically real. There are several directions that a multimodal analysis like this can take, differing in scope and scale. A modest and situated claim could be that this multimodal blending of gestures, drawings, talk, and eye-gaze is valuable to architects in particular because it facilitates tasks that are especially relevant to the profession. This might include, for example, visualizing a

Figure 24.3  A transcript from Murphy (2005) demonstrating how multiple modes, including the architectural drawing, build on one another, sequentially and in composition.

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complex object in ways that are not easily afforded by two dimensional representations; using these visualizations for problem-solving, in projects that typically involve lots of problems; and calibrating the perspectives of multiple architects working on different aspects of the same design. A more general claim could be that multimodal action significantly figures into other linguistic formations like, for instance, narrative. In one piece (Murphy 2011) I used data from this project to demonstrate how architects tell stories about the buildings they are designing through multiple modes at once, and this multimodal form, I argued, helps other architects “experience” a design problem in a different way; but I also made the claim that storytelling in almost all contexts of interaction works like this, and that architecture just happens to be a good place to observe it. A final claim I made with this research is that phenomena that tend to get treated as individual and non-communicative—in my case, I was talking about imagination—are in fact social, interactive, and fundamentally involve the use of multimodal resources (Murphy 2004, 2005). Architects are thus shown to imagine collaboratively as they work— but not metaphorically. They literally construct the “objects” of imagination with and for each other in the shared space between them. This is what Charles Goodwin (2018) later called “co-operative action,” that is, the continuous providing of material for each other that we jointly use to achieve the particular structures that support intersubjectivity. Claims like this take the broad stance that since all human communication is, at its core, multimodal, the analysis of multimodal interaction should not be merely an “approach,” but should be the conceptual and methodological starting point for all studies of human communication—given that everything is multimodal.

Future Directions for Multimodality The issue of where to take the multimodality perspective in the future is a pressing one, especially if one conclusion is that everything is multimodal. To some extent, it is possible that the perspective could slow, or even stall, with regard to what new insights it can offer, if, for instance, it devolves simply into re-articulating in different situations that several modes interact simultaneously to create relevant meanings—a finding that is, at this point, widely accepted. Indeed, multimodality research that makes more ambitious claims, and attempts to use the approach to reimagine well-understood phenomena in new ways and forms, is better positioned to continue cultivating multimodality itself as a relevant field of inquiry. If multimodality matters to communication, what we ought to keep exploring is how exactly multimodal communication figures in many other linguistic, social, cultural, and political phenomena. To that end, more recent studies have examined embodied interaction not simply in terms of its co-incidence with talk, but for its complex intersection with grammar in spoken language (Keevalik 2018), an area in need of far more attention. Further modes have been added to multimodal interaction, too, perhaps most notably touch (Cekaite 2015; Chapter 21, Cekaite and Goodwin). Linguistic anthropological work on communication technology, media, and their intersection, while not directly situated within a multimodal interaction framework, has been quite analytically remunerative when combined with multimodality (Choe 2019), in particular when exploring topics like gender (Calder 2019), race (Calhoun 2019), regulation (Cavanaugh 2017), and migration (Lyons and Tagg 2019). As new technologies and media forms are developed, the multimodal perspective should be the fundamental point of departure for studying their adoption and use. And while there have been multimodality studies of non-English languages for decades, most of them have been other European languages, Japanese, or Korean. With only a small number

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of exceptions—most recently, Mark Sicoli’s (2020) work with Zapotec speakers, but also Nick Enfield’s (2003) work on Lao—multimodality has not been extensively studied with speakers from the Global South. Extending the multimodality perspective beyond the ambit of globally salient languages will only strengthen its integrity. The multimodality framework can also benefit from an increased openness with regard to how “not language” phenomena come to matter, including treating semiotic resources like images, text, film, advertisements, and so on, not as subordinate to linguistic and embodied modes, but as worthy of analysis on their own terms. Several recent studies provide instructive models for how to do this. Shalini Shankar (2016) has shown that for young participants of a national spelling bee, staged in front of an audience and broadcast on cable television, “spelling a word” is not simply about remembering letters and uttering them out loud and in order. Instead, she argues that spelling is significantly about sound for the spellers, as they listen to and say the word aloud; it is also about form, as they trace letters on the back of their name cards; and it is about vision, as they manage their embodied experience while the stage lights burn down on them and the audience looms, darkened in the distance. Constantine Nakassis (2019) employs an augmented multimodality perspective to analyze the resonance of visual-textual forms between and across domains that are otherwise treated as distinct: Tamil oratory, and Tamil mass cinema. Critical to his approach is that data derived from both oratory and film are treated with distinct analytic integrity, and in the process the semiotic echoes that move between the two domains are fully revealed. Research in Deaf communities has also demonstrated the power of multimodal analysis. Erica Hoffmann-Dilloway’s (2018) work on SignWriting—a system for graphically representing movement—traces how it switched from the receiver’s point of view to the signer’s point of view, and in her discussion, she provides an insightful analysis of how the switch prompted signers to consider and re-evaluate intersubjective experience. Finally, Terra Edwards (2018) has detailed how DeafBlind students at Gallaudet University—which has been significantly shaped to accommodate the visual needs of sighted Deaf signers—have pushed for redesigns of the school environment to better accommodate protactile engagement, that is, interaction with space and people that affords, and indeed, prioritizes touch. As Edwards shows, this re-building of space is deeply linked with what she calls “re-channeling” language for DeafBlind students, such that the space of interaction, movements of bodies through it, and the linguistic systems they use to communicate with each other are all mutually constitutive. All of these projects, and others like them, maintain a focus on human bodies in their analyses, but are not so constrained by those bodies that they are unable to examine other systems—spatial, cinematic, writing, and design—right alongside them, through and for their own features. Finally, the future of multimodal analysis will be influenced by two important factors. The first is methodology, and in particular the tools we use for data collection. For much of its run the history of inquiries into “not language” has been characterized by the ambitions of researchers far outstripping technological feasibility. The advent of multimodality research in the early 2000s—including the dramatic increase in numbers of individuals doing it—was largely the apotheosis of 60 years of incremental attempts to capture systematically what is both clearly observable to the human eye and meaningful to human interaction. Once cameras were small enough and cheap enough, and once high-definition video and audio was simple enough to incorporate into ethnographic research, researchers could finally move on from the constraints inherited from the 1950s. Take, for example, the fact that almost all video-based studies of communication are stationary, subject to the stable positioning of the camera. Once small, mobile, and even wearable cameras became available, studies of communication in motion, like riding in a car (Laurier 2019), walking in a group (Mondada

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2017), or even walking away (Broth and Mondada 2013) became possible. We can expect that with emergent technology, like drones, virtual reality and augmented reality goggles, and other devices that collect kinds of data we have not even yet imagined as being relevant to communication, multimodal research will find many more avenues to explore. The second factor, which follows from the first, is that transcription practices must significantly advance, or perhaps be entirely rethought, to fully take advantage of what multimodal analysis can reveal. There has been considerable discussion about how best to represent multimodal data (Aarsand and Sparrman 2021; Mondada 2018). But creating published transcripts using 20th century logic and early 20th century tools—horizontal lines of text, screen grabs, and graphic notations generated by Microsoft Word, for instance—significantly hinders our ability to analyze more deeply and make new arguments about multimodality (Murphy 2021). Indeed, if one of the central goals of multimodality has been to decenter language in human communication, then it is quite ironic that the anchor point of almost all multimodal transcripts remains the written word. As long as transcription is treated as a “word process” that subordinates everything to the standards for representing verbal language—and not a “graphic process” that designs transcripts compositionally and, indeed, multimodally—then the multimodal perspective itself is likely to fade away.

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Sicoli, M.A. (2020). Saying and Doing in Zapotec: Multimodality, Resonance, and the Language of Joint Actions. New York: Bloomsbury. Streeck, J. (1996). How to do things with things: Objets Trouvés and symbolization. Human Studies 19 (4): 365–384. Streeck, J., Goodwin, C., and LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied Interaction: Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Streeck, J. and Kallmeyer, W. (2001). Interaction by inscription. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 465–490. Trager, G.L. (1958). Paralanguage: A first approximation. Studies in Linguistics 13 (1–2): 1–12. Wolfgram, M. (2014). Gesture and the communication of mathematical ontologies in classrooms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (2): 216–237. Wundt, W.M. (1973). The Language of Gestures. The Hague: Mouton.

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460  keith m. murphy

25

Language and Food

Jillian R. Cavanaugh and Kathleen C. Riley Introduction We begin this chapter on language and food by noting how the two are materially intertwined. Humans eat and talk with their mouths; sounds travel the same paths as swallows. Hands, similarly, lift food to lips as well as write, sign, and type, while ears take in utterances as well as the crackle of food frying. Commensality, or the predilection of most humans to communicate while eating together, involves at the least: silent gestures, emotional vocalics, and casual chatter, if not also ritualized interactions and formal oratory. Food production, preparation, and provisioning also rely often on language in the form of spoken directives or gossip, written recipes or regulations, advertising texts, and verbal negotiation. Food and language thus frequently constitute one another in multiple, often intimate, ways. Studying language alongside food has both a long history and a short one. Early ethnographers like Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Zora Neale Hurston researched and wrote about events and contexts in which food and language co-occurred. The potlatch ceremonies of the people known to Boas as Kwakiutl (now Kwakwaka’wakw), characterized by competitive feasting and the exchange of valued foods, also featured speeches and claims to prestigious names (Boas 1895). For Trobriand Islanders, spoken spells and embodied magic were crucial for producing a successful yam harvest (Malinowski 1965). In early twentieth-century Florida, gifting and consuming a valued food like watermelon helped create the social environment for sharing life histories (Hurston 2018). More recently, linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, linguistic ethnographers, and foodways scholars have investigated this intersection more deliberately, seeking to document and analyze how language and food work together to make meaning, produce value, and shape lives. This research spans a range of topics, contexts, and methods for analyzing everything from food media and linguistic labor in food production to food-and-language socialization and language and food revitalization movements.1

1

  For reviews of the literature on food and language, see: Cavanaugh et al. 2014; Cavanaugh and Riley 2017a; Karrebæk et al. 2018; Riley and Cavanaugh 2017a, 2017b; Riley and Paugh 2019. For collected volumes on the topic, see Cavanaugh and Riley 2017b; Gerhardt et al. 2013; Szatrowski 2014.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

A focal point in this scholarship is language about and around food. Language about food encompasses discourses—from everyday chitchat to ideologically-freighted public pronouncements—about foodways, or the ways people do food, which include foraging and growing, marketing and advertising, cooking and eating. Language about food may take myriad forms from health codes and FDA regulations, to mediatized food art (e.g., Kara Walker’s Subtlety2) and “foodography” (i.e., food photography found popularly on Instagram), as well as everyday debates over peas and dessert at the dinner table (Ochs et al. 1996; Paugh and Izquierdo 2009). As such, and especially when language about food is performed around food, it tends to be multimodal, multisensorial, and multifunctional as well as interdiscursive. By multimodal, we mean that multiple communicative modalities, from talk and texts to gaze and body alignment, are intimately intertwined in and relevant to interactions about and around food (Szatrowski 2014). These also engage multiple senses: beyond sight and sound, taste, smell, and texture become salient when food is involved e.g., how the softness of soju took on salience in Korean advertising (Harkness 2013). By multifunctional we mean that food and language work in many, frequently unacknowledged, ways beyond denotation (that is, the dictionary definitions of words). For instance, food and language may seem to resemble each other iconically as when the timing and length of toasts reflect the status and cultural competence of those toasting and being toasted (Manning 2012; Throop and Duranti 2015). They may also point to each other indexically as when the last vestige of an immigrant family’s mother tongue are the terms used for the foods from the old country still served at home, collaboratively signaling the same ethnic identity, such as during the ItaloAmerican holiday meal known as La Vigilia (Di Giovine 2010). Food and language, then, frequently work together interdiscursively; that is, discourse in one setting quotes or alludes to discourse in another setting, pulling attention and emotions across past and present moments, recalling other contexts and foreshadowing events to come. For example, Italian families living in France co-construct an understanding of what the French term goûter (snack) signifies, namely, whether it is sweet or savory, eaten as an afternoon “meal” or just anytime, and how eating at home differs overall from eating at French preschool or, for that matter, at Grandma’s house (Ghimenton and Riley 2020, pp. 40–42). Language and food are collocationally intertwined in our landscapes; that is, foodscapes—the appearance of food or depictions of it in the world we traverse—and linguistic landscapes—the written, signed, and spoken manifestations of language in that same world—may intertwine and resonate with each other in complex and subtle ways. For instance, rough mountain landscapes in Corsica are seen as producing rough foods that then echo the crude language presumed to be produced by those who consume those foods (Pietikäinen et al. 2016). In these examples of language alongside food, we see how food often functions as another communicative mode, acting across contexts as both medium and index of human existence, symbolically reflecting and performatively forging social identities and relationships. This is because food fulfills both material-biological needs—as bodies depend on consuming basic nutrients—and social–emotional states, linking, for instance, tasty experiences to safety and familiarity or alternately to newness or change. For instance, food’s meaning-making translates into comfort foods, such as rice and beans for New Orleanians (Beriss 2012), but also into gastrotourism, such as was celebrated by the late Anthony Bourdain in his TV series, Parts Unknown. Either way, encounters with salient foods are experienced alongside and through the use of appropriate (sometimes appropriated) terms, speech acts, and genres 2

 https://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker.

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(from jokes to narratives), which in turn are part of linguistic repertoires that may be familiar or foreign, shared or aspired to, unremarkable or highly attended to. The interpretation of food as a form of language may also be inverted when language is understood as a form of metaphorical food. That is, some forms of talk are considered poisonous (gossip, evil spells) while others are viewed as nutritious (an inspiring sermon or much-needed heart-to-heart talk). This reading of language as healthy or toxic consumption can also be found in popular ideologies of how we become members of our communities: that we are explicitly fed (via words) our cultural norms for how to be in the world. A scholarly version of this can be found in theories of language socialization, analyzed as the complex processes by which novices develop language and norms for appropriate use as well as other cultural knowledge through immersion in social interaction across the lifespan. When these social interactions occur around food, the cultural knowledge being acquired includes foodways. This intertwined process of food-and-language socialization is common because much human interaction is organized around the production, exchange, and consumption of food, whether foraging in nomadic bands or processing meat in urbanized nation-states. That is, humans often learn to speak and listen while dining at home (Ochs et al. 1996) or snacking on the trail (Jarvenpa 2017), gardening or cooking (Schieffelin 1990), or organizing summer festivals (Jourdan 2019). Through talk around, about, and through food, children (as well as migrants, anthropologists, and other newcomers) develop both the alimentary and communicative competence needed to prosper in their communities. However, this metaphoric understanding of language as food can also contribute to stigmatizing discourses such as the “language gap”: a well-intentioned but thinly veiled critique of economically marginalized and racialized parents for exposing their children to cognitive malnutrition by not “feeding” them the right kind of linguistic input (Paugh and Riley 2019). Thus, the socialized multimodal and multisensorial habitus, or embodied ways of knowing how to be and act in the world (Bourdieu 1984), may also be the seat of and help reproduce ethnocentric prejudices entrenched in linguistic and alimentary ideologies and hierarchies. Such prejudices are structured by social, economic, and political hierarchies that align the symbolic capital of elite foodways (from farming and marketing practices to cuisines and cutlery) with elite linguistic varieties and markers (accents, particular vocabularies, and sometimes languages). Such hierarchies sort valorized foodways and prestigious linguistic forms, such that the contingent associations of both with higher status appears just “as things are” (and should be), and the social, economic, and political inequalities they index are masked. Oinoglossia (Silverstein 2006)—i.e., the specialized terminology learned and displayed by wine connoisseurs—is one example of a class-marking, food-focused linguistic register (linguistic variety connected to and indicative of particular contexts of use and the people typical of those contexts), where food and linguistic practices are learned, but also naturalized to express relatively high social status. Judgmental communicative acts labeling pork and rye bread as “what children should eat” in a Danish classroom, especially targeting immigrant children’s lunches that lack these foods, exemplify how food discourses may reflect and construct racist and nationalist ideologies and hierarchies (Karrebaek 2013). Frequently, mixed foodways and languages that emerge out of social contact and cohabitation are also put to use as markers of denigrated communities and people. When these two syncretic formations co-exist (as when the trade in spices and transplantation of grains is entangled with the interplay of migrant laborers’ and fortune-seekers’ multiple languages), the symbolic impact is more potent still. Their stigmatization is the result of colonization, immigration, and other forms of social disruption, none of which happen in

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language and food  463

a political vacuum. When the powerless assemble dishes or sentences in new ways out of the available ingredients, these disrupted ways of forging meaning have often been spat out, misinterpreted, and denigrated by those in power. For example, for middle-class Senegalese immigrants to Paris, (post)colonial ideologies of race, class and religion resonate through both their Wolof–French code-switching practices as well as their foodways—as social setting dictates their decisions to eat with their hands au bol (seated around a common bowl) or with a fork á table (at the table) (Yount-Andre 2018). On the other hand, elite speakers, eaters, and food producers may appropriate without respect mixed forms—such as fusion cuisines (Wilk 2006) or Mock Spanish language (Hill 2008)—elevating them as cool or otherwise desirable, while those lacking access to privilege will still be scorned for their similar usage. Nonetheless, the allure of elite foods and accents is sometimes resisted as subaltern folk assign covert prestige to their own linguistic patterns and foodways. We will return to many of these points in the next two sections, where we illustrate a few of the interconnections between language and food introduced here by turning to research in our respective field sites (northern Italy for Cavanaugh, France and French Polynesia for Riley). Then, by way of conclusion, we explore future directions for food and language scholarship, focusing in particular on food (inter)activism and the discursive-food forces it contests.

Linguistic Labor and Food Production: Naming Salami in Northern Italy Food can be a way to make a living, from agriculture, animal husbandry, and food production on family farms or in enormous factories, to food service in coffee shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. In all these workplaces, language will be as much a part of work as any other practice, including following printed checklists tacked to walls, writing menus on chalk-boards, or making loud-speaker announcements. Linguistic labor is essential to food production and its circulation, and food-oriented workplaces are ripe ethnographic sites to explore food and language as mutually-informing. A focus on the names of particular heritage food items quickly demonstrates this interplay. The notion of “heritage food” itself is a tightly bundled package of sometimes-contested material substances and practices and verbal and textual representations, but generally refers to foods associated with a particular group’s histories of production and geographical territory. For instance, in the northern Italian town and province of Bergamo, the local salami is a heritage food: it is culturally important, with a documented history of production and consumption, and a common material form in terms of size, shape, and flavor profile. Across the province, it is eaten frequently, produced widely, and talked about as delicious, traditional, and nostrano (approximately, ‘our local,’ in Italian). For those who make their livings producing and selling Bergamasco salami, they must work to translate this cultural importance into market value for their goods, creating distinction within a narrow range of variation. One possible variation is what to call it: the names on labels and uttered at farmers markets, gatherings, and dinner tables are varied and indexically-laden. As linguistic anthropologists have long noted, all names are densely indexical in the sense that they point to particular people or objects in the world, but also place them relative to their contexts of use, relationships among speakers, and status vis-à-vis other people or objects (Blum 2017a, 2017b; Fleming 2011; Perley 2015). Naming of objects can be part of branding processes, in which particular qualities are bundled together into recognizable similarity (Shankar 2015). Salame

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464  jillian r. cavanaugh and kathleen c. riley

bergamasco (Bergamasco salami) and its variations referentially denote a particular class of edibles, presumably materially similar to one another, and in some way anchor those items to this particular place. But there are lots of specific names for this class of objects, all indexing slightly different constellations of values, contexts of use, relationships among producers and consumers, and relative price and market value. Additionally, these names draw variably on the two languages used in the province: Italian, the national standard, and Bergamasco, the local vernacular. This linguistic variation in naming practices mirrors the extensive diversity of verbal practices that surround and occur during the production, circulation, and consumption of this salami, which will nearly always include some mix of the two languages. The mix itself is highly variable, ranging from Italian with a Bergamasco accent and/or with Bergamasco words and calques3 mixed in, to Bergamasco with some integrated Italian words or phrases. A few examples will demonstrate this variety. One mid-sized company (50–75 employees), Bonelli, employs Bergamasco to name its salami “ol salàm de la bergamasca” (the salami of the Bergamasco [province]).4 The other salami this company makes (among many other products) is named salame nostrano (‘our local salami,’ notably in Standard Italian). Both can be purchased in supermarkets across the province and are made in a state-of-the-art factory, with multiple stories, dozens of workers, and large-scale food-making machinery, all of which allow the company to produce enough to satisfy the demands of keeping supermarkets stocked. The two differ only in the finishing touches of how they are bound up with twine before aging: ol salàm de la bergamasca is tied by hand, while salame nostrano is tied by machine. The two names, however, signal difference at multiple levels. Salame nostrano is marked simply as ‘our local’: what we Bergamascos eat, the salami of our territory and our history. “Nostrano” achieves this association of particular territory and the people of that territory with what it labels because it is a deictic like ‘here’ or ‘ours’ in English, the meaning of which differs contextually depending on who is included in this particular ‘our’ or what place in particular is indicated by this ‘here’ (see Chapter 33, Duranti). Indeed, Italians in other provinces often call the very different salamis unique to their own territories “salame nostrano” amongst themselves and in their own territories—for them, that particular salami is ‘our local salami.’ For instance, a salami sold in a specialty shop in Brescia, a town just to the east of Bergamo (and only an hour or so away by car or train) labeled “salame nostrano” would indicate that that was salame bresciano (Brescian salami). It is the use and encountering of “nostrano” in a particular place that renders it meaningful, implying its origin, but also that it has not traveled beyond the confines of that particular local place. Indeed, Bergamasco salami rarely circulates outside of the province of Bergamo, having local appeal, but not much caché beyond its confines. This helps make this salame nostrano readable as the salami of Bergamo and Bergamasco people when encountered within the province of Bergamo. By contrast, the Bergamasco name, ol salàm de la bergamasca, materially identical to “salame nostrano” except for how it is tied, indexes its place of origin differently and in two ways: through referentially representing the province of Bergamo, and through the language of the name, as Bergamasco always indexes its speakers and their territory (Cavanaugh 2009). In so doing, this name also points to what’s in the salami (specific proportions of fat and lean parts of the pig, a large grind texture, natural casings, the requisite salt and only a few flavoring spices), who made it (Bergamascos, and this family-owned company in particular), 3

  Calques are linguistic elements borrowed from one language into another and translated literally or separately.   This and all other company, product, and individual names are pseudonyms. Bergamasco words appear bolded and Italian words are italicized.

4

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and how it was made (such as aging periods and how the salami is tied up). As such, it taps into widespread discourses anchored in the notion of terroir (Trubek 2009), which associate particular foods with particular territories, their ecologies, and their traditions of food production. The Bergamasco name also indexes a slight difference in production processes, which take more dedicated time and worker expertise, and aligns these salamis with an artisanal tradition of hand-made foods anchored in Bergamo, engendering a slightly higher price, or market value. Consumers may or may not know what the difference between these salamis is, but the company is betting on the Bergamasco language name to index higher value to their customers. A smaller producer, Pietro, makes and sells something he calls salame del Castinello, named after the farm complex, or podere, where he raises his pigs, which has been in his family for a few generations. This name identifies a much smaller place of origin for these salamis, indexing traditions of farming, animal husbandry, and salami-making that occurred at this podere, and so many others like it across the plains of Bergamo and Lombardy more broadly. Pietro told me he decided not to use Bergamasco language or the place name in the name of his salami in order to differentiate his products—made on a much smaller scale, by Pietro and just a few part-time workers, and almost entirely by hand—from those of larger producers like Bonelli, whom he criticizes for their industrial scale production and dismisses as not producing “real” Bergamasco salami. There is also a history of conflict among larger scale producers and smaller ones who raise their own pigs, as Pietro does, over efforts to attain EU source designations for Bergamasco salami (see Cavanaugh 2007 for details), so this name indirectly indexes that conflict, too. Here, the use of a particular (Italian) place name in the product name does the work that the choice of Bergamasco in the Bonelli product name does: points to a Bergamasco place, in this case a very particular one. But as the larger producer has basically claimed the Bergamasco name, Pietro chose a different indexical route to tie the representation of his salamis to Bergamasco traditions of food production. In other cases, the choice of language seems less significant than the form of the name. A third producer, whose scale of production falls between Bonelli’s and Pietro’s, calls their salami salame “Bergamasco” (‘Bergamasco’ salami), the quotation marks indexing a complex communicative alignment or stance among participants, or what Erving Goffman (1981) called “footing.” To put quotation marks around a word or phrase, whether in writing or speaking, is to draw attention to that element, distinguishing it from surrounding text or talk. The speaker, in other words, has adopted a footing toward what they are saying that sets it apart from the flow of communication. “Salame bergamasco” (these are our quotation marks, quoting various speakers whom Cavanaugh has heard denote local salamis with this phrase in Italian, including consumers, producers, and others involved in food circulation) appears to be unmarked and unremarkable; speakers are simply referring to an object with a particular name. Whereas “salame ‘Bergamasco’” (quoting both this company’s website and its product labels) draws attention to “Bergamasco” and sets it apart from the rest of the phrase, indicating that it is doing something in addition to simply denoting an object i.e., calling attention to the “Bergamasco-ness” of this salami. Is this salami extremely Bergamasco in some way? Or it is somehow NOT Bergamasco, although it is made in the province of Bergamo, by a company owned by Bergamascos, and materially fits the description of a Bergamasco salami? Or perhaps not AS Bergamasco as other similar salamis, due to having been produced in a factory (similar to Bonelli’s salamis), largely, though not entirely, with machines (also similar to the Bonelli salami, it is tied by hand)? It is impossible to say definitively, but the quotation marks signal some sort of marked relationship between the name, the place, and the food.

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466  jillian r. cavanaugh and kathleen c. riley

A clue to deciphering this gap lies in how these salamis circulate. A few go to supermarkets within the province, but most are sold to specialty butchers or directly to restaurants, where the company who made them, and the particular name attached to them, will be backgrounded as consumers choose among regional salumi (the broader category of preserved meats, including pancetta and prosciutto), and call them out simply by name, as in “mi dia due etti di salame bergamasco, per favore” (‘please give me two tenths of a kilo of Bergamasco salami’), a common request in butchers, specialty shops, and supermarket delis across Bergamo. This salami then will frequently come to stand in for all Bergamasco salami, making no particular claims about the specific location where it was made (beyond in Bergamo), one more regional salami among many across Italy, a categorization underlined by being in Italian. And because these salamis sometimes circulate beyond the province of Bergamo, this name helps distinguish them as Bergamasco in contexts beyond the province (unlike the deictically named “salame nostrano”). So perhaps the quotation marks (visible in text though inaudible in speech) are meant to emphasize the Bergamasco-ness of this salami, claiming distinction through its membership in, and very embodiment of, this category. Cavanaugh’s long-time interlocutor, Roberto, however, would say it doesn’t really matter if it is called ol salàm bergamàsch or il salame Bergamasco or salame nostrano or even just salàm or salame (he calls it all of these pretty interchangeably), dismissing salamis like Bonelli’s ol salàm de la bergamasca as not the real thing, no matter what the name. What matters is where and how a salami is procured (ideally from a friend, family member, or acquaintance), which language is spoken with that person (ideally, mostly Bergamasco), as well as the setting in which it was ultimately consumed (among friends and family, amidst ample talk in Bergamasco). For Roberto and others like him who see being Bergamasco as a set of ongoing linguistic, alimentary, and other practices and not something that can or should be commodified, objectified, or branded, salami and its consumption, circulation, and production should be grounded in bonds of personal sociability and cultural solidarity. People do eat that stuff from the grocery store, he has told Cavanaugh, but he and his family eat “quello genuino” (‘the real thing,’ literally, ‘that genuine [one]’), which they get from people they know, and then eat together. The name itself matters little in this context, where even focusing on the differences or particularities of naming indicates a distance from what Roberto and others like him view as the authentic material object. To return to footing, to insist on a particular name distances oneself and the food from the social interconnections that truly make up what it is to be Bergamasco. For Roberto, speaking Bergamasco (including as part of the usual codeswitching and codemixing of Bergamasco and Italian that characterizes most speech in Bergamo) will be an unmarked part of these connections, and salami will often just be salàm or salame. For him, like the stereotypical Bergamasco person (and speaker), Bergamasco salami is simple, authentic, and without fancy airs (or marketing ploys in the form of particular names). And while the names of the previous three salamis described are all protected by intellectual property, trademark, and various source designation schemes via the European Union, Italian nation-state, and regional and provincial organizations (all of which depend on extensive documentation and its very specific linguistic forms—see Cavanaugh 2019), the salamis that Roberto prizes circulate without such protections or constraints, often produced on family farms just a few at a time and thus not subject to the types of health inspections and regulations that discursively govern the circulation of the other salamis. Although it is beyond what can be explored here, this means that Roberto’s salamis are largely free from the regimented labor practices and documentary regimes (modes of documentation specific to particular institutions and bureaucracies) that must be followed by workers in all

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of these and other professional companies with whom Cavanaugh has worked, where the production and circulation of food is accompanied and constrained by the production and circulation of language in verbal and documentary forms (Cavanaugh 2016). And while Bonelli’s and the other companies’ salamis leave behind extensive linguistic material evidence of their production and circulation (such as labels, packing manifests, bills of sale, or certificates of authenticity), the salamis that Roberto and his family consume leave behind only the social bonds enacted through friendly talk among Roberto’s family, those who gift them the salami, and those with whom they consume them, as well as those eaters’ satisfied palates and full bellies.

Language as Food, Food as Language in France and French Polynesia

As evidenced by the Bergamasco salami, some foods take on deeply symbolic values for a community and are thus used in some ways like a linguistic code. Similarly, language may be understood as a kind of sustenance, especially when both are approached as embodied, consequential practices. In this section, we look at several examples from France and its semi-autonomous colony, French Polynesia, of how these two—food functioning as ­language and language as food—may become entangled. To begin, consider the significance of the baguette, meaningful to the French not only as a nutritional staple but also as a multisensorial object of discourse. In 1789, bread (or the lack of it) was what triggered the foundational French Revolution. In 1920, Parisian bureaucrats concluded that the minimum weight, maximum length, and maximum price of a baguette needed precise regulation as documented in the Parisian prefecture’s recueil (collection) of administrative acts. And just last year (2021), the French nominated the baguette for inclusion in UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage. The baguette speaks and is spoken about as symbol, lexeme (or word), and object of legislation, contributing to French discourse about national identity. It is also an object around which genres of sociality emerge. Friends with whom one shares bread are known as copains (alongside bread), and breaking baguettes together at every meal is part of many families’ daily rituals. Similarly, ripping and eating the nose off one’s fresh (perhaps still warm) baguettes on the way home from visiting with one’s local boulanger (baker) is considered one of the few appropriate ways to eat on the street in a bourgeois community (although, in recent decades, “sandwiches”—just a baguette with butter and a slice of ham—may also be eaten by youth on the run). The objection to eating in subways or on park benches is not that one is doing it publicly or in an unsanitary manner, but that one is doing it alone and without discourse. Instead, eating should take place à table (at the table), where etiquette requires that eating be accompanied by convivial conversation. And this talk often circulates around the sensuous and symbolic qualities of the food being served and consumed, with some elaboration on past meals and future recipes. Because chefs (professional and domestic) pride themselves on knowing the origins of the ingredients they cook with, the provenience of produce is regularly labeled and discussed. And the now globalized discourse about how local eating matters, encoded in the term terroir (see also its use in the last section) was first coined by the French to discuss how their diverse wines and cheeses taste of the specific soil where the grapes were grown, the cows grazed, or the bacteria multiplied. For many, all this talk about and around food is not only a self-evident index of French identity but is also a way to reproduce it. In the bourgeois suburbs of France where Riley conducted research, great emphasis was placed on raising children into appropriate food and discourse patterns simultaneously (Riley 2009; see also Morgenstern et al. 2015). Children were explicitly taught and

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implicitly engaged in polite social interactions both at market and during meals, thus learning how to communicate around and about conventional French foodways as well as some transformations thereof. For instance, children accompanied parents not only to the corner butcher and cheese store, but also to modern stores devoted to fancy frozen foods and outdoor markets where much produce now arrives from Africa instead of local farms, learning to evaluate foods and discuss purchases as they were made. In some homes, the children would eat early in three abbreviated courses (for example, homemade soup and unfrozen bread, grated parmesan on tortellini, and ice cream) with mother standing by to police interactions. In the following excerpt from the transcript of a typical dinnertime interaction around the kitchen table, a mother scolded the alimentary and linguistic errors of her two youngest sons5: mother: 

Qui veut de euh… tortel-li-ni? (Who wants some uh…tortellini [Italian accented]) justin  [9 years old, out of his chair, patting his belly]:  Maman, j’ai plus faim. (Mama, I’m full) mother:  Non. On se met à table. (No, we sit at the table.) [Justin sits, brings his face close to his plate and forks pasta into his mouth, spills some on his lap, picks it up and puts it back in his plate and licks his knuckles.] pierre [11 years old]:  Oh, Justin, tu manges mal. (Oh, Justin, you eat badly). mother:  Justin, c’est dégoûtant (Justin, that’s disgusting) [Georges, 3 years old, squirms from his seat] mother:  Il n’y a pas de dessert pour ceux qui sont debout. Tu le sais très bien maintenant, hein? (There’s no dessert for those who are standing. You know that very well, right?). justin:  J’en veux plus de pâtes, là. (I don’t want any more pasta) [rotating head back] Berk. Euh…pardon. C’est pas berk, mais… (Yuk. Uh … pardon. It’s not yuk, but…) mother:  C’est charmant ce que tu fais là. (That’s charming, what you’re doing there.) Both Georges and Justin transgress the rule that one must stay in one’s seat when eating while Justin also errs by spilling his food and licking his fingers, then using the impolite term berk (yuck). The children’s presupposed knowledge of the norms is displayed in several ways: the eldest Pierre begins the scold for eating poorly, Maman states that even the littlest Georges should know better, and Justin is begging pardon for his speech even before Maman begins to scold. By contrast, in the Marquesas, an archipelago of the semi-autonomous collectivity of French Polynesia, many French foodways are deemed bizarre by te ’enana ’o te henua6 (the people of the land, as they refer to themselves in their own Polynesian language). The food of singular importance is the breadfruit, a name given by European explorers who, from the sixteenth century on, so fully appreciated this arboricultural staple that they transplanted it to the Caribbean to feed their enslaved plantation laborers there. In the Marquesas, this is the food around which life was once organized—around its seasonal, communal harvests and preservation in fermentation pits (Riley and Donaldson 2018). Although imported rice and locally produced breads now dominate daily eating, discussion of which breadfruit 5

  Transcript B12.5/03. All names are aliases. Speech is in italics with translations in parentheses and contextual information in square brackets.

6

  Boldface is used for words in Marquesan by contrast with French words, which are italicized.

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will be ripe when and on which trees is still fairly routine. While choices about how to prepare breadfruit for a meal—roasting over the open fire, frying slices in hot oil, or pounding it freshly roasted together with the fermented version—have never required much verbal negotiation, the ’Enana of the Marquesas have developed a French genre of food talk (discussion of the relative merits of various culinary practices) for interactions with (especially French) tourists. And even as ripe breadfruit increasingly fall and rot in the roads and yards of the Marquesas, and the people there lament the growing need to buy their fermented breadfruit in plastic sacks from those who still do the fermentation (but in plastic barrels instead of banana-leaf-lined pits), multinational corporate actors have begun spreading the good word about breadfruit, processing and advertising it as a healthy, environmentally correct alternative to wheat. Their advertising iconography is an example of how food may be made to speak and how signs are used to feed our desires. For instance, one Swiss entrepreneur, enamored of the tale of the Bounty,7 began in 2013 to collect, process, and package breadfruit flour for global consumption. In his hand-drawn imagery, the Bounty sails over the iconic plump green fruit and large lovely leaves, all portrayed using a “primitive art” style (i.e., child-like drawing) that indexes the European idealization of the South Seas “noble savage” they felt entitled to conquer.8 By contrast, Patagonia, an international company specializing in sustainable outdoor gear, has began selling breadfruit crackers in three flavors several years ago.9 The advertising scheme forefronts the crispy looking snack accompanied by insignia of the company’s environmentally and socially conscious governance agenda (certified GMO and gluten free). On the box, breadfruit leaves are transformed into a symmetrical motif while on the company’s website a lush photo of the green fruit accompanies a lengthy explanation of the health and environmental benefits of growing and eating this food, including discourses about the ills of agribusiness and gluten. So how are these globalized discourses digested locally in the Marquesas, especially by children? First, despite the inculcation of lunch regimes at school canteens (where both the French language and French manner of eating with forks and separate plates are imposed), the French emphasis on talking while eating has not become the norm in homes—in fact, the French ideal of “family meals”—i.e., sitting down once or twice at regular times of day to eat with a regular set of household members—is not a common practice in most villages. By contrast, adult genres of gossiping over coffee or ribaldry around beer have been happily imported, but these are syncretically interwoven with precolonial traditions such as exchanging news while sipping kava (Tomlinson 2004; see also Brenneis 1984). For children who participate, if only passively, in most adult interactions, food-and-language socialization also takes place while collecting shellfish and river shrimp, planting cassava, grilling goat, as well as snacking on Twisties from the village store or Tahitian chestnuts pounded open on the sea wall. 7

  The Bounty’s mission to transport hundreds of breadfruit shoots to the Caribbean plantations was waylaid in 1789 by mutineers intent on remaining in Tahiti to enjoy a romanticized way of life with their local lovers. 8   The breadfruit flour logo, no longer on the market but lingering on the web, could still be accessed here as of 12/24/2022: https://www.tahitipack.fr/tahiti/farine-uru-arbre-pain-p-294.html. 9   Sesame-honey, seeded turmeric, and aji mojido. Patagonia strategically used both culinary and linguistic choices to index the ethnic diversity deemed palatable for its globalized market. However, this product too has been discontinued, remaining only as a disclaimer on the web (https://www.patagoniaprovisions.com/collections/crackers as of 12/24/2022): At Patagonia Provisions, we’re committed to bringing you the best quality products that do less harm to the earth. We are discontinuing our breadfruit crackers because we believe you deserve better quality.” Having tasted the product, Riley saw no problem with the “quality”, but suspects it was a supply problem instead – i.e., the global distribution of breadfruit remains as elusive now as in the days of the Bounty.

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What children in all these contexts learn is how to procure and prepare food and how to think and talk about and around it. For instance, adults discuss the gendered division of food tasks, infusing notions of sexuality into many of these, as was found during preparations for one Sunday meal, when grating coconut on a serrated shell poking out from between one’s legs and pounding breadfruit with a phallus-shaped stone was delegated to the father while the daughter was directed to collect limes and pick crabmeat from the shell (Riley 2016). Children’s food-and-language socialization is also structured into local valorization of indigenous culture through training for bi-annual cultural revival festivals that began in 1987 (Riley 2013). For these and other youth competitions where language, food, crafts, and tattooing are celebrated, children are trained to dance and sing, write and recite poetry, and listen respectfully to long speeches in te ’eo ’enana (the people’s language). They also learn to raise, prepare, and enjoy traditional foods—especially ika te’e (raw fish) prepared in the old way with only salt, or mountain bananas and pork from an earth-oven, ways of speaking and eating they have otherwise been losing their taste for. Given these entangled ways in which language may feed us and foodways speak for us, it is surely worth asking what happens when traditional foodways and ways of communicating are transformed in tandem. Does knowledge of how to produce and share food disappear along with the language used to say it? Does one lose one’s voice along with one’s desire for the foods of one’s grandparents? The ’Enana of the Marquesas began by the 1970s to express regret at suppression of their language by French educators and importation of global foodways due to French subsidies for canned fish and meat, oil and sugar, flour and rice, as well as baguettes. However, contemporary food-and-language discourses about the necessity of sustaining and revitalizing endangered Indigenous languages and foodways are themselves paradoxically an import of globalizing forces. These ideologies first reached the Marquesas in the mouths of French priests, administrators, and doctors, the very types of actors whose imperial practices led to the demise of both the language and foodways of the ’Enana in the first place (Riley 2011). More recently, the revitalization movement is suffused with food sovereignty issues of health and environment in ways that appear very French in form and function—e.g., NGO efforts to save endangered bird species that are good to eat or create marine reserves for the sake of oceanic balance rather than for the preservation of traditional tuna-fishing grounds. This emphasis on the “universal good” does not always sit well with the average ‘Enana, who often have their own ideas about the value of their land, food, culture, and language, and have long been incensed by those who come to thieve, lecture, and leave (Donaldson 2019).

What’s Ahead for Food and Language As these ethnographic examples demonstrate, food and language tend to be subject to similar types of pressures and structures of change via colonial and post-colonial circulations of ideas, people, and food stuffs, as well as other globalized market mechanisms that change them indelibly. Engaged scholars are invested in projects to restore the dignity, histories, and material resources of those whose foodways and speech patterns have been materially disrupted and symbolically demeaned, in the process revising what it means to be a food activist and an interactive listener. As linguistic anthropologists of food, we are turning to the potentialities of what we call food (inter)activism (Riley 2017; Riley and Paugh 2019), a form of participatory research in which researchers listen dialogically to how others are engaging in communicative reciprocity with food in ways that are aimed at restoring personhood, relationships, communities, and the planet. We discuss here a few instances of this concept.

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Scholars have long elicited stories about food as a way to unpack the intimate difficulties involved in socio-politically oppressive contexts. Counihan (2004) developed a collection of food-centered life histories as a means to represent the “food voice” of Italians undergoing socioeconomic and political transformations in twentieth-century Italy; Abarca (2007) recorded charlas culinarias (chats that happen among women while cooking in the kitchen) in order to highlight the life struggles and strengths of Mexican–American women on both sides of the border; and Dossa (2014) collected narratives about the difficulties of procuring, preparing, and serving food from Afghani women in Kabul and as refugees in Canada, focusing less on trauma and more on how food and food discourse engender resilience and empowerment. In each case, talking about and around food provides means for people to voice difficulties on the one hand while also claiming rights to personal wellbeing, material self-sufficiency, and/or political sovereignty. Another site for investigating the role of language in unleashing and promoting food activism can be found within food justice movements. Broad (2016) studied communicative networks and practices developed in community food and urban agriculture activism that emerged from the Black Panthers movement in South Los Angeles. As potent and potentially valuable symbolic resources, marginalized groups may seek to revitalize their languages and foodways as mutually reinforcing projects, as discussed above for the ’Enana of the Marquesas. Similarly, in the US South, Gullah Geechee activists promote their language and foods as a way to lay claim to land and resources while exposing a history of racial injustice. Mediatized depictions of these activities, which reach broad audiences in multimodal ways, are part of the explicitly “interactional” part of food (inter)activism. For instance, food documentaries such as “High on the Hog”10 or YouTube channels, such as those celebrating Ron Finley, the “gangsta gardener,”11 provide rich sites of overlap between food and language as both are pressed into various types of service. At the same time, local food movements of various sorts may effectively erase certain types of food producers, modes of circulation, and eaters, for not properly belonging to a place or for doing things differently than what certain gatekeepers deem to be the right way, as Mapes (2021) shows with food activists in New York City. Such gaps and erasures must be recognized, documented, and engaged, so that existing power structures are not reproduced but transformed. Forces of resistance can be complexly distributed across societies. For instance, Riley is researching how “local food” is materially and discursively produced, distributed, and consumed, in the state of Vermont, where food activism has successfully rebuilt local economies (Hewitt 2009). Many “real” Vermonters (those said to have “seven generations in the ground,” not the original Abenaki residents) resist this progressive, foodcentric message, viewing it as being told what to do by the so-called “nanny state.” This communicative resistance is not so different from what Riley encountered in another field site: a privileged, liberal-leaning, private school in New York City. There, Riley studied how the movement to change school food was negotiated and verbally packaged by administrators, teachers, parents, and students, resulting in a carefully designed curriculum that included enriched health and environmental education programs, involvement in school gardens, and access to many tasty and healthy food choices. However, one segment of the school community, committed to their children’s freedom to choose their foods, effectively disrupted this goal of socializing students into the alimentary and communicative

10

 https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/may/26/high-on-the-hog-review-stuffed-to-bursting-withculinary-delights. 11  https://ronfinley.com/pages/about.

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competence needed to question the mainstream food system or put their myriad advantages to work for planetary health and justice for all (Riley 2021). In our research, we have seen the destruction that can be wrought by the material and discursive strength of global forces such as agribusiness and commercial advertising. But along with other scholars, we have also documented how healthy, sustainable, just, equitable, and meaningful foodways can be socialized and circulated via, for instance, communicative reciprocity enacted around, about, and through food. Communicating reciprocity with food involves sharing meaningful dishes and nourishing forms of expression with others as well as respectfully sampling theirs; expressing food thanks to gods, family, and essential workers; learning and teaching to garden, cook, eat, and dispose of food sustainably; and amplifying the food sovereignty of local communities. For instance, in Italy, the rise of G.A.S. (Gruppi d’Aquisto Solidiali, “Solidarity Purchasing Groups”) demonstrates how reciprocity as a mode of food provisioning and social interaction can nourish families and support small-scale farmers (Grasseni 2013). G.A.S. are established by people who come together to form groups to buy foods in bulk directly from producers, distributing responsibilities across members and working to forge social connections both among themselves and to those who produce their food. In these groups, one person may be responsible for olive oil, another rice, a third oranges, and so on, coordinating to purchase, pick up, and distribute the foods, as well as cultivating enduring connections to those who produce them. While scholarship on the social dimensions of G.A.S. has explored the good that such projects promote and are organized around—for the planet, for the families, for the producers—it is equally clear that language is a key component in how these groups function. Language also factors into what is produced by them, including manifestos for better eating, moments of socializing on farms or in homes, and countless emails in their coordination. Alternately, consider the possibilities for sociality that emerged in New York City during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the suspension of so-called “opencontainer laws”—quality-of-life regulations forbidding open-air public alcohol consumption that were long applied unequally across socioeconomic and racial groups in the city—enterprising individuals began making and selling pre-bottled cocktails, loaded into backpacks or wagons as they made their way around city parks and streets. Sales patter often centered on what potential customers were already doing or could do, as in “Hey parents, enjoy a cocktail along with your (socially distanced) little league baseball game.” Such talk and the movement of a previously indoor mode of socializing out into public spaces helped create and enhance a sense of shared experience, of being in it together, here in the park, drinking and talking together. It was also a way for people who lost jobs during the pandemic to make some money in the face of enduring economic hardship. This was not a solution to persistent inequalities, but helped create an alternative shared public space, made possible by lifting laws that enacted and reinforced social and racial inequalities, as well as the shattering of everyday practices and routines that characterized the pandemic in New York City, as elsewhere. As we have explored in this chapter, language and food are connected to their material conditions and contexts of use in terms of production, circulation, and consumption. How people encounter language and food—listening and tasting with all our empathetic senses, but also within nets of solidarity and shared experiences—may make a difference in whether humans are able to imagine and generate sustainable futures. We hope to leave the reader with a conscious digestion of food and language that may lead to enacting planetary health and social justice, giving the planet and its many species (human and beyond) a voice.

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26

Language Policy and Ethnic Conflict

Christina P. Davis Introduction The goal of this chapter is to sketch out a linguistic anthropological approach to how language policies have been used in situations of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflict occurs when two or more ethnic groups compete for power, resources, and territory. Like conflicts more generally, ethnic conflicts can be violent or involve nonviolent disputes and contestations (Briggs 1996). Language rights and access to education have been at the center of ethnic conflicts in postcolonial nations. Following independence from colonial rule, nationalist elites, many of whom had benefitted from access to education in the colonial language, passed language policies with the aims of redistributing power to equalize opportunity for different social groups and strengthening national unity. But language policy is never neutral or unfettered (Tsui and Tollefson 2004); in fact, it has been conceptualized as a weapon that can be used to the advantage of both the centralizing state and separatist groups (Gal 1989). In nations such as Sri Lanka, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, and South Africa, postcolonial language and education policies increased tensions between ethnic minority and majority groups struggling for political and economic power. In the last few decades, many of these nations have sought to bring about peace through education reforms addressing language policies or curricula (Hornberger 2002; Sørensen 2008). But there are often significant gaps between the aims of these initiatives and their implementation in schools (Davis 2020b). Literature on language planning and policy has traditionally analyzed national policies and pedagogies, but in the last two decades sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have sought to ground those studies in locally situated ethnography. Consistent with the sense that language policy is a “practice of power” (Levinson and Sutton 2001, p. 1), a number of authors have advocated the need to look beyond schools and other kinds of institutions (e.g., government offices and courts) to investigate policy in relation to people’s beliefs, ideas, and lived experiences in different settings and situations (Canagarajah 2005; McCarty 2011; Ramanathan 2005). Scholars have examined how language policy is

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

enacted at different levels of practice, from national policies to community events to face-to-face interactions (Wortham 2008). In this chapter, I first discuss how postcolonial language and education policies reinforced linguistic inequalities and ethnic divisions in Asia and Africa (section on “Postcolonial Language and Education Policies and Ethnic and Class Inequalities”). Next, I review ethnographic approaches to the study of language policy that focus on the process by which dominant ideologies of language and social difference are reproduced and contested across institutional and non-institutional settings, and how power relations shape communicative possibilities (section on “Ethnographic Approaches to Language Policy and Ethnic Conflict”). While not all the examples discussed are from postcolonial nations, they are contexts where different ethnic groups compete for power, authority, and state recognition. Then, in the section on “Multilingual Policy and Conflict Amelioration in Sri Lanka,” I use the analysis of the implementation of multilingual education policies in Sri Lanka, a postcolonial nation ravaged by ethnic conflict and civil war, to demonstrate how local policies, practices, and ideologies can prevent national policies from fostering ethnic integration, and, in fact, reinforce language-based ethnic divisions and inequalities. The hazards of ameliorating conflict through language policy are showcased by the examination of the politics of speaking Tamil in public and in ethnically-mixed social spaces. In the conclusions, I consider the need for linguistic anthropological studies of postcolonial nations to analyze the complex role of English as a local and global language, and how it functions in the mediation of ethnic, religious, and class identities and inequalities.

Postcolonial Language and Education Policies and Ethnic and Class Inequalites Eighteenth century European ideologies associated with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) naturalized the idea that nations should be united by a single language (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). But in postcolonial nations across Asia and Africa, pervasive multilingualism is the norm, rather than an exception (Blommaert 2007). Colonial rule and eighteenth and nineteenth century linguistic and ethnological projects contributed to solidifying racial/ethnic categories that had previously been much more fluid (Irvine and Gal 2000; McIntosh 2005). In many cases, language is the defining feature for contrasting ethnic identities (van Binsbergen 1994). Historical approaches have viewed language policy as “inevitably linked to historical sociopolitical relations marked by competing interests on the basis of class, ethnicity, race, religion, or other key markers within and among nation-states” (Hopson 2011, p. 101). Colonial education systems created linguistic and class hierarchies between those who had obtained an education in the colonial language (e.g., English, French, Portuguese, or Afrikaans) and those who had not. Colonial governments groomed a small elite to occupy civil service jobs. General schooling was limited to the primary level, and access to higher levels of education was tightly controlled. Only those individuals who achieved higher education became proficient in the colonial language (Rampton et al. 2008). This exclusive group was able to move into elite circles of the society, joining those who had wealth and power (Tsui and Tollefson 2004). Following independence, nationalist leaders were faced with decisions about which language(s) should be established as official and which should be used for instruction in schools. They were aware that any mistakes could fuel tensions between ethnic, religious,

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or class groups. In India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Namibia, and South Africa, English, which already functioned as a common language under colonialism, was granted some degree of official status and became the dominant or preferred language of instruction in schools (Tsui and Tollefson 2004). The decision to retain English was frequently justified with the argument that it was “ethnically neutral and therefore, theoretically, also politically neutral” (2004, p. 4). The reinstatement of English reproduced the linguistic hierarchies of colonialism by giving advantages to anglophone elites (Rampton et al. 2008). While English-medium education became widely equated with opportunity, as E. Annamalai (2004, p. 189) discusses in relation to India, “a social advantage for the minority of students has been misleadingly projected as the advantage of English-medium education.” He notes how the students who obtain lucrative government and private-sector jobs are likely to have studied in well-funded English-medium schools (often private) and come from families who have been using English for multiple generations (2004). Even in cases where education policies favored English, decisions regarding the teaching of vernacular languages in state education systems reified language-based ethnic differences. In Singapore, for instance, English was declared to be the language of instruction in all government schools, but students were required to study their “mother tongue” (Chinese, Malay, or Tamil) as a subject. Government policies thus contributed to creating an image of a multicultural state, one comprised of three ethnic groups defined by language (Pakir 2004). In Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Tanzania, political leaders turned away from English in favor of vernacular language(s) to address the disparities suffered during colonial rule (Canagarajah 2005). The Malaysian government attempted to create a cohesive national identity by establishing Bahasa Malaysia as the national language and the sole language of instruction in government schools. But these policies did not alleviate inequalities as much as expected since they resulted in bifurcated education systems in which government schools provided an education in the vernacular while fee-levying private schools could offer English-medium instruction (Tsui and Tollefson 2004). This situation increased linguistic and class inequality because those who could afford to attend English-medium private schools had better access to government and private-sector employment. Sri Lanka is distinct from other postcolonial contexts because nationalist leaders replaced English in the state education system with two vernacular languages (Sinhala and Tamil), a decision that had negative consequences for ethnic relations. Most of the nation’s population identifies as Sinhala and the largest ethnic minority groups are the North and East Tamils, Up-Country Tamils (the descendants of migrants who arrived from South India during the British colonial period to work as plantation laborers in the central highlands), and predominantly Tamil-speaking Muslims.1 After independence in 1948, the Sinhala Buddhist majority government instituted discriminatory policies against Tamils (Hindu or Christian) and Muslims, who they believed had been given preferential treatment in the colonial period. In 1956, the government made Sinhala the sole official language of the nation, a decision that hurt the status and future prospects of the English-educated North and East Tamils, who had relied on civil service jobs in the South (Sørensen 2008). (Tamil was made a “co-official” language in 1987 and English was given status as an interethnic “link” language.) 1

 Sinhalas and Tamil ethnic identities have been primarily defined on the basis of language. Although many Muslims speak Tamil as a first language, the government classifies them as an ethnic minority group on the basis of their religion.

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When policy makers instituted Sinhala and Tamil as languages of instruction in government schools in the 1940s and 1950s, this policy, combined with the takeover of schools by the state, produced a centralized education system where all school-aged children were guaranteed a free education. However, the segregation of students by language and ethnicity increased feelings of ethnic difference and mistrust (Davis 2020b). Violence on the part of Sinhala and Tamil youth in the 1980s—including the JVP (the People’s Liberation Front) insurgency (1987–1989) and the civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) (1983–2009)—motivated education policy reforms.2 In 1997, the National Education Commission (NEC) announced a program that introduced curriculum changes stressing a multicultural perspective and a policy requiring Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students to study their other official language at the secondary level. A few years later the NEC called for increased attention to English, paving the way for the introduction of English-medium subjects in some government schools (2020b). While English has long been associated with power and inequality in Sri Lanka and other postcolonial nations (Ramanathan 2005), globalization and neoliberalism have led to an ever increasing demand for it (Highet and Del Percio 2021). In India, where national policies favored English, the current government has extended the “nativist” ideological position taken by several previous governments and stressed the need for state schools to offer mother tongue instruction, thus relegating English-medium education to private schools (Annamalai 2021). But some nations that initially gave the vernacular primacy, including Malaysia and Sri Lanka, are reintegrating English into government schools (Selvaraj 2010). In Sri Lanka, policies do not just stress English because of its global utility but because of its acknowledged role as an interethnic link language (Davis 2020b). Israel is another nation where some policy makers and school administrators have sought to promote peace by teaching children the language of the other ethnic group (Feuerverger 2001). Sri Lanka, to which I will turn shortly, is unique among postcolonial nations because its policies imagine both English and vernacular languages to be tools of ethnic integration.

Ethnographic Approaches to Language Policy and Ethnic Conflict Language policy has been defined as a set of complex sociocultural processes that are mediated by power relations and reside in the “normative claims about legitimate and illegitimate language forms and uses” expressed by people and institutions (Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty 2008, p. 9). Ethnographic work on language policy has stressed education inside and outside schools as a key domain for language policy studies (McCarty 2011). Approaches to bilingual education programs that focus on classroom interactions demonstrate the agentive role of teachers and students in policy implementation (Lin and Martin 2005). These studies also show how linguistic and social practices in schools and communities can support or hamper multilingual teaching and learning (Hornberger and Johnson 2007). In her work on South Africa, Nancy Hornberger (2002) examines multilingual education initiatives consistent with South Africa’s Interim Constitution of 1993, which, embracing language as a human right and multilingualism as a resource, raised nine major African languages to national and official status alongside English and Afrikaans. She explains that while policy makers and educators were enthusiastic to teach literacy in languages the children already spoke, the students showed resistance to the initiatives because of the 2

  See Hettige (2002) on Sri Lankan youth and the JVP insurgency.

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widespread demand for English as a language of power. She suggests, in relation to South Africa and Bolivia, that multilingual initiatives will be successful and minority and indigenous languages will flourish if more implementational and ideological spaces are opened for multiple languages and literacies in classrooms and communities. A number of scholars have provided ethnographic accounts of language policy implementation across institutional and non-institutional domains. These approaches build on important work in the ethnography of education, which examines educational inequalities in relation to youth’s lives beyond the classroom (Heath 1983), and investigates how youth, in their talk with adults and peers, engage with and reconfigure linguistic and social inequalities and differences (Rampton 1995). Vaidehi Ramanathan, in her account of the English-vernacular divide in India, calls for attention to the “spaces of unplanned language planning … grounded, local realities, especially those around how humans rethink language and literacy-related policies” (2005, pp. 98–99). Suresh Canagarajah (2005), using such an approach, examines how the LTTE’s anti-English policies were taken up in everyday usage once it established a de facto state in Sri Lanka’s north in the 1990s. He analyzes Tamil and English practices in the contexts of songs, police interactions, and job interviews. Recent linguistic anthropological approaches to language policy that focus on language ideological practices inside and outside institutions and power relations have illuminated understandings of language politics, minority language movements, and ethnic difference and conflict (Das 2016; Kelly 2022; Rosa 2019). Language ideologies have been defined as “conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices,” which, like other kinds of ideologies, are “pervaded with political and moral interests, and are shaped in a cultural setting” (Irvine 2012, para. 1). They are partial and incomplete, and they privilege some social groups over others. They may consist of explicit statements about language, or the more implicit assumptions involved in everyday practices (Irvine 2018; also see Silverstein 1979; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). The literature has analyzed the content of explicit language ideologies in relation to social hierarchies and political relationships, but there has been a more recent move to connect language ideologies to individuals, groups, and practices, across space and time (Agha 2007; Philips 1998). Scholars have gained insight into the processes by which dominant ways of thinking about language in relation to social differences are perpetuated by studying the enactment of language ideologies across different settings, situations, and levels of practice. As has long been observed in linguistic anthropology, people’s linguistic choices both reflect and produce power dynamics within a community (Duranti 1994). Language ideologies embed power relations because the values that people ascribe to linguistic and nonlinguistic signs (e.g., images, clothing, and gestures) involve beliefs and agendas that are “anchored to political relations” (Gal and Irvine 2019, p. 13). Literature on language practices in bilingual and minority communities has shown how inequalities shape communication. For instance, in her study of Spanish/English bilingualism in New York City, Bonnie Urciuoli (1996) demonstrates how power relations in the wider society influence the relative prestige values attributed to Spanish and English, structuring when and where it is acceptable to speak Spanish or mix it with English, and by whom. Studies of everyday interactional dynamics between majority and minority groups bring insight into accounts of national-level policies, discourses, and institutions. Alexandra Jaffe (1999) brings an ideology- and power-focused approach to her study of multilingual policy implementation in Corsica. She looks at cultural activists’ attempts to reverse the language shift from Corsican, the minority language, to French, the majority language and the official language of the nation. Importantly, she does not just focus on the activities of national policy makers and local activists, but also attends to both explicit

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language policy and ethnic conflict  483

discussions of language and less conscious patterns in everyday discourse to analyze their effects on people’s attitudes toward making Corsican an official language and requiring it to be taught in government schools. She ultimately shows how dominant ideologies that are intertwined with issues of cultural identity and political and economic power negatively influence the outcome of revitalization efforts while reproducing existing hierarchies. Kathryn Woolard’s (2016) ethnography on Catalonia, Spain, furthers studies of minority language politics by examining the processes by which linguistic legitimacy is established in the struggle for Catalan, the regional vernacular, to gain authority in relation to Castilian, the official language of Spain. Not confined to the study of policy implementation, she analyzes how linguistic authority is reconfigured in relation to what it means to be Catalan across different levels of practice, “from electoral politics and mass media through high school classrooms and cliques to individual linguistic biographies” (2016, p. 8). Previously, people in Catalonia felt pressure to command the “standard” Castilian taught in schools across the country but be competent in Catalan because of the high socioeconomic status of its speakers in comparison with predominantly immigrant-descended Castilian speakers. But even though Catalan was well positioned, its status as a minority language and as an emblem of an authentic ethnic identity discouraged members of the larger community from adopting it. But in the twenty-first century a turn away from discourses of authenticity transformed Catalan from a marker of an authentic Catalan identity “to a more anonymous, universally available public language” (p. 10), largely through education policy that made Catalan the primary language of instruction in schools in the region.

Multilingual Policy and Conflict Amelioration in Sri Lanka Attention to the implementation of multilingual education initiatives through the politics of interaction inside and outside schools can illuminate the challenges of ameliorating conflict in postcolonial nations through language policy and education reform. As Kenneth Bush and Diana Saltarelli’s comparative study of education and peacebuilding argues, national education programs often fail to “change the underpinning logic and structure of behavior” because they involve the addition of new policies rather than the revision of old ones (2000, p. 33). Transformative solutions often require changes to the structure of national education systems (2000), which can be costly and politically controversial. While the addition of English-medium instruction in government schools can support interethnic relations, it may also have a negative effect in increasing class disparities (Annamalai 2004). Conversely, youths who have been studying in English may not be motivated to learn literacy in vernacular languages, as Hornberger (2002) discussed in relation to South Africa. As consistent with Woolard’s (2016) observation, initiatives that require members of the majority group to learn a minority vernacular language are frequently met with resistance when that minority language serves as an emblem of an authentic ethnic identity. That resistance is only more acute when the minority group is associated with violent ethnic or religious conflict. This discussion of policy implementation in Sri Lanka demonstrates how local policies, practices, and ideologies can prevent multilingual programs from boosting ethnic integration and cohesion, and how ethnic differences and inequalities are reinforced through everyday interactions. I first discuss the implementation of the trilingual initiatives at a multilingual school in relation school-based social practices, the teaching of Sinhala-asa-second-language (SSL) and Tamil-as-a-second-language (TSL), and the ideological perspectives of Tamil-medium teachers and students (see sections on “From National Policies to Local Practices,” “Teaching the Other Official Language”, and “The Perspectives of

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Teachers and Students”). I then turn to the politics of speaking Tamil in the public sphere to demonstrate the difficulty of using SSL and TSL programs to increase integration in schools when Tamil language practices in Kandy, Colombo, and elsewhere in the south are ideologically fraught (section on “Interactional Politics in Public Spaces”).

From National Policies to Local Practices

The trilingual education policies that the NEC passed in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s and 2000s were not transformative in Bush and Saltarelli’s (2000) sense because they did not change the structure of the national education system that divides schools on the basis of language of instruction (Sinhala and Tamil) and religious affiliation (Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, and Muslim).3 The programs are premised on the idea that ethnic integration will increase if youth learn to communicate with one another in all three languages, but because most Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim students study in separate schools, there are few in-school contexts where interethnic communication can take place. Government schools that combine Sinhala- and Tamil-medium streams (.7% of all schools) (Department of Census and Statistics 2018), some of which offer English bilingual streams, are testing grounds for the efficacy of trilingual initiatives in encouraging interethnic communication and mutual understanding (Davis 2015, 2020b). Girls’ College is a Buddhist national school (managed by the Ministry of Education) that offers Sinhala- and Tamil-medium streams at the primary and secondary levels and an English bilingual stream at the secondary level. It is located in Kandy, a large city in the central highlands. A symbolic center for Buddhism and the Buddhist state, Kandy is also a multiethnic city where Sinhalas, Tamils, and Muslims share commercial and residential spaces (Tambiah 1986). This discussion draws on research I conducted at the school from February to August 2008, and from June to July 2011. I observed and recorded the grade 10 Tamil-medium girls’ interactions in school and in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as observed secondary-level TSL, SSL, and English-as-a-subject classes. The Girls’ College Sinhala-medium stream comprised approximately three-quarters of the school. Per school policy, Sinhala students (Buddhist and Christian) studied in the Sinhala medium and Tamil students (Hindu and Christian) studied in the Tamil medium. Most Muslims studied in Tamil, but some studied in Sinhala. Although Girls’ College attempted to project a multilingual and multicultural image in its official publications and events, the Sinhala Buddhist identity of the school was dominant in practice. Most schoolwide events and functions were conducted in Sinhala and incorporated Buddhist religious practices. Sinhala was used on the intercom system, although the sports results were broadcast in English. Consistent with the distinct Sinhala and Tamil national curricula, Sinhalaand Tamil-medium students were separated for academic and extracurricular subjects (music and dance). While some programs, such as the annual sports day, brought them together, those were infrequent (Davis 2020b). Girls’ College Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students studied SSL, TSL, and English-as-asubject in their separate home classrooms. The English sectional head, a Muslim woman who had studied at an English-medium school, believed in the positive value of English as both an interethnic link language and a global language. She attempted to create multiethnic English-speaking social spaces by conversing with students and fellow teachers in English only, but those dynamics rarely persisted in other interactions. Sinhala- and 3

  Sri Lanka has some private schools, many of which are English medium, but the vast majority of children attend government schools.

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language policy and ethnic conflict  485

Tamil-medium students were admitted to the English bilingual stream on the basis of the grade 5 exam and their home language (only math and science were offered in the English medium). Girls who came to the program from the Sinhala-medium stream (Sinhalas and Muslims) studied in separate bilingual classrooms where they took their English- and Sinhala-medium subjects. Students who transferred from the Tamil-medium stream (Tamils and Muslims) came to the bilingual classrooms for their English-medium subjects but stayed in their Tamil-medium home classrooms the rest of the time. Thus, despite its unique status as a trilingual school, the national initiatives did not succeed in promoting interethnic integration because Girls’ College did not use the SSL, TSL, and English programs to integrate Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students inside or outside the classroom.

Teaching the Other Official Language

SSL and TSL teaching practices at Girls’ College were directly impacted by language-­ teaching norms and asymmetries in students’ linguistic proficiencies. There are significant lexical and grammatical differences between literary and colloquial varieties of Sinhala and Tamil. The SSL and TSL textbooks included both forms, but classroom instruction at Girls’ College emphasized reading and writing to the exclusion of speaking, a practice consistent with the focus on preparing for national exams, which only test written competencies. Despite Tamil’s current status as a co-official language, Kandy Tamil speakers need to speak Sinhala to manage everyday tasks—from riding the bus, to shopping in the market, to getting safely through military checkpoints. But Sinhala students, by contrast, had limited proficiency in Tamil (Davis 2020b). Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim education administrators and teachers in Kandy discussed how Sinhalas were resistant to learning Tamil because of its association with Tamils and the LTTE. In fact, the Girls’ College TSL teachers not only refrained from encouraging Sinhala students to speak Tamil but reinforced language-based models of ethnic difference in their everyday practices. In 2008, the SSL teacher, a Sinhala Buddhist woman, taught her classes in Sinhala. The girls in the class would freely ask questions in Sinhala when they did not understand the lesson. The two young TSL teachers, a Tamil Hindu woman and a Muslim woman, taught their classes almost entirely in Sinhala. The only time I heard the students speak Tamil in TSL classes was when greeting the teacher and doing elocution exercises. One day I sat in on a grade 8 TSL class taught by Fatima, the Muslim teacher. We chatted in Tamil while the students completed an assignment. She told me that the students do not like it when she teaches the class in Tamil because it means they cannot understand the lessons. She pointed to the textbook and said she has trouble understanding some of the “pure” Tamil words. She explained that she speaks Tamil at home but uses Sinhala words for foods and spices and Arabic words for prayer times. Her emphasis on her linguistic heterogeneity sharply contrasted with Tamil claims of speaking a language free from foreign borrowings (Davis 2020b). After the students completed the assignment, Fatima invited me to chat with them in Tamil. I asked a group of Sinhala girls a few basic Tamil questions, but they did not respond. Fatima introduced me to a Sinhala girl who had recently won a Kandy-wide Tamil competition, but she did not invite her to speak. She then called over a group of three Muslim girls, who all regularly sat together, and invited them to speak to me in Tamil. She explained that almost all Muslims know Tamil because they speak it at home. The girls initially conversed with me in Tamil but switched to English to discuss their ambition to become lawyers. Fatima mentioned in Tamil that she does not like it when students speak English because she is left out. In her comments to me, she equated their linguistic practices with

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their ethnic identities. She distinguished Muslims from Tamils by their heterogenous ­practices (the mixing of Tamil, Sinhala, and Arabic). She also distinguished Muslims from Sinhalas on their ability to speak Tamil. Her correlation of linguistic practices with ethnic identities rationalizes, and thus potentially ensures that Sinhalas would not speak Tamil in the classroom (Davis 2015, 2020b). Her unfavorable stance toward the use of English points to the class difference between herself and the three Muslim girls.

The Perspectives of Teachers and Students

At Girls’ College, the grade 10 Tamil-medium girls’ understandings of the complexity of their position in the school was evident in both their explicit statements and language choices. They frequently expressed pride in being students at a leading national school, but they also showed awareness of the discrimination they were subjected to as Tamil-speaking ethnic minorities. In 2008, one of my focal students, a Tamil Hindu named Anitha, noted that there were no Tamil girls on the sports teams. Some try out, she said with a smile, but they are simply told they are not good enough to join (Davis 2020b). When I interviewed her in 2020, she discussed how the Tamil girls were talented in English, but they were overlooked for English awards and rarely admitted to the English bilingual program (Muslims were more represented) (Davis 2020a). The Tamil-medium students took it for granted that they should be proficient in Sinhala. Once when I asked a Tamil Hindu girl if she understood a muffled Sinhala intercom announcement, she answered “Of course.” English functioned as a common language for Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students, but the grade 10 Tamil-medium girls preferred to converse with their Sinhala teachers and classmates in Sinhala. While all of the girls desired to improve their English, they also associated it with elitism and class divisions. Many Tamilmedium students preferred to speak English-inflected Tamil (inserting English words and phrases in Tamil speech) with their classmates rather than full English because they felt that speaking English “too well” would risk making them seem snobbish (see Nakassis 2016). Although English was ingrained in their everyday practices inside and outside the classroom, the use of Sinhala was particularly important in helping define their belonging to the school. In fact, students got upset when Sinhala teachers or administrators treated them like non-ratified Sinhala interlocutors. One day in 2008, two Muslim students were chatting outside their classroom as they browsed the sports results in a Sinhala government paper. A Sinhala administrator came by and told the girls in English to be quiet and return to their classroom. At her home later that day, one of the girls told me that despite the fact that they all spoke Sinhala well, Sinhala teachers and administrators sometimes act like they cannot speak it. She mentioned linguistic inequalities between Sinhalas and Tamil speakers by stating that “we” learn “their language,” but they do not learn “ours” (Davis 2020b). Some of the grade 10 Tamil-medium girls noted that they had Sinhala friends at school. Speaking to their association of English with elitism, a group of girls stated that they preferred the Sinhala-medium girls to those in the English bilingual stream because the latter group was too “posh.” But I rarely observed Tamil- and Sinhala-medium students interacting on campus, with the exception of Muslims. The Tamil-medium sectional head, a Tamil Hindu woman, told me in 2008 that there had been more interaction between Sinhala- and Tamil-medium students ten years before, but the war had increased ethnic tensions (Davis 2020b). Anitha noted in 2020 that most of her Sinhala classmates had good character, but there were some narrow-minded girls who passed rumors about Tamils girls. They all work in offices now, she added, but their attitudes have not changed. Invoking negative stereotypes, she said that most Sinhalas consider Tamils to be “terrorist blood”

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language policy and ethnic conflict  487

(those affiliated with or supporting the LTTE) or “Up-country tea-plucking blood” (tea plantation workers and their descendants are often assumed to have low caste and class status) (Davis 2020a). The Tamil-medium students’ attitudes toward the trilingual programs significantly contrasted with those of their teachers. While Fatima had refrained from making such direct statements, in 2011 two newly appointed Muslim TSL teachers, who identified as Tamil– Sinhala bilinguals, enacted the widely circulating ideology that Sinhala girls do not like to speak Tamil because they associate it with Tamils. But when I shared this view with two of the girls from my 2008 focal class who were completing grade 13, they seemed dismayed by the idea. They said that the Sinhala girls want to speak Tamil but that they do not know how because they are not taught properly (Davis 2020b). Indeed, Sinhala students with no exposure to Tamil outside school would not be able to carry on basic conversations without in-class practice. A view into the politics of speaking Tamil in public spaces can illustrate the significance of interactional politics, and specifically language choices, in reproducing conflict and inequality.

Interactional Politics in Public Spaces

The grade 10 Tamil-medium girls’ sociolinguistic practices were subjected to very different constraints at home and at school versus in Sinhala-majority public spaces. The girls spoke Tamil and English-inflected Tamil in their homes in Kandy or surrounding towns, although some also spoke Sinhala. At school they were expected to mainly speak Tamil as Tamilmedium students, but on the street, at the market, or on the bus, the Tamils had to be careful about their use of Tamil because it pointed to their ethnic identity. During the last phase of the war (2007–2009), Tamils were at significant risk of arrest, disappearance, or harassment on the basis of suspected LTTE affiliation. In 2007 several Tamils in the capital city of Colombo said they avoided speaking Tamil in public to conceal their ethnicity (Davis 2020b). In Kandy, where ethnic tensions were less pronounced, Tamils did not necessarily try to conceal their ethnic identity, but rather avoided conspicuously displaying it, which meant speaking Tamil discretely. In 2008, a Tamil Hindu student at a Tamil-medium school hit her younger sister on the leg for shouting in Tamil on a Kandy bus. On another occasion, I overhead several Girls’ College Tamil-medium teachers discussing with shock how a Tamil Hindu teacher from the north had been observed speaking Tamil loudly in downtown Kandy. When I relayed this story to an Up-country Tamil colleague who had left Sri Lanka in 2007, he said, “Growing up in the Up-country, you’re used to the majority being Sinhala, so you don’t speak Tamil loudly” (Davis 2020b). This comment reflects his internalized sense of the need to defer to the Sinhala majority by downplaying his Tamil identity. Most of the Girls’ College Tamil-medium students went directly to and from school, home, and extracurricular activities by bus, autorickshaw, or car, and did not spend much time walking around town. But when they did, they had techniques that allowed them to converse in Tamil with their friends without attracting attention. They would generally walk very close to their friends and whisper in Tamil in the ear, but only when nobody was close enough to overhear. Kandy Tamil boys were a little more unruly in public, but their practice of walking with their arms around each other’s shoulders generally allowed them to converse in Tamil without being overheard. Muslim students tended to be less concerned about being overheard speaking Tamil (girls’ hijabs indicated their Muslim identity), but they frequently emphasized the need to speak Sinhala in Kandy (Davis 2020b).

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I spoke to Anitha about her conduct in public in 2020. After finishing grade 13 at Girls’ College, she completed a B.A. at a private college before starting an IT job in Colombo. When I asked her if she felt comfortable speaking Tamil in Colombo, she echoed my Tamil colleague’s statement in noting, “Obviously it’s better not to show we are Tamils. This is the main reason why Tamils don’t keep bindis (decorative markers associated with Hindus) on their foreheads.” But she added that Sinhalas have on occasion directly told her to stop speaking Tamil.4 Once a Sinhala woman interjected into her conversation with a Tamil friend, telling them to stop speaking Tamil because she could not understand what they were saying. Her stories also indicate that her Sinhala speech is monitored. When her office went on an excursion to the zoo she mistakenly said the Sinhala word for tiger instead of leopard and her Sinhala coworker abruptly corrected her, “No, we don’t have tigers in Sri Lanka because we have chased every tiger (LTTE) from our motherland” (Davis 2020a). She was referring to the Sri Lankan army’s May 2009 defeat of the LTTE, which brought an end to the twenty-six year civil war. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the last few months of fighting in the northern region. The idea that Tamil speech in public spaces should be subjected to eavesdropping by Sinhalas speaks to the politically problematic position of Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka, even over a decade after the war. While several Sinhalas in Kandy told me that they speak some Tamil when in Tamil-speaking majority areas, Sinhalas in the south often viewed the use of Tamil a challenge to the presumed dominance of Sinhala. I got insight into Sinhala, Tamil, and English interactional dynamics in 2007 to 2008 when I spent time with a group of Sri Lankan youth at the Kandy branch of an international NGO dedicated to promoting peace and ethnic integration. Its leaders, who were Muslims and Sinhalas, stressed the need for volunteers to communicate in all three languages. The Muslim and Tamil members followed this practice, but the Sinhala members, despite having studied TSL in school, rarely spoke Tamil outside a joking or mocking context.5 They would repeat soundbites from Tamil films that involved imitating the gruff voices of uneducated village characters, a practice that perpetuated the stereotype of Tamils as lower class. The Muslim and Tamil members would translate Tamil into Sinhala or English or both during events to accommodate the Sinhala and foreign NGO volunteers. On one occasion in 2008, at a peacebuilding program attended by Muslims from eastern Sri Lanka who did not speak Sinhala, a Muslim volunteer began the event in a careful mix of Tamil and Sinhala (I was the only foreigner present). When the topic turned to recent violent attacks against eastern Muslims, the conversation switched to a fast Tamil. Several of the Sinhala volunteers left the room, presumably because they felt excluded (Davis 2020b). The effort to promote interethnic integration through SSL and TSL programs in Sri Lankan schools is challenging because of the inequal and conflicted position of Tamil in relation to Sinhala. As I have discussed, the use of Tamil in public and ethnically-mixed spaces in the south not only points to a minority ethnic identity (Woolard 2016), but it can also be construed as an affront to Sinhala. In contrast to vernacular languages, English might be more effectively used to bolster interethnic communication in Sri Lanka and other postcolonial contexts because of its role as a common language for those with access to it. Harsha Wijesekera (2022) assesses the efficacy of three trilingual Sri Lankan schools at promoting inclusivity through English bilingual programs. Two of the schools failed to use the 4

  See Zentella (2014) for a discussion of how Spanish speakers in the United States are told to stop speaking Spanish in the workplace.

5

  See Hill (2008) on Mock Spanish.

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language policy and ethnic conflict  489

programs to create positive intergroup communication because of administrators’ and teachers’ aversion to the idea of ethnic heterogeneity, but the third was more successful. The school authorities there demonstrated a commitment to multilingualism by creating trilingual display boards and notices and singing the school song in all three languages. Interviews with parents revealed their appreciation for the principal’s efforts to combat discrimination against Tamil-speaking students and create a more equitable learning environment. As her findings suggest, English bilingual streams cannot be effectively used to bolster interethnic communication and mutual understanding unless policy-makers, principals, and teachers acknowledge and work to alleviate linguistic and power inequalities between Tamil speakers and Sinhalas.

Conclusions Linguistic anthropological studies have brought a holistic approach to the study of language policies and practices in nations where there have been contestations between ethnically-defined groups. These studies not only describe power dynamics and struggles for legitimacy between majority and minority populations, but also reveal the processes by which language is associated with ethnic, religious, regional, or class identities (Jaffe 1999; Woolard 2016). Scholars have demonstrated that schools reproduce linguistic inequalities and differences, and that policies and practices in schools are influenced by the sociolinguistic practices of society at large (LaDousa 2014; Wortham 2008). By grounding research in schools in an account of the politics of interaction in public spaces, I am not assuming a sharp division between what occurs inside institutions and outside them (Philips 1998). Rather, ethnographic methods are key to identifying the ways in which dominant ideologies and power inequalities, reproduced by national-level policies, interrelate with local education practices and everyday interactions across different contexts. Such methods reveal the limits and possibilities of achieving interethnic integration through multilingual reforms, as well as the ways historically emergent ethnic formations might articulate with such reforms. Multilingual education policies that aim to create peace and ethnic integration in postcolonial nations cannot be successful unless students from different linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups are integrated inside and outside the classroom. While transformative solutions, like school desegregation, cannot be achieved in the short term (Bush and Saltarelli 2000), nations like Sri Lanka could bring about positive social change by gradually increasing the number of multilingual and multiethnic schools. To close the gap between the content of the national policies and their implementation, it is imperative for policy makers to work with principals and teachers to ensure that they are committed to encouraging interethnic communication and alleviating linguistic inequalities (Wijesekera 2022). One way to interrupt interactional dynamics that devalue minority languages is to initiate intra- and interschool events and activities (e.g., debates or plays) where students are encouraged to interact in, and mix, the colonial language with regional or local languages. These interactions could inspire youth to create shared frames of reference—slang expressions, catch phrases, and nicknames—that would allow them to feel a sense of joint participation in a multilingual social space.6 Such practices might also work to reduce the association of languages

6

  I draw on Ben Rampton’ s work on “crossing,” the strategy by which people switch into codes typically thought not to belong to them in a way that involves a sense of moving across ethnic or social boundaries (1995, p. 486).

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490  christina p. davis

with opposing ethnic or religious identities, and thus make members of the majority group more open to learning and speaking minority languages. Overall, policy makers and educators alike must understand how multilingual practices can work to both mitigate and reinforce social differences. Studies of language policy in postcolonial nations will benefit from more attention to how speakers ideologize English in relation to vernacular languages across different social domains. Scholarship shows how global and postcolonial English has moved away from its role in assumed processes of cultural homogenization and now treats it as a local interactional resource that is often combined with other languages (Pennycook 2007). Christina Higgins, for one, investigates how “East Africans exploit the heteroglossia of language to perform modern identities through localizing global linguistic and cultural resources while generally maintaining the multiple layers of meaning from both the global and the local” (2009, p. 148). While the literature has emphasized the role of English as a form of what Pierre Bourdieu (1991) called “symbolic capital,” only a few works have investigated how its association with class divisions and the legacy of colonialism impacts its learning and use (Canagarajah 2005; Kandiah 2010; Nakassis 2016). Studies of multilingual policies and practices cannot assume that English is ethnically/politically neutral or has positive value across all social situations (Tsui and Tollefson 2004). They must attend to the way ideologies and practices around English reify ethnic, religious, class, gender, and regional differences and inequalities in relation to local languages and to nation-building processes and globalization. Scholarship should also consider how teachers, students, and other individuals reconcile the role of English in national-level policies with their multifaceted English practices in both face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions.

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Nakassis, C.V. (2016). Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pakir, A. (2004). Medium-of-instruction policy in Singapore. In: Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? (ed. J.W. Tollefson and A.B.M. Tsui), 117–134. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. New York: Routledge. Philips, S.U. (1998). Language ideologies in institutions of power. In: Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (eds. B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard, and P.V. Kroskrity), 211–225. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramanathan, V. (2005). The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. (1995). Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialization. Pragmatics 5: 485–513. Rampton, B., Harris, R., Collins, J., and Blommaert, J. (2008). Language, class and education. In: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2e, vol. 1 (ed. N.H. Hornberger), 72–82. Boston: Springer. Rosa, J. (2019). Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press. Selvaraj, B. (2010). English Language Teaching (ELT) curriculum reforms in Malaysia. Voice of Academia 5 (1): 51–60. Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In: Papers from the Parasession on Units and Levels (eds. P.R. Clyne, W.F. Hanks, and C.L. Hofbauer), 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. and McCarty, T.L. (2008). Key concepts in bilingual education: Ideological, historical, epistemological, and empirical foundations. In: Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2e, Vol. 5: Bilingual Education (eds. J. Cummins and N.H. Hornberger), 3–17. New York: Springer. Sørensen, B.R. (2008). The politics of citizenship and difference in Sri Lankan schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 39 (4): 423–443. Tambiah, S.J. (1986). Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tsui, A.B.M. and Tollefson, J.W. (2004). The centrality of medium-of-instruction policy in sociopolitical processes. In: Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? (ed. J.W. Tollefson and A.B.M. Tsui), 1–20. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Urciuoli, B. (1996). Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press Inc. van Binsbergen, W (1994). Minority language, ethnicity, and the state in two African situations: the Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga of Botswana. In: African Languages, Development and the State (eds. R. Fardon and G. Furniss), 142–190. New York: Routledge. Wijesekera, H.D. (2022). Recognizing diversity: Multiethnic Sinhala- and Tamil-medium schools in Sri Lanka. In: Language, Education, and Identity: Medium in South Asia (eds. C. LaDousa and C.P. Davis), 182–207. New York: Routledge. Woolard, K.A. (2016). Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia. New York: Oxford University Press. Woolard, K.A. and Schieffelin, B.B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 55–82. Wortham, S. (2008). Linguistic anthropology of education. Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 37–51. Zentella, A.C. (2014). TWB (Talking While Bilingual): linguistic profiling of Latina/os, and other linguistic Torquemadas. Latino Studies 12: 620–635.

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27

Secrecy

Erin Debenport Introduction Describing what secrecy is and does presents a particular kind of puzzle: how can we describe practices made up of intentional concealments and carefully considered revelations? Furthermore, presenting secrecy’s unifying features risks ignoring the fact that secrets matter to different groups in different ways or that the consequences of information control and dissemination vary wildly. What is possible is to ethnographically analyze talk and action involving the guarding and sharing of knowledge—as well as their meaningful absences—as part of observing information control in context. This chapter surveys recent work on secrecy—and its constituent parts, concealment and revelation—with a focus on scholarship that takes language and other sign systems as foundational to theorizing this phenomenon. Following this, I illustrate secrecy’s shifting, comparative nature by working through several ethnographic examples from my ongoing work with Indigenous Pueblo communities in the Southwest United States. In these examples, secrecy is manifested in acts of information control and dissemination, alongside the use of an ethical register, a speech style built around the idea that proper concealing and revealing are central to the constitution of moral action1. One of the key features of this register is to draw distinctions between individuals, groups, registers, speech genres, historical periods, and other social formations and actions. It is in this sense that the register can be said to be comparative. This speech style is also characterized by the use of and concern for technologies of language circulation, with discussions about the moral consequences for writing, texting, and using social media to reveal community or personal secrets. These ethnographic examples show that communities undergoing rapid linguistic shift and efforts at cultural revitalization are especially productive sites for studying local attitudes about secrecy, and how communities use technologies to ethically manage and disseminate information. Finally, the ethical register used in Pueblo communities that is described here

1

 See Muehlebach (2013) for a discussion of an emphasis on “ethical registers” as one emergent trend in sociocultural anthropology. In this article, I imbue her helpful concept with understandings of “register” as a speech style associated with certain contexts, groups of speakers, or functions (c.f. Agha 2005).

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

foregrounds the moral importance of adherence to aesthetic preferences that privilege subtle acts of concealment and tasteful disclosures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future work on secrecy, concealment, and revelation in linguistic anthropology.

Uncovering Secrecy This section concentrates on four types of scholarship about secrecy, work that focuses on either concealment or revelatory practices that make up this phenomenon: surveys of the secrecy literature that engage closely with central topics in linguistic anthropology, studies of specific speech genres and registers dependent on concealment, genres and registers that hinge on revelation, and secrecy as an ideologically-shaped social practice built on the shifting distinction between public and private spheres. Framing secrecy as an explicitly ideological phenomenon emphasizes that local concerns about how information should appropriately be hidden or revealed shapes how information is controlled or circulated, a point that is illustrated in the ethnographic illustrations of how Pueblo language ideologies that emphasize the tight control of cultural information govern the way that information is closely protected or carefully disseminated.

Secrecy in Anthropology

Starting with Simmel’s foundational chapter that inspired future work in anthropology “The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies” (1906), there is a rich body of literature dedicated to elucidating the shared characteristics of concealment as a communicative practice. Tanya Luhrmann’s essay “The Magic of Secrecy” (1989) initiated a new wave of ethnographic work on concealment. Luhrmann works with contemporary British practitioners of witchcraft, middle-class professionals who hide their membership in covens and whose rites center on the possession and careful dissemination of esoteric knowledge. As a complement to her ethnographic focus, Luhrmann also offers a list of secrecy’s primary functions, asserting that “concealment creates property” (ibid, p. 136), creates value, and also “alters attitudes of both insider and outsider toward the thing concealed” (p. 161). The article also stands out in its description of the affective experiences that follow from having access to esoteric knowledge. In her account, magicians take pleasure in carefully guarding and sharing knowledge, experiencing secrecy as “exciting” (p. 162), “therapeutic” (p. 162), a way to safely enjoy “private, idiosyncratic belief” (p. 142), to learn more about oneself (p. 149), and to enjoy a “sense of control” (p. 145). Secrecy allows for the crafting of private selves and the creation of an alternative to the “external world” (p. 140), that is, for the magicians she works with, one that is “safe, good and pure” (p. 159). As her title suggests, the ability to experience multiple worlds and transcend the hard line between reality and truth is indeed quite magical, for witches or anyone else. Graham Jones (2014), provides the most comprehensive view (to date) of the anthropological literature on secrecy. While other authors also mention secrecy’s long-standing connection to anthropology in its focus on secret societies and through the common portrayal of the ethnographer as someone who is uniquely able to reveal hidden truths (e.g., Mahmud 2014), Jones directly asks: “What if anthropology itself were considered a medium of secrecy?” (p. 60). He also reveals what he calls “ethnography’s secret,” asserting that “[j]

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ust as secrecy is a prototypical anthropological topic, the methodological challenges ­associated with studying it bring into sharp relief more general practical, ethical, and epistemological issues of ethnography” (p. 61). Notable for linguistic anthropologists, and especially compatible with semiotic approaches2, Jones surveys how guarded knowledge circulates (or not) across various media, including spoken and written language, digital platforms, and “the body, expressive culture, and material culture” (p. 53). He ends by discussing “reflexive” approaches to ethnographic writing that overtly recognize the practical and ethical factors inherent in representing secret knowledge, highlighting authors whose research itself actively conceals ethnographic and linguistic information as part of the academic writing process. Thomas Kirsch’s 2015 review essay also explicitly engages with topics in linguistic anthropology. Kirsch aligns his approach with the work of Susan Gal, summarizing his definition of secrecy as “a discursive phenomenon that can be used to characterize, categorize and organize virtually any kind of social fact” (p. 202). Similar to Gal and Irvine’s (2019) work on comparison as a component of constructing difference, he describes the “sociality of secrecy” as “relational” (ibid, p. 196), and emphasizes, like many theorists of secrecy, that hidden knowledge can be revealed without using language (ibid, p. 197). Like Luhrmann, Kirsch embeds his survey of the secrecy literature within a specific ethnographic context: his work with Zambian Pentecostal Christians. As Jones does, he appraises influential texts (Kirsch 2015, pp. 192–197), providing a compact literature review. Differently from Luhrmann, who gives us a sense for the relationship between (inner) selves and secrets, Kirsch focuses on other people’s interest in secret information as part of critiquing how anthropological theories of secrecy fall short. He is concerned with the consequences of theories that assume “the existence of (real or imagined) others who are concerned and consequently have an interest in the disclosure of what is concealed from them” (p. 190). In other words, for a secret to matter, you have to assume that someone is interested in its revelation. The special relationship between secrecy and anthropology is also the frame used by Lenore Manderson et al. (2015) in their introduction to a special issue of Current Anthropology on “The Life and Death of the Secret.” Although not explained as such, the authors also indicate that there are specific speech genres bound up with revelation, connecting the topic of secrecy to “scandal and gossip, whistle blowing, exposure, and leaks” (p. S188). The Manderson introduction is also notable for its international and cross-disciplinary scope and the diverse professional roles that its authors inhabit through their affiliation with universities, museums, and hospitals. It is unique in the authors’ focus on non-state entities, rather than state or military institutions that have been more thoroughly studied within the secrecy literature (Gusterson 1999; Masco 2010). The authors draw on these various contexts to explore how secrets “die,” the term they use to describe what happens to secrets after their moments of annunciation, when “they cease to exist in their telling” (p. S183). By doing this, the piece shifts the focus from secrets and their concealed contents to

2

  Semiotic approaches to studying language and other sign systems in context continue to be influential within linguistic anthropology. Such work expands the view of language to include other sign systems, allowing for the analysis of extra-linguistic data alongside the careful analysis of language use. This tradition is also characterized by a focus on “non-referential” functions of language that “index” particular social stances. See Chapter 33, Duranti and other chapters in this volume for more background.

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revelations and their consequences, emphasizing the significance of the “[h]istorical moment determines what can and cannot be shown or told, exposed or displayed” (p. S187).

Genre, Register, and Technologies of Concealment

Another corner of the linguistic anthropological literature on secrecy concerns the study of particular speech genres, speech styles, and technologies of language circulation whose central functions are to either conceal or disclose. This aligns with popular understandings of language use and information control, as well. It is common knowledge that one way that secret societies are held together is through initiation rites; you whisper to thwart eavesdroppers during a juicy gossip session, and you use passwords and encryptions to protect sensitive content. Conversely, disclosures and revelations are hallmarks of speech genres such as the press release, the “gender-reveal” party, or a carefully timed social media post that can help bring down people in power. Secrets and their disclosures are constitutive features of particular kinds of speech events, registers, and technologies. A longstanding topic in linguistic anthropology concerns so-called “Mother-” or “Brother-in-law languages” or “avoidance registers”separate, parallel vocabularies or other linguistic features, that are used to index respect, signify kin relationships, and encode other non-referential information. By using (or refusing to use) these registers, speakers, writers, and signers invoke or “index” social relationships (Chapter 33, Duranti), and create the conditions of possibility that will shape future interactions. Irvine and Gal (2000) analyze hlonipha, a Nguñi (Southern Africa) avoidance register used as a means of showing deference to particular kin, whose sounds and lexicon came to be used throughout the region to also index respect for non-kin relations. In Ellen Basso’s 2007 article, she describes how a Kalapalo (Brazil) speech style is used in two very different contexts: within families to carefully discuss others’ marriage problems and as a kind of lingua franca used by speakers of different languages within the region that help solidify extended social networks. Alice Mitchell’s (2018) essay focuses on stances of deference and relationships of obligation that are enacted through the use of Datooga (Tanzania) avoidance register. In this context, “women avoid referring to their senior affines by birth name, while also avoiding words that ‘allusively’ refer to these in-laws by sharing lexical or phonetic material with their names” (2018, p. 4), using this speech style with both members of their families and more distant acquaintances as part of forging and maintaining relationships. Luke Fleming’s (2015) cross-linguistic research on avoidance registers from Aboriginal and Papuan languages shows how taboo words and topics become sources for the vague, generic vocabularies often used to indirectly refer to honored family members by speakers of such registers. Although participants in these interactions are not prevented from knowing exactly who or what is being discussed, avoidance registers share aesthetic features with other concealment practices while also functioning as grammaticized examples of “public secrets” (Taussig 1999), which maintain their effectiveness despite widespread knowledge of their contents. Other speech genres, registers, and technologies are intimately connected to processes of concealment, captured in studies of more amorphous phenomena like silence, indirection, effacement, and bluffing. Keith Basso’s classic essay “Speaking with Names” (1988) shows how Western Apache people are able to say very little while relying on place names to trigger associations—again, what linguistic anthropologists would call “indexical” links— and points of view that connect with the ancestors and the moral lessons they can impart.

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Similarly, Richard Bauman’s (1983) work on silence among seventeenth-century Quakers shows how language ideologies that privilege limited speech shaped spiritual practices, allow believers to be closer to God, and, like Basso’s example, avoid the excessive talk that prevents individual, unfettered religious experiences. Charles Piot’s (1993) study of how Kabre people in Tanzania practice and talk about secrecy also moves the focus outside of ritual spaces and specialized knowledge to focus on more everyday forms of information control and strategic disclosure as part of naming and ritual insults. Finally, Nicco La Mattina’s (2022) essay explores how the colonial-era anxieties of Italian ethnographers working in Libya and Algeria are evident in their unease with their informants’ use of “argots” or “secret languages,” which were seen as masking the intentions of mysterious “others.” Like avoidance registers, other ways of (not) speaking, like using indirection, argots, silence, and sly insult, share many of the aesthetic features and social effects of secrecy practices, including intentionally withholding information, the maintenance of in/ out group boundaries, while also showing that secrecy isn’t about not knowing, it’s about knowing the proper ways not to know. Other work has emphasized the use of the body, objects, or visual cues to obscure knowledge. Jones’s (2011a) ethnographic study of French magicians looks at the technology of “misdirection,” which performers use to obscure the mechanics behind a magic trick. In her study of Italian women Freemasons, Lilith Mahmud (2014) carefully describes how members of this sect learn to practice particular forms of linguistic and bodily discretion to hide their Masonic affiliation, controlling their gazes and wearing subtle symbols of their religious affiliation. Sasha Newell (2013) details the “public secret” that most apparel brands in Cote d’Ivoire are counterfeit and therefore necessitate active “bluffing,” comparing this to local practices of ritual masking that also hide knowledge in plain sight. Lastly, two authors in an edited volume, The Anthropology of Ignorance (2012), draw on methods from linguistic anthropology that center a semiotic approach to studying language and other sign systems, here, to study the work that people must do to accomplish various forms of radical obliviousness. Shunsuke Nozawa theorizes opacity, detailing how social media users in Japan work to obscure their faces and hide their identities, producing anonymity even as they engage in practices of self-fashioning. Gretchen Pfeil’s account of sarax, a Wolof (Senegal) sacrificial alms-giving practice, details the acts of effacement that must occur to obscure the identity of the giver when food, money, or other objects are surreptitiously distributed to the poor. Relying on simple technologies such as opaque bags, envelopes, or wrapping paper allows those who have been instructed by a diviner to give alms to do so anonymously, obscuring these acts of contrition and the sins that necessitated such gifts.

Genre, Register, and Technologies of Revelation

If we agree with Michael Herzfeld (2009) that secrets must always be revealed to be socially significant, then it is critical to look at speech genres, registers, and technologies of language circulation that emphasize revelation. Within linguistic anthropology and adjacent disciplines, gossip—the telling of others’ secrets—has remained an enduring topic. Theorists have responded to Gluckman’s (1963) classic essay on gossip and scandal, using ethnographic examples to complicate his conclusion that gossip is a method of social control. In their comprehensive volume, Stewart and Strathern (2004) provide a survey of the gossip and scandal scholarship, expanding on their own research in Papua New Guinea and presenting the findings of other anthropologists. Niko Besnier’s (2009) ethnography of gossip on Nukalaelae atoll that is part of the nation of Tuvalu in the west-central Pacific Ocean, uses close transcription methods of

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spontaneous conversations to show how gossip unfolds during hushed interactions with friends, in community meetings, and beyond the confines of the island itself. Recalling how theorists have linked the study of secrecy to the discipline of anthropology, he makes a similar argument for gossip, observing: “Not only is gossiping central to what ethnographers actually do during fieldwork, but it also encapsulates what anthropologists have come to think of as the essence of the discipline: an interest in the mundane, the overlooked, and the trivial, out of which the anthropologist distills not-so-mundane insights into how humans organize life in groups” (Besnier 2009, p. 1).3 Along with gossip, other work centering on the disclosures of others’ secrets includes studies of having/sipping/spilling/serving “tea” (Barrett 2020), a form of in-group gossip that originated with gay men. Witchcraft accusations, a ritualized (and often very consequential) form of disclosure, has also received much scholarly attention (again, Strathern and Strathern provide a survey of this literature). Other writing focuses on the telling of one’s own secrets. Summerson Carr (2013) analyzes post-Vatican II theological writings to draw the connection between Catholic confession and language ideologies in the West that privilege the idea of inner truths, while Cristina Giordano (2015) describes the speech genre of “denuncias,” disclosures about human trafficking made by recent migrants to Italy that draw on features of religious confession, with participants sometimes implicating family members in the process. As detailed by Plummer (2003), the ritual of “coming out” is a speech event consisting of a disclosure about one’s own sexuality. This piece foregrounds the high personal and political stakes involved with revealing hidden information. This theme is also found in Gabriella Coleman’s extensive scholarship on leaks and computer hackers (e.g. Coleman 2013), work that also focuses our attention on how digital technologies enable new forms of revelation.

Secrecy, Publicity, and Ideology

As part of a growing focus on language ideologies in the subfield, several scholars have taken a close look at the pervasive and mutable line between the public and private. Although the use of these two categories is widespread in popular discourse, as recent work in linguistic anthropology and adjacent disciplines has shown these are not discrete, objective labels but rather ideological constructions connected to their sociolinguistic contexts. Just as the phenomenon of secrecy itself encompasses both concealments and exposures, looking at what must be discussed or done privately always involves the possibility of public circulation. Beginning with a special journal issue (1995), followed by an edited volume (2001), Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard collected work by scholars closely involved with developing theory in this area to address the issues of privacy and publicity.4 As part of examining how racist discourse appears in public conversations, Jane Hill (2001) centers her attention on language ideologies in the US that underpin the prevalent sense of boundedness between these spheres, which, as she argues, requires paying attention to “the social spaces where talk occurs, of the topics and themes which it engages, of speakers of styles and genres” (Hill 2001, p. 197). Gal combined this focus on the ideological underpinnings of this folk distinction by focusing on how difference is created semiotically (2002, 2005). She summarizes: 3

 Additional linguistic anthropological scholarship on gossip includes (Brenneis 1984; Haviland 1977, 1998; Jones et al. 2011b; Paz 2009).

4

  Many of these pieces were more concerned with describing a particular kind of group formed through shared, reflexive practices with language, a related, but for the purposes of this review, distinct focus (see Cody 2011 for a survey of this literature).

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Public and private are co-constitutive cultural categories, as many have pointed out. But they are also, and equally importantly, indexical signs that are always relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used (Gal 2002, p. 80).

This contains two key features of privacy—and by extension, secrecy: that it relies on comparison and that it is indexical, or, dependent on context while also creating context. Gal explains that the public/private distinction is a fractal phenomenon in the sense that it “can be projected onto different social ‘objects’—activities, identities, institutions, spaces and interactions—that can be further categorized into private and public parts” (p. 81). So, for example, a private conversation contains material that is more or less in need of concealing, or that someone delivering a public speech still avoids revealing private, personal information. Manderson et al. (2015) cite Gal’s work while also bracketing the closely-related but distinct study of (counter)publics, saying: “Here is a contradiction that people routinely negotiate: secrecy is a vital way of demarcating the private/public divide while it also constitutes the public sphere.” These observations about the public/private distinction, combined with aspects of the works detailed above, provide important lessons for describing information control and dissemination: secrets and revelations are ideologically-driven, contextually anchored performances, often associated with specific genres, registers, or technologies. These processes rely on comparison to draw distinctions between relatively secretive (or public) people, events, groups, and things. I now turn to ethnographic examples from my ongoing ethnolinguistic research and community work with Pueblo tribes in New Mexico (US) to illustrate these features of secrecy and revelation.

Secrecy, Revelation, and Pueblo Ethical Registers The two ethnographic examples that I present concern the politics of access to Indigenous languages and community knowledge, issues that are often at the heart of the community language projects to which I contribute as a linguist. In addition to showing, as other ethnographers have also observed (Siragusa 2017), that community language programs often involve issues of secrecy and dissemination, these vignettes also expand the focus beyond language politics. The practices I describe also center on what museum anthropologist Chip Colwell describes as “the Pueblos’ historical struggle to control images” (Colwell‐ Chanthaphonh 2011, p. 451), with an emphasis on the potential for cultural knowledge to circulate online, showing the importance of examining technologies’ role in information control and revelation. In all of these cases, I use pseudonyms for individuals, each tribal nation/Pueblo, as well as the name of the primary Indigenous language spoken in these communities (“Keiwa”). While these measures take on greater importance depending on the specific community being described, I also use pseudonyms for tribes with relatively open policies with respect to knowledge dissemination to show that secrecy practices among the Pueblos are negotiated relationally, that ethnographic writing is itself an act of concealment and revelation, and that regardless of the current political climate, the line between public and private can always shift. Pueblo practices of information control are such a large part of everyday life that they are most often quietly performed without much commentary. Instead of directly telling people to keep information secret, concealment and discretion are made manifest in, for example, the way dictionary example sentences are carefully calibrated to share exactly the right amount of sensitive cultural information, how closely language program participants guard

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their stacks of flashcards, or the way that Pueblo dancers tightly control movements and gaze during ceremonies (Debenport 2015). Alongside examples of subtle concealments, in this section I also make space for moments in which my colleagues make information control explicit, through issuing direct instructions to conceal, or, by overtly showing how to obscure sensitive cultural information through their own performances of discretion. This helps to illustrate that the social and political work imagined and enacted through knowledge control practices is inherently relational, relying on comparisons between individuals, within and across groups, and traversing different times and spaces. Both subtle and overt concealments help to constitute a certain type of ethical register, a style of speaking and/or acting in which participants explicitly or implicitly evaluate, compare, align, and challenge the maintenance, showing, and telling of secrets as part of being a morally sound Pueblo person. The first example takes place against the backdrop of an experiment with community Indigenous language literacy that took place at San Ramón Pueblo, New Mexico. Early on in my decade with the community language program, John, the director of the San Ramón language program, approached me in the library where we were working on the first draft of a community Keiwa/English dictionary. He showed me a copy of Elsie Clews Parsons’ (1962) study of Pueblo ceremonial practices, Isleta Paintings, which he kept in a file cabinet, safe from prying eyes. Originally published in 1962, this controversial book contains drawings done by an Isleta man working with the storied anthropologist. Apparently, the man from Isleta had been recently incarcerated when Parsons approached him and was in desperate straits when he agreed to participate. Although a new edition was released in 2018, and a quick Amazon search yields many affordable used copies, it does not circulate comfortably in Pueblo circles as it contains images depicting guarded ceremonial scenes and words and phrases in Keiwa. I describe a time when John and I looked at the Parsons book: As we look through the book, he [John] continues to remark on the inappropriateness of these words and images being published, adding, “The artist’s family still catches hell for this.” Although it might appear that John himself was making these scenes inappropriately available by choosing to keep a copy of the book and by showing it to a non-community member, John was modeling the importance of indirectness, propriety, and the close management of cultural knowledge, stances that I saw enacted again and again during the ten-year period when the tribe introduced indigenous language literacy and I worked as part of the language program (Debenport 2015, p. 4).

Here, to be meaningful, secrets (the words and images in the book), must be disclosed (carefully showing them to the linguist). When John pointedly brought the book out of its hiding place, he was imagining an audience of other people who would surely be interested in seeing the sacred images and written examples of the Keiwa language. The performative presentation of the book contributes to making it a secret. Throughout our interaction, John engages in both explicit and more implicit uses of the ethical register, directly telling me the enduring consequences for the family of the man who shared secrets with an anthropologist and unknown readers, but also pointedly removing and then returning the book to its hiding place. The effectiveness of this act relies on comparison: John is comparing himself (someone who knows how to keep a secret) to the Isleta man who made the paintings for Parsons years ago. His family isn’t “catching hell,” and this book isn’t about his Pueblo. It also depends on the performative imagining of others who are interested in the hidden knowledge the Parsons book contains. John’s words and actions that day began a process of “enregisterment” (Agha 2005), where I was taught to speak and act ethically through managing my concealments and disclosures.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly in Pueblo contexts where secrets are so tightly controlled, it was a specific revelation that brought about the end of using the technology of writing as part of the language program, a disclosure that also marked the beginning of the end of the official partnership I had with San Ramón. I had been working for three consecutive summers with a group of young adults as part of the tribe’s summer program. During the mornings, the students in the program led language-learning games in Keiwa with the younger kids (think “Red Rover,” and “Twister”), and the afternoons were spent with John, the tribal librarian and me, learning about Keiwa grammar and pronunciation and writing and translating dialogues. The event described in the following excerpt occurred at a meal marking the close of the summer language program: The tribe was footing the bill for our lunch, and one of the students suggested that we write a thank-you note to the tribal leaders as our last Keiwa exercise. John was skeptical. “You never know what might set them off,” he warned. “I’m not so sure about the idea.” Eventually responding to the students’ enthusiasm, he helped them to draft a short thank-you note in Keiwa, which the students transferred to a large poster board and delivered to the tribal offices. John’s hesitancy was prescient. Apparently, in the next council meeting, the governor raised several political issues and connected them to literacy, calling for the end of writing the Keiwa language (Debenport 2015, p. 113).

In my previous analysis of this event, I used this story to critique the idea that literacy was an irreversible phenomenon and to show that information control was an ongoing process rather than a result of a one-time decision. But, upon re-examination, I can see an additional interpretation. John was also teaching me and the students how to properly conceal and reveal in explicit and implicit ways: he told us he didn’t like the idea, and later on, he retreated to his office while the students labored over the card, shouting spelling corrections only when needed. Most importantly, though, this is a story about the potentially corrupting power of a revelatory technology (writing), and the aesthetics and ethics of revelation. It was common knowledge at the Pueblo that the students were learning to speak, read, and write Keiwa. The class met in the tribal library and played language games with every child under 15 who was participating in the summer program. John, the librarian, a small group of fluent speakers, and I had been working for years on a dictionary and had produced an adult curriculum and several children’s books in the language. To make a large card with Keiwa writing, directly addressed to an undifferentiated group (the tribal council) was a bridge too far, and signaled an aesthetic preference among Pueblo people for subtle revelations, a theme that appears in the next vignette, where a public secret becomes a scandal. We had failed to use an ethical register. My other example concerns revelations made and comparisons drawn by tribal members from a second Native community where I work: San Miguel Pueblo, located near San Ramón along the Rio Grande River. Like the story from San Ramón, it illustrates the explicit and implicit ways that people comment on the proper way to conceal or reveal as part of using and teaching others the art of ethical concealment and revelation. This story also illustrates that the form of revelations matters; in other words, particular ways of speaking (registers) and speech events associated with particular contexts (genres), are seen as more (or less) appropriate means of disseminating community secrets. One afternoon several years ago, Raúl, a colleague of mine from a different southern Pueblo, suddenly turned his computer to face me. We were working on a community language project, so I assumed he wanted my opinion about spelling or pronoun choice. Instead, he had Facebook pulled up, and said, “Have you seen this page someone from San

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Miguel Pueblo put up?” Scrolling through the page—called The San Miguel Crier,5 we saw a series of political rants, cartoons, doctored clip art, and editorials, calling out people by name for misuse of power, trouble with the law, and other misdeeds. Amidst a few lighthearted posts, the anonymous author known only as the Pueblo Crier took an overtly political (and critical) stance, mimicking language found in the preamble to the US constitution, saying: “We the people are the rightful masters of both the tribal council and the courts, not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the corrupt who pervert the constitution.” Written in the style of a press release, the Pueblo Crier’s opening salvo announced that a prominent tribal official has been arrested for a serious crime, posting an announcement of the upcoming pre-trial hearing. Both Raúl and I were shocked. The intentional spilling of community secrets by an anonymous tribal member to an unregulated audience seemed to contradict Raul’s experience of a lifetime of carefully observing Pueblo secrecy practices. After the abrupt reversal of Keiwa literacy at San Ramón, I was surprised, too, since this was considerably more overt than the thank-you card written by the language students that had helped bring down the tribal language program. The San Miguel Crier whistleblowing site is a lively space for political debate and the pleasurable consumption of community secrets. Its exposures take the form of diverse genres, including political cartoons, press releases, and leaked state documents. Here, I follow the site’s very first post and the reactions to the disclosures it contained. Although penned by a single, anonymous author, in posting the announcement of the tribal official’s arrest, the Pueblo Crier positioned themselves as able to see the Pueblo as a whole, and commented on its moral decline. The first of many commenters remarked: “If he is convicted […] what a disgrace to our tribe!” Another poster added, “It’s disgraceful and disgusting to see high level officials placing themselves in avoidable situations.” Although the Pueblo Crier had disclosed one person’s secret, it is implied that this is the community’s revelation to manage. Still, after other similar comments rolled in, the amount of “likes” faded, as the post disappeared into the constantly updated scrolls of its audience’s respective feeds. Two days later, the Pueblo Crier took a different approach to disclosing the same community secret: that the tribal official is in serious legal trouble. The new post consisted of three pictures: two photo-shopped mugshots of the tribal official in question, with lipstick kisses covering his face and neck. In the second shot he was wearing his own bright pink lipstick, and wore a self-satisfied smile. The third was a photo of a weasel against the same mugshot backdrop. The caption read: “One of these animals leads a wild life, and the other is wildlife. Can you tell the difference? (Hint: one has been arrested for Crime X).” This post failed to generate any likes or comments, and the Pueblo Crier interpreted this lack of uptake (I think correctly) as criticism of the way they presented the disclosure, and the images that connected the tribal official to a frivolous, sexually promiscuous, and perhaps even a nonnormative gender identity. The site’s author adopted a defensive tone, asserting that parody is a form of protected speech and that they have a “right” to post such material. Still, the silent disapproval of the second post endured in the lack of reposts or comments. The third communique on the topic arrived a few days later. The Pueblo Crier reposted the weasel mugshot graphic following the caption “Update,” before announcing the time

5

  The actual name of the public Facebook page is the real name of the Pueblo plus the Keiwa word for “it is said,” or, “hearsay,” the name the site’s author also uses. Here, I use “The San Miguel Crier” to refer to the Facebook page, and “Pueblo Crier” as a shorthand for the site’s author.

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and place of the tribal official’s pre-trial hearing the next day. After posting the details, they presented what they called a “scorecard” for the defendant, listing the dates of past arrests and offenses. They ended the post by returning to a civic-minded stance saying: “This behavior reflects poorly on the dignity and integrity of San Miguel Pueblo.” Once again, a number of supportive comments pour in. In a sense, the Pueblo Crier was taking away some of the sting of the weasel graphic by de-centering the image and connecting the update to ostensibly impartial news sources. This allowed them to back up their original claims with a slew of new, but related, disclosures that dilute the unpopularity of the lipstick post. Throughout the life of this post, comparison abounded, in the invocation of other Pueblos (“What will they think of us?”), and also in the judgments of its readership. Like the thank-you card, the weasel post was too direct, which, along with its luridness, points to a shared aesthetics of revelation that elevates subtlety and seriousness. The audience of commenters, by voicing their aesthetic preferences as part of crafting disclosures using the new technology of Facebook, helped make possible this unlikely page, which is still active at the time I am writing this chapter. We can also see an example of what Manderson et al. (2015) describe as the “death” of a secret, which occurs when it ceases to be told. This was present in both the silence that followed the weasel post, but also in the way that these revelations soon faded into the feeds of everyone who follows the Facebook page. However, because these secrets can always be revived through links, likes, and repostings, they are not dead, but only dormant, showing that the idea of secrets “dying” is misleading and imprecise for many of the same reasons that scholars and community members have critiqued the idea of language “death” (Hill 2002; Perley 2011). In his “The Social Life of Cultural Value” (2003), Asif Agha traces the life of the British register known as “received pronunciation,” carefully characterizing its features, including the use of specific words and sounds and the contexts where this speech style is used. He shows how this speech style associated with upper-class identity stances became recognizable to the majority of Britons as it spread from particular elite institutions and was disseminated in popular literature and newspapers. Building off Agha, instead of being about class, the Pueblo examples I analyze here points to the extension of a different speaking style, focused on the ethics and aesthetics of appropriate concealment and revelation. Crucially, this involves contrast: artfully drawing distinctions between favored forms of concealment and dissemination (the mugshot vs. the lipsticked weasel), and groups (their Pueblo doesn’t know how to keep images and languages safe). Like Agha’s (2003) discussion of how RP’s expansion was carried out in new speech genres such as penny weeklies and later when the BBC radio service was introduced, the ethical register of Native speakers I worked with appears in new contexts: the Facebook comments section, the conversation between a linguist and a language teacher, and the surprise of a written thank-you card. But regardless of whether this register is being used to distinguish between types of selves or to separate groups, it is always about ethics, and the correct ways that moral persons control or disseminate cultural information. This emphasis on managing the control and dissemination of cultural knowledge and work on Pueblo religion illustrates how the entire religious political system is based on balancing practices of concealment and revelation (Brandt 1980; Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2011), which suggests that these ways of managing knowledge have been around for a long time. These ethnographic examples I discuss show how and where this ethical register continues to grow, an illustration of a specifically linguistic anthropological theory of secrecy and revelation.

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Future Revelations These ethnographic examples and the other works surveyed here demonstrate how secrecy continues to be a popular concern in linguistic anthropology, with the keeping, sharing, and divulging of secrets constituting crucial parts of crafting selves, forming groups, and doing politics. Equally clear is the necessity of always making space in the conversation for disclosures, both in terms of providing ethnolinguistic examples of events where information is shared, and also in theorizing what constitutes various types of revelations and their consequences. Like many other classic topics within sociocultural anthropology (gender, race, power, subjectivity), ethnographically-anchored studies of secrecy benefit from a close focus on talk, texts, and signs. In this conclusion, I suggest themes and methods that might carry forth a linguistic anthropological approach to understanding concealments and revelations. One potential theme concerns the impact of radical forms of disclosure on political action and the presentation of ethical selves. The public secret of police violence against Black Americans has been forced into the public sphere through the deployment of cell phone videos, creating the possibility for accountability and change, while also threatening to further normalize the power of the state and retraumatize communities of color. This new technology of revelation has also solidified new identities, including the figure of the “Karen,” stereotypically understood as a nosy White woman who surveils non-White people in public spaces under the guise of promoting safety and compliance. Similarly, at both San Ramón and San Miguel Pueblos, the technologies of writing and posting anonymously on Facebook, respectively, makes possible new kinds of academic/community partnerships and forms of political accountability while also shaping identity stances, with the emergence of the cultural property manager or the whistleblower. Future work in linguistic anthropology that explores these and related topics would rest on prior studies of online activism, including examples of social media platforms being used to build social movements such as protests against antiBlack violence (Bonilla and Rosa 2015) and disclosures of sexual assault (Deal et al. 2020). Another antecedent would be Gabriella Coleman’s work on hacking, which explores the dissemination practices of expert secret-spillers like Anonymous (2013), investigative journalists (2017), and the moral stances adopted by hackers (Coleman and Golub 2008). A second area of potential study involves decoding secrets as a political and/or leisure practice, with a special focus on the consumption of conspiracy discourses and the trafficking in hidden truths. The Q-Anon conspiracy that came to prominence in 2020 hinges on the unique ability of an unnamed revelator, “Q,” to expose disparate clues and weave them together into a legible global conspiracy (McIntosh 2021). In a less-sinister vein, Susan Lepselter’s (2016) multi-sited ethnography with UFO enthusiasts and abductees in the rural US engages with this idea, illustrating secrecy’s magic by spotlighting a loose group of insiders. This community is formed through a shared belief in the ability of some people to sense hidden truths, an ability they believe sets them apart from society at large but also gives their lives meaning and fullness. Lepselter shows that “apophenia,” or “the experience of perceiving connections between random or unrelated objects” (Lepselter 2016, p. 3), allows people to uncover what they feel are larger secrets, illustrating a new form of expertise found among conspiracy thinkers. The appetite for conspiracies and the uncovering of hidden patterns is also evident in our media consumption, with true-crime podcasts and television shows overtaking the airwaves and the emergence of citizen scientists and detectives who comb genetic databases and old police records to piece together secrets to reveal to their audiences—acts ripe for linguistic anthropological analysis.

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secrecy  505

It appears through this review of linguistic anthropological work on concealment and revelation that secrecy indeed “ripples through anthropology” (Jones 2014, p. 54). Still, as demonstrated in the examples discussed in this chapter, some eras seem especially saturated with secrets and revelations. I am finishing this chapter after 14 months spent inside my home as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, an experience that has carried with it new ways of thinking about the issues explored in this essay. Along with others who have been fortunate enough to be able to work remotely, I have seen practices, people, and things typically associated with the private sphere, folding laundry, chatting with housemates, wearing sweatpants—inserted into the public-facing job of teaching and advising. Many of us reckon daily with the politics and ethics of transparency and surveillance (“This meeting is being recorded”), and how secrets shared might be revealed to infinite audiences. We have adopted new practices of concealment (taking care to not accidentally post a private chat to the entire Zoom meeting), and new practices of discretion and bodily hexis (using digital backgrounds to obscure private spaces while revealing a curated public self). New speech genres of revelation have also taken hold, including the Zoom happy hour and the webinar, as well as emergent registers associated with these genres. Scholars are already engaged with ethnolinguistic data from the Covid-era that looks at avoidance, including Fleming and Slotta (2020); Russell (2020), and others, revealing that secrecy’s future in linguistic anthropology is assured.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Alessandro Duranti, Robin Conley Riner, Rachel George, Steven Black, and one anonymous reviewer for their generous help with the style and substance of this piece. This chapter is dedicated to Michael Silverstein, for his unfailing encouragement and support, and for helping me to identify secrecy as an ethnolinguistic and theoretical thread worth following.

REFERENCES Agha, A. (2003). The social life of cultural value. 23(3–4), 231–273. Language & Communication. Agha, A. (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 38–59. Barrett, R. (2020). Tea fit for a queen. Anthropology News, website, February 20, 2020. Basso, E. (2007). The Kalapalo affinal civility register. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17 (2): 161–183. Basso, K. (1988). “Speaking with names”: Language and landscape among the Western Apache. Cultural Anthropology 3 (2): 99–130. Bauman, R. (1983). Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among SeventeenthCentury Quakers. Cambridge University Press. Besnier, N. (2009). Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics. University of Hawaii Press. Bonilla, Y. and Rosa, J. (2015). # Ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42 (1): 4–17. Brandt, E. (1980). On secrecy and control of knowledge. In: Secrecy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (ed. S. Tefft), 123–146. Human Science Press. Brenneis, D. (1984). Grog and gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and substance in Fiji Indian conversation. American Ethnologist 11 (3): 487–506. Carr, E.S. (2013). “Signs of the times”: Confession and the semiotic production of inner truth. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 34–51. Cody, F. (2011). Publics and politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 37–52.

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Coleman, E.G. and Golub, A. (2008). Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory 8 (3): 255–277. Coleman, G. (2013). Anonymous and the politics of leaking. In: Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society (eds. B. Brevini, A. Hintz, and P. McCurdy), 209–228. Palgrave Macmillan. Coleman, G. (2017). Gopher, translator, and the ethnographer and the media. In: If Truth Be Told: The Politics of Public Anthropology (ed. D. Fassin), 19–46. Colwell‐Chanthaphonh, C. (2011). Sketching knowledge: Quandaries in the mimetic reproduction of Pueblo ritual. American Ethnologist 38: 451–467. Deal, B.-E. et al. (2020). “I definitely did not report it when I was raped … #WeBelieveChristine #MeToo”: A content analysis of disclosures of sexual assault on twitter. Social Media + Society. Debenport, E. (2015). Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibility in Indigenous New Mexico. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Fleming, L. (2015). Taxonomy and taboo: The (meta)pragmatic sources of semantic abstraction in avoidance registers. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25 (1): 43–65. Fleming, L. and Slotta, J. (2020). Social distancing and the cultural semiotics of contact. SLA blog, http://linguisticanthropology.org/social-distancing-cultural-semiotics-contact Gal, S. (2002). A semiotics of the public/private distinction” differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13 (1): 77–95. Gal, S. (2005). Language Ideologies compared: Metaphors of public and private. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 23–37. Gal, S. and Irvine, J. (2019). Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge University Press. Gal, S. and Woolard, K. (1995). Constructing languages and publics: Authority and representation. Pragmatics 5 (2): 129–138. Gal, S. and Woolard, K. (2001). Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Routledge. Giordano, C. (2015). Lying the truth: Practices of confession and recognition. Current Anthropology 56 (12): 211–221. Gluckman, M. (1963). Gossip and scandal. Current Anthropology 4: 307–315. Gusterson, H. (1999). Secrecy, authorship and nuclear weapons scientists. Secrecy and knowledge production. Cornell University Peace Studies Program Occasional Papers 23: 57–75. Haviland, J. (1977). Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantán. University of Chicago Press. Haviland, J. (1998). “Mu’nuk Jbankil To, Mu’nuk Kajvaltik: He is not my older brother, he is not our lord”: Thirty years of gossip in a Chiapas village. Etnofoor 11 (2): 57–82. Herzfeld, M. (2009). The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces. Semiotica (175). ((January)). Hill, J. (2001). Mock Spanish, covert racism, and the (leaky) boundary between public and private spheres. In: Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (eds. S. Hal and K. Woolard), 83–102. Routledge. Hill, J.H. (2002). “Expert rhetorics” in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12(2): 119–133. Irvine, J. and Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Kroskrity, P. (ed.) pp. 35–84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Jones, G. (2011a). Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft. University of California Press. Jones, GM., Schieffelin B.B., and Smith, R.E. (2011b). When friends who talk together stalk together: Online gossip as metacommunication. Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media. : 26–47. Jones, G. (2014). Secrecy. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 53–69. Kirsch, T. (2015). Secrecy and the epistemophilic other. In: Dilley, R. and Kirsch, T.G. (eds). Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-knowledge 188–208. New York: Berghahn. La Mattina, N. (2022, in press). Secret language as “a weapon of defence”: the problem of opacity in Italian colonial Libya. Signs and Society 10 (2): xxx–xxx. Lepselter, S. (2016). The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan Press.

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Luhrmann, T.M. (1989). The magic of secrecy. Ethos 17: 131–165. Mahmud, L. (2014). The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters: Gender, Secrecy, and Fraternity in Italian Masonic Lodges. University of Chicago Press. Manderson, L. et al. (2015). On secrecy, disclosure, the public, and the private in anthropology: An introduction to supplement 12. Cultural Anthropology 56: S183–S190. Masco, J. (2010). “Sensitive but unclassified”: Secrecy and the counterterrorist state. Public Culture 22 (3): 433–463. McIntosh, J. (2021). Alt-signaling: Fascistic communication and the power of subterranean style. Fieldsites: Society for Cultural Anthropology. Mitchell, A. (2018). Allusive references and other‐oriented stance in an affinal avoidance register. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28 (1): 4–21. Muehlebach, A. (2013). On precariousness and the ethical imagination: The year 2012 in sociocultural anthropology. American Anthropologist 115 (2): 297–311. Newell, S. (2013). Brands as masks: Public secrecy and the counterfeit in Côte d’Ivoire. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (1): 138–154. Nozawa, S. (2012). The gross face and virtual fame: Semiotic mediation in Japanese virtual communication. First Monday 17 (3). doi:10.5210/fm.v17i3.3535. Parsons, E.C. (1962). Isleta Paintings. Smithsonian Institution. Paz, A. (2009). The circulation of chisme and rumor: Gossip, evidentiality, and authority in the perspective of Latino labor migrants in Israel. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1): 117–143. Perley, B.C. (2011). Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada. University of Nebraska Press. Pfeil, G. (2012). Sarax and the city: Almsgiving and anonymous objects in Dakar, Senegal. In: The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach (eds. C. High, A. Kelly, and J. Mair), 33–54. Palgrave Macmillan. Piot, C. (1993). Secrecy, ambiguity, and the everyday in Kabre culture. American Anthropologist 95: 353–370. Plummer, K. (2003). Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues. University of Washington Press. Russell, K. (2020) “Social distancing” is more than standing 6 feet away. Medical Anthropology Quarterly Rapid Response Blog Series. https://medanthroquarterly.org/rapid-response/2020/04/ social-distancing-is-more-than-standing-6-feet-away (accessed 16 May 2021). Simmel, G. (1906). The sociology of secrecy and of secret societies. American Journal of Sociology 11: 441–498. Siragusa, L. (2017). Secrecy and sustainability: How concealment and revelation shape vepsian language revival. Anthropologica 59 (1): 74–88. Stewart, P. and Strathern, A. (2004). Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip. Cambridge University Press. Taussig, M. (1999). Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press.

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508  erin debenport

28

Legal Language and Its Ideologies

Robin Conley Riner

Language and Law In anthropology, there is no single, universal definition of law. It is in fact a job of legal anthropologists to identify the varieties of law and law-like processes that exist in diverse cultural contexts across time and space. But there are some things we can say about what qualifies a cultural practice as law, or as law-like. Many legal anthropologists, especially those writing before and up to the middle of the twentieth century, defined law as a system of rules or obligations—either explicit or unspoken—with built-in consequences for when those rules are broken (e.g., Hoebel 1954; Malinowski 1985[1926]). Starting in the late twentieth century, legal anthropologists began to expand their conception of what constitutes law well beyond an established system of rules. Legal anthropologist Sally Merry, for instance, defines law as a “system of thought” that makes certain categorizations and relations seem natural and taken for granted (1988, p. 889).1 This latter conception of law is not so different from ways in which language has been described by linguistic anthropologists. Language is, in this view, “a mode of thinking” and a “cultural practice … that both presupposes and at the same time brings about ways of being in the world” (Duranti 1997, p. 1). Law and language alike are recognized as able to shape how we understand and act in the world. The relationship between law and language extends beyond this parallelism. Law and language scholars from a variety of fields have recognized that law is primarily a linguistic phenomenon and have brought language to the center of their definitions of law.2 The everyday activities that constitute law—mediating a dispute, undergoing a traffic stop, 1

 Legal anthropology since the 1980s has often been more concerned with locating legal processes within historical and social contexts, rather than attempting to define what law is (Merry 1988).

2

 Some of the foundational work that posits law as primarily a linguistic phenomenon includes Conley et al. (2019); Conley and O’Barr (1990); and Mertz (2007, 1994).

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

applying for a license, drawing up a contract—are in fact communicative events (Conley et al. 2019, p. 6). Thus “[i]n a practical, everyday way, law is language” (ibid). Linguist Peter Tiersma similarly avers that “law—virtually by definition—comes into being through language” (1999, p. 1). Research on language and law developed historically from a variety of independent academic disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and legal studies, and it continues to lack the cohesion of a single discipline.3 In the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship in both sociolinguistics and law and society (the latter deriving from sociology) began to focus on language as a primary medium of legal processes. A significant body of law and language research has included scholars who apply conversation or discourse analysis methods to the study of legal interactions (Atkinson and Drew 1979). These works, which have investigated (largely in the US and UK) legal processes including small claims court proceedings (Conley and O’Barr 1990), rape trials (Ehrlich 2001; Matoesian 2001), and plea bargaining (Philips 1998), reveal how the microdetails of talk-in-interaction serve to create, reinforce, and/or transform law as a social practice, which includes legal concepts, rules, and categories of persons. For example, linguist Susan Ehrlich’s book Representing Rape (2001) uses conversation analysis to investigate a university tribunal and criminal trial of a male student accused of sexual assault. Her analysis reveals how the talk of these trials not only revictimizes the rape victims, but also “define[s] and delimit[s] the meanings that came to be attached to the events and subjects under scrutiny” (ibid, p. 1). Through the unfolding of these trials, she argues, the victims’ “understandings of the events were rendered unrecognizable or imperceptible” (ibid). Additional, promising advancements in the application of interactional and conversation analysis to legal settings have included incorporating multimodal features, such as gesture and prosody, into analyses of the construction of legal meaning through face-to-face interaction (e.g., Deeb 2013; Goodwin 1994; Matoesian and Kristin 2018). Research in linguistic anthropology, specifically, has incorporated ethnography with discourse analytic methods to explore the relationship between the micro-details of legal talk and the power structures that shape and are constructed through legal and political institutions. This includes, for example, Justin Richland’s (2021, 2008) work on the role of language in Hopi Tribal Court proceedings and in Native American tribes’ negotiations with the US government, Susan Hirsch’s (1998) investigation of gender and language in Kenyan Islamic courts, and my research on the language of US death penalty trials (Conley 2016). Legal anthropologists, as mentioned above, have expanded the notion of law beyond its traditional conception as formal adversarial or legislative processes. Along these lines, linguistic anthropologists have made a significant contribution to understanding the linguistic construction of power in political and other institutional contexts that often borrow from or are tangential to law as it is traditionally conceived. Alessandro Duranti (1994), for instance, analyzes the grammatical constructions of political oratory in Samoa. He demonstrates how political negotiation is in fact a “linguistic problem,” being essentially about how to tell or not to tell a story (ibid, p. 3). Through his ethnographic research in Chiapas, Mexico, John Haviland (2010) explores family disputes as sites of the enactment of sociopolitical power. More recently, as will be discussed in the conclusion, linguistic anthropologists have turned their attention to the role of language in distributions of power and the criminalization of differential types of persons within and across national boundaries. 3

  For a thorough discussion of the history of language and law research, see Conley et al. (2019).

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510  robin conley riner

In essence, the contribution of much linguistic anthropological work on law has been to highlight the role of language in the workings of law’s power, how the latter is “realized, exercised, abused, or challenged” (Conley et al. 2019, p. 2). Language is in fact more than simply the vehicle of law’s power; “language is legal power” (ibid, p. 16). Language’s “pragmatic, meaning-making” capacity, its ability to both reflect and constitute the social world, is the foundation of law’s “macrosociological force” (Richland 2013, p. 213). This chapter explores this proposition through a focus on legal language ideologies, or ideas about legal language and how it operates. Legal language ideologies are integral to the worldview-making capacity of law, as they mediate how law-in-practice shapes the world and our ideas about it, and how specific legal processes are constituted by ideas about how legal language works. This chapter thus takes the perspective that law is “not only made up of language, but [also of] ideas about what language is, how it functions, and how it relates to the world of experience” (Andrus 2015, p. 3). This rest of this chapter explores linguistic anthropological and related scholarship on language and law that centers on the nexus between legal language ideologies and legal power. More specifically, the chapter describes a language ideology that is prevalent in US law, illustrating its properties through studies of diverse legal contexts including law school classrooms, contract law, domestic violence hearings, and (im)migration policies. A discussion of the linguistic practices through which this ideology is produced and maintained demonstrates that language ideologies central to US legal practice serve to constitute and reinforce law’s power, as well as the inequities that undergird it.

Language Ideologies and Legal Power Language ideologies are rationalizations about language and how it works in relation to specific cultural contexts and experiences (Kroskrity 2004, p. 496). In this chapter, I conceptualize ideologies, whether of language or law (or both), as inherent to practice, rather than as ideal abstractions that are separable from practice (Brenneis 1988, p. 230; Silverstein 1985). Language ideologies include ideas that speakers can articulate about language, as well as often unarticulated stances toward and norms about language that are embodied in interactions (Kroskrity 2004, p. 496). These ideas about language and how people (should) use it often affect actual language structure and use. Language ideologies are thus “bridges between the sociocultural experiences of speakers and ways in which they actually speak” (Conley et al. 2019, p. 128). For example, if you are brought into a court of law to serve as a witness and are questioned by an attorney, you may conform the way you talk to a style that you think of as appropriate for such a setting. You might, for instance, downplay your regional accent. Or you might use features of “Standard English” that you do not normally use in everyday conversations, such as lexical choices that avoid slang words or grammatical constructions that are not contracted, such as going to instead of gonna. Many of these linguistic shifts are not consciously done by speakers. Nonetheless, style-shifting in a legal context (or any context, for that matter) is always informed by language ideologies. We have culturally-informed ideas about who typically has power in legal settings, and we have associated ideas about how these people talk and how people should talk to and around them. These ideas are based on historical, systemic inequities that, at least in the US, typically equate status and power—especially in institutional settings—with whiteness, masculinity, and high socioeconomic status, thus devaluing and often condemning the styles of speaking associated with disenfranchised and underrepresented groups of people. Though one personally may not be

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legal language and its ideologies  511

able to articulate exactly which linguistic features are associated with these styles, ideas about people’s speech patterns will permeate one’s linguistic choices while you sit on the witness stand. As with all language ideologies, those specific to legal contexts are thus linked to and derived from culturally-specific ideologies about race, gender, authority, and other ideas about the social world and how it works. For instance, in the George Zimmerman murder trial,4 reactions to the highly publicized testimony of Rachel Jeantel, the African American close friend of the victim, Treyvon Martin, revealed the inseparability of people’s racialized ideas—both from the jury room and media platforms—about Jeantel’s appearance, ways of speaking, intelligence, and moral standing. All of this informed judgments about her credibility as a witness and arguably played a significant role in the jury’s not guilty verdict (Rickford and King 2016). The interwoven nature of these ideas means that an idea that is purportedly about language—that Jeantel was “hard to understand,” as one juror described—can elide the racialized ideologies about intelligence and credibility that inform such a statement. By identifying and detailing the multiple, sometimes conflicting, hierarchically organized language ideologies that co-exist in any legal process, we can start to understand the inequities and power relations that undergird any legal system, and also why certain people’s experiences are downplayed or ignored within legal processes. Duranti argues that specific research agendas in language and communication scholarship stem from each discipline’s own ontologies of language, or their assumptions about the “essential qualities of language” (2011, p. 30); in other words, “what language is and what language is good for” (Haviland 2003, p. 764). For example, a common assumption about language is that its main function is to describe experience. Another one is that it is a way of doing things. A third one is that “languages” are bounded entities that can be named and are easily distinguished from other “languages” (see Chapter 5, Hauck and Mitsuhara). It turns out that people who practice law (both professional and lay people) have their own ideas about the essential properties of language, and these are central to making law what it is. Focusing on these ontologies of language allows us to see the worldview-making capacity of law as described by Merry above—its ability to establish and reinforce naturalized understandings of how the world works. This capacity of legal language to “make and remak[e] the world” (Richland 2013, p. 214), moreover, extends well beyond formal legal settings, such as the courtroom, to realms often shaped by, or alongside, law, including finance, regulatory governance, science, and technology (ibid). The linguistic anthropological studies described below will illustrate a commonly-held ontology of language in US legal practice, defined in the next section. These studies reveal the effects people’s adherence to this ideology have on their language use and on legal outcomes, as well as the ideology’s role in perpetuating inequities in the US legal system.

A Dominant Language Ideology of US Law The centrality of language ideologies to the constitution and reproduction of legal power can be demonstrated by examining a language ideology that permeates many levels of legal practice in the US, from the writing of contracts to courtroom interaction. I will refer to it as the legal language as autonomous entity ideology. It has three primary features: (1) Legal 4

  In 2012, George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder for the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges. Jeantel was Martin’s friend, whom he spoke with on the phone during the altercation with Zimmerman, and she served as a witness for the prosecution.

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512  robin conley riner

language (and law more generally) is a bound system that exists (and must exist) on its own, separate from other varieties of language (Mertz 2022). (2) The meanings of legal lan­ guage expressions are thought to be consistent and acontextual. While legal concepts and rules must be applicable across changing collections of facts, the idea is that a single legal word can and should have a consistent, single meaning across these varying contextual contingencies. (3) Being insular and distinct from other varieties of language, legal language requires experts to act as translators, or gatekeepers, to laws’ meanings for the rest of the population. This language ideology is key to how US law defines itself and sets itself apart from other cultural institutions. In their discussion of the ideological processes by which languages are defined and delimited, Judith Irvine and Susan Gal assert that identifying a language “presuppose[s] a boundary or opposition to other languages with which it contrasts” (2009, p. 402). Languages are delimited according to definitions of language varieties and ideas about how these varieties map onto specific people, events, and activities (ibid). Through the belief that legal language is purportedly autonomous and its meanings are context-independent, law becomes understood as a unique, semi-autonomous cultural institution. Thus in US law, the belief in law as an autonomous institution—and, relatedly, in legal language as a variety that can operate separately from “everyday” language—asserts that law, in its purported neutrality, somehow transcends cultural inequalities and idiosyncrasies (see Chapter 32, Briggs). For example, Conley et al. (2019, pp. 52–54) describe the intersections between “macro” and “micro” discourses of divorce mediation. Norms about divorce meditation (the “macro” discourses) mirror those of law in general; mediation is purported to be a “rational” process, one that can transcend the emotional turmoil that divorce often entails. Professional meditators enforce such norms through their control over the talk of the mediation sessions. They, for example, will often disallow discussion of the parties’ past behavior, as well as dismiss women’s expressions of anger (Grillo 1991). While these discursive sanctions are meted out in supposed support of maintaining the rationality (and gender neutrality) of legal proceedings, they can have the effect of disempowering women and reinforcing gender bias in the law (ibid.). Work such as this demonstrates that language— legal language included—is not a “neutral medium” for describing the world; rather, it is “populated,” as Bakhtin (1981, p. 294) wrote, with the interests and intentions of its previous users. Revealing dominant language ideologies operational in any legal system can help reveal the positioned and interested nature of law’s norms and practices. Additionally, the assumption that legal language is a bound system, existing apart from other language varieties and requiring experts to understand it, is based on and reinforces the notion that there are types of people that are distinct from other types of people, some of whom are naturally privy to certain uses of language and some of whom are not. As argued by Haviland, the US legal system operates and establishes its authority through “ideological principles about what counts as ‘language’ in the first place, how linguistic varieties are conceived to be interrelated, and who is entitled or obligated to use what varieties in what circumstances” (2003, p. 765). The legal language as autonomous entity ideology, therefore, is also predicated on the assumption that one language variety (standardized English) in part affords law its neutrality, and that everyone has equal access to attaining this linguistic variety (ibid). This ultimately hinders a socially just application of law, as it disregards the historical and socio-cultural inequities of the application of law in the US, including its differential application to people of color, its bias towards those who are proficient in certain languages and language varieties, and its hindrance to those who may not have access to the professional gatekeepers that others do.

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legal language and its ideologies  513

The following sections explicate the three properties of the legal language as autonomous entity ideology, providing examples from linguistic anthropological scholarship that detail specific linguistic practices by which this ideology is instantiated and reflected on, and the effects it has on people’s experiences with the legal system. The discussion will also focus on what this dominant way of thinking about language in the law elides, and the consequences of that elision. I should clarify that I am not claiming that everyone views legal language or US law according to the ideology outlined here.5 Instead, the examples given below illustrate that this language ideology is a prevalent way of thinking about how language works in US law, one that is demonstrated in the words and actions of legal professionals, as well as lay people engaged in legal processes. Since language ideologies are always multiple and often conflicting within any social context (Kroskrity 2004), it is possible for multiple legal ideologies to coincide and clash with each other, as well as with other cultural ideologies and discourses, even within a single legal proceeding (e.g., Hirsch 1998; Merry 1990).

Feature 1: Legal Language as an Autonomous Linguistic System

The first feature of the legal language as autonomous entity ideology conceptualizes legal language as distinct, bounded, and self-referential, operating without interference from other language varieties. This ideology entails the notion that legal language, in its distinctness, provides the legal system with a neutral medium for communication, one that is not subject to the influences of individual persons’ circumstances or interests or to the contexts in which it is used. Bernard Weissbourd and Elizabeth Mertz argue that this legal ideology is central to the view of law as “abstract and ascertainable apart from context” (1985, p. 271). In this way, it is derivative of Enlightenment ideologies about rationality, according to which certain discourses (such as those of science and law) can promote objective thinking and action that is unbiased and universally applicable (Bauman and Briggs 2003; see Chapter 32, Briggs). The idea of law as a self-contained, bounded linguistic system is in part fostered by the reliance on precedent in US common law; each use of a legal concept derives its meaning and impact from some previous use of it within the same system (Mertz 2007, p. 58). The meanings of legal concepts thus build and take shape through their iterative use across legal practices, which reinforces law’s insularity. The context of meaning for legal language is understood to be the semantic system of legal precedent, rather than the contingencies of actual interactions that constitute legal proceedings. This latter type of contextually dependent meaning is usually called “pragmatic” or “indexical” by linguists and linguistic anthropologists, who, along with other language and law scholars, focus on uncovering the interactional contexts that construct the meanings and effects of legal language, thereby challenging the legal language ideology I have been describing. In the following example, the belief in legal language as distinct from other language varieties is illuminated in a discussion of how attorneys write contracts. The following example is taken from interviews with lawyers and judges, on the basis of which I examine legal professionals’ ideas about language and their conceptions of how language operates in their profession. Excerpts 1 and 2 are drawn from an interview I conducted with a US corporate attorney. In Excerpt 1, this attorney discusses the importance of precision in writing legal contracts. His notion of precision relies on the idea that meanings of legal words (if

5

  Counter to the ideology I describe, legal realists, for instance, propose that context is central to shaping legal meaning and legal systems (Weissbourd and Mertz 1985).

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514  robin conley riner

the correct word is chosen) are unique and immune to ambiguities, thus constituting law as a self-contained referential system. Excerpt 1 (bold font added for emphasis) Corporate attorney: It’s really important that the wording is precise. One of the things you work real hard to do is get some precision in the understanding so you don’t have ambiguities and problems … because I write so much and draft so much, a big focus for me is always the precision of the language. And I work I think maybe harder than most people because I’ve seen how things can go wrong. I really push to get the language as precise as I can. That means in a lot of cases that it’s long. You have to detail out exceptions and qualifications on what’s said to be precise. And you have to work very hard, work very hard to make the language, particularly in a big contract, consistent. You don’t want to say, say a concept in x words here and then say that, try to say the same thing in y words there. I spend a lot of time, a LOT of time, doing what you would call wordsmithing.

In his reflections on the importance of precision in drafting contracts, this attorney reveals his view of contracts as objects that have agency, being made up of language that can do things (cf. Austin 1962). The precision of the language is important because in this view, ideal contract language is constituted as a system of unique words with specific meanings that, once fixed in the document, can achieve certain ends, regardless of who is reading it and in what context. This perspective is further highlighted later in this same interview: Excerpt 2 Corporate attorney: I’m trying to think of an example where I wrote something so plainly, you know just slam somebody in the face, that they realized what, you know, the deal was … there are situations where I will just list out, you will not do this. X, Y, Z. And everybody understood it, but when they see it written down, you know you will never do this.

Here, the attorney expresses his view of the power of a written contract to solidify a “deal” and affect people’s future choices and behaviors. This view of contract language is based in the belief, common to US law, that written language attains an “autonomy” or “rationality” that spoken language does not (Mertz 2007, p. 23). Central to the notion of legal language as an autonomous system, this ideology “views written texts as self-contained, as carrying determinate meaning that inheres in the written words themselves” (ibid, p. 46). US law schools reinforce the idea that the law operates as a distinct linguistic system, as a “key function” of law schools is to train lawyers to this “common language” (Mertz 2007, p. 5). Mertz’ ethnography of US law schools demonstrates how their training methods socialize students to turn their attention away from social context, bolstering the notion of legal language as “apparently neutral in form” (ibid). This perspective on language, Mertz argues, “appears to ensure the same treatment for everyone,” obscuring the social inequities that US law in fact perpetuates (ibid). And while law purports to operate as a system of universal concepts, abstracted from social reality, the meanings and effects of legal language are in fact (just like those of any cultural institution and any language) deeply embedded in the cultural contexts in which legal language is constructed and used. In the case of US law, the focus on purportedly universal concepts conceals the “social roots of legal doctrines, avoiding examination of the ways that abstract categories, as they develop, privilege some aspects of conflicts and events over others” (Mertz 2007, p. 5). For example, the “reasonable man” standard is a legal concept that purports to be universal, but it in fact conceals issues of what kinds of experiences count as “reasonable” and to whom

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legal language and its ideologies  515

(ibid, p. 14). As legal scholars Dolores Donovan and Stephanie Wildman argue, in an effort to “emphasize the objective nature of the [reasonable man] standard,” courts “have resisted identifying the reasonable man with any special characteristics of race or class” (1981, p. 436). However, they continue, the “mythical reasonable man has always been identified with the male sex” and renders women and members of other marginalized groups invisible within the legal system (ibid). “Stand your ground” laws, for example, the first of which was passed in Florida in 2005, justify the use of deadly force in situations of self-defense based on a “reasonable” belief that lethal force was necessary to save oneself from death or serious injury (Ward 2015). Recent research on the application of these laws reveals that the reasonable person standard in these cases often relies on racist beliefs, considered typical for the “average” person, that the use of self-defensive force is more reasonable when the victim is a person of color (Berenguer 2017, p. 704). The existence of these laws thus codifies, “condones and perpetuates bias” (ibid, p. 744), despite their reliance on a purportedly universal legal category.

Feature 2: Legal Meaning as “Fixed” and Acontextual

The belief that legal language is an autonomous entity relies, as explained above, on the notion that the meanings of legal words and acts do not derive from their contexts of use. This requires a process through which everyday events can be translated into terms that refer to the law’s own distinct world of meaning. There is a widespread recognition among language and law scholars (and others) that law serves as a process of transformation (Felstiner et al. 1980/81). Regardless of the cultural context, legal processes tend to take the actual experiences and events of people’s lives and transform them so they fit into specific institutional categories, usually with the goal of resolving or at least mitigating conflict. This process of transformation has been described variously as translation (Mertz 1994; Mertz et al. 2016), reduction (Richland 2013, p. 220), and abstraction (Mertz 2007). Regardless of the analytic terminology used, each of these conceptualizations positions language as central to the acts of transformation that constitute law. “Law is,” Mertz argues, “the locus of a powerful act of linguistic appropriation, where the translation of everyday categories into legal language effects powerful changes” (1994, p. 441). In their influential article, William Felstiner, Richard Abel, and Austin Sarat identify the first, and perhaps most critical, stage of transformation in any legal dispute as “naming” (1980/81, p. 635). In this stage, people come to perceive an individual experience as one that coincides with a legal category. Through the process of naming, one’s experience (such as having trouble breathing) is identified as injurious and labeled (as asbestosis). This act of naming then enables claims to legal action (based on knowledge that asbestosis is caused by certain working conditions and neglect by an employer). By classifying an experience according to a specific legal category, one’s perception of events in their own life is altered (such as their understanding of their own illness). This process of naming purports that legal language is “able to explicitly fix meaning, a process that creates an erasure under which the interactional flexibility of language is hidden from scrutiny” (Andrus 2015, p. 2). The attorney’s notion of “wordsmithing” in Excerpt 1 above, for example, assumes that one can identify the “correct” word to convey a certain meaning in drafting a contract, and once that word is identified, the meaning is thought to be fixed, unambiguous, and consistent. This belief in “fixed” meaning is also evident in the so-called “textualist theory” of legal interpretation. Textualists (at least strict ones) locate meaning in legal texts that is

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decoupled from the texts’ contexts of writing and interpretation. US Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a famous textualist, wrote that “the text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed” (1997, p. 2). Excerpt 3, also drawn from my current project on legal professionals’ understandings of language, comes from an interview I conducted with an appellate judge in the southeast United States. In this excerpt, he discusses his service on a state Supreme Court case, one in which the majority of other justices adopted a textualist approach in their opinion, on which he dissented. The case involved whether a statute regarding “artificial insemination” could be applied to a dispute concerning in vitro fertilization, arguably a qualitatively equivalent process. Excerpt 3 (bold font added for emphasis) …when I was called up to sit with the Supreme Court. And uh, we had a, we…what we had was a statute that was written after artificial insemination was invented but many years before in vitro fertilization was invented. That provided for the automatic legitimation of a child so conceived. And the statute used the expression, rather than in vitro fertilization and the majority, which is, our Supreme Court is wholly dominated by textualists. They held that no, it doesn’t say in vitro so it doesn’t mean in vitro. And in the course of thinking that through and writing a rather impassioned dissent it was a bit of a broadside on textualism as meta-law. I started thinking about well, this whole idea … really is, well I said linguistically naïve, reflects I think a mistaken idea about how language works.

The textualist interpretation of statutory language holds that, once a law is written, the meanings of the words written in the law do not change, regardless of historical, social, or contextual contingencies. In vitro, from this perspective, “means in vitro,” and cannot be interpreted to mean anything else. This view of language focuses on the referential meaning of the word, decoupling its meaning from shifts in meaning that occur over time and through changing contexts of use. In the above excerpt, the judge expresses his belief that such a stance is an erroneous way to interpret the law and does not capture how legal language in fact works (and should work). Through the process of semantic “fixing,” the law is distinguished by what it is not—what meanings are not intended—and through this it delineates who and what are not part of law (Richland 2013, p. 220). Transforming events, actions, and people into legal categories that hold purportedly fixed referential meaning can thus serve as a mechanism of control over lay people who are engaged in legal processes. Jennifer Andrus (2015) provides an example of this in her analysis of the language used in US domestic violence hearings. She argues that using the term “victim” exclusively to refer to someone who has been abused by a domestic partner is an act of appropriation, whereby the words, subjectivity, and positioning of the complainant are bound and delimited when this word is applied (ibid, p. 6). The application of the word victim in a legal context, she argues, attempts to contain and specify the nature of the complainant’s experience, who that person is, and what their relationship to the law is. This ultimately serves as a process of control. “Positioning women narrating events of domestic abuse as victims allows the law to appropriate those narratives when it sees fit” (Andrus 2015, p. 6) by translating complainants’ experiences into legal categories. In her work on immigration discourses in “Small-Town USA,” Hilary Parsons Dick (2011) sees in the circulation of racializing immigrant discourses a process akin to the semantic fixing described here. “Performative nomination” is defined by Michael Silverstein (2005, p. 11), as the “baptizing of categories of person that … take broadly circulating, informal us/them dichotomies and transform them into highly entextualized, codified labels that carry the backing of the state” (Dick 2011, p. 37). Just as the

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legal language and its ideologies  517

application of the term “victim” to a domestic abuse survivor appropriates the experiences of those facing domestic violence, eliding elements of their experiences in lieu of others, the application of terms such as “illegal” to certain groups of migrants uses the force of legal discourse to conflate and erase the experiences of many diverse individuals, forcing onto them the indexical meanings associated with such a term. Scholarship such as Andrus’ and Dick’s uncovers the active construction of legal or quasilegal terms and highlights the slipperiness and contradictions inherent in their uses and meanings, as well as the erasure of experiences that occurs through the application of these terms. The process of legal transformation described here accounts in part for law’s worldviewmaking capacity, discussed at the start of the chapter. By translating a woman’s identity and experience into the category “victim,” or a migrant’s into “illegal,” law (through language) has “the capacity to impose and affirm culturally powerful definitions of social reality” (Ehrlich 2001, p. 18). Law’s power, moreover, derives in part from its elision of the worldview-making that it accomplishes. US law relies predominantly on the idea that language works for the most part through “presupposing indexicality” (Silverstein 1979), which assumes the existence of objects, concepts, or relationships outside of contexts of language use and privileges the type of meaning that is language-independent. This assumes that legal language always refers to a world already out there, rather than serving to constitute that world (Weissbourd and Mertz 1985, pp. 267–268). According to this view of legal language, law can “capture” a truth that is out there, ready to be represented in language. In fact, however, law molds any “facts” into its own, narrow sieve of available interpretations. Brenda Danet (1980) provides a potent example of law’s linguistic construction of reality in her discussion of the various terms used to refer to an unborn child in an abortion manslaughter case. In 1975, a doctor was convicted of manslaughter after having provided a late-term abortion for a patient. By tracking differing forms of reference to the fetus throughout the trial, Danet reveals the construction of reality through the use of language: “a good deal of the trial,” she writes, was concerned with negotiation over whether the object of the abortion had ever been a “person,” a “male child,” a “baby boy” (ibid, p. 187). In this sense, she argues, “‘life’ and ‘death’ are not discrete, dichotomous categories” (ibid), but instead are semantic labels for shifting, malleable constructions that are given meaning upon their use in specific contexts. As research such as Danet’s demonstrates, privileging the presupposing indexical and referential meanings of legal language ignores the multiple, contextually-dependent meanings generated through the use of any sign. It also conceals the creative side of indexical meanings (Silverstein 1979) (like the establishment of an addressee through use of the word “you”) that legal language-in-use constructs, thus obscuring a central mechanism of law’s power. In short, law does not simply name things; it constitutes them. The dominant view of legal language as simply “fixing” the meaning of a word, however, elides this process of linguistic-cultural construction, thereby erasing the cultural, indexical meanings of signs and reinforcing the insularity of law discussed above. The obscurity and impenetrability of US legal language is well-recognized. This impenetrability is in fact strategic—by (purportedly) creating a semantic world to which only legal language refers, the law attempts to control the ways in which events and experiences are classified in order to be dealt with.

Feature 3: Gatekeepers

Conceptualizing law as an autonomous, self-referential system requires professionals who can facilitate the process of translation of everyday events into legal categories, and of legal categories into terms that a non-professional can understand. This is difficult to achieve because language ideologies held by legal professionals do not often correspond with those

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held by witnesses, victims, or other non-professionals who call on the law in situations of trouble. This can cause conflict when these groups meet and use language in disparate ways within legal processes. Lay people who need to “navigate legal contexts” are often at an “ideological and semantic disadvantage” (Andrus 2015, p. 53). Experts are often called upon to try to resolve such conflict, essentially translating legal language into “everyday language”6 and back again. Such a process, while it ostensibly (and sometimes practically) helps lay people attempting to use the legal system, also reinforces the insider/outsider distinction that maintains law as an autonomous institution and contributes to its aura of impenetrability. While this issue manifests in explicit practices of translation from one language to another (see Haviland 2010), translation from “everyday” to “legal” language can be a subtler process with similar and often deleterious effects. A stark example can be drawn from the examinations of complainants in rape trials, the language of which has been said to contribute to their revictimization (Ehrlich 2001; Matoesian 1995). When examining witnesses, attorneys hold discursive control over the interaction, given that witnesses’ talk must be responsive to attorneys’ questions. In rape trials, this can reinforce the gender power imbalance that leads women to overwhelmingly be victims of rape in the first place. As an example of this phenomenon, Ehrlich describes ways in which attorneys’ questions perform “selective reformulation” of rape victims’ answers (ibid, p. 74; Heritage 1985), which allows attorneys to “commit witnesses to descriptions that may be incompatible with previous versions of events” (Ehrlich 2001, p. 74). This process can be seen as a form of “translation” of a victim’s account into a version compatible with the attorney’s story of the case. Excerpt 4, drawn from the cross-examination of the victim in a criminal trial, illustrates this phenomenon: Excerpt 4 Q: You had what I would call a subjective fear of this man. In other words, you were genuinely scared of him, right? A: Yes. Q: But he didn’t do anything overt to cause you to be fearful? By overt I mean, he didn’t do anything outward to make you afraid, never threatened you? A: He never uttered any threats. Q: No. Never punched you or mistreated you physically in any way? A: No.        (Ehrlich 2001, pp. 74–75)

Through this exchange, the attorney reformulates the victim’s fear, first characterizing it as subjective and eventually invalidating it based on a conception of fear reserved for a response to physical threats (ibid.). Illustrated here, attorneys qua legal gatekeepers can “define the meaning, the terms and the upshots of a particular set of answers” (Hutchby and Woffitt 1998, p. 166). Translating an individual’s experience into a legal category through a third-party professional often results in silencing the voice of the person whose experience is being translated, especially in cases in which an already disenfranchised person comes into contact with the law. In her work on the discourse structures of domestic violence hearings, Shonna Trinch (2003) describes processes whereby women’s complaints of domestic violence are transformed/translated into legal evidence: The interview [between complainant and attorney] will result in a written account of intimatepartner violence, formalized as public property. Once the story is inscribed in the legal

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  I put “everyday language” in quotes here because it is part of this ideology to contend that “everyday language” is itself a distinct, separable language variety.

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legal language and its ideologies  519

document, these women continue to lose control over their stories, as they can no longer tell it their way, and they can no longer decide what can be done with it. (Trinch 2003, p. 188)

Such processes of translation “deauthoriz[e] the speaker of the story about a violent act against her” (Andrus 2015, p. 4). Conceiving of legal language as an autonomous entity and requiring experts to act as gatekeepers to its insular world of meaning serves as a bastion of law’s power. Not only does law purport to control meaning, but the process of legal translation takes away control from legal outsiders in understanding and navigating their own experiences. As shown in the examples above, translating women’s experiences with violence into legal evidence relies on a language ideology “in which women’s explanations of their own experiences are measured against the ‘real,’ as the law defines it” (Andrus 2015, p. 5). Thus, legal gatekeeping entails protecting the law’s own world of meaning, along with the belief that such meaning corresponds with and has the authority over “reality.”

Linguistic Anthropology of Law into the Future The legal language as autonomous entity ideology assumes that the only work to be done to ascertain meaning is decoding the details of the language system used—the words, grammar, sentence structure, etc.—and that it is within these details alone where meaning resides. This perspective is antithetical to linguistic anthropologists’ ontological commitment to language as a form of social action and a means of differentiation that is never neutral (Duranti 2011, p. 30). Language is, in this view, a form of social action carried out by specific people with specific interests. What is at stake when a domestic violence experiencer is referred to as a “victim,” therefore, is not simply what the word victim refers to, nor even the possible indexical meanings of such a term (e.g., it assumes a passive role in the experience (see Spry 1995)). Also crucial is what the act of applying such a label does to the woman’s life, experience, and understanding of her experience. The fact that the label is applied by legal professionals in a legal setting bestows the label and the consequences of its use with an added level of authority. The work of linguistic anthropologists, such as the examples outlined above, reveal that meaning is always necessarily related to context of use and to ideologies about how, by whom, and among which audiences language is used. It is this lesson on which linguistic anthropologists who interrogate legal language focus their attention. They strive to reveal, through close analysis of legal-language-in-use, how legal meanings are constructed through the interaction among particular actors and particular legal texts in particular contexts. It is telling that, once exposed to linguistics research, the judge quoted in Excerpt 3 rejected the ideology of legal language commonly held by legal professionals—textualists, specifically—and espoused a view of language more in tune with the linguistic anthropological perspective. As he explains, “textualism is linguistically naïve in assuming that … text is the thing in itself, and that the human being who’s trying to put an idea down on paper … is just wholly irrelevant.” This is in fact what many linguistic anthropologists working in the field of language and law are attempting to show—that law is a messy, constantly changing, politically charged, human endeavor. It is not built through a pristine linguistic system that can be held apart from everyday life, but it is one that is constructed within such life.7 A belief in the insularity and objectivity of law, however, obscures this fact and leaves us blind to the ways in which law intersects with our lives, shaping the ways we act and think. 7

  While not necessarily language-focused, scholarship by legal realists (see Tamanaha 2008 for a review of legal realism) is also devoted to uncovering the ways in which law is shaped by its everyday practices and the humans engaged in such practices.

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Research on language and law has increasingly been focused on interrogating legal power by investigating how dominant legal ideologies are co-constructed alongside cultural ideologies of patriarchy, racism, and other planes of oppression. These ideologies play a role in the establishment and maintenance of law’s power, and law—especially given its purported objectivity and thus its role as an arbiter of “truth”—aids in the reproduction and authority of these ideologies. Gregory Matoesian, for instance, in his analysis of language in rape trials, argues that law is not a “gender-neutral and free-floating institution but … a socially structured and gendered component of patriarchal domination” (Matoesian 1993, p. 15). Matoesian, along with Ehrlich and others, contends that the discursive devices used when plaintiffs are cross-examined in rape trials contribute to the normalization of rape afforded by a patriarchal, heteronormative order. In one cross-examination, for example, a defense attorney’s questioning presents the facts of the case in such a way as to hold the plaintiff herself responsible for the rape, ultimately reinforcing patriarchal norms about consent and gender roles in sexual activity. Excerpt 5 (bold face added for emphasis) Lawyer:  He told you he was in medical school? Witness:  Yes he did. Lawyer:  Of course, that got you more interested in him, didn’t it? Witness:  I was interested in any other outlooks he could have on my daughter’s problem… Attorney: You became more interested in him as you found out that he had this kind of background? Witness:  I became more interested in what he had to say. (Matoesian 1995, p. 686)

The attorney’s questioning here reinforces a gender-biased perspective on rape that assumes sexual conduct cannot be characterized as rape if the woman was at any point “interested” in her assaulter, the normalization of which is reinforced by discourse markers such as “of course” and the tag question format, “didn’t it?” which presupposes the truth of the proposition put forth in the question. This entrenched bias in the structure of the US legal system “ultimately leads to systematic translation of the embodied and linguistic experiences of women, people of color, queer people, people with disabilities—anybody who doesn’t neatly fit within the white male paradigm in which Anglo-American law has developed” (Andrus 2015, p. 4). The processes of legal translation discussed above are thus mediated through language structures and ideologies that privilege certain experiences and certain types of people. The common legal language ideology that language is neutral reinforces the idea that law is, too. The language ideologies described in this chapter contribute to the misconception that law (via legal language) is an objective system acting outside the contingencies of time and place. By revealing these ideologies and their effects on legal practice, linguistic anthropological scholarship on law promises to uncover how systems of discrimination are built into the very language with which law is carried out. Part of this effort has included an active body of work on language, (il)legality, and (im)migration that interrogates the semiotic processes through which racialized social and legal categories around (im)migration are constructed and circulated (e.g., Chavez 2015; Dick 2011; Rosa 2018). Crucially, such processes entail the integration of legal discourses with everyday, local discourses about personhood and identity. Dick, for instance, whose work on migrants in “Small-Town USA” is discussed above, explores the “ideological links” between local government ordinances on immigration and “a history of federal law that has

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legal language and its ideologies  521

created the conflation between the ‘illegal alien’ and ‘the Mexican immigrant’ as a criminal outsider” (2011, p. 37). Places like those in which she did her research often do not have available to them established “models of identity” through which to process new arrivals. People in these contexts often rely on widely-circulating categories of person originating in immigration law—e.g., outsider, criminal—in order to process and deal with newcomers to their communities (ibid, p. 39). In his critical discussion of the “drop the I-word campaign”8—a nation-wide initiative that calls for the cessation of the use of the term “illegal” in public discussions about (im)migration— Jonathan Rosa similarly argues that language can function as a “sign of exclusion and inequality” (2018, p. 35). He contends that the term “illegal” as applied to migrants in the US is framed by the media as “neutral” and “accurate” (ibid, p. 36), in part because of its supposed denotation of a legal category. The term “illegal immigrant,” however, is in fact misleading and racist, as it is typically only applied to certain migrants, namely, those with brown skin who speak Spanish (cf. Dick 2011). A study examining media coverage of immigrants in the Southeast, for example, states that “[r]ather than focus on immigrants as economic threats, the most dominant negative characterizations of Mexican immigrants and of Central and South American immigrants focus on their perceived criminal tendencies” (Brown et al. 2018). The term “illegal immigrant” is also oxymoronic, given that the US Immigration and Nationality Act defines an immigrant as someone who has been lawfully admitted to the country (Rosa 2018, p. 36; Plascencia 2009). Scholarship such as Dick’s and Rosa’s illustrates the power of linguistic anthropology to disentangle and challenge the complex ways in which legal and other cultural discourses interact in the production of racism and discrimination. Rosa argues, for instance, that changes in how (im)migration is discursively represented can “contribute to efforts toward imagining and establishing migration as a fundamental human right” (2018, p. 35). Early legal anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski emphasized the permeability and imbrication of legal, social, and linguistic systems within a given cultural context. They were also dedicated to dismantling “law” as an objective, universal concept, instead revealing any legal system’s deep embeddedness in the cultural context of which it is a part. It is this lesson that linguistic anthropologists have brought forward to the study of law today and can bring into the future. By detailing the specific linguistic processes through which law is created, especially those that co-occur with or are themselves constituted of “everyday” language, researchers can begin to uncover and thus challenge the powerful ideologies that set law apart as a transcendent, objective institution.

REFERENCES Andrus, J. (2015). Entextualizing Domestic Violence: Language Ideology and Violence against Women in the Anglo-American Hearsay Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Atkinson, J.M. and Drew, P. (1979). Order in Court: The Organization of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Holquist, M. (ed.) Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, R. and Briggs, C. (2003). Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 https://www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/drop-i-word.

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Berenguer, E. (2017). The color of fear: Cognitive-rhetorical analysis of how Florida’s subjective fear standard in stand your ground cases ratifies racism. Maryland Law Review 76 (3): 726–746. Brenneis, D. (1988). Language and disputing. Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 221–237. Brown, H.E., Jones, J.A., and Becker, A. (2018). The racialization of Latino immigrants in new destinations: Criminality, ascription, and countermobilization. RSF: The Russel Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4 (5): 118–140. Chavez, A.E. (2015). So te fuiste a Dallas? (So you went to Dallas?/So you got screwed?): language, migration, and the poetics of transgression. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25 (2): 150–172. Conley, J. and O’Barr, W.M. (1990). Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conley, J.M., O’Barr, W.M., and Riner, R.C. (2019). Just Words: Law, Language, and Power, 3e. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Conley, R. (2016). Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danet, B. (1980). “Baby” or “fetus”?: Language and the construction of reality in a manslaughter trial. Semiotica 32(3–4):187–220. Deeb, H.N. (2013). Boiling down the M-word at the California supreme court. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23 (1): 41–64. Dick, H.P. (2011). Making immigrants illegal in small-town USA. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (1): 35–55. Donovan, D.A. and Wildman, S.M. (1981). Is the reasonable man obsolete: A critical perspective on self-defense and provocation. Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 14: 435. Duranti, A. (1994). From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duranti, A. (2011). Linguistic anthropology: Language as a non-neutral medium. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics (ed. R. Mesthrie), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ehrlich, S. (2001). Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge. Felstiner, W.L.F., Abel, R., and Sarat, A. (1980/81). The emergence and transformation of disputes: Naming, blaming, claiming. Law & Society Review 15 (3/4): 631–654. Garcia, A. (1995). The problematics of representation in community mediation hearings: implications for mediation practice. Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 22: 23–46. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. Grillo, T. (1991). The mediation alternative: Process dangers for women. Yale Law Journal 100: 1545–1610. Haviland, J.B. (2003). Ideologies of language: Some reflections on language and U.S. law. American Anthropologist 105 (4): 764–774. Haviland, J.B. (2010). Mu xa xtak’av: “He doesn’t answer.”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (1): 195–213. Heritage, J. (1985). Analyzing news interviews: Aspects of the production of talk for an “overhearing audience.” In: Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 3, Discourse and Dialogue. van Dijk, T. (ed.) (pp. 95–117). London: Academic Press. Hirsch, S. (1998). Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoebel, A.E. (1954). The Law of Primitive Man. Harvard, MA: Atheneum. Hutchby, I. and Woffitt, R. (1998). Conversation Analysis. Oxford: Polity Press. Irvine, J.T. and Gal, S. (2009). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In: Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, 2e (ed. A. Duranti). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Kroskrity, P. (2004). Language ideologies. In: Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (ed. A. Duranti), Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Malinowski, B. (1985[1926]). Crime and Custom in Savage Society. Totowa, NJ: Helix Books. Matoesian, G. (1993). Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Matoesian, G. (1995). Language, law, and society: Policy implications of the Kennedy Smith rape trial. Law & Society Review 29: 669–701.

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Matoesian, G. (2001). Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matoesian, G. and Kristin E.G. (2018). Multimodal Conduct in the Law: Language, Gesture, and Materiality in Legal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merry, S. (1988). Legal pluralism. Law & Society Review 22 (5): 889. Merry, S. (1990). Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mertz, E. (1994). Legal language: Pragmatics, poetics, and power. Annual Review of Anthropology 23: 435–455. Mertz, E. (2007). The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think like a Lawyer”. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mertz, E. (2022). Within and beyond the anthropological study of law and language. In: Oxford Handbook on Law and Anthropology (eds. M. Foblets, M. Goodale, M. Sapignoli & O. Zenker), 283–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mertz, E., Ford, W.K., and Matoesian, G. (eds.) (2016). Translating the Social World for Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Philips, S.U. (1998). Ideology in the Language of Judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics, and Courtroom Control. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plascencia, L. (2009). The “Undocumented” Mexican migrant question: re-examining the framing of law and illegalization in the United States. Urban Anthropology 38 (2–4): 375–434. Richland, J. (2008). Arguing with Tradition: The Language of Law in Hopi Tribal Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richland, J. (2013). Jurisdiction: Grounding law in language. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 209–226. Richland, J. (2021). Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rickford, J.R. and King, S. (2016). Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel (and other vernacular speakers) in the courtroom and beyond. Language 92 (4): 948–988. Rosa, J. (2018). Contesting representations of migrant “Illegality” through the drop the I-word campaign: rethinking language change and social change. In: Language and Social Justice in Practice (eds. N. Avineri et al.). London: Routledge. Scalia, A. (1997). A Matter of Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In: The Elements (eds. P. Clyne, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer), 193–248. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Silverstein, M. (1985). Language and the culture of gender. In: Semiotic Mediation (eds. E. Mertz and R. Parmentier), 219–259. New York: Academic Press. Silverstein, M. (2005). Axes of evals: Token versus type interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15 (1): 6–22. Spry, T. (1995). In the absence of word and body: Hegemonic implications of “victim” and “survivor” in women’s narratives of sexual violence. Women and Language 13 (2): 27. Tamanaha, B.Z. (2008). Understanding legal realism. Texas Law Review 87: 731–785. Tiersma, P.M. (1999). Legal Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trinch, S. (2003). Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ward, C.V. (2015). Stand your ground and self-defense. American Journal of Criminal Law 42 (2): 89–138. Weissbourd, B. and Mertz, E. (1985). Rule-centrism versus legal creativity: the skewing of legal ideology through language. Law & Society Review 19 (4): 623–659.

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Language, Power, and Justice

IV PART

29

Language, Gender, Race, and Sexuality: Intersectional Perspectives

Lal Zimman Introduction Since the mid-twentieth century, the study of language, gender and sexuality has coalesced as a prolific and highly interdisciplinary area of inquiry, shaped in part by the influence of political movements that have also driven feminist and queer theory in the academy, including white liberal feminisms beginning in the 1970s and white queer theory in the 1990s (Barrett 2014; Bucholtz 2014). This history has produced a field that often centers critical perspectives on gender and sexuality—as its name implies—without necessarily recognizing the ways they are inseparable from other dimensions of subjectivity and domination (Bucholtz and miles-hercules 2021; Lane 2021), among them race, indigeneity, citizenship, and disability. Amidst growing efforts to decolonize and address racism, transphobia, and ableism within the academy, I focus here on what Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) called “intersectionality,” a concept that is critical for the continued viability of language, gender, and sexuality studies, but has not been fully understood. As miles-hercules (2022) persuasively argues, intersectionality is often used to refer to any perspective that acknowledges the coexistence of multiple aspects of subjectivity or the “complexity” of identity. Yet, as part of a long legacy of Black feminist thought, Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality in a legal context was specifically focused on the unique forms of structural oppression Black women experience—and resist—which are shared by neither white women nor Black men (Collins 2015; Crenshaw 1989: Nash 2019). In this sense, intersectionality recognizes the forms of vulnerability, violence, and abjection experienced by those who occupy particular types of intersections while offering protection and intelligibility to others. More than that, intersectionality is a product of Black feminism (Nash 2011), inviting us to

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

examine the ways race and gender work together to exert structural force while also operating in quite different fashions. In most language, gender, and sexuality (LGS) scholarship, the potential of intersectionality in its original meaning has yet to be realized (Chun and Walters 2021; miles-hercules 2022; Bucholtz and miles-hercules 2021). The study of language at the intersection of gender and race is far from new (Mitchell-Kernan 1972; Morgan 1991; Stanback 1988), and a growing set of researchers are critically engaged with gender and sexuality alongside race through examinations of the gendered qualities of the voice (Calder and King 2020; Campbell-Kibler and miles-hercules, 2021; Mendoza 2021), the documentation of women’s use of racialized language varieties associated with masculinity such as African American and Chicanx Englishes (Lanehart 2009; Mendoza-Denton 2008), the navigation of normative links between whiteness and queerness and erasure of queer/trans people of color (Cornelius 2020; Davis 2019; Lopez and Bucholtz 2017) and narratives of identity and affect (Johnson 2017; Lane 2018). But the core theoretical concepts used in LGS still reflect a history in which race has played a minimal role. This chapter reviews two of these concepts—indexicality and performativity—and identifies ways they might be shifted in more intersectionally-minded directions. These ideas are explored in an analysis of RuPaul’s Drag Race (Bailey et al. 2009-), a popular reality television show with an international reach. As the show shifts toward greater gender-based inclusion, tensions are revealed with the strong, ongoing undercurrent of anti-Blackness both on the show and in viewers’ engagements with it. Attending to the ways gender and race can work both with and against each other in this context demonstrates the need to reconsider how indexicality and performativity—and related concepts such as linguistic appropriation—are theorized in language, gender, and sexuality. Queer linguistics—that is, approaches to language, gender and sexuality that center non-heteronormative practices and subjectivities (see Calder 2020)—have been especially influential in the development of performativity (Livia and Hall 1997), and I follow queer and trans linguists (Zimman 2020) by positioning my analysis of anti-Blackness on Drag Race in relation to practices of trans inclusion. Such a treatment sheds light on the ways marginalized communities’ needs are often positioned in conflict with one another both discursively and materially.

Theoretical Cornerstones: Indexicality and Performativity in Intersectional Perspective

Histories of LGS research often begin with Robin Lakoff’s (1975) Language and Woman’s Place, which famously described “women’s language” in terms of features like tag questions (“The war is terrible, isn’t it?”), “hypercorrect grammar” (avoiding constructions considered “ungrammatical” in standardized English e.g., multiple negation), politeness (e.g., “Will you please close the door?” rather than “Close the door”), and rising intonation on non-questions (e.g., a cook indicating dinner will be ready “around 6?”), among others. Despite the subsequent uptake of generations of scholars who treated “women’s language” as a universal claim about how all women speak, Lakoff herself at times presented “women’s language” as a hegemonic construction contextualized by whiteness, class privilege, and heteronormativity. However, Lakoff’s theory presents these features as both cause and product of [white] women’s continued subordination to [white] men. Despite the presence of “correct” grammar and “politeness”—both saturated with racist and classist implications—as features of “women’s language,” the theory lacked a place for the privilege of the white, middle class, heterosexual cisgender women thought to most closely embody the style.

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Indexicality The connection Lakoff draws between stances of submission and white femininity is an example of indexicality, a concept that characterizes the way language becomes associated with particular forms of personhood and other social meanings that has been advanced in large part by specialists in language and gender (e.g., Eckert 2008; Inoue 2004; Ochs 1992). Indexicality can be characterized as a relationship between a linguistic form and its meaning where the former “points to” the latter. An example of a classic index is the pronoun I, which has no fixed meaning but rather refers to whoever utters it. Indexicality offers a framework for understanding the social meanings that adhere to language, as when a lilt of the voice or a turn of phrase conveys something about the speaker, addressee, or communicative context that goes beyond the semantic content of what is said. Like the target of a pointed finger, indexical meaning is context-sensitive and, as a result, slippery and open to multiple competing interpretations (Hanks 1999). The same linguistic form not only has the potential to index multiple meanings, those meanings are also layered and organized in ways that reflect their sociocultural and historical properties. Elinor Ochs (1992) divides indexical meanings into direct, which are typically relevant to the immediate interactional context (or the “pragmatic functions of language,” p. 337), and indirect, which are built up through repeated use of those direct indexes in particular contexts or by particular types of people, such as white women. Per Ochs, gender is rarely indexed directly, except in cases where gendered forms function primarily or exclusively to mark a person’s gender. Examples of direct indexes of gender include gendered pronouns (e.g., English she vs. he) and grammatical gender (e.g., Spanish muchacha vs. muchacho). More often, gendered meaning is conveyed indirectly, as in Ochs’ example of the Japanese sentence-final particles wa and ze, which are often described as belonging to the speech of women and men, respectively. In interaction, however, Ochs notes that speakers of any gender may use wa to convey a stance of “delicate” intensity or ze to construct a “coarse” intensity. These stances come to index gender through repeated use of wa by women and ze by men, and the use of those particles becomes part of how gender is constituted. Layered indexical meanings have been important in language and sexuality research to explain the links between sexual orientation and gender normativity, as in (non-intersectional) investigations of how sexuality is attributed based on the voice (e.g., Zimman 2013). A feature that indexes femininity among gender-normative women—like the use of a high frequency, fronted (i.e., closer to the teeth), or “lispy” articulation of /s/—can become an index of non-heterosexuality when produced by a speaker understood to be male. However, J. Calder and Sharese King (2020) have called into question the basis of this assumption by showing that the gender-based patterns in /s/ said to exist for “English” may not hold even for straight, cisgender speakers of color. Furthermore, even purportedly direct indexes of gender can be implemented for other purposes, as when gay men call each other she or gender variant communities use a mixture of feminine and masculine grammatical forms to construct nonbinary identities (Zimman 2020 for a review). While the layering or ordering of indexical meanings implies a linear relationship in which one indexical association builds on the last (see also Silverstein 2003), Penelope Eckert (2008) instead presents possible meanings for a linguistic feature on an indexical field. The field maps out indexical meanings—interactional and macrosocial—without making claims on the primacy of any given meaning or the order in which they emerged; in the case of /s/, gender and sexuality would be present alongside regionality (Campbell-Kibler 2008), class (Stuart-Smith 2007), and ethnocitizenship (Maegaard and Pharao 2016). The

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  527

appropriate meaning is narrowed based on the linguistic and semiotic context in which the form appears. To continue the previous example, a fronted /s/ is more likely to be associated with gay men if the pitch of the voice is very low, whereas a much higher pitched voice might lead a fronted /s/ to go unnoticed as an unmarked index of normative femininity. As this example suggests, and as Calder (2018) also argues, the embodied, multi-modal presentation of the self is part of the context that informs the differentiation of indexical meanings (Goodwin and Alim 2010; Pratt 2019; Starr et al. 2020). Indexicality has been characterized as driven by patterns of usage that, over time, build up associations between interactional stances and macrosocial identities; this process is known as stance accretion (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). Yet Miyako Inoue (2004) observes that this relationship can also be inverted, in which a history of use is invented in service of current indexical meanings and the social projects those meanings serve. Ideology plays a crucial mediating role and allows indexical relations to emerge even in the absence of stance accretion via actual use. Eckert’s (2008, p. 469) core example of an indexical field is for /t/ release in English.1 Race is not named on the field, but much of what does appear is associated with whiteness and wealth: elegance, politeness, formality, clarity, prissiness, articulateness, and educatedness. On the other hand, the field also includes expressions of anger, exasperation, and annoyance. In the context of anti-Blackness, the attribution of anger to a Black speakers’ use of released /t/ may have little to do with the other linguistic features they deploy and more to do with raciolinguistic ideologies that project aggression and violence onto Black bodies. The context that narrows the field is therefore even broader than the speaker and immediate environment; it includes the ideological systems that inform the attribution of meaning to others’ communicative acts. This pushes us toward another element of semiotic theory that is often absent from discussions of indexicality: the interpretant (Peirce 1955), or the understanding of an index that is created in the mind of a perceiver (cf. D’Onofrio and Eckert 2020). Thinking about interpretants highlights the potential that interlocutors might have wildly different ideas about what is being indexed, and identifies an avenue by which any index of Blackness can be appropriated in service of anti-Blackness. We can find a tool for thinking about interpretants in the theorization of Inoue’s (2003) listening subject and Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa’s (2015) white listening subject. This concept shifts the locus of meaning-making away from the intention a speaker is thought to have, or the idea that indexes simply “have” meaning, and toward the interpretive practices listeners bring to bear as part of a larger material and ideological context. Marie Maegaard and Nicolai Pharao’s (2016) investigation of fronted /s/ among Danish men highlights the importance—and ideological dimensions—of the interpretant. While a fronted /s/ is associated with gayness among ethnically Danish white men, it is also found in “street language,” a style associated with “immigrants” (of unspecified origins) and youth. Through experimental manipulation, the authors show how the attribution of gayness to a male voice with a fronted /s/ is inhibited by the presence of an intonational contour associated with “street Danish” in an experiment with high school students from Copenhagen (whose social characteristics are otherwise unspecified). Maegaard and Pharao interpret this finding in part via homonationalism, through which gayness is constructed as a sign of Western social “progress” while racialized and Orientalized immigrants are rendered sexually, culturally, and politically regressive. Puar (2007) identifies homonationalism

1

Stops like /t/ prototypically involve closure and release gestures, the latter of which is the more audible component of the sound. However, /t/ is frequently unreleased in certain contexts, e.g., at the end of words.

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as serving imperialist wars and Islamophobia, upholding the West as a bastion of queer affirmation, and justifying the continued policing of Brown [queer] bodies, but its application to /s/ in the Danish context leaves us without a sense of how homonationalism impacts [queer] immigrants. These impacts are precisely what intersectionality points us toward as we think about not only what meanings indexical fields enable, but also what they render impossible or invisible, and how these (im)possibilities reflect and reconstitute systemic inequality for those facing intersectional marginalization. The opacity of certain constellations of meaning—such as being both queer and of color—calls to mind processes like indexical bleaching (Squires 2014), through which layers of indexical meaning are erased. This process occurs on a daily basis when Black language is appropriated by non-Black people in ways that erase its origins (Bucholtz 2016; Johnson 2003; Lopez 2014). Observing one example that is directly relevant to this chapter, miles-hercules (2022) discusses the phrase And I oop- which is sourced to a video made by Jasmine Masters, a Black drag queen who appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In brief, the phrase was subsequently taken up by white speakers as an expression of surprise and came to be attributed to digital subcultures dominated by white users (in this case, the “VSCO girls” of the VSCO social media platform). Indexical bleaching is therefore not an arbitrary process, but a tool of social domination that will be highlighted in the analysis below.

Performativity The ability to use an index even if it is associated with a gender to which one does not belong is part of what made indexicality such a useful concept for LGS work into the age of performativity and queer theory. J.L. Austin (1962) identified performatives as a class of utterances that cannot be described as true or false, but which have an impact on the world through being said (e.g., I now pronounce you married, which produces a marriage when uttered in the right context; Hall 1999). Yet Austin lands on the observation that all utterances are performative, as they all perform a speech act of some sort. Judith Butler (1990) famously applies this property of language, which she calls performativity, to gender, characterizing it as something that comes into being through doing. As with performative utterances, there are cases where the performativity of gender is especially evident, as when drag queens draw on established indexes of femininity while also denaturalizing that femininity by detaching it from cisgender womanhood. But Butler, mirroring Austin, emphasizes that all gender is performative. Like Ochs, Butler sees gender’s performative enactments as built up through repeated uses, or iterability. However, Butler explicitly frames iterability as creating potential for agency and subversion. If gender norms are created through repeated iterations of normative forms (e.g., a Japanese-speaking woman saying wa), they might be disrupted by a refusal to iterate those norms (e.g., a non-woman saying wa or a woman not saying wa). The theoretical centering of normativity as a primary source of oppression, and appropriation as a technique of subversion and self-empowerment, reflects the influence of nonintersectional views of gender and sexuality on indexicality and performativity. Yet racism is not enacted primarily through the enforcement of behavioral norms (though they do exist), and appropriation is frequently a tool of white supremacy rather than its undoing. The structures surrounding white supremacy do not have a well-theorized place in performativity, which often focuses on individual action and self-realization. The very fact that self-identification has emerged as a tool for transgender liberation (Zimman 2019), but not of anti-racism (miles-hercules 2022), itself reflects an important difference in the social mechanics of gender and race.

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  529

Despite decades of calls to bring intersectionality into LGS, the discipline at times manifests Patricia Hill Collins (2000 [1990]) observation that “alternative knowledge claims,” like those of intersectionality, are frequently “absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms” (219); this is precisely the process miles-hercules (2022) describes regarding the distortions intersectionality has undergone. An interdisciplinary approach to language, gender, race, and sexuality requires re-examinations of theoretical foundations as well as re-readings of literatures for their unrecognized theoretical contributions. To take one small example, few writing about indexicality have addressed its similarity to what Geneva Smitherman (1977) termed tonal semantics. Tonal semantics is a way of talking about the additional meanings that prosody contributes to an utterance, which exceeds what is represented in the lexicon and grammatical structures alone. Of course, the meaningful use of prosody is not unique to Black speakers, but Smitherman’s theorization of tonal semantics is. Rather than producing an overarching theory that applies to all speakers and all levels of language, Smitherman recognizes the Black body as simultaneously a locus of sound production and central site of meaning-making across the African diaspora. That is, even when enslaved Black people were unable to maintain their African languages, prosody may have created a multimodal connection between the Black diaspora and tonal West African languages that is transmitted intergenerationally.2 Engaging with tonal semantics as a precursor to contemporary indexicality is important as redress for the exclusion and under-citation of Black thinkers—especially those who are not cis men—within the sociocultural linguistic canon. But tonal semantics also illustrates an approach to intersectionality: it is particularized to African American Language, where prosody occupies a salient, gendered place, and to the sociohistorical context of its speakers. To follow this example might lead not to an intersectional approach to language, gender, race, and sexuality, but to multiple intersectional approaches that attend to specific intersections in ways that an abstract notion of intersectionality that is applied uniformly to every social positionality cannot. The next part of this chapter offers one such intersectional exploration, focusing on anti-Black racism and trans inclusion on the reality television show, RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Anti-Blackness and Trans Inclusion on RuPaul’s Drag Race Drag queens and their mediatized portrayals have played a prominent role in both queer theory and queer linguistics. Butler’s early explorations of performativity relied in part on Paris is Burning (Livingston 1990), a documentary about ballroom drag culture in 1980s New York City, in which communities of queer/trans people of color compete—or walk— in different categories that represent various combinations of gender presentations and embodiments, from “executive realness,” to “butch queen first time in drags at a ball,” to “luscious body.” Butler’s insights and questions were taken up linguistically in Rusty Barrett’s (1995, 2017) rich analyses of Black drag queens in Texas. The queens Barrett studied often used what he characterizes as a “white-woman style,” which bears many of the same features as Lakoff’s “women’s language.” Yet the style is parodied and denaturalized both through its enactment by non-female Black bodies and by the queens’ manifestation of other linguistic practices that clash with the ideological construction of upper middle-class

2

Indeed, it may be that intonation and prosody more broadly captures a kind of attentional pull (Throop and Duranti 2015) that has been preserved across generations of Black Americans.

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white femininity associated with white-woman style: the use of sexual humor and gay slang, swearing, and voicing Blackness and masculinity through the momentary use of African American Language and/or voicing a lower pitch. As Barrett’s analyses make clear, drag rests as much on racialization as on gender or queer politics. Furthermore, he captures the potential disconnect between the gendered and racial implications of drag performances in his analysis of an on-stage parody of sexual assault that problematized the portrayal of Black men as (hetero)sexually dangerous while also making light of violence against Black women. RuPaul’s Drag Race can be thought of as a twenty-first century corollary to Paris is Burning: a highly influential representation of drag that is celebrated for representing a world previously unknown to most of its straight, white and/or cisgender audiences. RPDR, as it is known to fans, is a competition reality television show hosted by RuPaul Charles, a Black American drag queen, television personality, and musical artist who rose to public prominence in the 1990s after establishing a career performing in Atlanta and later New York City. The show’s format challenges a group of drag queens to complete tasks that test their acting, sewing, dancing, singing, stand-up comedy, and lip-syncing skills, among others. RPDR is a global reality television empire, with over 20 seasons of content in the United States and nearly as many filmed in other parts of the world, including Australia/New Zealand, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, and the UK.3 An episode typically consists of a mini-challenge (e.g., a photoshoot), a maxi-challenge (e.g., making a garment from unconventional materials), a runway, and a final “lip sync for your life” between the two bottom-ranked queens in that episode, one of whom is eliminated. A season culminates with a performance between three or four top queens, from whom a winner is selected. The winner receives a cash prize, but many contestants—win or lose—go on to participate in live performance tours, create and host web shows and other drag-related content, and release musical tracks and merchandise timed to correspond with their appearance on the show. The identity politics of RPDR depart from the history of drag in the United States significantly, and nowhere more so than in the ways queens who are Black, Latinx, and/or trans are positioned on the show. Contemporary drag in the US is based largely on performance genres developed by queer and trans communities of color, such as the balls in Paris is Burning, and the competitive nature of the balls clearly sets the stage for the framing of RPDR as a competition-style reality show. Black and Latinx queers have brought to drag the racialized semiotic practices found in their communities. As the examples below will show, the centrality of Black language in drag continues unabated, yet it is frequently recast on RPDR as simply drag language.4 Trans people—or people who today might understand themselves as trans—have also played a central role in the development of drag art forms. Many of the legendary figures of drag and/as queer activism, such as Marsha P. Johnson, Crystal LaBeija, Dorian Corey, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy—all of them Black—were femme queens who may have feminized their bodies, consistently presented as femme in the world, and/or used feminine language to describe themselves.5 Before white cisgender gay men’s activism began to more aggressively distance itself from trans people in the 1970s (Stryker 2008) and the category of transgender was increasingly institutionalized in the 3

Seasons will be referenced in this chapter with the abbreviation SX while episodes are referred to as SXEY (e.g., S4E1 is episode 1 of season 4). 4 For example, LaGanja Estranja, a white queen, was criticized for using an exaggerated voice that made heavy use of prosody associated with African American Language, but the critiques never mentioned race and at one point RuPaul referred to it as a “kiki voice,” i.e. something drag queens do for fun. 5 Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, the only of the queens listed here to survive the twentieth century, identifies as transgender. It is not clear whether the others would identify with this label as it is used today.

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  531

1990s (Valentine 2007), the line between these identities was a blurry one, especially in communities of color. This legacy is uninterrupted, as trans femmes/femme queens continue to be the drivers of much innovation in drag and its associated art forms (Mendoza to appear; additionally, many drag performers today identify as non-binary (Calder 2018; Mendoza ibid) in addition to those who are openly trans women. Despite this context, the vision of drag constructed on RPDR until recently reflected a more normative understanding of the genre as the purview of cisgender gay men. This understanding is further embedded within a post-racial politics that has undoubtedly facilitated the show’s critical and financial success.

Commodified Blackness on RuPaul’s Drag Race

Part of RPDR’s commercial success has derived from its ability to capitalize on its audience’s appetite for linguistically-oriented commodification (Heller 2003; Johnstone 2009). Videos and articles offering definitions of “drag slang” can be found across the internet, and many official RPDR products feature these terms. In mid-2021, visitors to the online store for the production company that makes RPDR, World of Wonder, would find functional buttons that, when pressed, play audio clips including one of RuPaul saying “gurrrl” (Figure 29.1), a neon lamp that reads “werk”, and clothing with iconic catchphrases from the show (e.g., “Don’t f*ck it up” and “Sashay away”). Blackness is highly salient in many of these products, as in the case of the “gurrrl” button, which is racialized by the word itself (Scott 2000; Spears 2009), potentially by its non-standard spelling, and quite audibly through the prosody of RuPaul’s voice. The show, however, has often erased the racial history of the terminology it popularizes. The language used on RPDR frequently undergoes indexical bleaching, whereby lexical items, linguistic features, and discursive practices associated with African American Language are deracialized. For the interpretant of a queer white listening subject, these features may be indexically bleached such that they index LGBTQ+ identity or proximity to drag culture. The material goods that RPDR sells are available to anyone who can pay, and with products like the “gurrrl” button, fans of the show can literally use RuPaul’s voice as their own. But first, the product description in Figure 29.1 addresses the shopper as “Gurrrl” before suggesting that she might use the button during mundane activities like video conference calls—a staple of middle-class workdays in the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of the terms that appear in drag glossaries come from Black and Latinx ballroom communities, some of which were introduced in Paris is Burning, such as reading (“the real art form of

Figure 29.1  GURRRL BUTTON (a product on the World of Wonder online store).

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insult,” as Dorian Corey defines it in the film) and (throwing) shade (a more indirect form of this art), which share clear similarities with signifying (Mitchell-Kernan 1972; Morgan 1996; Washington 2020) and other discursive practices of indirectness associated with African American women (Morgan 1991). Indexical bleaching does not go uncritiqued in the RPDR fandom, but many of the words that appear in drag glossaries—tea, kiki, slay, snatched, drag (someone)—can also be found in articles, blog posts, and videos that define “zoomer” or “generation Z slang,” sometimes in ways that suggest the indexical bleaching is accompanied by semantic reinterpretation.6 This process exemplifies how white LGBTQ+ people are part of a chain of appropriation that brings Black language into the white mainstream. On other occasions, new words are coined on RPDR that replace names that have already been in use, enacting not indexical bleaching but a lexical colonization. Whereas indexical bleaching retains the form and semantic meaning of a term, lexical colonization involves the application of a new term to refer to an existing concept or referent, erasing not only meaning but the very trace of its history through which its origins might be revealed. This is the case with the term death drop, which has been used on RPDR to refer to a vogue dance move and feat of bodily contortion long known as a dip in ballroom communities. Dips involve a controlled fall from standing position that culminates with the body on the floor with one leg extended and the other tucked under or backwards toward the torso. The phrase death drop became associated with LaGanja Estranja, a white queen from season 6 of RPDR (2014) who frequently performed the move, and she later sold merchandise featuring the phrase. In June 2018, after much probing from members of ballroom communities and their supporters on social media, LaGanja announced on Twitter that she would no longer be offering products that say death drop and encouraged her fans to use the term dip instead. RPDR, however, did little to boost this correction, and many fans and contestants persist in the use of death drop, both on and off the show. Clearly, there is money to be made, and lexical colonization makes it all the more difficult for these material rewards to make their way back to the people who generated the commodified practices and the context in which such products have value. On the show, the appropriation of racialized language and other forms of semiosis may be rewarded by RuPaul, who often finds great humor in performances that effectively embody racist tropes like a heavily accented Asian character or hypersexualized Black woman (Brennan and Gudelunas 2017; Strings and Bui 2013). Queens are generally successful with the judging panel when they portray racialized characters associated with their own racial identities, as when Filipinx-American queen Manila Luzon performed as a newscaster with a thick “Asian” accent (S3E5; Jenkins 2017; Strings and Bui 2013) or when Black queen Coco Montrese roasted RuPaul as her “good cousin from the Brewster Projects” (S5E7); both won their challenges. On other occasions, queens have been celebrated for or encouraged to appropriate racialized personae that differ significantly from their own. In a faux presidential debate (S4E9), white cisgender queen Chad Michaels performed as “Chad ‘the Lady Pimp’ Michaels,” who donned a pink leopard print outfit with matching pink afro-puffs, described herself as living in a trailer park and “one of the first transgender dancers on the Soul Train,” and spoke with African American English-like 6

For example, an article in Elle Australia from 2018 that offers “a beginner’s guide” to slang from RPDR defines reading as “to criticize or critique,” leaving out that it is a form of art that it is part of the ritual insult genre welldocumented among speakers of African American Language. The same article defines fish as ‘looking/feeling ultrafeminine’ and “serv[ing]” or “feel[ing]” fishy as ‘be[ing] extra girly.’ In drag contexts, fish refers to queens whose embodied femininity is indistinguishable from that of cisgender women, making its common meaning a strange phrase for cis women (the apparent audience of this article) to use in reference to themselves.

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  533

features. When asked how she would redecorate the White House, she responded “I’mma paint that bitch pink and fit the capital with an up-do. Up. Do.” Chad’s jokes were wellreceived by the judges and she placed in the top two for the challenge. Viewers of RPDR play a somewhat paradoxical role in their engagements with antiBlackness. On one hand, there is a vocal segment of viewers whose social media presence includes calling attention to racism on RPDR. Apparently in response to these pressures, contestants have become more wary about taking up performances of racialized others on the show. One white contestant from season 13 (2021), Utica Queen, wore a bizarre headpiece made of stuffed squirrels while portraying Bob Ross, a white painter known for his instructional public access show, because she was concerned that wearing an afro style wig that matched Ross’s actual hair would be “inappropriate” (S13E9). Many queens do receive negative messages or public castigation for their behavior on the show, but the primary targets for harassment are queens of color. The treatment Black queens have received has been so abusive that RPDR generated a public service announcement-style video in which six popular Black queens appear out of drag, introduced by their real names, sharing everyday facts about themselves and imploring fans to “stop the threats, stop the racism that is affecting this community” and to treat Black queens “like the human beings we are” (RuPaul’s Drag Race 2020). At times, queens of color have been so affected that they delete their social media accounts—typically a crucial part of their business model—and several have discussed facing serious mental health effects.

Trans Inclusion on RuPaul’s Drag Race

As anti-Blackness maintains a strong undercurrent on RPDR, another issue surrounding the portrayal of marginalized queens relates to trans inclusion and representation. Especially in early seasons, transness was invoked for the purposes of humor, for instance when RuPaul repeats a joke she had told elsewhere about the difference between a drag queen and “a transsexual” being “about twenty-five thousand dollars and a good surgeon” (All Stars S1E2). Until the middle of season 6 (2014), each episode of RPDR started with a message from RuPaul introduced with the phrase “You’ve Got She-Mail”—word play on a sexualizing transphobic slur for trans women. Around the time trans people’s complaints about this word’s prominence on the show were taken up by Carmen Carrera, a contestant who came out as trans after appearing on the show, the sound clip introducing RuPaul’s announcements was changed to, “She done already done had hers’s.” This phrase is unintelligible in the context of the show, but clearly invokes African American Language through the done aspectual marker, the intensity of the AAL-marked phonology used, and the nonstandard doubly-marked possessive pronoun hers’s (Rickford 1999; Green 2002).7 RuPaul reports having heard this phrase from an Atlanta waitress and finding it funny—presumably for its nonstandardness—enough to keep as part of her linguistic repertoire since at least 1986; as she notes in a clip-show episode of RPDR, she has “taken that [phrase] to the bank” (S7E13). For more than ten years, RuPaul was resistant to the idea of casting trans women on RPDR based on what she perceived as an unfair advantage among those who transition medically via hormones and/or surgery. This attitude had shifted considerably by season 13 (2021), which included a white openly trans man, GottMik, and into season 14 (2022), which was the first to cast a trans woman, Kerri Colby, who had already come out and 7

It is worth noting that redundantly marked pronouns like hers’s are not included in descriptions of African American English in texts like Green (2002) and Rickford (1999), and RuPaul elsewhere describes the speaker in this anecdote as having gotten “mixed up” when producing that pronoun.

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transitioned before filming began. With these inclusions came other changes, like the gender-neutral translation of the catchphrase, “Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman win,” to, “Racers, start your engines, and may the best drag queen win.” Furthermore, S13E2 featured a conversation about pronouns between GottMik and a Black cis contestant, Olivia Lux. Both shared that they use she/her pronouns in drag and he/ him out of drag, in an interaction that resembled pronoun exchanges in trans-/nonbinaryaffirming spaces, but which is atypical on the show, where contestants are generally referred to as she both in and out of drag. The warm reception of GottMik’s presence among the season’s cast was not always shared by viewers, including a few former contestants. In the latter category, much attention was paid to comments from Nina Bo’Nina Brown (S9), a Black queen who was heavily targeted by anti-Black harassment after her own appearance on the show. On multiple occasions, Nina made social media comments that seemed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of GottMik’s drag and suggested that the praise GottMik received was ill-deserved because of the advantages Nina perceived to be associated with GottMik’s assigned sex.8 Numerous RPDR contestants—most of them white—expressed their dismay toward Nina on Twitter by calling her comments transphobic, hateful, disgusting, and gross. In just one of several similar comments, Jan Sport, a white competitor from season 12 (2020) wrote, “Transphobia is absolutely disgusting and won’t be tolerated here. [Nina Bo’Nina Brown], that was horribly violent and gross. Shame on you” (Figure 29.2). Jan followed up this tweet with another, saying that she is not trying to “be another person telling you [Nina] information you already know” but that the purpose of Jan’s tweet was “to voice that I do not stand for that.” The situation with Nina Bo’Nina Brown contrasts with another from season 13, in which a white competitor, Elliott with 2 Ts, faced far milder reactions from fellow contestants for transphobic comments she made on social media about Caitlyn Jenner, or for the antiBlackness she was accused of expressing on multiple occasions, such as by praising season 13 co-star Symone for offering “Black girl magic,” but in a way that was “elegant” and “tasteful” rather than “aggressive.” One of the strongest responses to this comment from a RPDR contestant came from season 12 winner, Jaida Essence Hall, a Black queen: “Word

Figure 29.2  Tweet from Jan Sport (RPDR S12) in response to Nina Bo’Nina Brown.

8

I have chosen not to reproduce the comments Nina made, but will note that they involved a number of assumptions (e.g., that GottMik has not had genital surgery, something which has not been disclosed publicly) and ignoring the many male-assigned queens whose bodies are more curvaceous or petite than GottMik’s.

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  535

Figure 29.3  Tweet from Jaida Essence Hall (RPDR S12) in response to Elliott with 2 Ts.

of the day: aggressive … Just wow. I’m glad to know there are some black girls that can be elegant tho. [rolling eyes emoji]” (Figure 29.3). This comparison is drawn not to rank the severity of transphobic and racist discourse on RPDR or in general, nor to object to the strong support shown for GottMik, but simply to illustrate that anti-Blackness and trans affirmation can occur in the same speech act, in the same moment. A Black queen can be called “violent” and “disgusting” for voicing transphobia after having already been marginalized by the show’s community; white contestants can advertise their support of Black Lives Matter in their Twitter bios without thinking about how someone they are condemning might be impacted by the violence and dehumanization that kills trans femmes of color; and contestants who express problematic ideas can be harshly, publicly shamed by numerous peers in some cases while receiving grace in others. These processes contribute to a zero-sum system that positions Black and trans communities as at odds with one another, erasing their intersection in the process. A final example of the potentially fraught relationship between anti-Blackness and transaffirmation comes from the first season of Drag Race Down Under (2021), the Australian/ New Zealand franchise of RPDR. Midway through the season (S1E5), it was revealed that a white contestant, Scarlet Adams, had previously performed in blackface as part of her drag act. When Scarlet spoke about this, only white queens remained in the competition; the season’s two queens of color were the first to be eliminated from the competition. The season’s openly non-binary white queen, Etcetera Etcetera, took Scarlet to task and challenged her to make reparations to Black communities rather than only apologizing. Though confronting a fellow white person about racism, Etcetera incorporates transness in a way that occasions an inclusive pronoun we in reference to those who are negatively impacted by “systematic oppression”: “/A lot of drag scenes are extremely racist./ I see drag queens saying, ‘It was just a joke, you need to get over it.’ But it’s like, while people of color and trans people are still facing violence every single day from the systematic oppression /that we live in is—it isn’t a joke to me/.”9 In a complex set of outcomes, Etcetera was uniformly

9

Text within slashes represents voice-over dialogue, which may be edited in ways that stich together speech to create an impression of continuity.

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praised by her co-stars for her anti-racist stance—unlike Black queens who have taken similar ones in other seasons—while also being eliminated from the competition that same episode. Meanwhile, RuPaul invited Scarlet to explain herself on the judging runway— which she did with apparent contrition—before refusing to “cancel” Scarlet and instead expressing support for her continued participation on the show, calling the situation “a lesson in humility and accountability.” That RuPaul is Black, but not trans, is surely important when it comes to the disconnect between anti-Blackness and trans-affirmation on RPDR (see Blaque 2016 for a Black trans perspective on the show’s anti-Black racism). Equally important, however, are the political logics of gender and race. Both constructs are salient dimensions of political consideration for the show, yet they are approached through wholly different strategies. Appropriation (and its problematization) figures prominently in negotiations of race on RPDR, but has not been mobilized for addressing gender, including as it pertains to trans people, though in theory it could be in cases like Chad Michael’s creation of a character described as a transgender dancer. This asymmetry is a politically-grounded one: even as appropriation has been characterized by theorists as a tool for queer liberation and critical gender politics, its salience as a tool for racial domination remains more powerful. White supremacy mobilizes appropriation to take ownership of communities of colors’ cultural practices and products in order to reap their social and material value. Gendered domination, by contrast, more often involves a rejection of femininity, gender non-conformity, and/or transness on the part of those with gendered privilege. This makes “inclusion” a sometimes-useful framework for thinking about gender and sexuality even as it fails to account for anti-Blackness—after all, Black queens were never absent from RPDR even as they were characterized as angry (e.g., S1’s Akashia Davis), speaking unclearly (e.g., S2’s Tyra Sanchez), insufficiently feminine (e.g., S7’s Jasmine Masters), excessively political (e.g., S10’s Vixen), or simply villainized by the show’s editing process. Although RPDR has made significant shifts in its orientation to trans contestants, its engagement with anti-Blackness remains ambivalent. Given viewers’ harassment of contestants of color, RuPaul’s divestment from anti-racist discourse might itself be an economically-informed decision (albeit one consistent with views she expressed before the show10), as might RPDR’s new investment in trans inclusion.11 In any case, the image of RPDR has become one where white trans contestants are treated with increasing care while queens of color remain harshly judged, frequently eliminated early in the competition, and encouraged to parody their own ethnoracial identities, only to return home and face both abuse for their shortcomings and backlash for their successes—especially when they send a favored non-Black queen home. When trans inclusion and anti-Blackness confront one another, the consequences are equal parts complex and dangerous, and for no one more than Black trans people. All of these outcomes have their own material consequences—fewer gigs and sponsorships, lower booking fees, and less demand for merchandise—that tie semiotic practices to the perpetuation of systemic inequality.

10 RuPaul has defended queens who perform in blackface in the past such as her friend, Chuck Knipp, when he came under fire for his blackface performance of “Shirley Q. Liquor” in the early 2000s. 11 As recently as 2017, RuPaul was quoted saying that she wished people would not apologize for using transphobic slurs like tranny, which is a word RuPaul says she “loves” (Signorile 2017), even when it occurs in an unambiguously transphobic context.

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language, gender, race, and sexuality: intersectional perspectives  537

Directions for Future Work The future of language, gender, and sexuality scholarship must be intersectional. However, to move past the theoretical absorption and marginalization of intersectional theory that Collins describes, researchers should focus on theorizing specific intersections as they emerge for marginalized subjects as well as carefully re-thinking how the theory might be best applied to intersections of privilege. Appropriation has emerged in this piece as a practice that underscores the folly of applying identical analytic frameworks to race, gender, and sexuality, which must instead be theorized in ways that reflect their broader social logics. Moving away from the urge to abstract and universalize across intersections allows for the emergence of new theory and revivals of unrecognized theoretical histories. But an intersectional approach to gender, race, and sexuality demands more than academic or theoretical reorientations. It also demands attention to the lived reality for the people who do this theorizing, and a deeper recognition that theory emerges from the intersecting forces on scholars’ lives (Chen 2021; Foster 2021; Mendoza-Denton 2021). A field that struggles to attract, hire, and retain scholars of color, particularly when they are also trans, female, queer, disabled, and/or otherwise marginalized, has little hope of overcoming such exclusions through theory alone. Equally important are our hiring, tenure, and promotion norms; funding models; graduate admissions processes; course offerings; citation practices; and material investments in communities. Just as an intersectional analysis of race and gender on RuPaul’s Drag Race highlights the politico-economic implications of Black queer art and its commodification, intersectional thought requires attention to the way such forces operate in our communities, within academia and beyond.

Acknowledgments Thanks to members of the UC Santa Barbara Trans Research in Linguistics Lab, especially deandre miles-hercules and Dozandri Mendoza, for their feedback on this chapter’s content. I am further indebted to many who have directly and indirectly shaped my thinking in ways manifested in this chapter, including Kristy Ali, H. Samy Alim, Mary Bucholtz, J. Calder, Kendra Calhoun, Anne Charity Hudley, Tracy Conner, Jenny L. Davis, Julien De Jesus, Penny Eckert, Jazmine Exford, Joyhanna Yoo Garza, Kira Hall, Lina Hou, Sharese King, Jamaal Muwwakkil, and John R. Rickford.

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Foster, M. (2021). I’ve known rivers: A journey through the academy in search of my language, voice and power. Gender and Language 15 (3): 403–413. Goodwin, M.H. and Alim, H.S. (2010). “Whatever (neck roll, eye roll, teeth suck)”: The situated coproduction of social categories and identities through stancetaking and transmodal stylization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (1): 179–194. Green, L.J. (2002). African American English. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hanks, W.F. (1999). Indexicality. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9 (1–2): 124–126. Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 473–492. Inoue, M. (2003). The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: citing, sighting, and sitting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology 18 (2): 156–193. Inoue, M. (2004). What does language remember? Indexical inversion and the naturalized history of Japanese women. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (1): 39–56. Jenkins, S.T. (2017). Spicy. Exotic. Creature. Representations of racial and ethnic minorities on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture, Brennan, N. and Gudelunas, D. (eds.) 77–90. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Johnson, E.P. (2003). Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnson, L.P. (2017). Writing the self: Black queer youth challenge heteronormative ways of being in an after-school writing club. Research in the Teaching of English 52 (1): 13–33. Johnstone, B. (2009). Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech 84 (2): 157–175. Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row. Lane, N. (2018). Narratives of affect: Language and feeling in Black queer space. Journal of Language and Sexuality 7 (1): 55–76. Lane, N. (2021). An open letter to the editors of the Journal of Language and Sexuality. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10 (1): 59–62. Lanehart, S.L. (2009). African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Livia, A. and Hall, K. (1997). “It’s a girl!” Bringing performativity back to linguistics. In: Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality (eds. A. Livia and K. Hall), 3–18. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Livingston, J. (dir.) (1990). Paris Is Burning. Art Matters. Lopez, Q. (2014). Aggressively feminine: The linguistic appropriation of sexualized blackness by white female characters in film. Gender and Language 8 (3): 289–310. Lopez, Q. and Bucholtz, M. (2017). “How my hair look?”: linguistic authenticity and racialized gender and sexuality on the wire. Journal of Language and Sexuality 6 (1): 1–29. Maegaard, M. and Pharao, N. (2016). /s/ variation and perceptions of male sexuality in Denmark. In: Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics (eds. E. Levon and R.B. Mendes), 88–104. New York: Oxford University Press. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2021). Language, gender, race, politics: How my field and I chose each other and what I learned along the way. Gender & Language 15 (1): 119–127. miles-hercules, d. (2022). The real tea: Language at the intersections. In: The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. Barrett, R. and Hall, K. (eds.) New York: Oxford University Press. Mitchell-Kernan, C. (1972). Signifying and marking: Two Afro-American speech acts. In: Directions in Sociolinguistics (ed. J.J. Gumperz and D. Hymes), 161–179. New York: Blackwell. Morgan, M. (1996). Conversational signifying: grammar and indirectness among African American women. In: Interaction and Grammar (eds. E. Ochs, E.A. Schegloff, and S.A. Thompson), 405– 434. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, M.H. (1991). Indirectness and interpretation in African American women’s discourse. Pragmatics 1 (4): 421–451. Nash, J.C. (2011). “Home truths” on intersectionality. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 23 (2): 445–470.

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Nash, J.C. (2019). Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In: Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (eds. A. Duranti and C. Goodwin), 335–358. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, C.S. (1955). Philosophical Writings of Peirce (ed. J. Buchler). New York: Dover Publications. Pratt, T. (2019). Embodying “tech”: Articulatory setting, phonetic variation, and social meaning. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24 (3): 328–349. Puar, J.K. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rickford, J.R. (1999). African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications. Malden, MA: Blackwell. RuPaul’s Drag Race. (2020). Everybody say love! [heart face emoji] RuPaul’s Drag Race” [YouTube video]. from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyE9eH4nTKw (accessed 22 February 2022). Scott, K.D. (2000). Crossing cultural borders: ‘Girl’ and ‘look’ as markers of identity in Black women’s language use. Discourse & Society 11 (2): 237–248. Signorile, M. (2017). RuPaul sounds off on the new season of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race,’ Obama, the word ‘tranny,’ and more. Huffington Post, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rupaul-onrupauls-drag-race-obama-tranny_n_1205203 (accessed 14 October 2021). Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23 (3–4): 193–229. Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Spears, A. (2009). Theorizing African American women’s language: Girl as a discourse marker. In: African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education and Identity (eds. S. Lanehart), 76– 90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Squires, L. (2014). From TV personality to fans and beyond: Indexical bleaching and the diffusion of a media innovation. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24 (1): 42–62. Stanback, M.H. (1988). Feminist theory and black women’s talk. Howard Journal of Communication 1 (4): 187–194. Starr, R.L., Wang, T., and Go, C. (2020). Sexuality vs. sensuality: the multimodal construction of affective stance in Chinese ASMR performances. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24 (4): 492–513. Stryker, S. (2008). Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. Strings, S. and Bui, L.T. (2013). “She is not acting, she is”: The conflict between gender and racial realness on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Feminist Media Studies 14 (5): 822–836. Stuart-Smith, J. (2007). Empirical evidence for gendered speech production: /s/ in Glaswegian. In: Laboratory Phonology, 9. (eds. J. Cole and J.I. Hualde), 65–86. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Throop, C.J. and Duranti, A. (2015). Attention, ritual glitches, and attentional pull: The President and the Queen. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4): 1055–1082. Valentine, D. (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Washington, A.R. (2020). “Reclaiming my time”: Signifying, reclamation and the activist strategies of Black women’s language. Gender and Language 14 (4): 358–385. Zimman, L. (2013). Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: the perceived sexuality of transgender men. Journal of Language and Sexuality 2 (1): 1–39. Zimman, L. (2019). Trans self-identification and the language of neoliberal selfhood: agency, power, and the limits of monologic discourse. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 256: 147–175. Zimman, L. (2020). Transgender language, transgender moment: Toward a trans linguistics. In: The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality (eds. R. Barrett and K. Hall). New York: Routledge.

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30

Engaged Linguistic Anthropology

Netta Avineri and Jocelyn Ahlers From “Public” and “Applied” to “Engaged”1 Engaged linguistic anthropology (ELA) is characterized by a commitment to cultivating ongoing relationships and mutual accountability with communities in the service of collaboratively-defined social change. We begin this chapter with a consideration of related terms such as engaged, public, and applied as they are used within the field of anthropology. We then turn to outlining four hallmarks of an engaged linguistic anthropology, highlighting projects where these appear. We then mobilize these hallmarks to analyze the authors’ engagement life cycles and research trajectories, underscoring how the hallmarks have emerged in different ways over time. The chapter concludes with theoretical and methodological takeaways for the field—as well as a set of guiding reflection questions offering readers the opportunity to explore their own engagement life cycles and futurities.

1 

As we sat down over several months to write and revise this chapter, there were many people in the room with us: our colleagues and students, community members, and imagined readers. As linguistic anthropologists who honor and aspire to engage, community is a central focus of the work that we do. Our process has been reflexive, critically collaborative, and dynamic. In positing a description of what ELA is and does, we have relied on the wisdom of colleagues across our fields and of the communities with whom they and we work, drawing on their models of engagement to come to a grounded conceptualization of ELA. At times, we struggled with whether or how to affix this label onto others’ work, without having a conversation with them about their own understandings of their work and their engagement life cycle; this, too, is part of the iterative reflexivity that is a hallmark of ELA. It is our hope that our product and process may be a turn in an ongoing conversation about how our field can and does pay explicit attention to the role of language within communities, its impact on social inequities, and its centrality to social justice.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Engaged, Public, Applied Anthropology: A Spectrum

Within the field of anthropology, definitions and articulations of engaged, public, and applied anthropology are typically overlapping and intertwined. Most broadly, engaged anthropology, dating back to Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and others, refers to the ways that anthropology has spoken to social issues in contemporary society. Here, anthropology’s contribution to discussions of topics of broader social import derive from its special perspective … —its focus on the microsocial situation framed by macroeconomic and political forces, its examination of the way social situations are made meaningful through discourse, symbols, and language, and its analysis of the small site’s embeddedness in larger structures of power (Merry and Low 2010).

In this articulation of an inclusive engaged anthropology, Sally Merry and Setha Low describe diverse forms of engagement including: sharing and support, teaching and public education, social critique, collaboration, advocacy, and activism (ibid). On the other hand, Catherine Besteman (2013) makes a distinction between engaged and public anthropology. Engaged anthropology, she argues, is collaborative, critical, reflexive, practical (in that it is oriented toward the achievement of shared goals), and values-driven or associated with value judgements (in that engagement is based on shared agreements that a certain way of living or doing things is better than an alternative way) (p. 3).

By contrast, public anthropology orients towards a public outside of anthropology and academia, with the goal of promoting anthropological knowledge more broadly, and towards enhancing its public image (p. 4). As neat as this binary may seem, Norma González (2010) suggests that we should be careful not to reify such oppositions, recognizing instead that interdisciplinary work that brings the insights of engaged and advocacy scholarship into the development of theory helps to challenge the false lines often drawn between advocacy and scholarship (p. 250). For other scholars (e.g., Bangstad et al. 2017, p. 499), public refers to publics other than the academy or anthropology as a field; typically this means a fairly broad audience that may or may not include the community that has been the focus of the research. Communitydefined and -driven projects, as discussed further below, can lead to calls for change in the public sphere, or in public policy. By contrast, in many cases public anthropology privileges scholars’ perspectives, while then moving to educate the public outside of the field. Luke Eric Lassiter (2008) articulates a range of public anthropologies, on a continuum from public scholarship, which may or may not be intended to influence policy, to an amplification of action or activist anthropology, a public interest anthropology (pp. 71–72). He, too, acknowledges the fairly large set of often-overlapping terms to describe this work, including public anthropology, public interest anthropology, engaged anthropology, and public archaeology, as well as the close alignment in the goals of applied anthropology (see Guzmán and Medeiros 2020) and practicing anthropology. It is in this sense that Barbara Rylko‐Bauer et al. (2006, p. 186) urged applied anthropologists to engage with guiding questions such as: “How do we operationalize the goals of addressing and ameliorating social problems? How do we translate knowledge successfully into pragmatic action? Which strategies actually work?” In their conceptualization of the closely related applied linguistic anthropology, Netta Avineri et al. (2021) highlight the intertwined nature of language with ideologies, ­practices, and histories. They also explore the ongoing balancing acts involved in more traditional

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engaged linguistic anthropology  543

ethnographic methods (e.g., participant-observation) alongside advocacy for social change. Through four in-depth case studies (“language gap,” discourses of “illegal” immigration, language proficiency-related categories in the Census, and sports team mascot names), they provide a methodological approach for applied linguistic anthropology that includes: (1) Methods of noticing, in-depth observation, longitudinal reflection, and thoughtful ­critique; (2) Centering the role of language in social justice efforts; (3) Recognition of one’s positionalities and roles in relation to the topic/issue at hand; (4) Processes of collaboration, coalition-building, audience coalescence (Avineri and Perley 2019); and (5) Efforts to raise awareness for social change and liberation. Applied linguistic anthropology mobilizes the tools of the field in the service of social change by moving from observation to active participation through collective action. In his call for higher education’s broader purpose and “commitment to the common good,” Ernest Boyer (1996) highlights that “the academy must become a more vigorous partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic, and moral problems, and must affirm its historic commitment to what [he] call[s] the scholarship of engagement” (p. 13). Budd Hall et al. (2015) note that central to an engaged university is knowledge democracy, recognizing the full range of epistemologies, methods, and movements across communities beyond the academy. They present a range of community-based pedagogies including action research, participatory research, and community-university partnerships as approaches and methodologies in service of knowledge democracy. Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) (Eatman et al. 2018) is practiced across the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and educational realms. As described by Timothy Eatman et al. (2018), PES reconceptualizes how knowledge is produced and foregrounds the role of mutually beneficial partnerships in the pursuit of justice (p. 533). These forms of engagement manifest in distinct ways within each of the disciplines (e.g., within the field of Environmental Studies partnering with local community organizations focused on environmental racism). Furthermore, engagement decenters academic knowledge (which includes particular credentials, standardized language ideologies, constrained access to information, and particular modalities/genres of sharing knowledge) and foregrounds community knowledge (emergent, connection-rich, collaborative). Engaged scholarship therefore supports recent work in decolonizing and abolitionist pedagogies.2 In reconceptualizing how knowledge is produced and shared, engaged scholarship emphasizes ethics, interdisciplinarity, and critique. In these conceptualizations, public, engaged, and activist are a spectrum with overlapping and mutually defining features.

Engaged Linguistic Anthropology: Four Hallmarks Drawing from the above literature, we identify four hallmarks of engaged linguistic anthro­ pology: (1) Explicit attention to the relationships between language and social inequities within and between communities; (2) A “radical redistribution of expertise” (Rymes 2021, p. 204); (3) Iterative reflexivity; and (4) Accountability to oneself and to others. These perspectives are complementary in an ELA praxis (Mayo 2019). Furthermore, ELA projects aim to effect social change with a goal of moving towards social justice, beginning with a recognition of the mutually constitutive nature of language and culture as a necessary

2

cf. Bhambra et al. 2018; de Sousa Santos 2015; Gorski 2008, Martin et al. 2017; McCarty et al. 2018; Reyes Cruz 2008; Betasamamosake Simpson 2020; Tuck and Yang, 2012.

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starting point. We first briefly discuss each of these hallmarks in the abstract, and then turn to engaged linguistic anthropologists and their practice to explore them more concretely in the following sections. ELA, explicitly or implicitly, recognizes that language participates in the creation and reproduction of structures of inequity and that language can be a tool in disrupting those hierarchies.3 In this way, ELA often serves the interests of social justice (see Avineri et al. 2019). Here we draw upon Lee Anne Bell’s (2007, p. 3) conceptualization of “social justice [as] the full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet the[ir] needs.” As Avineri and Martinez (2021) note, “justice is relational and aspirational”. Regimes of language standardization and language oppression are central modes of marginalizing minoritized populations. Such regimes, coupled with language use that encodes oppressive prototypes of minoritized populations, are significant tools in maintaining inequities and in naturalizing them. In this way, language policing and monitoring “standard” versions of language create and enforce inequities (see Cushing 2019, 2020; Khan 2019). But language has an equally powerful role to play in pushing back against these regimes. Moving beyond simply acknowledging the validity of minoritized dialects and languages and towards critical inclusion of those dialects, languages, and the people who speak them across the spectrum of social life is crucial to building societies attentive to everyone’s needs and aspirations. Engaged linguistic anthropology thus often serves the goals of social justice by challenging/disrupting oppressive linguistic practices and/or valorizing the language practices of minoritized populations. Fundamentally, engaged linguistic anthropologists decenter the “knowledgeable outsider” with a research agenda, in favor of multilateral engagements between and among community members, outside researchers, and publics (e.g., Boyer 1996; Eatman et al. 2018; Hall et al. 2015). This form of critical collaboration goes further than listening to and working for communities; it involves a collective recognition and revisiting of the dynamics within the collaboration itself. Cultivating relationships is central to pursuits of justice (Avineri and Martinez 2021). Critical collaboration is a central part of solidarity, an ongoing negotiated process of relational work with others. In working to define “solidarity” in dialogue, Martinez et al. (2021) articulate ideas that resonate with many of the hallmarks we recognize here. These include being in relationship with one another, asking what community can teach academia (rather than centering the idea that academia brings something important to community), and “working collaboratively in mutually beneficial relationships across false borders that separate us” (Martinez et al. 2021, p. 444). Importantly, they conceptualize solidarity as a matter of praxis, in much the same way that we describe ELA as a matter of praxis. Key to this process is iterative reflexivity, in which outside researchers and community members regularly examine project goals and processes, and the relationships among them, resulting in a deeper collaboration that shifts over time in response to changing interests. Such reflexivity requires a sense of mutual accountability among project members: accountability to one another and to the needs of the communities within which such projects take place. These connections necessarily disrupt traditional notions of academic expertise, requiring a recognition of the many types of expertise present and of the need for all those types in moving towards mutually defined goals. In projects that embrace the shifting grounds described here, even “outcomes,” a word that suggests predetermined or defined endpoints, are called into question, and the ongoing nature of this engaged work is foregrounded. We now turn to an exploration of how these hallmarks are embodied in the work of particular linguistic anthropologists in collaboration with communities. 3

For an example of scholars engaging in wide-ranging thinking about these issues see Smalls et al. (2021). Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31:2 special issue on language and white supremacy.

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engaged linguistic anthropology  545

Engaged Linguistic Anthropologists in Action To critically explore ELA as a practice, we have found it essential to foreground engaged linguistic anthropologists—individual scholars and practitioners in deep collaboration within academic and community settings. In addition to the four hallmarks described above, the work of ELAs typically does one or more of the following: broadens publics; builds linguistic anthropological capacity within communities; and advocates for languages and their users. Related in meaningful ways to applied linguistic anthropology, ELA is explicit in its consideration of the publics that it speaks with, including those outside of traditional academic disciplines and professions. As with the collaborative and engaged linguistic anthropology described by Barbra Meek (2017), the publics addressed by ELA are often communityfocused, and also often speak to futurities—mobilizing present-day publics with the hope of effecting change for future publics. For example, collaborative linguistic anthropological work challenges the pernicious claim that children of lower socioeconomic status are typically exposed to a smaller number of words than those of higher socioeconomic status (the so-called “language gap”) resulting in cognitive and other deficits (e.g., Avineri et al. 2015; Johnson et al. 2017; Orellana 2017); described in more detail in the section on “Engagement Life Cycles.” This critically-oriented work speaks to publics including educators and those who develop education policy with two goals: first, foregrounding the problematic assumptions that underlie policies based on the “language gap” (Paugh and Riley 2019) and second, educating those publics in ways that foreground the range of meaningful language practices of diverse communities frequently targeted by “language gap”-informed policies. Other projects of ELA that expand the range of publics and audiences include advocating for language reform. Anthropological linguist Ana Celia Zentella (2019) has engaged in collaborative advocacy around Census language that describes families in which no one reported speaking English “very well” as “linguistically isolated.” The naming of sports team mascots and ski resorts4 with titles that invoke Native Americanness is a racist practice that normalizes the stereotyping, tokenization, and marginalization of Tribal communities and their members. Work by scholars such as Avineri and Perley (2019) aligns with broader social renaming movements which aim to highlight, call into question, and disrupt these practices. Analysis of political discourse (Avineri et al. 2021; McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020) provides linguistic anthropological and critical perspectives of interest to broader publics. A range of ELA projects also include working with educators about the languages that their students bring to the classroom, with the goal of disrupting regimes of “Academic English” standardization in favor of valorizing students’ languages in classroom praxis.5 Scholars have proposed instructive approaches to reconceptualizing knowledge production by creating “colaborativos” with immigrant Indigenous students and parents (Baquedano-López 2021), analyzing discursive violence and anti-blackness in schools and social media (Smalls 2020), and bringing together Latinx community and academic voices (Rosa 2018). In such work, the four hallmarks of ELA described above may take place as part of the researcher’s individual praxis or as part of the work that takes place between and among the researchers. They may also support the work of creating what Avineri and Perley (2019) call audience coalescence, “an emergent coalition building process that identifies and promotes predispositions and stances toward redressing social injustices” (p. 149). Their chapter describes in detail these processes in relation to sports team mascot names and public racism: collaborating and coming together 4

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/08/25/squaw-valley-ski-resort-changing-name/ e.g., García-Sánchez, 2014; Lee and Oxelson 2006; Paris and Alim 2017; Siegel 2006; Smitherman 1999; Wolfram and Dunstan 2020.

5

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among fellow scholars, communities, and publics to both raise awareness and move towards social change. We would suggest that this audience coalescence is an important way in which these projects may be distinguished from more general public linguistic anthropology, whose goal is to educate the public at large about the tools, methods, and findings of linguistic anthropology. Such education does not inherently have the goal of advocating for change in pursuit of social justice, nor does it prioritize the building of community and coalition to advance social justice, both features of audience coalescence. ELA may also focus on bringing the tools of linguistic anthropology to community-defined and -driven projects and building linguistic anthropological capacity within communities. In many projects of this kind (such as those described by Ahlers, below) one explicit goal articulated by community members is to develop their methodological toolkits. Examples of such capacity-building include: Kawaiisu community members learning to complete morphological analysis of their own languages (e.g. Grant and Ahlers, forthcoming); K-12 students engaging in original research with their own families and communities (e.g., https://www.skills.ucsb. edu/team-research); and undergraduate students inventorying linguistic repertoires of a region (e.g., Zentella 2009). Here, the application of the four hallmarks takes place not only within individual praxis, but as part of the conversation between and among project participants. Paul Kroskrity and Barbra Meek (2017) present a wide range of case studies in which “Indigenous language research … [involves] negotiation with and intervention by members of the Native American communities involved” (p. 3). Similarly, Grant and Ahlers (forthcoming) describe work with the nüwa (Kawaiisu) community which is founded in community-articulated projects which have, among other goals, the aim of increasing community researchers’ capacities to engage in linguistic documentation and analysis of their own language. Finally, ELAs advocate for change within the field of linguistic anthropology and/or academia more broadly; in this sense, other linguistic anthropologists are the public, and the goal is to ask those in the field to reflexively consider its methods, its conceptualization of language and its theoretical models, and its relationships with the communities within which research projects take place. Such initiatives could be said to address, in Ilana Feldman’s words, “who gets to be inside of our world, [to whom we owe a] kind of horizontal responsibility” (Bangstad et al. 2017, p. 497); in other words, they expand who is included in the linguistic anthropological public. Projects in this vein include Leonard, Lukaniec, and Tsikewa’s Natives4Linguistics (https://natives4linguistics.wordpress.com). Work that strives to acknowledge and make room for methods, theoretical constructs, and interdisciplinary praxis that are outside of the dominant academic discourse6 is another important turn in the work to decolonize the fields of linguistics and anthropology. Furthermore, work that challenges field-internal preconceived ideas are part of opening up the field to a reflexive consideration of its own objects of analysis, modes of practice, and theoretical constructs. For example, a range of recent scholarship has critically examined who and what count as “good” speakers, prototypical speech community members, or “real” language use.7 Similarly, Kathryn B.H. Clancy and Jenny L. Davis (2019) delve into the question of who, really, is being referred to by the terms WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), and what social constructs and power dynamics are embedded within, and hidden by, its use. Engaging means decolonizing. The history of anthropology has been characterized by an increased reflexivity about anthropologists’ relationships with the communities whose practices they observe, participate with, and document. Anthropological methods and sensibilities, while

6

e.g., Archibald et al. 2019; Leonard 2018, 2021; Shulist and Rice 2019; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Wilson 2008.

7

(e.g., Ahlers 2006, 2009; Avineri and Harasta 2021; Davis 2017; Morgan 1994).

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engaged linguistic anthropology  547

ostensibly about long-term relationship building and participant-observation, have in many cases reified existing colonizing dynamics between individuals and groups. As highlighted by several scholars in related fields (e.g., Leonard 2017; Motha 2020; Ndhlovu 2021), decolonizing involves a recognition of (1) histories of oppression and (2) present-day realities shaped by ongoing injustice. For example, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) challenge scholars to recognize settler colonialism and the “entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave” in structuring relations among individuals and groups, noting that decolonization “is not an ‘and’. It is an elsewhere” (p. 36). One way to build linguistic anthropological capacity within communities is to decolonize language-related fields themselves (Leonard 2017), whose perspectives on and ways of “doing” language have been exclusionary, particularly to those whose languages and communities have often been objects of study, rather than subjects. As demonstrated by the above-mentioned studies, engagement involves reimagining the roles of the researcher in relation to communities as well as reconceptualizing who are collaborators and audiences/publics. When the very nature of knowledge construction is reimagined then these paradigmatic power dynamics/relations/hierarchies can be reconstructed in imaginative ways. We then move beyond observation and documentation to critical collaboration for social change.

Engagement Life Cycles In this section, we describe our own “engagement life cycles” as a form of critical engagement with our praxis, an integrated approach based on theory, reflection, and action (Mayo 2019). “Engagement life cycles” are narratives exploring the ways in which engagement shifts and adjusts over the course of an individual’s work with and within communities.8 These engagement life cycles therefore allow us to reflexively examine processes and relationships while collectively imagining new futures. The two “engagement life cycles” discussed below demonstrate the development of the four hallmarks of engagement over time, within two career trajectories. The first life cycle began with a locally oriented engagement around particular community issues, which then transitioned to sustained engagement within academic communities about diverse publicfacing topics. The second life cycle describes in-depth, long-term collaborations to address local pressing context-bound linguistic issues. The two life cycles are complementary since they highlight diverse forms of community collaboration.

Part I: Engagement, from Local to Public

In Avineri’s current collaborative research, teaching, and advocacy, the emphasis has been to interact with individuals and groups in local and academic communities to effect social change. Foregrounding the diverse forms of knowledge that everyone brings to the table, Avineri’s work recognizes the inherent power dynamics (“me-cro”/individual, micro, meso, macro) that shape interactions across those epistemologies (see Avineri 2019b). Interdisciplinary exchange and multimodalities have been central to these collaborations and knowledge sharing among communities, audiences, and publics. Fostering others’ engagement in issues and advocacy has been central, so that “findings” take on a life beyond academia. These features echo many of the guiding principles of “public 8

In conceptualizing “engagement life cycles” we were inspired by Kroskrity’s (2021) “lingual life histories,” a “life history narrative which examines language use and cultural linguistic norms as they arise across an individual life” (Rao and Everhart 2021) in its highlighting of the role of self-exploration in the long-term, dynamic nature of engagement.

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548  netta avineri and jocelyn ahlers

anthropology,” manifesting in diverse ways through interactions with key people and events. There are ­topical, methodological, and epistemological throughlines as well as connections across diverse projects. These examples embody the four hallmarks of engaged linguistic anthropology: (1) Explicit attention to the role of language within communities and its impact on social inequities; (2) A “radical redistribution of expertise” (Rymes 2021, p. 204); (3) Iterative reflexivity; and (4) Accountability to oneself and to others. Yiddish and Hebrew Metalinguistic Communities: Engagement as Long-Term Connections In Avineri’s ethnographic research, engagement was understood as longitudinal, in-depth interactions with communities that connect to a language. Especially salient in this work have been hallmark 2 (radical redistribution of expertise) and hallmark 4 (mutual accountability). The researcher’s personal and professional interests intertwined in a dissertation focused on a three-year multi-sited ethnography of Yiddish language socialization with a range of metalinguistic communities, groups of “positioned social actors engaged primarily in discourse about a language” (Avineri 2012, 2014, 2017, 2019a). Engagement with these communities (including learners, educators, language advocacy organizational leaders, and community members) involved participant-observation in classes, workshops, and cultural events—an ethnographic process that involved her becoming part of the Yiddish metalinguistic community. Through interviews, classroom discourse analysis, and examination of diverse media, the “metalinguistic community” model emerged based on Yiddish while also looking outward into other heritage language communities with similar features and generalizable themes (see Avineri and Harasta 2021). At that time a focus on social justice was implicit but not foregrounded, with the research centering on a heritage/endangered language in secular Jewish immigrant communities. Building deep relationships with particular educators, learners, and leaders throughout this process was central because of the long-term nature of Avineri’s engagement and the communities’ focus on creating positive impact for future generations. The research has been shared and disseminated through more traditional forms of academic knowledge sharing (e.g., articles, book chapters, and conference presentations), alongside opportunities to consult on Yiddish culture curricula and be interviewed by journalists about the research. Through a process of iterative reflexivity, newer conceptualizations of “engagement” have emerged in relation to the broader impact of this and related research. In ongoing collaboration with colleagues (researchers and practitioners) focused on Hebrew use in a range of educational contexts, collective engagement has focused on effecting change in specific domains identified as relevant by a particular community of practice. This formulation has especially foregrounded redistributing expertise and accountability to oneself and to others. Based on a two-year study of Hebrew educational contexts including surveys, interviews, and observations of diverse stakeholders throughout the US, multimodal engagement with publics has taken various forms including a detailed report and associated infographic,9 a news article,10 and various webinars11 designed for Hebrew educational communities of practice. The original study invited perspectives from a range

  9 https://www.casje.org/lets-stop-calling-it-hebrew-school-rationales-goals-and-practices-hebrew-education-part-time-2 10

  https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/lets-stop-calling-it-hebrew-schoolnew-study-debunks-myths-about-part-timejewish-education/

11

https://hebrewatthecenter.org/skira/; https://hebrewatthecenter.org/sicha/

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engaged linguistic anthropology  549

of stakeholders within the Hebrew educational space, and the results and findings are now being shared with educators and administrators; this iterative process allows the research to continue its life beyond academic spheres. These multiple modalities (cf. Avineri et al. 2021) of knowledge-sharing are a central part of the engagement project, embodying a reconceptualization of the diverse connections among research/practice/ collaborators/audiences/publics. Multimodality therefore becomes a method for redistributing expertise. Language, Social Justice, and Critical Service-Learning: Engagement for Social Change More recently, Avineri’s conceptualizations of “engagement” have expanded to include a foregrounded focus on equity and social change and a thorough commitment to diverse knowledges throughout the entire process, therefore integrating all four hallmarks of engaged linguistic anthropology. Her collaborations with colleagues over the past decade have focused explicitly on language and social justice, including a focus on (among other issues) the “language gap,” sports team mascot names, and bilingual education. Here, engagement involves collaborative actions with local communities and diverse audiences to effect small scale and broader social change. Exploring interdisciplinary connections among language-related fields has been central to these endeavors—e.g., applied linguistics’ focus on “addressing real world issues” (http://www.aaal.org) alongside linguistic anthropology’s commitment to ongoing meaningful relationships with communities. She sees this trajectory as having begun in earnest in 2010, when she co-organized a “public conference” on “Linguistic Diversity in American Classrooms” in response to reports from Arizona that teachers with “accented English” were being removed from classrooms. In that case, a collaborative space for educators and the general public was created in order to engage around issues of language, education, discrimination, and marginalization. Since then, bringing together scholars with social justice-oriented foci to collectively build awareness with an eye towards social change has been central to her engaged praxis. Her approach to this work has been informed by other fields, including critical servicelearning (Butin 2010; Mitchell 2008) and community engagement due to their focus on power redistribution and social change. The courses, conferences, projects, and professional associations she has been involved with have foregrounded meaningful community-based projects for social change.12 For example, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Committee for Human Rights/Society for Linguistic Anthropology Task Group on Language and Social Justice (LSJ) is a professional collective of engaged linguistic anthropologists, for which Avineri served as a “Core Member.”13 This organization provides engaged linguistic anthropologists with concrete ways to mobilize the four hallmarks. The pernicious notion of a 30 million “word/language gap” between working class (minoritized) children and middle class (white) children has been one central focus of the LSJ Task Group. In collaborative efforts focused on this issue, engaged linguistic 12

At an especially inspiring Imagining America conference session there were “buzzwords” on poster paper around the room, including the word “engagement.” Conference attendees were able to walk around the room and add words, symbols, and drawings that they associated with the buzzwords. One drawing associated with “engagement” was a hand with a wedding ring, and our discussion highlighted the notion that “engagement is a promise.” This notion has stuck with the first author since—highlighting the ongoing nature of true engagement as well as the forward-looking nature of these forms of collaboration. 13 In the LSJ the adopted practice is to use the wording of “Core Members” to designate the leadership team (as opposed to words like “Chair,” “Vice Chair,” etc.) as a way to demonstrate a range of knowledges alongside flattened hierarchies for engaged collaborative work.

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anthropologists are reflexive with and mutually accountable to one another and their publics/audiences through ongoing dialogue across diverse viewpoints. Engaging in a range of modalities to raise public awareness of the racist underpinnings of this notion has involved a Journal of Linguistic Anthropology “Forum” bringing together a range of scholarly voices on the topic (Avineri et al. 2015), a video abstract,14 an Anthropology News piece,15 an AAA Blog post, a AAA 2015 panel, and media interviews.16 The public and naturalized racism of sports team mascot names, symbols, and imagery is another issue that has been addressed by members of this group through a range of modes. These collaborations and public engagement have included an op-ed,17 the 2015 AAA Statement on Sports Team Mascot Names,18 demonstrations of the professional organization’s commitment19 to human rights and combating racist ideologies and practices, and a book chapter for undergraduate audiences (Avineri and Perley 2019) focused on “audience coalescence.” In 2021, Avineri was approached by a high school student collaborating with other members of her school community to research and take action around their school’s mascot. They sought out diverse academic and community perspectives to reconsider its harm and have since chosen to remove the mascot from their school. This example demonstrates how our engaged and public work can resonate at diverse scales. This engaged linguistic anthropological approach to a particular language and social justice issue involved multiple layers of iterative reflexivity as well as mutual accountability to raise awareness and mobilize others for social change.20 These language and social justice initiatives have foregrounded a public orientation and ongoing collaboration with one’s interdisciplinary communities to effect social change and provided relevant socialization practices for collaborative advocacy. She has found that ethnographic approaches to participant-observation and attention to language, genres, and audiences have been essential methodological training for engaged linguistic anthropology. More recently, she has built upon the Language and Social Justice Task Group’s ethos in other professional organizations as well as engaging with academic communities and diverse publics through a range of publicly oriented genres (e.g., position statements, newsletter articles, endorsements, webinars, and professional listservs). Her hope is that this ethos provides a blueprint for communities of practices committed to social change. The four hallmarks have permeated these various projects and initiatives in diverse ways, demonstrating how engagement can meaningfully occur at individual, institutional, local, and public-­facing scales.

Engagement, in Dialogue with Community

When Ahlers began working with Native California communities engaged in projects of language revitalization more than twenty-five years ago, her work was informed by a model of language research that mirrored what Keren Rice has called “advocacy research,” which 14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj3c1WXZ9fI     https://www.linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2016/08/29/an-news-the-gap-that-wont-be-filled-an-anthropoliticalcritique-of-the-language-gap-by-avineri-et-al/

15

16 17 18 19

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/beyond-the-word-gap/479448/ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-this-holiday-season-le_b_6262672 https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=13107

https://associationsnow.com/2015/03/anthropological-association-takes-stand-native-american-mascot-debate/ 20 The first author’s research with Yiddish metalinguistic communities provided her with a deep commitment to endangered language communities. She found through her ethnographic research that processes of minoritization and marginalization in language communities are pervasive across contexts, and also particular to specific communities/contexts. This earlier work helped prepare her to foreground Indigenous voices and eventually partner with Indigenous scholars to engage around issues of language and social justice.

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engaged linguistic anthropology  551

includes “research on and for subjects” (emphasis original; Rice 2006, p. 3). Within this framework, the researcher has linguistic questions to investigate, and at the same time, plans to produce materials of interest and relevance to the community within which work takes place—research on and for. In this context, engagement might be defined as longitudinal, in-depth interactions with communities that connect to a language, with an eye toward serving community needs as they pertain to language. Over time, the researcher was exposed to voices which explicitly questioned the problematic structures and assumptions that underlie research “on” communities, and the author’s engagement trajectory, presented below, increasingly moved towards an incorporation of the four hallmarks of engaged anthropology outlined above. After a number of years completing research projects informed by the concepts of advocacy and empowering research, the author began work with members of the Elem Pomo Tribal community in the context of the Breath of Life language revitalization workshop. In this workshop, which pairs linguists with community language researchers who are interested in using archival materials in language revitalization work, the author was assigned to be the Elem team’s linguist. This team, composed of language speaker Mrs. Loretta Kelsey, learner Mr. Robert Geary, and the author, continued to work together after the workshop was over. The early development of a practical orthography of Elem led to a working praxis (Freire 2000) which fostered the development of the hallmarks of engaged anthropology. As a linguist, the author initially assumed that she would apply the alphabetic principle—one symbol per phoneme in the language—to inform the construction of the practical orthography. It became immediately clear, however, that this approach failed to address what mattered to the speaker and learners, who most desired a practical orthography that felt intuitive. This was especially important to elder speaker Mrs. Kelsey, whose personal language notes became a guiding document in the process. This meant, for example, using letters in ways that, as often as possible, mirrored English orthography, and avoiding symbols which were jarring for Elem community members (e.g., @ for schwa /ə/). At monthly meetings, team members would transcribe Mrs. Kelsey’s speech into the current version of the practical orthography and compare notes. Differences between team members’ transcriptions engendered discussion and amendments to the orthography. This process eventually resulted in a practical orthography that the speaker and learners were comfortable with and that served their needs. The process, then, recognized types of expertise other than the academic one that is so often given precedence in the development of orthographies and other language documentation (and often, revitalization) materials. The process also honored accountability. The development of the practical orthography was important to the language community. It was the writing system that the author used for everything that the team produced for community use, and for all publications which referenced the language. At the time, this was not common practice. In earlier projects, the author had seen the frustration Native language speakers and learners in one Tribal community felt when a senior linguist insisted upon inserting morpheme breaks in documentation of the language. These breaks did not accord with their sense of how the language worked, and it was an external imposition of an analytical construct that was not theirs. Repeated discussions that honored mutual accountability, including the recognition of how uncomfortable elder speaker Mrs. Kelsey often was with morphological analysis which focused on breaking the language down into its component parts, prioritized respect for Mrs. Kelsey’s expertise, and required that team members pay attention when she pointed out other ways of understanding the language and its structure and use. This in turn opened up investigation into broader questions about how the language and its use by fluent and

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not-yet-fluent speakers alike played an important role in constituting the community. By moving the linguistic work of the project away from orthodoxies about “good speakers”, and, instead, opening the door to recognizing the many ways that community members are good speakers of their languages, in whatever combination they may appear, it highlighted how much there is to be learned from how those languages function within their speech communities (e.g., Ahlers 2006; Ahlers 2017; Avineri and Harasta 2021). Thus, the project as a whole, founded on the group’s understanding of the importance of Elem to the community, and of the ways in which its reclamation was one important part of working to reduce the many social inequities that were a result of systemic institutional abuses and attempts to eradicate Pomo language, government, history, and culture, came to include the hallmarks of engaged linguistic anthropology. As a result of this experience, engagement came to mean work, located within a community, which decentered academic expertise in favor of recognizing and centering the expertises of speakers and learners. It also focused on not just engaging in language revitalization, but also supporting language reclamation.21 Most recently, the author has had the opportunity to work with the Kawaiisu Language and Cultural Center (KLCC) on a range of projects aimed at documentation and revitalization of nüwa abigip (also known as Kawaiisu). These projects have all been initiated by the KLCC, a non-profit organization administered by members of the Kawaiisu community. Nüwa abigip is an Indigenous Uto-Aztecan language of what is now Kern County, CA. As of 2021, there is one first-language speaker, Mrs. Lucille Girado-Hicks; her brother, Mr. Luther Girado, and sister, Mrs. Betty Hernandez, both of whom have since passed away, were integral members of the project team. Luther’s daughter, Ms. Julie Turner, and KLCC grant-writer Ms. Laura Grant, both learner/speakers of the language, have been leaders in formulating project goals in constant consultation with the community of speakers (both old and new) and learners. All project goals have been defined by members of the community, and the impetus for projects comes from the community, rather than from the outside researchers who are involved in the project; this is what is meant by community-defined and -driven work. The Kawaiisu documentation projects have focused on building capacity in community researchers so that they may analyze their own language; the role of the author and the other project linguist, Dr. Justin Spence, has been to share expertise as needed, guided by the leadership of the community throughout the projects. While some scholarly publications and research have arisen from the team’s work, these have been incidental, rather than central, outcomes of the projects. Furthermore, community researchers have increasingly become the authors and presenters of outward-facing articles and presentations. Ahlers’s role in KLCC projects, informed by the work with the Elem Pomo, fits much more closely into a model of “accompaniment” (Bucholtz et al. 2016), than of “helper” or “outside expert.” Community researchers have expertise in their history and the role of nüwa abigip in the community and have made their long-term language goals explicit. For example, during the launch meeting for one project, they said they wished for a deeper understanding of “the vas, the gups, and the dums” (Julie Turner, personal communication)—the complex verbal morphology of the language. Recognizing the role that recording, transcription, and analysis of elicitations had played in linguist Dr. Spence’s

21

“[P]lace-specific actions through which individuals and/or groups are countering forms of marginalisation experienced by minority language speakers and communities” (De Korne and Leonard 2017, p. 5).

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engaged linguistic anthropology  553

understanding of the morphology of nüwa, the KLCC began a National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages-funded project (Award ID: BCS-1561925) to record spontaneous conversation among speakers. The nearly 60-hour corpus that was developed in the early stages of the project became the focus of intensive work in learning to complete multi-tiered transcriptions using Elan software. Early on in the work, based on feedback from community researchers as they learned the software and became more comfortable with the process of transcription and morphological analysis, team member Laura Grant recognized the usefulness of style guides for aiding team members in the recognition and glossing of morphemes; these became an unexpected and significant product of the project. This is one example among many of the ongoing conversations, reflections, and reconsiderations that have been a hallmark of this kind of work. The transcription style guides themselves were and are living documents, adjusting as additional data clarify the roles of specific morphemes. The guides have become an important turn in the conversation with extant (largely linguist-driven) documentation of the language; as community researchers have analyzed nüwa, they recognize places where today’s language use differs significantly from that documented earlier. While some of the differences they note could be due to changes over time, in other cases, community understanding of what speakers are doing with language informs this new analysis. In other words, community expertise in their language and its use is driving theoretical models about language structure and function. The author’s role in this part of the process can be conceptualized as one of translator22—offering explanations of what was meant in earlier linguistic analyses of the language and entering into conversation about the degree to which those analyses fit community understandings of language-in-use as documented in the recordings. This critical collaboration across diverse knowledges is another hallmark of engaged anthropology and is foundational to the team’s work together. This project, then, has at various times been focused on bringing the tools of linguistic anthropology to community-defined and -driven projects, and on building capacity within the community to conduct linguistic analysis themselves. The collaboration in the project has relied on reflexivity and accountability for its success. And a key element has always been to recognize where expertise in nüwa lies—with speakers, learners, and community researchers. These brief glimpses into some of the author’s work with Tribal communities engaged in language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation foreground what we call a life cycle of engaged linguistic anthropological work. This is different from the “advocacy research” model (Rice 2006) because it relies on learning from and with community members and elder speakers. The researcher has an obligation to become accountable to communities for that learning. That recognition leads to the radical redistribution of expertise described above (perhaps better framed as a recognition of where expertise has always lain in such language work—with speakers and community members), as well as to modes of mutual accountability, including the iterative reflexivity that keeps each project fresh and responsive to community needs. This “life cycle” is one which may be familiar to others who have found themselves, over time, becoming more engaged in their praxis. 22

This is the term that community members have used, so I keep it here. My role, they said, was to translate “linguistics” into everyday English. This was of particular importance in finding ways to make use of extant linguistic documentation, which used opaque (and often theory-dependent) linguistic terminology to describe the language’s polysynthetic morphology.

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Conclusions Through our discussion in this chapter, we have discussed both engaged linguistic anthropology as a practice and engaged linguistic anthropologists—individual scholars and practitioners who are grounded in relationships within academic and community-based spheres. Explicitly acknowledging both practices and professionals involves theoretical and methodological implications, through in-depth exploration of the four ELA hallmarks described above: explicit attention to the role of language within communities and its impact on social inequities; radical redistribution of expertise; iterative reflexivity; and accountability to oneself and to others. Linguistic anthropologists’ methods and training focus on interaction, products, processes, and the dynamics of micro, meso, and macro level processes. Engaged linguistic anthropologists balance in-depth observation of the world as it is with collectively envisioning the world as it could be. Therefore, there may be tensions between objectivity and subjectivity in building a different reality (see Avineri et al. 2021). Integrating multiple perspectives into one’s theory of change involves reconceptualizing both academic and community knowledges. Building methodological toolkits for an ethnography for social change involves a reflexive, iterative, reciprocal, dynamic process that upends hierarchies of knowledge. As these cases have demonstrated, theory is developed through methods that are grounded and bottom–up, and that incorporate community perspectives. A community-centered (vs. discipline-centered) approach in which the community is visible necessarily pushes the field to consider important issues around co-authorship, citation practices, the genesis of theory, and an acknowledgement of participants’ roles as co-researchers. We encourage linguistic anthropologists to reflect upon their own “engagement life cycles” to map out their current, future, and aspirational approaches to their work. One starting point is to reflect upon the below questions in relation to their own praxis: Your why—review what the goals of the research are, whether it is applied, and how the goals are decided upon. With whom are you working (individuals, groups, communities, contexts)? How are you working with them? Who are the authors of the work produced in a project? Next, consider what language-based issues are the focus of the project, and what societal inequities are implicated and/or addressed. How will the knowledge generated by the project be shared, and who are the intended publics and audiences? And finally, now what—what are the implications of this research?

Contemplating the answers to these questions considering the four hallmarks described above can be useful not only at the outset of a project but also, in the spirit of iterative reflexivity, throughout the subsequent work as well. As we have seen throughout this chapter, engaged linguistic anthropology’s focus on connections among our research, pedagogy, and advocacy pushes us to reconsider what are the “tools of linguistic anthropology” and how we can then mobilize them for impactful social change.

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31

Language and Racism

Krystal A. Smalls and Jenny L. Davis Introduction This chapter, which looks at some of many tangled and layered connections between language and racism, begins with the introduction of “modern race,” by which we mean race and racism within the context of European modernity. Race, the division and classification of humans based on the arbitrary grouping of observable physical traits and notions of ancestry, is a social system (i.e., a broad network of relations and the structures) that has taken many forms throughout human history and often functions as ethnoracial structures situated in a hierarchy.1 Ethnoracial structures provide political and sociocultural rubrics for sorting people based on physical features and notions of ancestry and are embedded in, and emerge out of, layered histories and structures of power that traverse the local and global, therefore making any instantiation of race inextricable from racism. The term “ethnoracial” takes into account the ways in which structures of difference based on perceived phenotypical variation (race) and structures of difference based on understandings of recent heritage (ethnicity) often bleed into one another and do much of the same sociocultural and political work. And, informed by intersectional theory (Collins 1998; Crenshaw 1989), we understand the ethnoracial as inextricable from gender, sexuality, class, and (dis)ability and the social hierarchies through which they are constructed and lived, even when our discussions do not explicitly parse these dimensions. The modern social system and construction that many of us identify as “race” is composed of classifications formulated over several historical moments, which may include periods preceding what many refer to as modernity (as well as postmodernity or “late modernity” (Giddens 1991)) but that were formalized during this extensive era.2 Throughout each of its stages, iterations of biological race (via scientific racism) were generated to eventually produce classifications of humans that have significantly conditioned many aspects of social organization and sociality across historical times and places.

1 2

Du Bois 1940/2011; Omi and Winant 2014; Painter 2011. See Bindman et al. 2010; Heng 2011; Kelley 2017; Makalani 2021; Mills 1997; Painter 2011; Robinson 2000.

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

Modern race takes form via colonialism (settler colonialism, especially) and racial slavery (i.e., the Atlantic slave trade), two structural processes animated by capitalism.3 Together, these structural processes (capitalism, colonialism, and racial slavery) serve as the cognates of what Barnor Hesse described as “racialized modernity” to name the ways in which modernity was always already a racial project (2007). Because modern race has been as widely exported as modernity itself, when studying any aspect of language (formal, functional, or other) in a context that has been informed to any extent by European modernity and the understandings of human(ness) and governance that it violently peddles (namely, around civility and citizenship, sovereignty and nation), it is necessary to have some sense of its prevalent racial ontologies (i.e., categories of racialized subjects/objects) and meanings that have been directly or performatively connected to these categories. In particular, for scholarship concerning language and discourse in the US, or in social spaces impacted by the US, some grappling with the subject categories that emerged in those places from these yoked structural processes of modernity is requisite to avoid reproducing certain harms. This means acknowledging and sitting with the ways in which modern race helped ­construct the concepts of “Human,” “Savage,” “Other,” and property and in so doing, effectively produced a racial order in which those racialized as white, or as closest to white in a global context, were positioned at the apex and those who were considered Black (African, “Negro”), or closest to Black, were positioned at the nadir (Wynter 2003), or at the “bottom of the well” (Bell 2018)—a slot sometimes, and uncomfortably, shared with other Indigenous and racialized peoples, depending on geopolitical context. In tandem with racial slavery and its afterlife (Hartman 2007), which constructs Black subjects in the Americas as property (Spillers 1987), the overlapping project of settler colonial dispossession and genocide via European and American colonial regimes racializes Native American populations in the US as “historical, endangered, and artifactual” (Meek 2020). In this ideological framework, Native Americans are imagined as a singular group of people whose characteristics are as much temporal (of the past) as geographic, biological, and linguistic.4 These “raciontologies” (Rosa and Diaz 2020) have engendered a popular US praxis of treating Black and Native people and the fruits of our intellectual and creative labor as the property of others—in particular, via linguistic appropriation and ownership through knowledge about our language structures and practices (Davis and Smalls 2021). They also engender a sense of the inalienable right to police Black and Native (and people of color) bodies, movements, and behavior (e.g., regulating language, dress, and other semiotic practices via “Karens”; “Permit Pattys”; vigilantism, etc.). And, these processes of racialization have rendered Native American and Black as not only mutually exclusive categories5 but also as monolithic categories in which ethnic and national distinctions are effectively erased or deemed irrelevant in the popular imaginary, even regarding language.6 While modern race is not a “Black–white binary,” as many understand it and take it up, its general hierarchical form does have rather consistent and foregrounded (but not immutable) poles that help organize the global field of racial meaning-making (or, the semiotic processes used to realize and legitimize racialization) and that often get operationalized as a binary. Who is slotted as white or Black, in-between, or something else will vary in 3

See Du Bois 1904; Hesse 2007; Mills 2003; Painter 2011; Robinson 1983/2000; Williams 1944/2015. See Byrd 2011; Deloria 2008; O’Brien 2010; TallBear 2003, 2013. For discussion of how these practices were then mobilized globally, see Byrd 2010. 5 Byrd 2019; King 2019; Leroy 2016. 6 Byrd 2019; King 2019; Leroy 2016. 4

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different places and times, and the antipodal categories may only abstractly and/or unconsciously condition the way meaning about being human is made (in the context of global or transnational interaction), even where no Black-identified or white-identified people are present. Therefore, the hierarchical continuum of race as constructed vis-à-vis European modernity is crucially relevant for examining the ways groups are racialized in the US, Europe, throughout the Americas, and elsewhere. This understanding means that most considerations of race (as racialization, racialism, racial identity, or racism) in and beyond language study demand an engagement with modern race (as a global organizing principle that is always already racist in that it is based on a relatively stable (but not rigidly fixed) racial hierarchy). Alongside several scholars, Arthur Spears has long argued that considering the “macro-contexts” (2019) in which linguistic and discursive processes of racialization emerge is vital for language scholarship intended to be decolonial, anti-racist, or abolitionist. In the following section, we highlight two central approaches (raciolinguistics and Indigenous and decolonizing approaches) that have helped shape the study of language and racism, and one key concept from the field: “mock language.” Following Spears’ (2021) and others’ calls to attend to the broad structures of race/ism that condition individual, interpersonal, and institutional practice (Hill 2008; Rosa and Díaz 2020), we then apply the approaches and the concept of mock language in a discussion about the gaming universe of World of Warcraft (WoW). In particular, we consider how the discursive practices that constitute much WoW sociality help reproduce modern race/ism (as antiblackness and anti-Nativeness in our inquiry).

Key Approaches and Concepts in the Study of Language and Race/ism Key Approach: Raciolinguistics

The focused study of the myriad interconnections between language and race—taken up as racialism, racialization, racial identity, or racism—gained prominence in the 1970s (e.g., Labov 1972; Smitherman 1977), and since then, has remained a steadily growing subfield (which encompasses linguistics, anthropology, communications, and cultural studies) despite the US’s fickle attention to, and concern with, racial (in)justice. The 2016 volume Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race (edited by H. Samy Alim, John Rickford, and Arnetha Ball) retroactively named and formalized the subfield and, with contributions that have reverberated throughout language studies, helped graph the current raciolinguistic terrain of several nation-states. This pivotal text, alongside the 2020 Oxford Handbook on Language and Race (edited by Angela Reyes, H. Samy Alim, and Paul Kroskrity) and the bodies of work that help constitute the subfield, lay bare the willful violences and the unintended harms, erasures, and misconstruals that can emerge when we bypass race in our meaning-making about social kinds, social orders, and social life overall. And, critically, many of these works also examine the ways racially marginalized peoples navigate, resist, and live beyond racist structures and practices.7 Naming and Addressing White Supremacy  In recent years, an increasing number of studies on language and race/ism have engaged with race scholars’ key interventions including those from Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, anthropology, sociology, education, and history, as well 7

Smitherman 1977; Morgan 1993; Alim 2004; Rosa 2018; and Smalls forthcoming as a few examples.

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as from interdisciplinary language scholars working in these fields. Together, they help us better understand how individuals’ and groups’ racialized identities, intentions, feelings, and thoughts are certainly important sites of inquiry, but must be examined within historical, political, and cultural context.8 They also help us understand how there is no race without racism or its interrelated sociopolitical hierarchies of gender and class, as formulated by the Black Feminist concept of “intersectionality” (Collins 1998; Crenshaw 1989). This approach often takes up intersubjectivity, identity, interpersonal relations and any other phenomena related to person-making not only as relational on the micro-scale of everyday human interaction, but also as contingent upon vast past and present sociopolitical structures. In particular, it considers how people make meaning about selves and others via racial ideologies. Many of these scholars explicitly cast modern race/ism as White Supremacy and have insisted that we consider the ways it helps shape social life and death. For example, Arthur Spears’ game changing edited volume Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture (1999) brought together work which modeled a way of thinking about race and language in relation to White Supremacy that was grounded in theory about race produced by scholars from all over the world; addressed wide political, economic, historical context; and acknowledged the interlocking of race and class. Spears (1999, 2021), Hill (1998, 2008) and others have shown that without a framing that acknowledges the existence and effects of White Supremacy, studies of practices by people who have been constructed as white help position whiteness as an unmarked universal and default human by presenting themselves as studies about “women” or “the working class” or “teachers.” As such, racialized phenomena like calling the police on BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color) people without hesitation, or describing an adult Asian woman as “cute as a button,” might be overlooked or considered merely the actions of individuals and not as possible constituents (or products) of whiteness as a social structure.9 That is to say, scholarship in which a research subject’s designation as white (or relationally white, white-adjacent, symbolically white, provisionally white, etc.) is not factored into analyses helps predicate white normativity and thereby holds up one of the bastions of White Supremacy-cum-whiteness-cum-modern race. When juxtaposed to an almost obsessive attention to practices by Black, Indigenous, and people of color over past centuries, practices which are almost always regarded as related to our “culture” or ethnoracial positioning, the “unmarked whiteness approach” risks presenting the practices of racialized others as culturally or community specific (and homogenous) and does not examine how interactions between white and non-white people, institutions, discourses, etc. are embedded in multiscalar systems of power. Following Jane Hill and her steadfast investment in marking whiteness (1995, 1998, 2008), several scholars have also devoted much of their research to examining how whiteness is reproduced via language, discourse, and related policies.10 Political anthropologist Faye V. Harrison (1995, p. 49) noted the ways in which “the variation in racial constructions, including the conventionally neglected configurations of whiteness” became an anthropological concern some 20 years ago, and emphasized how complex and interrelated sociopolitical trajectories work together to “encode, hierarchize, and pathologize difference.” And, as Mary Bucholtz (2019) explained, when whiteness is

   8 DuBois 1940/2011; Omi and Winant 2014; Painter 2011.    9 See Hill 1998, 2008; Rosa and Díaz 2020; Rosa and Flores 2020; Spears 1999, 2020. 10 See, for example, the scholarship of Mary Bucholtz, Paul Kroskrity, Ana Celia Zentella, Cecilia Cutler, Janet McIntosh, Jennifer Roth-Gordon, Nelson Flores, Lanita Jacobs, Jonathan Rosa, Hilary Dick, Jamie Thomas, Kendra Calhoun, Miyako Inoue, Sherina Feliciano-Santos, deandre miles-hercules, and Jamaal Muwwakkil.

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language and racism  563

attended to, especially in popular discourse, it may be in service to maintaining White Supremacy through the performance of a vulnerable or “wounded” white positionality. Careful attention to broader context, and to the primacy and resourcefulness of whiteness (as a product and conduit of White Supremacy), inspired and organized a 2021 special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on Language and White Supremacy in which contributing authors earnestly took up the task of examining the linguistics and discursive workings of White Supremacy and the myriad forms of coloniality and antiblackness it has engendered (Smalls et al. 2021). Like Hill’s and others’ body of work, such scholarship helps us to better connect the dots between a heinous system of White Supremacy, the structures it engenders, and everyday practices. Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Raciolinguistic Perspective  In 2015, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa introduced the concept “raciolinguistic ideologies” in order to emphasize and provide precise terminology for the ideological co-naturalization and co-articulation of language and race (Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa and Flores 2017, 2020). Their concept allows us to consider, for example, a common assumption of languages deemed “creoles” as dumbed down (or simplified) versions of a European language (e.g., Jamaican Patois, African American English/Language, Hawaiian Pidgin/Hawai’i Creole English) as an expression of a language ideology that likely emerges from and/or reifies racial ideologies about Black and other Indigenous peoples as intellectually inferior. This particular kind of raciolinguistic ideology, like most things we extract from the social world and name as ideological, actually laminates several ideological frameworks about language and race and does so in ways that help buttress one another. As part of their effort to offer decolonial and decolonizing tools to students and scholars of language (professional and lay), Rosa and Flores show us how language ideologies about and within racially marginalized/oppressed communities in the United States are configured within specific forms of racism, specific forms that they and others tell us are situated within/under/against White Supremacy and/as coloniality (2017; Rutazibwa 2020). Specifically, the “raciolinguistic perspective” (Rosa and Flores 2017) that they propose urges not only a painstaking, and painful, examination of prevalent ways of thinking about, listening to, sorting, and treating people who are racialized as other than white (i.e., the global majority in terms of racial ontologies), but also how those ways are colonial (as in, tethered to European and US empire) and historical (as in, situated in history). Picking up Miyako Inuoue’s concept of the “listening subject” (Inoue 2003), they implore us to turn our analytical gaze to those who help determine how others are heard (and seen, Rosa 2019) and to the ideological structures that shape their determinations. Alongside others, we echo that the context of various racisms (or racial orders) usually entails the spatially and temporally expansive, inextricable, and mated structures of racial slavery and European settler colonialism.11 Evident throughout Rosa and Flores’ collaborative work, and in the work of most Black and/or Indigenous scholars and other scholars of color, is that these processes of racialization occur within the spacetime of White Supremacy, colonialism, and racial slavery (i.e., within the historical context of modern race). And, while we suggest a wide spatiotemporal reach of White Supremacy vis-a-vis European modernity that must be accounted for, we also recognize that the categories implicitly or explicitly imposed by these structures (or structuring principles) can be configured differently in different contexts, or, as Harrison stated, that: “Although the multiplicity of local and national racisms cannot be 11

Clarke and Thomas 2006; Davis and Smalls 2021; King 2019.

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564  krystal a. smalls and jenny l. davis

reduced to a uniform Western racial hegemony, neither can they be separated from Western cultural influence” (1995, p. 50)—or from the political-economic logics of Western (European-cum-US) imperialism. In addition to race and language studies that center verbal language, some scholarship specifically considers the role of racialized bodies and other non-linguistic signs in semiotic mediation, via a racial semiotics, or “raciosemiotics” (Smalls 2020; forthcoming) (Rosa 2019).

Key Approach: Indigenous and Decolonizing Approaches

Much of the work of Indigenous approaches to language and racism has focused on the often taken for granted narratives about Native American and Indigenous peoples, especially as they are mediated by or channeled through ideologies about language. These narratives typically rely on “Native American” as a racial formation and position Native American and Indigenous languages—and the peoples who speak them—through frameworks of “extinction,” “failing,” “endangerment,” and “lasting.”12 Indigenous approaches have also exposed linguistic anthropology’s (and other fields of language study) role in creating, holding up, and circulating such narratives and discourses—especially through the frameworks of “Salvage Anthropology”13 which imagine language or linguistic data to be separate from, and separable from the communities that speak, have spoken, or may speak those languages again. They also disrupt commonly-held notions that linguistic anthropology, and closely related fields like linguistics, are somehow separate from and therefore not accountable for settler colonial practices of land theft, the collection of human remains, and ethnographic collections (Davis and Smalls 2021). This attention to the many machinations of settler colonialism has meant examining Indigeneity and its relationship to race, and also naming White Supremacy and examining how various modes of white normativity have depended on and sustained the disposability of Native American people, languages, cultures, and sovereignty. In addition, Indigenous approaches have called on scholars for several decades to decolonize their research practices by using collaborative research methods, and learning from Indigenous methodologies. These approaches also urge the refusal of narratives of the inevitable disappearance or demise of Indigenous peoples and/or our languages and offer frameworks for language survivance, reclamation, and Indigenous language futurities, as tools for centering Indigenous epistemologies and perspectives in research about Indigenous peoples.14

Key Concept: Mock Language

First introduced in Jane Hill’s research on Mock Spanish, mock language is the use of appropriated (interethnic) semiotic resources from languages or varieties associated with racialized populations to display covert racism through the reproduction of negative stereotypes.15 The use of mock language thus positions those languages (and their speakers) as both (racio)linguistically marked and un-American (in the context of the US) or un-white. This type of language use is pervasive and found in everything from casual conversations to film, television, and social media to greeting cards and business names and in settings both 12

Leonard 2007, 2020, 2021, Meek 2011, 2020, Davis 2017a,b, 2021, Perley 2012. See for discussion Leonard 2020, 2021; Davis 2017a,b; Perley 2012. 14 Davis 2017a,b, 2018; Leonard 2020; Leonard and Haynes 2010; Miller et al. 2021. 15 See Barrett 2006; Bucholtz and Lopez 2011; Chun 2010, 2016; Hill 1995, 1998, 2008; Meek 2006, 2020; Mendoza-Denton 2017; Rosa 2016; Roth-Gordon 2016; Zentella 2003. 13

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explicitly connected to the populations being mocked—like Mock Spanish used in a Mexican restaurant (detailed in Barrett 2006)—and in those with no obvious connection. Critically, mock registers usually operate at the level of broad ethnoracial categories, rather than of specific languages or nationalities. In fact, the erasure or blurring of those specificities is often a key feature of these registers and aids in their ability to racialize. For example, a speaker may produce a Mock (East) Asian way of speaking to mock an East Asian person of any ethnicity, maybe calling it “Chinese,” rather than produce Mock Korean or Mock Cantonese and in this way, lump all East Asian languages and people together to construct a racialized grouping for which ethnic or other distinctions therein are not relevant. Similarly, Mock American Indian English (or Hollywood Injun English, per Meek 2006) exists rather than Mock Lakota or Mock Choctaw and uses features from across a wide array of (often unrelated) languages or makes up features and words altogether. This practice of consolidating and genericizing significantly different languages in order to perform and help reify (that is, make into a thing that feels real) a type of person relies heavily on raciolinguistic ideologies (as previously defined). Along with the irrelevance of ethnic and other distinctions, knowledge of the syntactical, phonological, or lexical systems of languages and people being mocked becomes irrelevant because the goal is for broad recognizability and as a result, those linguistic systems are reduced to being insignificant, disorderly, and easily available for the purposes of entertainment and ridicule. Not only is accuracy not the intent or concern of the users of mock varieties, they may be intentionally inaccurate in order to position languages like Spanish and African American English as marginal, linguistically unsophisticated, and readily available for outgroup ­consumption (such as when one deploys the common Mock Spanish practices of a­dding  an  “o” to English words (“el cheapo”) or hyper-anglicizing Spanish words (i.e., “grassy-ass”)). Mock language then, is typically reproduced via, and helps produce structures of racism. What mock varieties “do” depends on how the languages and varieties (and critically, their speakers) are positioned within hierarchies of race16 and who produces them. For example, Rosa (2016) demonstrates that Mock Spanish does not impact nor refer universally to all Spanish or Spanish-heritage speakers, but rather those racialized as Latinx (i.e. not Spanish from Spain), thus, Mock Spanish within the context of the United States is more about reinforcing designations of populations as not-white than not-English speaking. Indexicality  Integral to an understanding of mock language, the analytic concept “indexicality” helps us connect linguistic signs (words, pronunciations, whole languages, gestures, etc.) to meanings at play beyond denotational glosses (e.g., dictionary definitions), the immediate context of use, or a speaker/user’s intentions (Ochs 1990; Silverstein 2003). That is to say, indexicality (non-referential indexicality, in particular) is a way of talking about how a sign points to a meaning (or several meanings) that may not be easily identified. These meanings often rely on and help structure social positions, sometimes by helping someone perform a certain social type (like an “educated person” or “political pundit”) and, by contradistinction to the type being performed, help construct another person as a similar or other type. Jane Hill, following Elinor Ochs’ formulation of “direct” and “indirect indexicality” (Ochs 1990) explained how Mock Spanish can simultaneously index different social meanings (Hill 1995). For example, saying “Grassy-ass” (a hyperanglicized pronunciation of the Spanish word gracias) to thank someone may directly index a humorous social type, a cosmopolitan social type, or a familiarity with Spanish and may indirectly construct Spanish (and its speakers) as “objects of derision” (Hill 1995, p. 206). Uses of Mock Spanish, and other mock varieties by extension, also indirectly index a kind of social distance between stereotypical speakers of the mocked language and the speaker using the mock variety. 16

See Rosa 2016.

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A Brief Look at Black and Native (Dis)Possession via Language in Digital Life In order to demonstrate the ways these approaches and concepts (alongside others) help elucidate connections between language and racism in everyday life, we will spend the remainder of this chapter applying a raciolinguistic and raciosemiotic approach to look at mock language in the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). We flag the ways these uses index and/or mediate raciolinguistic ideologies via discursive gaming practices which help perpetuate White Supremacist constructions of Black (specifically Afro-Caribbean and African American) and Native American and Indigenous people in North America. We situate specific practices of temporarily wearing/inhabiting/performing Black and Native people in the “massive multiplayer role-playing online game” (MMRPOG) WoW within an American17 traditional practice of Black and Native dispossession undergirded by racial slavery and settler colonialism. We consider how the “cyber colonial” (Pressnell 2013) social world depicted in WoW through its lore, visual design, and gameplay offers tools, instructions, and permission to carry out what Smalls calls “body snatching” (2019), which encompasses a wide range of practices of dispossession (e.g., mock language, language appropriation, cultural appropriation, blackface, redface, blackphishing, mascotry). Building out from Davis’s ongoing research on race, language, and WoW (2017a), this section examines how “off-line” raciolinguistic ideologies are central to the creation of one of the most extensively played digital games in the world (and the most popular MMORPG (https://www.pcgamesn.com/10-best-pc-mmos)). With more than 100 million accounts created over the game’s lifetime and an average of 5 to 6 million active accounts at any given time (Sarkar 2014), the WoW gaming universe offers high levels of player customization and variation in the gameplay experience including: movement between 1st person and 3rd person player vantage point; PvE (player versus the environment), PvP (player versus player), and role-playing servers; combinations of avatars across gender, race, and class; and a range of modes of sociality occurring in online and offline contexts in player guilds, raid parties, conventions, discussion forums, Fandom sites, etc. All of these experiences interface with the WoW digital domain and its visual and auditory representations, place names, and scripted non-player character interactions and pre-set quest options. The digital world of World of Warcraft is called Azeroth18 and is populated by eleven playable races of humanoids which inform every aspect of gameplay. Both individual gameplay and interactions between players are centered around constant inter-racial antagonism and alliance. While the races in WoW represent a range of species from mundane Humans to fantasy elves to anthropomorphic pandas and cows, many of these races are created through the deployment of mock representations of the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of broad “real-world” ethnoracial groups (Davis 2017a, 2017b; Langer 2008). From the names and language practices of non-player characters (NPCs) and place names that shape the digital linguistic landscape to the ways players themselves take up these mock linguistic practices both inside and outside of the game, WoW sociality provides examples of language and racial conflation across semiotic domains that demonstrate the role of language as a primary means of creating a racialized digital fantasy world that mirrors that of the offline world. And, in doing so, it maintains digital gaming worlds as “white public

17 These ideologies and practices drawn mostly from the United States, but also reflect those throughout the continental Americas to some extent. 18 Later expansions added an additional world, Outland, and the Shadowlands realm.

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space” (Hill 1998), or as spaces in which white normativity and Supremacy are effectively maintained. When starting WoW, players choose between two factions before creating their online character: the Alliance (“resilient,” “just,” and “ambitious” Humans who use an unmarked Standard American English and their allies whose semiotic repertoires draw mainly from the British Isles) or the Horde (centered around a twice enslaved “foreign race” corrupted by a demon-god and their allies whose semiotic repertoires map primarily to minoritized ethnoracial groups in North America) (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Human# ­ Culture). We focus our attention on two Horde mock languages that are combined with a semiotic pastiche of racial stereotypes: the languaging of the Trolls, who use a mock Englishrelated creole (Mock Jamaican Patois); and that of the Tauren, who use a mock American Indian English.19

Noble Savages and Mighty Warriors: Tauren Racial Discourse

The majority of players in the US play for the Alliance as Humans (Nardi 2010), but a much smaller subset of players select Tauren characters, a Horde race of anthropomorphic bovine who live on “the Tundra.” They speak in Mock American Indian English, or “Hollywood Injun English” (HIE) (Meek 2006). HIE is characterized by lexical items like Cochise, How!, Wounded Knee, Chief, and Last Mohican and “the sprinkling of nature metaphors throughout a character’s dialogue” (p. 94). Tauren NPCs have stereotypical names (Cairne Bloodhoof or Brave Cloudmane) and topics of conversation, often linked to nature, being warriors, or shamanism which is combined with a semiotic pastiche of Native American stereotypes. Most Tauren players start off in Camp Narache, Mulgore, with an introductory video that slowly sweeps closer to a Tauren village with tall totem poles and housing structures that are a mash-up of teepees and longhouses. As the view approaches the center of the village, the viewer sees an anthropomorphic cow wearing a large feather headdress and standing in front of multiple cairns holding the wrapped remains of deceased Taurens. The video is accompanied by a voiceover describing Tauren personhood, culture, and history to construct “bestial” and “noble” “warriors” and “hunters” and “child{ren} of the Earth Mother.” Thus, this opening narrative and accompanying video invites players to embody their Tauren avatars and engage with the Tauren landscape through the use of lexical items stereotypically associated with Native Americans. As players of Tauren avatars interact with their digital environment, they encounter place names such as Camp Narache, Thunderbluff, Hunter’s Hill, Red Cloud Mesa, and Bloodhoof Village while the screen identifies nonplayer characters, or NPCs, as “wounded brave” or “fledgling brave.” Some are identified with specific names and levels for those playing in Player Versus Player mode, such as “Brave Running Wolf (level 95 elite),” “Ruul Eagletalon,” and “Brave Rainchaser.” For their first quest, Tauren players interact with Chief Hawkwind, who is standing in front of a large funeral pyre with a wrapped Tauren body on top as other Tauren and a pandaren monk stand nearby while background music and the sound of someone weeping play in the 19 There is also a later-added race of anthropomorphic pandas, the Pandaren who use a Mock Asian (Chun 2010) variety. The Pandaren are the only race that can be either Alliance or Horde; Blizzard describes them as an “enigmatic” people with a “noble history” that “stretches back thousands of years” (https://worldofwarcraft. com/en-us/game/races/pandaren), perhaps reflecting a particular kind of othering reserved for East Asian people in the White Supremacist imaginary. Mink Choi, a Korean American book publisher and long-time WoW player shared in a 2014 NPR article that: “Yes, giant pandas that belong to clans with Chinese-sounding names and lands filled with ‘Asian’ architecture” (Demby 2014).

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background. Chief Hawkwind, when activated by players, greets them with “Well met,” and then “How!”—the second of seven different greetings that represent the NPC greeting repertoire of all Taurens. Importantly, all Tauren quests and NPCs deploy HIE features— the latter even when interacting with non-Tauren characters in the game. As such, all players playing Horde characters, and many playing Alliance characters, will encounter this mock Native linguistic representation.

Violent Savages and Dark Magic: Troll Racial Discourse

WoW’s website tells us that “The savage trolls of Azeroth are infamous for their cruelty, dark mysticism, and seething hatred for the other races,” establishing them as a particular kind of savage quite distinct from the Tauren. We are also told that the race has been “plagued by a history of subservience and exile” (https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/ game/races/troll). While Human NPCs have names like “Benjamin Foxworthy,” “Merissa Stilwell,” and “Marcus Jensen,” and offer programmed greetings of “hey there” and “good day to you,” in towns with names like Goldshire, Troll NPCs, in contrast, bear names that incorporate non-human animalistic features (which often index their non-human physiological traits) such as “Lar Prowltusk,” “Vel’rin Fang,” and “Chief Ukorz Sandscalp.” The tusked, longarmed, strong-legged beings frequently greet players with “Greetings, mon,” and “Spirits be wit ya, mon.” Like the Tauren, they are organized into tribes but dwell in mostly tropical settings called Sen’jin Village and Darkspear Isle. Many Troll names also index a stereotypical “traditional African” phonology and morphology that seems to be based on Bantu languages’ agglutinative structures that feature multiple short open syllables (namely, Consonant-Vowel clusters) (e.g., “Una Kobuna,” “Unjari (Feltongue),” “Ruuzulu”). In general, Troll language use includes the highly stigmatized (and usually misused) habitual aspective “be” of African American Language and related varieties, phonetic erosion (such as word-final consonant reduction and deletion), and replacing theta (/th/) with /d/. One of the most marked (indexically salient) features of Troll language, however, is the use of mon— a gender-neutral, highly informal, term of address—helping to construct it as a Mock Jamaican Patois. As an example, in a beginning quest for people playing Hunter Troll avatars, players are addressed as mon and then are given instructions to learn basic weaponry skills by striking targets shaped like tiki (Trolls’ magically animated masks) in language using several of the mentioned features. With its “africanized” namings, incorporation of Oceanic cultural products (e.g., tikis), and indiscriminate uses of features from Jamaican Patois and African American Language, Troll language ways effectively index an aggregated Blackness in which ethnic distinctions are irrelevant—similar to Tauren mock language. In a wowpedia.fandom.com guide to playing Troll, which opens with the Mock Patois introduction, “So, ya want ta be a Troll, mon?” Trolls are described as “violent and bloodthirsty” with “tribal” and “shamanastic” roots. This prologue to playing Troll (assumed to be written by an expert player) claims that the race is “based on Haitian and Jamaican cultures” and, ironically, warns players against using stereotypes “to an extreme degree” (seeming to note that some use of stereotypes is unavoidable) lest they risk appearing “racist and offensive.” It then asserts—in line with several other commenters (approximately 50) we came across on this site and on WoW’s discussion forum—that some other WoW races are also based on “real world cultures” (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/How_to_roleplay_a_troll). This metalinguistic account also makes pointed connections between physiological difference and/or deviance and linguistic production (“having huge tusks jutting out of

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your mouth” that are inferred to help produce the “accent”). These particular ideologies about the ways language is linked to essential difference help maintain the anti-Black raciolinguistic logics of early linguistic and ethnological theories—and enduring folk theories— about “thick lips” and varieties produced by people of recent African descent (Crawfurd 1866; Dillard 1973).

Digital (Linguistic) Role-Play as Body Snatching in the Settler–Slave State

In WoW, playable humanoid races are patently tied to colonial groupings based on biological, geographic, and linguistic mappings of race. This is done through explicit expressions of racial stereotypes about dispositions, traits, spiritual practices, and perhaps most concretely, language. By formulating typical linguistic practices for each race through NPCs’ verbal interactions, the game invites players to mimic the NPCs as they (players) digitally perform and embody racialized figures, thereby rendering mock language a means to lay claim to (or snatch) these racialized figures and real racialized groups they index. This role of mock language in digital gaming is far from exceptional: as in other mediated and non-digital contexts, it plays an essential role in the circulation of racialized varieties and the formation of white public space.20 In particular, these mock varieties reinforce particular “common sense” expectations about racialized groups and function as registers in many ways (Agha 2005). World of Warcraft is especially robust, however, to the extent that it invites players to be both the direct interlocutors and producers of these racialized varieties. It is also notable due to the sheer amount of exposure to these varieties players and spectators get in terms of number of players worldwide and hours logged among them. As Meek notes in her discussion of the role of these types of representations in the larger public perceptions of Native Americans, “for non-Native audiences, the logics derive primarily from mass-mediated experiences rather than real-life interactions” (2020, p. 374). Mock language in World of Warcraft makes the races inherently, and audibly, different from each other (and from the players themselves) on the one hand, but sufficiently close to English21 to make them portable and snatchable by players. When situated within the ongoing processes of racial slavery and settler colonialism,22 roleplay practices like those in WoW—when used by non-Black and non-Native US-based players, especially—become more than racial, but also categorically racist and colonial and White Supremacist. That is to say, pretending to be a symbolically Black or Native American character that is based on largely harmful and dehumanizing stereotypes when you do not identify as either is not just a racializing practice or event but a deeply racist one. In the context of the settler–slave state, we consider these kinds of role-playing practices, articulated largely through language use, as extensions of a historical praxis of body snatching (Smalls 2019) which permeates the activities of this nation-state and much of the modern world. Using a raciosemiotics approach, Smalls has defined body snatching as an expansive set of symbolic practices of embodied dispossession, or semiotic means through which racialized bodies and embodied practices are stolen from certain kinds of subjugated groups by members of dominant groups (2019). Body snatching is, in many ways, a reformulation of linguistic and cultural appropriation, as they have come to be used in popular discourse, that emphasizes the connection between the historical and ongoing theft of literal bodies 20

See Barrett 2006; Bucholtz and Lopez 2011; Hill 1995, 1998, 2008. WoW can also be played in other languages, depending on geographic location and player choice. 22 Hartman 2007; Sharpe 2016; Simpson 2014. 21

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(e.g., enslavement, scalping, incarceration, kidnapping, grave robbing, gene theft, postmortem theft) and the unconsented use of embodied practices from groups who have been historically subjugated largely because of the ways their bodies have been constructed by dominant schemas (Davis and Smalls 2021). In this way, certain bodies are treated as highly “entextualizable”—that is, made into an extractable and moveable text via a semiotic process called “entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Urban and Silverstein 1996) that can be used without the consent of the subjects that inhabit them (Smalls, forthcoming). In tandem, embodied practices like language, dance (and movement, in general), and spiritual practices can be extracted (dispossessed) and contextualized (repossessed) by others. In several ways, body snatching renders Black and Native personhood a thing that can be easily disposed of, so that Black and Native bodies, once emptied of personhood, can be more easily dissected, replaced, mocked, worn, or rendered caricatures of real Humans. Both forms of body snatching reify the notion that Black and Native bodies’ value can only be fully realized when owned, or inhabited i.e., (re)possessed (Moreton-Robinson 2016), by a proper Human subject—and both flag the peculiar bearing of Black and Native dispossession in the making of the US settler–slave state and in particular, in the construction of the white American citizen-subject. Body snatching allows non-Black and non-Native players to digitally wear and inhabit Blackness and/or Nativeness while maintaining ontological distance in multiple ways—with the use of mock language being one notable example. With its default Human as prototypically white and American (with a Standard American English accent), detailed lore and racial descriptions throughout its cultural architecture, customizability of avatars, and the ability to actually “play Indian” (Deloria 2007) or perform “digital blackface” (Parham 2020) with others through the use of mock languages in gameplay and chat, WoW follows Disney (Lippi-Green 1997) as a powerful pedagogue of White Supremacy a la US empire, regardless of players’ ethnoracial or national backgrounds.23

Language and Race/ism: Future Directions While the historical trajectories in which various ethnoracial structures exist are different and complex, most—if not all—pass through and/or are impacted by racialized modernity (Hesse 2007) as a structuring paradigm. This means that when we, as scholars of language, culture, and society, are looking at any aspect of human life after the fifteenth century, we are also dealing with White Supremacy, antiblackness, and anti-Indigeneity (whether we attend to them or not). To put it very plainly, this means that any sociocultural structure or practice in any part of the world touched by European modernity—that is to say, any contemporary context—is situated within the global structure of coloniality and, specifically, within “the coloniality of power” (Lugones 2007; Quijano 2000), “modernity/coloniality” (Mignolo 2006; Quijano 2007), or the “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” (Wynter 2003) articulated through European colonialism (among others). By situating everyday discursive racializing practices like those in WoW within relevant historical context, we hope to show that modern race is historical in that it is not a fixed universal 23 There are a growing number of conversations (e.g., subReddits, blogs, articles) that are examining WoW’s possible role as a breeding ground for White Supremacist ideologies. A 2021 article by Steve Messner for pggamer. com reviews some of these allegations: https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-community-is-grapplingwith-allegations-of-widespread-racism-in-its-top-end-raiding-guilds.

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feature of human life, but rather a persistent global pattern in recent history (Lowe 2015). We also stress that because modern race (in its varied manifestations) helps shape the political, social, cultural context that most language scholars encounter in their studies, it is important that rather than invoke “race” or “racism” as generic concepts that derive meaning solely at a local or regional scale (that is autonomous or discrete from others) or solely on an interactional scale, scholars who are compelled toward anti-racist work or toward better understandings of race should take it up as a historical and global racial hierarchy which impacts most local structures of social organization and micro interactions. Even when sociolinguistic practices or ideologies are not as plainly derivative of European modernity’s racial order as in WoW, scholars who take up race, racialization, or racism in language studies are responsible for accounting for White Supremacy (via coloniality/modernity), antiblackness (via racial slavery), and anti-Indigeneity (via settler colonialism) as global and historical structures, and for deeply citing Black, Native, and people of color scholars who have studied these phenomena, less they run the risk of producing knowledge that is not only inadequate, but also harmful in many cases. From this understanding, we echo many scholars (see Charity Hudley et al. 2020) before and beside us who consider the stakes for producing knowledge about language, culture, and society to be extremely high for Black, Indigenous, and people of color folx throughout the world. The reverberating impact of anthropology, linguistics, and other social sciences on our lives cannot be accurately measured but most of us feel it daily: in the ways our words are interpreted, the ways our bodies are treated, how our practices are taken (up) (Davis and Smalls 2021). Therefore, as more Black, Indigenous, and people of color scholars enter the subfield, we are seeing a linguistic anthropology that stands on what Alessandro Duranti anticipated as a possible fourth paradigm shift—which reaches deeper into race, gender, and queer theory to continue the work of our scholarly forebearers of terminating common questions and approaches and further blurring the boundaries around what we understand to be “linguistic anthropology” (Duranti 2003). We understand these ruptures and new beginnings to be moves toward language and culture scholarship that is in service to the protection and celebration of Black and Native people and all marginalized peoples.24

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32

Communicative Justice and Health

Charles L. Briggs Introduction To approach justice issues, I focus here on systemic inequities, the infrastructures and practices that engender them, and the ideological labor required to make them seem like natural, perhaps inevitable features of actually existing worlds. My concern is with what are generally seen as two separate landscapes of inequity and how their study gets parceled into distinct, sometimes opposing scholarly traditions, networks, training programs, journals, and bibliographies. One way of phrasing my task would be bringing together approaches to linguistic or communicative inequities, a major focus of research in linguistic anthropology, with health inequities, the subject of extensive work by medical anthropologists. My goal, however, is more subversive: I want to show that the preceding sentence is utter nonsense by unseating the foundational opposition between language and communication versus medicine and health. Rather than calling for a rapprochement, I seek to demonstrate that linguistic and medical inequities are co-produced, that is, emerging from entangled sets of assumptions and sharing many sites and practices of production. Reflections on linguistic and medical inequities have deep Eurocentric roots. In seventeenth-century England, White, elite, European adult men were projected as modernity’s natural embodiments. Key to performing one’s modernity was rejecting “superstition” in favor of science, defined as abstract, general, universal, objective, and disinterested knowledge of the natural world (Latour 1993). Another strategy for claiming the mantle of the modern lay in mastering “language,” constructed as signs that link words and ideas in stable, transparent, and context-free ways (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Defined respectively as the production of knowledge and communication, both required constant ideological work, in Susan Gal’s and Judith Irvine’s terms (Gal and Irvine 2019); this work entails constructing science and language as autonomous, self-contained spheres existing apart from politics, emotion, and self-interest. Knowledge and communication were projected as disembodied: seemingly open to anyone, their mastery required erasing overt links to particular identities, bodies, contexts, and desires. Nevertheless, only elite, White, European men seemed capable of achieving the required forms of self-surveillance and discipline: women were excluded as being tied bodily to reproduction, workers as exhausted by physical exertion, and the peoples A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as lacking access to Western education. Accordingly, these purportedly opposing “provinces of knowledge” (Locke 1959 [1690], p. 483) provided twinned practices for locating individuals every time they opened their mouths, thereby symbolically inscribing hierarchies on populations that were simultaneously subordinated through material inequities and racial, sexual, class, and ableist forms of violence. The bad news is that over 300 years later, this process is still going strong. The good news is that linguistic and medical anthropologists have focused much attention on mapping these inequities and identifying the structural forces that produce them; some scholars have collaborated with social movements in challenging them. Linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and scholars of pragmatics scrutinized what John Baugh called “linguistic profiling,” using “auditory cues” (2003, p. 158) for “racial identification based on speech” (p. 156). Subsequent research suggested that many other perceived semiotic characteristics enter into constructions of racial, national, sexual, and other differences. The 1960s witnessed sociolinguistic approaches that traced how pronouns encode relations of power and solidarity (Brown and Gilman 1968) and mapped the association of language varieties with forms of racial and class subordination (Labov 1972). Classic work on “motherese” and “foreigner talk” (Ferguson 1975; Snow and Ferguson 1977) suggested how designing speech to match the perceived communicative features of designated recipients creates models of perceived failures of knowledge, rationality, agency, and communicative competence.1 Scholars have traced how bilingualism is often denied the status of a communicative resource and transformed into a locus of pain, stigmatization, racialization, and material and political subordination (Urciuoli 1996; Zentella 2003). Contributing to debates about White supremacy, racism, and racialization, Jonathan Rosa uses “a raciolinguistic perspective” to focus on “racial and linguistic co-naturalization,” analyzing “the ongoing rearticulation of colonial distinctions between populations and modes of communication that come to be positioned as more or less normatively European” (2018, p. 5; emphasis in original). Rather than simply locating individuals vis-à-vis existing social types, discursive practices construct models of speakers and receivers and recruit voices, bodies, and populations to fill these projected slots, including highly stigmatized ones (Agha 2006). As with language, research on health inequities critically engages dominant ideologies and practices. The prevalent biomedical orientation, enshrined in professional associations and government regulations, turns health into disease and defines it through abstract, bounded categories of pathologies, creating the sense that “individuals are harmed by inanimate objects, physical forces, or unfortunate social conditions (like poverty)—by things rather than people” (Krieger and Bassett 1993, p. 165). The medicalization (Zola 1972) of social problems reifies notions of causation vis-à-vis “hegemonic biomedical models” (Menéndez 2009) in such a way as to equate medical knowledge with the perspectives of biomedical professionals and diagnostic and treatment practices—particularly pharmaceutical—they are authorized to undertake. Researchers have demonstrated that Black and Latinx patients receive lower-quality health care than Whites, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and health insurance (Smedley et al. 2003). Medical anthropologists have studied health inequities ethnographically; work has focused, for example, on HIV/AIDS (Farmer 1992; Sangaramoorthy 2014) and diabetes (Doucet-Battle 2021; Moran-Thomas 2019).2 Nevertheless, systemic health inequities have often been individualized as questions of bad

1

  See Amy Shuman (2015) on disability and projections of communicative (in)competence.   I list here only a few examples out of substantial bodies of research in both linguistic and medical anthropology.

2

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behavior, lifestyle, ignorance, or noncompliance. Social justice perspectives have helped change conversations about health, locating scholars as part of broader conversations initiated by members of medically-underserved populations and social movement organizations (see Krieger 2011). Communicative profiling fits hand-in-glove with medical profiling, assessing individuals and populations based on their perceived concordance with stereotypical projections of medical beliefs and behaviors.3 Potential synergies between research on language- and health-centered inequities have been limited, however, by two problems. First, they are co-produced, entwined in ways that augment their insidious effects and thwart efforts to expose and eliminate them. Second, these lines of research generally operate in blissful ignorance of one another. Anthropology is sub-disciplined, structured so that medical and linguistic anthropologists generally inhabit separate, sometimes opposing analytic frameworks, research practices, curricular trajectories, American Anthropological Association sections, and journals, often resulting in mutually exclusive bibliographies, even when researching the same phenomena. There are, nevertheless, counter-currents of research that fruitfully connect issues of language and health. Gregory Bateson (1972) used close studies of interaction in seeking social causes for psychiatric disorders. Aaron Cicourel (1992) made major contributions to both linguistic and medical anthropology based on decades of research in and on medical schools. Starting in the 1970s, sociologists, linguistic anthropologists, and other scholars opened a broad research agenda focused on doctor–patient interaction (Heritage and Maynard 2006), which crucially influenced the training of physicians and other health professionals. Elinor Ochs used interaction analysis and video ethnography to illuminate such conditions as agoraphobia and autism (Capps and Ochs 1995; Ochs 2015). Cheryl Mattingly and Linda Garro (2000) have emphasized the importance, complexity, and the multiplicity of ways that narratives shape illness and healing and how their plots can be enacted corporeally and verbally. Charles Goodwin’s (2010) sensitive studies of his father traced how aphasia patients collaborate with others in effecting interaction and creating meaning. I have used critical linguistic and medical anthropology approaches to explore how communicative- and health-based profiling intersect during outbreaks and epidemics (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003, 2016). Encouragingly, the last decade has witnessed an efflorescence of work that draws deeply on linguistic and medical anthropological perspectives and entwines them in diverse and creative ways, as I detail below. To extend research that challenges linguistic/medical scholarly boundaries and suggest the importance of these efforts in addressing issues of justice, I will use the concept of health/communicative inequities. The term uses a lexical juxtaposition to bring together how these seemingly discrete axes intersect, helping to highlight three dimensions. The first is ideological. Here I draw on Gal and Irvine (2019). They carefully distinguish their use of the term from notions of false consciousness, which claim scholarly access to objective structures while criticizing other parties as devising hidden strategies for advancing their self-interest. Gal and Irvine rather speak of “ideologizing” and “ideological work” (2019, p. 14), highlighting connections with “power, politics, interest, and social action” (2019, p. 13). Communicative profiling thus involves the ideological labor needed to construct notions of language and communication in particular ways, subordinate, denigrate, or disappear other definitions, and produce subjects and subject positions that seem to quintessentially embody both privileged and stigmatized imaginaries (Agha 2006). Second, communicative profiling 3

  Medical anthropologists, particularly Byron Good (1994), have critiqued an opposition that separates biomedical knowledge from beliefs and behaviors of populations characterized as separated by patterns of culture and/or class.

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communicative justice and health  579

also involves pragmatics, the moment-to-moment, nuts and bolts specifics of how signs unfold heterogeneously in daily life, reflecting and constituting contexts (Silverstein 1976). Pragmatics, a significant focus of research (Levinson 1983), includes how voices, bodies, and objects come together in interaction and how hierarchically ranked languages and speech varieties intersect. Third, metapragmatics mediates complexly between ideological labor and pragmatics, constantly asserting—directly or implicitly, always in partial and incomplete ways—how particular pragmatic features should be interpreted. Claiming authority over ideological work, pragmatics, metapragmatics and how they interrelate constitutes communicative profiling in powerful if always indeterminate, shifting, and contestable ways. As I suggest below, projecting particular relations between these three axes and drawing attention to points at which their inevitable lack of concordance becomes explicit provides a fundamental foundation for rationalizing health inequities and, in turn, for addressing issues of justice.

Communicability as Infrastructure for Health/Communicative Inequities Writing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the principal global anxieties is the communicability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Beyond how it can produce intense and sometimes lingering symptoms and pack Intensive Care Units and morgues, COVID-19 is notable for its remarkable ability to move between human bodies. A constantly mutating RNA virus, SARS-CoV-2 produces variants that compete for the greatest communicability. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky declared that “the delta variant … is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of.”4 Emerging in November 2021, the omicron variant was even more communicable, so transmissible that it crowded out delta in the viral race to infect human bodies. COVID-19 is also quintessentially discursive, the focus of a constant avalanche of news articles, social media posts, webpages, statistics, maps, scientific and medical studies, and pronouncements by health officials. Public health measures surrounding epidemics posit an intimate and inverse relationship between the two sides of COVID-19’s communicability: If health officials circulate prevention guidelines widely and laypersons assimilate their statements and enact the corporeal measures they mandate or recommend, then the circulation of the virus will fade away. Note how communicative and medical dimensions of models of knowledge and bodies are both conjoined and ideologically separated. Scientific perspectives medicalized COVID-19, thereby locating the production of authoritative knowledge as the responsibility of leading clinicians, scientists, and epidemiologists. Knowledge was then purportedly turned into health communication, circulating as clinicians interacted with patients, health communication professionals (often assisted by advertising or media consultants) transformed findings and guidelines from scientific into a popular, less technical language, and journalists produced health stories. The designated recipient of these acts of communication was “the public,” whose members must be dutifully attentive to information directed at them, receive it passively rather than contesting or reinterpreting it, and display the indicated “behaviors.” I have termed such ideological labor—the construction of models of discourse production, circulation, and reception—as communicability to capture how this work makes particular discursive forms seem intrinsically mobile, even as it projects others as immobile. 4

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxGQgKJsG0M.

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580  charles l. briggs

Communicability is not to be confused with the pragmatics of communication, particularly with assessing whether communicative acts are or are not successful (to use a problematic commonsense term). Indeed, projecting communicability as a direct reflection of pragmatics, of how communication is or should be taking place, is a central feature of its ideological labor. When communicability is linked to ways of making forms of disease and health seem immanently mobile or immobile, I have used the term biocommunicability. The latter is often structured in linear, unidirectional, and hierarchical terms, such that persons who are not health professionals can be subject to critical commentary if they claim to produce knowledge about epidemics themselves or seem to fail to receive and assimilate public health discourse, a point I take up below. Briggs and Hallin (2016) refer to this form of ideological labor as the biomedical authority model. Early in the pandemic, the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) linked viral and communicative dimensions of COVID-19 communicability by decrying an “infodemic.” Clinicians and public health authorities cite “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” as diminishing vaccination rates, thus sustaining the pandemic. Early on, WHO provided a “COVID-19 Mythbusters” site that offered downloadable slides that positioned each “myth” on the right, with the medico-scientific knowledge meant to counteract it on the left.5 Figure 32.1 focused on a widely-disseminated “conspiracy theory,” the assertion that the pandemic emanates, literally, from 5G mobile networks. This seemingly simple slide performs a great deal of semiotic and ideological labor, even as it enacts both the illusion of a perfect fit between ideologies of communication and health and how official anxieties fuse two senses of the term viral—vast and uncontrollable twinned disseminations of pathogens and social media content. First, complex, heterogeneous, shifting, globally distributed discourse networks and practices are reduced to what is framed as referential content. Note that the “myths” themselves are simply presupposed in the WHO slide, suggesting that audiences are already familiar with them; this omission might also reflect a fear of iteration (Derrida [1972]1977), the idea that repeating these assertions might inadvertently help them circulate. The infantilized graphic representations of viruses and circulation routes, which share space with

Figure 32.1  World Health Organization, Mythbusters Website, slide on 5G “Misinformation” on COVID-19. 5

 https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/information/mythbusters.

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communicative justice and health  581

“myths,” might seem to imply a similar lack of sophistication on the part of people who embrace them. Even as it constitutes an ideological construction of discourse, the site projects a problematic scientific ideology. Science offers complex processes for producing, contesting, and reformulating evidence and interpretation, rather than simple pronouncements of the sort projected by Mythbusters. SARS-CoV-2 is a very tricky virus, constantly challenging efforts by clinicians, laboratory scientists, and public health professionals to represent as much as control it. My current research on the pandemic suggests that the shifting and often uncertain character of COVID-19 research and its translation into public health guidelines has often led laypersons who believe that science should present singular, unchanging “truths” to think that clinicians, scientists, and public health officials are liars or incompetents. The infantilization and homogenization of lay efforts as simple, ludicrous falsehoods projects a residual category that leaves little space for lay attempts make sense of a complex medical landscape. Laypersons’ contributions include patients’ attempts to interpret and treat their own and their relatives’ symptoms of COVID-19 and especially efforts to grapple with what is referred to as long COVID, the serious and sometimes disabling long-term effects of COVID-19 that some patients experience. WHO’s Mythbusters site illustrates several general features of biocommunicability. Projecting two parallel modes of circulation seemingly separates purely communicative phenomena (“myths”) from scientific and medical knowledge, the latter purportedly directly connected to viruses and bodies. Simultaneously, the slide’s ideological labor undermines the medical/communicative binary, suggesting that some discourse is directly tied to biology even as other assertions lack any biological foundation. Moreover, the WHO projects the “infodemic” as shaping epidemiological patterns by augmenting the virus’s circulation. Even as it projects ideologies of science and communication, the slide also illustrates how communicable models attempt to regiment the pragmatics of discourse, often in equally simplistic ways. In other words, abstract and often implicit projections of what constitutes legitimate forms of scientific thinking and how it should be communicated can constitute efforts to shape how people actually talk about and act on scientific concepts—like COVID-19—in day-to-day life. Stopping the “infodemic”—and thus slowing the pandemic—apparently requires pairing specific examples of knowledge and ignorance. Once laypersons learn the “facts,” they will stop circulating “myths” and perhaps even actively challenge them, thereby projecting a politics of science and language that has been widely touted since the seventeenth century (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Like the pragmatic entailments of most communicable models, “Mythbusters” seems remarkably oblivious to its own pragmatics: Given that the WHO has been targeted by conservatives since the 1980s, it is hard to believe a large percentage of Mythbusters’ projected audience is likely to visit a WHO website or deem it more reliable than social media platforms that circulate what are referred to pejoratively as conspiracy theories.

Unequal Indexical Landscapes of Care I turn now to more mundane, everyday efforts to construct biocommunicable landscapes with an example drawn from an arena where health/communication intersections have gained significant visibility, as much in scholarly research as in medical practice. Often referred to as “doctor–patient interaction,” this research trajectory forms a remarkable example in which clinicians help produce social scientists’ data and physicians, nurses, and

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582  charles l. briggs

professional schools take the resulting analyses to heart. The following example comes from a classic work, The Politics of Medical Encounters, by physician–sociologist Howard Waitzkin (1991). Compiling audio recordings of a random sample of 336 doctor–patient encounters (1991, p. 64), Waitzkin and his team took transcription issues seriously, guided by work in Conversation Analysis (CA) and sociolinguistics. The transcript reproduced in Transcript 1 involves questioning by a White physician of a patient who is characterized as a “Catholic, black, divorced, a high school graduate, and the father of three children” (1991, p. 84). “Leaning into a series of questions about the patient’s neck and back pain, the doctor connects the patient’s job with the primary diagnosis of ‘acute muscle spasm.’”6 Transcript (1) Excerpt of clinical interaction D:  All right. And you’re working somewhere? P:  At the ____ … (words) D:  What is your job there? P:  I’m the assistant food operations manager. D:  All right. Are you a healthy man basically? P:  I am. D:  Any chronic diseases? P:  I have, uhm, they call it, um, mature diabetes. D:  Do you take medicine for that? P:  No. I control my weight D:  Good. (Waitzkin 1991: p. 84) Waitzkin calls this exchange “routine and prosaic.” Elsewhere, Waitzkin brilliantly analyzes how medical encounters provide important sites where race and class inequities are produced, naturalized, and embodied. Interested in how the physician brings labor issues into the clinical interaction, Waitzkin does not analyze this case as racial bias. Even as this transcript illustrates the sorts of exchanges extensively analyzed in the literature on doctor–patient interaction, I would like to build on Michael Silverstein’s notion of indexical order (see Chapter 33, Duranti) in providing a different line of analysis. Silverstein suggests that there are several potentially relevant contexts and that they are ordered—hence his concept of indexical order—starting from the immediate spatiotemporal dimensions of the interaction. Nevertheless, indexical orders do not spring directly from contextual features but emerge from how they get reconfigured. “First-order indexicality” construes the interactional context in particular ways, a process that Silverstein refers to as “schematization” (2003, p. 193).7 Contexts are thus transformed into semiotic constructions that shape but are also reshaped by subsequent discourse. Things thus get complicated as initial indexical orders become the basis for further acts of schematization, a process that can create multiple, superimposed layers. Let’s take a simple, hypothetical example of a conversation between speaker A, B, and C while they are taking a walk. A draws attention to “a pretty flowering tree” (first-order indexicality), putatively transforming exercise and talk into the aesthetic appreciation of nature. B, who has a reputation for being argumentative, responds: “the species in question is not ‘a pretty tree’ but a white flowering dogwood or Cornus florida,” thereby building second-order indexicality on A’s schematization of this feature of 6

  I have not revised details of Waitzkin’s transcription; “(words)” indicates that one or more words are audible but cannot be discerned.

7

  Hanks (1990) minutely analyzed how indexicality is not rigidly determined by seemingly objective temporal and spatial interactional features. Ochs (1990) developed the notion of “indirect indexicality,” which helps illuminate this interactional and semiotic process.

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communicative justice and health  583

the context. C then accuses B of always acting combative and competitive, thereby creating a third-order indexicality that schematizes the first and second orders. Even as the concept of indexical orders can help us rethink doctor–patient interaction, Waitzkin’s example suggests ways of extending Silverstein’s framework. Silverstein would identify “the context” with the “first-order indexicality” unfolding in this clinical encounter, proceeding to examine how additional orders of indexicality continue to unfold. Doctor– patient interaction research fixes us even more solidly on interactions emerging in the space of the clinic as “the context,” the ground zero for calculating indexical orders. Even as Waitzkin challenges the doctor–patient interaction literature in other ways, he similarly identifies “the context” with the patient, physician, and the clinical space they occupy, thereby drawing attention away from a broader context that would include the role of nurses and receptionists. The participation framework, i.e., the configuration of the roles assumed by the participants in the event (Goffman 1981), in his transcripts is simply encoded as D: and P:. The doctor could have collaborated with the patient in positioning the latter’s worksite as a second site for building indexical orders, jointly constructing a “schematization” that would calibrate the relation between work and clinical orders. This move would have enabled the two to collaboratively connect the doctor’s labor with the patient’s labor, thereby productively reconfiguring the diagnostic and treatment process. Nevertheless, after asking for a job title, the physician closes the door to the exchange about work with “All right” and shifts to eliciting the patient’s medical history. The doctor thus allows “working” to enter briefly into the content of the exchange rather than to build indexical orders that spring from both clinical and employment contexts. Instead of permitting the worksite to transform how the context of the clinic was being schematized, a later jobrelated discussion headed in the opposite direction: the doctor urged the patient, in addition to taking time off from work, to take breaks lying down on a heating pad. When the patient signaled that this treatment plan was problematic by expressing “some difficulties in staying home or even cutting back on job-related activity” (Waitzkin 1991, p. 85), the physician did not invite the patient to deepen the doctor’s understanding of the health-related parameters of the patient’s job but rather offered to prescribe a narcotic. My goal here is hardly to second-guess the doctor, a task that I am neither inclined nor qualified to undertake. I instead wish to show that by controlling and restricting the unfolding of indexical orders, the physician missed a vital opportunity to pinpoint the causes of his patient’s condition and collaborate in devising a plan to eliminate them. The ideological frame that underlies the doctor’s attempt to metapragmatically regiment or control the exchange revolves around narrow biomedical definitions of pathologies, diagnosis, and treatment. Projecting an individual patient and clinical visit as the indexical horizon, the physician thus eliminated broader inequities. Many jobs—including agricultural labor, factory work, and the ever-growing demand for rapid package delivery—involve constant pressure on muscles and joints and stress, producing neck and back pain and commonly leaving workers with disabling injuries at relatively young ages. By avoiding moving indexically beyond the context of the visit, the physician never learns whether his patient faced unreasonable physical demands or whether occupational safety regulations might provide guidelines for bringing them under control. The doctor also failed to explore whether racialized inequities might be contributing to the patient’s situation, from pay inequities and unequal access to promotions to the sorts of microaggressions—brief, often subtle non-verbal and/or verbal forms of denigration targeting members of racialized populations that expose implicit bias—that have been linked to poor health (Gómez 2015). In short,

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the physician failed to transform the encounter into an opportunity to seek greater justice, both in the clinic and at the patient’s worksite. Extensive studies by linguistic anthropologists of other healing systems suggest that focusing on provider–patient dyads universalizes biomedicine’s central ideological and interactional features. Paul Kockelman (2007) documents K’ichi’ views of health and disease as distributed over several individuals rather than a single person (identified as “the patient”); this assemblage can then be treated as a single social person. T.S. Harvey (2008) similarly argues that Mayan healing encounters often involve multiple patients who co-narrate illness narratives, thereby locating sickness among multiple bodies. In biomedical encounters, individuals receiving treatment may be absent, their place taken by others. Research by Jennifer Guzmán (2020) studies interactions between non-indigenous providers and Mapuche patients in southern Chile through the lens of “health/communicative labor” (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2016). By drawing a sharp spatio-temporal boundary around clinical encounters, pediatricians rendered invisible the extensive labor of care that parents provide, including determining when professional care is needed and transporting patients—including by foot, horse-drawn carts, borrowed cars, or expensive taxis—over muddy or icy roads. Guzmán carefully documents how mothers’ demands for “recognition of care as a form of labor” (2020, p. 610) repositioned physicians in a broader indexical order; by projecting doctors’ contributions to care as taking place both inside and outside the clinic, mothers asserted that such acts as offering rides to families, rather than just driving by patients who were walking or waiting beside the road, would demonstrate physicians’ genuine concern for the wellbeing of those in their care. In her research on the participation of medical tourists in Mazatec healing, Paja Faudree (2020) not only widens understanding of participation frameworks to grant central roles to psychotropic plants but examines how contrastive models of bodies, words, healing, affect, and the ontological status of humans and morethan-humans can structure and destabilize healing interactions. The role of biocommunicability is particularly consequential when racialized inequities structure clinical interactions. Assessments of patients as health communicators enter into clinical judgments that, according to the Institute of Medicine, result in poorer care for Black and Latinx populations (Smedley et al. 2003). Van Ryn and Burke (2000) found that US physicians assumed that Black patients abused drugs and alcohol more frequently and were less educated and intelligent, less attentive to medical guidance, and less likely to follow treatment guidelines. Health/communicative ideological projections can be entirely at odds with pragmatics: racially profiled patients can produce the same signs—words, gestures, and practices for rendering their bodies accessible to medical technologies, gazes, and touch—as White patients and yet be judged as biocommunicable failures. Based on work in Guatemala, T.S. Harvey (2008, 2013) suggests that providers’ expectations that their interlocutors will act in accordance with the role of “the patient” is itself racialized when racial inequities in access to health care provide limited possibilities for learning biomedicine’s ideological and pragmatic contours. Translation enters complexly into this equation. Given that professional translators are generally more aligned with practitioners’ perspectives than those of patients, they often collaborate in hiding signs of resistance to professional ideological and metapragmatic control (Davidson 2001). Such erasures (Gal and Irvine 2019, p. 21) can withhold evidence that patients are displaying signs of active engagement and attempting to contribute communicatively to diagnosis and treatment, making it less likely to be classified as good, engaged patients. More broadly, translation imposes additional indexical orders that can amplify and constrain participant roles. The very concept of “medical translator” fits into the ideological reduction of “a whole family of semiotic processes” (Gal 2015, p. 224) to

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communicative justice and health  585

what is projected as rendering stretches of semantic content portable and yet stable across the borders defined by the “misrecognition of language as autonomous code” (Reynolds and Orellana 2009, p. 213). In other words, commonsense understandings of medical translation reduce complex processes of moving back and forth between multiple ways of speaking (including technical, medical varieties), experiences of health and illness, and ways of being in the world, including racialized, class and other inequities, into a simple matter of finding words in one language that seem to match those in another. Emily Gates-Doerr (2019, p. 299) argues that “translation, when treated as a process of making differences equivalent, functions to make nondominant languages and practices disappear.” Indeed, the need for medical translation can itself be a symptom of race and class hierarchies that limit the recruitment of physicians with similar race, class, sexual, and other features of patient populations. The demographics of nurses and patient populations are often more closely matched. Still, biomedical and other orientations of training programs and nursing protocols can diminish the potential advantages this concordance can confer. In a sensitive study of how nursing pedagogy in Papua New Guinea “transforms ‘receivers’ into ‘translators and disseminators,’” Barbara Anderson (2017, p. 759) analyzes how nurses shift between Tok Pisin and vernacular languages and between medicalized registers, taboo terms for sex, and forms of metaphor and indirection. These choices, accompanied by extensive metacommunicative and metapragmatic discourse, do not simply reflect evidence-based medical protocols or the need to promote comprehension. They instead perform “a kind of ethical metapragmatics” (ibid) that constitutes “an indigenized ‘confessional technology’” (p. 764) used “to extract ‘hidden’ truths” (p. 760), promote Christian values, increase adherence to treatment and prevention protocols, and manage what are portrayed as the uneducated affective repertoires of patients. In Delta Amacuro, Venezuela, Spanishspeaking physicians rely on Warao-speaking nurses as translators. Given that patients are often their neighbors and sometimes their relatives, nurses could provide crucial details to aid physicians in diagnosis, particularly in difficult cases. Physicians, who define the role of translation as moving referential content between two bounded, opposing linguistic codes, recruit nurses to help imprison discourse within narrow biomedical frames rather than inviting them to bridge indexical orders and medical systems. Anthropological research on the role of bilingual children as translators is striking (see Urciuoli 1996). Interpreting between parents and health professionals confronts children with unfamiliar medical registers and institutional procedures “while managing a synchronous, multiparty interaction” (Reynolds and Orellana 2009, p. 215). Beyond participating in discussions of parents’ sensitive health and other issues, child translators face difficult decisions about whether to acknowledge metapragmatic signs of communicative and medical profiling. Despite the immensity and precarity of the task, they often face both parents’ and providers’ “critiques of their linguistic, cognitive, social, and behavioral competencies” (2009, p. 221). Children similarly face deep contradictions when they become patients. Ignasi Clemente (2015) documents the struggles by children and youth with cancer diagnoses to demand active roles in clinical participation frameworks. Anthony Wright (2019) shows how biocommunicable profiling prompted oncology professionals to criticize and simultaneously reproduce anti-Black stereotypes and adultism in ways that engendered treatment inequities in a pediatric cancer ward. Such biocommunicable contradictions can entwine providers, patients, and families attempting to collaborate in fostering healthy outcomes in practices that undermine the achievement of health/communicative justice.

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Other Sites Where Health/Communicative Inequities Intersect Confining this discussion to clinical interactions would reproduce biomedical ideologies and fail to explore the broad range of sites where health/communicative inequities emerge and are sometimes exposed and challenged. Another critical arena in which the medical/ communicative binary is both reproduced and entangled is health communication, which unfolds on websites, social media, workshops, public service announcements, billboards, printed materials, and clinical spaces. Some of the most massive efforts are undertaken as “global health” agencies and non-governmental organizations export “Global North” health knowledge to overcome what are judged to be “Global South” deficits of knowledge. Here remarkable disjuncts between biocommunicable axes emerge as resources are channeled into health communication programs focusing on diseases high on funders’ agendas but of less importance in epidemiological terms for the countries who receive the funding (Benton 2015; Pigg 2001). Similarly, a narrow focus on health/communication—offered through workshops, materials, and mass media announcements—can run cover for failure to provide medicines that save lives (Nguyen 2010). Herein lies, in my estimation, a potentially fruitful and largely unexplored research site. Unlike provider–patient interaction, health communication and biomediatization have received relatively little attention from linguistic anthropologists. Given linguistic anthropologists’ interest in scalar issues (Carr and Lempert 2016), they could play a crucial role in analyzing how programs framed as “global health” seek to enable health/communicative inequities to jump scales by circulating knowledge from wealthy nations and multilateral organizations to under-resourced countries and, in them, recursively from local elites to health communication workers to impoverished laypersons (see Dutta 2008; Nguyen 2010). The promise of empowerment and agency offered by global health programs to poor and racialized populations through health communication is contradicted by ideological models that equate displaying legitimate medical knowledge with the use of words and communicative practices generated by elite nations, agencies, and actors (Pigg 2001). Accordingly, health communication is much like the regime of international aid analyzed by James Ferguson (1999)—designed to fail but in such a way as to serve the interests of elites all along the way. Recent work by linguistic anthropologists is tackling complex health/communicative intersections. Summerson Carr (2011) carefully documents how communicable dimensions of recovery pedagogies imposed on addicts in need of food and shelter evince these sorts of contradictions, as well how recipients critically revise them. New analytics and research strategies are needed to grasp the complex and shifting imbrications of media ideologies (Gershon 2010), technologies, and practices, including but not limited to the looming specter of “antivax” social media networks that algorithms or public health officials cannot tame. Lynette Arnold (2020) documented how migrants use cellphone conversations to impose biomedical discipline on their relatives back home. Juliana Friend (2020) tracked how figures of sex, modesty, and pleasure circulate digitally in Senegal through both NGO-sponsored health education programs and online pornography. Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas’s (2022) work in Buenos Aires examined how mediatization helps extend psychoanalysis from dyadic clinical interactions into mass media and everyday encounters between laypersons. Mara Buchbinder (2021) analyzed how assisted-dying debates and practices often hinge on linguistic as much as medical ideologies. Linguistic anthropologists have provided examples of lay care and health communication initiatives that exceed the logics and channels prescribed by professionals. Anna Corwin (2021) assessed claims that Catholic nuns are less prone to dementia

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by closely following forms of care-in-interaction provided by other sisters, reminiscent of Goodwin’s (2010) work on aphasia. Bringing together linguistic and medical anthropology and ethnomusicology, Steven Black (2019) documented how HIV-positive members of a South African choir used songs, stories, and jokes in combining Christianity with HIV/AIDS activism and advocacy, engaging audiences ranging from global “experts” to relatives, neighbors, and other HIV+ individuals. Racialized health inequities emerge in health communication “campaigns” in sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant ways, as suggested by an example of COVID-19 health communication. In California, Ventura County Public Health distributed two posters illustrating the amount of “social distance” needed to prevent COVID-19 transmission. One, sent to businesses, pictured a woman in business attire and a man with a white shirt and tie. Separated by two skis, the caption read, “6 FEET IS ABOUT THE LENGTH OF SKIS.” A poster distributed for display on farms featured a man and woman in work clothes with three vegetable or fruit crates between them; the caption read, “6 FEET IS ABOUT THE LENGTH OF 3 PRODUCE CRATES.” The majority of agricultural laborers in the County are Latinx, some drawn from Mexican and Central American indigenous populations. In addition to critiquing the contrastive objects used to measure distance, social media posts also commented on the detailed hair, facial, and other features of the ski poster figures and faceless silhouettes on the crates image. The graphic dimensions of these posters exemplify the everyday use of multiple semiotic features as forms of recipient design—how discourse is patterned in such a way as to match the perceived cognitive and linguistic capacities of the person(s) it targets—to designate the intended receivers. In a cholera epidemic in a Venezuelan rainforest, pamphlets distributed on the mainland in Spanish pictured middle-class nuclear families lacking marked racialized features. On the other hand, leaflets for rainforest distribution paired texts in Warao, the indigenous language, with denigrating, stereotypic images of semi-nude indigenous residents defecating and vomiting in open space (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003, pp. 113–117). Biocommunicability lies at the heart of health communication “campaigns” that performatively construct images of authoritative knowledge producers, the knowledge deficits of lay publics, and the very communicative circuits along which they seem to be moving. Social media critiques of the skis-versus-crates posters problematized the depiction of designated recipients. Still, they did not question the underlying ideological infrastructure: the projection of a linear transfer of knowledge from biomedical authorities to lay populations, mediated by health-communication artifacts. Nicola Bulled documents how the notion of “health literacy,” emerging in the 1990s, suggests that becoming an empowered patient entails managing a shifting and challenging skillset: “the ability to read, understand and act on health information, including comprehending prescription labels, interpreting appointment slips, completing health insurance forms, following instructions for diagnostic tests, and understanding of the essential health-related materials” (2015, p. 24). Decades of work in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics on literacies, including Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) classic work on how experiences with written and spoken texts outside of institutional contexts influence outcomes within them, could help illuminate the stakes for failing to negotiate telephone menus, electronic insurance forms and medical records, and online requests for doctor’s appointments, prescription refills, vaccines, and questionnaires. Even as most of us may shudder in recalling our own frustrations with such tasks, the consequences of becoming a “health literacy” failure are much more severe for people who face deep health/communicative inequities.

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The mass media form the most ubiquitous site for the performative construction of health/communicative inequities. In the United States, two dominant biocommunicable models have provided critical modes of racializing health (Briggs and Hallin 2016). The unilinear, hierarchically organized biomedical authority model, which dominated until recent decades, informed reporting and provided stories with a linear rhetorical structure. Biocommunicability often became the explicit focus for stories when a particular linear trajectory was characterized as having been obstructed and thus in immediate need of efforts to restore the proper circulation of knowledge. Gal and Irvine (2019) proposed a concept of recursivity, in which an opposition is repeated at another level of semiotic order. In the present example, the opposition between health professionals and laypersons, which affords the latter a subordinate position, recursively hierarchicalizes lay recipients in oppositions between “good patients” who understand biomedical discourse and make corresponding cognitive and behavioral changes and those seemingly in need of hypodermic infusions of knowledge to eradicate ignorance and superstition. Still others are deemed intractably out of the loop. In recent decades, a second model projects laypersons not as passive receivers but agentive, self-interested consumers of the health knowledge they extract from media, advertising, and social networks. This second model often becomes explicit in teaching patient–consumers how to properly search for health knowledge, use it in speaking with physicians (including how to request particular drugs), and make rational decisions about consuming competing “information,” products, and services. The two models often converge in the same story. These models racialize health/communicative inequities in two primary ways. First, until recently, most US media coverage avoided directly engaging racialized health inequities. In interviews conducted from 1993 to 2015, most White health reporters noted that addressing race explicitly in stories made them feel “uncomfortable,” whereas Black and Latinx journalists—especially those employed by “ethnic media” organizations—often told me that reporting racialized inequities was crucial. When the patient–consumer model predominated, bodies were generally White or blended into multi-racial assemblages. However, when coverage focused on race, the biomedical-authority model generally prevailed, portraying race as a factor associated with health problems. Health inequities were frequently interpreted through logics of blame, casting ill health as resulting from ignorance, bad decisions, and/or bad behavior. Discourses of culture projected entire racialized populations as homogeneously trapped in less-reliable media circuits, non-scientific “cultural beliefs,” and/or behavioral patterns that blocked the circulation of biomedical knowledge.8 In recent decades, explanatory frameworks have shifted toward emphasizing the broader material, social, environmental, and other factors that structure the distribution of health and disease, possibly resulting from greater visibility of research on causes of health inequities, the medicalization of identities (Epstein 2007), and pressure from activists and social movement organizations (see for example Davis 2007). Intersections between race and communicability seem to be changing. In another example drawn from the COVID-19 pandemic, an interview conducted in July 2021, a Californiabased National Public Radio reporter summarized a transformation culminating in 2020: “you can’t do a health story without talking about disparities now … whereas that was a choice before, I’d say, but I’m not sure if it was the pandemic, I think it’s just as much George, George Floyd, the racial unrest around police shooting; it’s just part of every story.”

8

  See Briggs and Hallin (2016) for a more detailed discussion of race, health, and communicability.

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An October 2021 CNN story focuses on a crucial component of COVID-19 health communication efforts—attempts to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates among Latinx residents of Chicago—provides a valuable example for tracking in what ways biocommunicable models are and are not changing (Transcript 2). The segment begins with CNN reporter Omar Jiménez (OJ) asking Silvia Trejo (ST) in Spanish about vaccine acceptance in predominantly Latinx Little Village. Words appearing on the screen but not spoken are italicized.9 Transcript (2) (CNN broadcast 4 October 2021) OJ:  Silvia Trejo answers yes but knows that it’s more complicated than that (.5) even as her husband and son became sick with COVID-19 last summer ST: Era yo que les cuidaba (It was me who took care of them.) OJ:  And even after their battle with COVID they weren’t sure if getting the vaccine was the right move. ST:  Había mucho como … . OJ:  She says that there were a range of concerns about vaccines in her circle including fears about having a chip inserted (.5) just one example of the false information that gets shared widely online. The accompanying visuals move from Jiménez and Trejo talking in the latter’s living room to technicians in full personal protective equipment administering tests (“husband and son”) to a crate of vaccines (“getting the vaccine”) to Trejo at her laptop (“one example”). This story complicates communicable roles. Jiménez—not a researcher or health ­professional—“breaks down racial disparities in Covid-19 vaccinations.” After mentioning the father’s and son’s “battle” with COVID-19, Jiménez increases volume on “after,” projecting a temporal progression and cause-and-effect relation that leads us to expect a decision to vaccinate. Disrupting the sequence with “they weren’t sure” prompts Jiménez to explain in Trejo’s own words “(concerns … in her circle”); Jiménez’s allusion to a widely decried COVID-19 “myth” echoes WHO’s diagnosis of “vaccine hesitancy” as partially caused by the “infodemic.” This contradiction is imbued with greater significance as the report quotes statistics that project racial differences in the rates of COVID19 infection and hospitalization between Latinx and White populations and initial rates of Latinx vaccination. Overcoming this dilemma seems to require a bilingual “promotora de salud or community health worker” who, by going door-to-door, “helps bridge” this biocommunicable “divide.” Volume increases—along with gestures and facial expressions—provide metapragmatic clues to these pragmatic contours. The story ends (Transcript 3): Transcript (3) (CNN broadcast 4 October 2021) ST: me fui educando en eso … OJ:  I went educating myself in that. The reason is that it’s important (.5) I discussed it with my son and my husband. You know what? We’re going to get it, making the experiences of those who have gone before her even more significant. Note how this part of the story moves complexly from an awkward translation of Trejo’s on-camera soundbite to a translation of its off-camera continuation to a third-person reference (her) that connects Trejo with Latinx professionals who turned their own public 9

  https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/04/health/pandemic-deaths-minorities/index.html I have retained infelicities in the translations presented in the CNN story.

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590  charles l. briggs

vaccinations into health communication events. Three soundbites resolve the narrative tension, overcome the rupture, and provide a happy biocommunicable ending. Closely tracking such examples provides a window on much more than a single reporter’s perspective. The story is an assemblage co-constructed by journalists, clinicians, public health officials, community health workers, and laypersons, a process I call biomediatization (Briggs and Hallin 2016). It points to a shift—which accelerated in 2020—in representations of how health/communicable inequities are perceived and portrayed. The NPR journalist’s invocation of George Floyd’s murder perceptively suggests that medicalizing health/communicative inequities does not render them immune to reflecting and shaping broader landscapes of race and racism. Rather than featuring White journalists and health professionals talking about Others, all persons featured are Latinx. No one attributes inequities to cultural gaps or individual failures; a Latinx physician and promotora instead point to structural factors, such as US migration policies, racialized inequities in access to health insurance, and time demands facing essential workers. Nevertheless, “conspiracy theories” foreground the biomedicalauthority model’s projection of publics who must be saved from “misinformation” that endangers individual and collective health, even if remediation requires a promotora’s knock on the door.

Conclusion According to “crisis and emergency risk communication” principles, designed to metapragmatically regiment how health and security officials, politicians, and journalists should collaborate in creating pandemic discourse, failure to passively reproduce official discourses can turn laypersons into more significant threats than viruses themselves (Briggs and Hallin 2016). In March 2022, however, the pandemic-biomediatization-industrial complex is increasingly losing traction, even among mask-and-vaccine friendly audiences. In 2021, unvaccinated patients accounted for most US COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths. Despite scientific uncertainties and shifting findings, lay contributions to knowledge production have been tossed into the denigrating dustbins of “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.” Simultaneously, as Trejo suggests, public health and clinical institutions largely passed the massive burden of COVID-19 care along to patients and their families. The seventeen months of ethnographic observations and interviews on pandemic discourse I have conducted thus far suggest that the unilinear, hierarchically ordered structuring of official biocommunicability, with its entailed reduction of lay participation to passive reception, figures prominently among the reasons that millions distrust vaccines and refuse masks. Ironically, vehement challenges from people labeled as “anti-vaxxers” reproduce dominant biocommunicabilities in claiming that “deep state” health authorities lost public trust because they did not consistently articulate simple, stable, transparent relationships between communicative acts and biological realities. In short, biocommunicable outcasts accuse doctors and officials of biocommunicable failure. Social movement histories have important lessons for linguistic anthropologists who wish to forge new scholarly perspectives and contribute to health/communicative justice. A significant focus of the Black Panthers was on providing healthcare and health communication, critiquing medicalization, exploring complementary and alternative medicine, and improving maternal/infant nutrition (Nelson 2011). Members of the gay social movement in the 1980s challenged medical profiling, stereotyping of gays by healthcare and journalism professionals, and the exclusion of HIV+ individuals from knowledge production by demanding the transformation of health/communicative infrastructures relating to HIV/

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AIDS (Epstein 1996). These and other social movements, including the disability rights movement, have demonstrated that analyzing and challenging communicative inequities requires careful attention to their embodiment: they are more easily naturalized when lethal connections to health inequities remain invisible. Linguistic anthropologists have much to teach medical anthropologists about how “mere” issues of language and communication help drive and obscure medical profiling. Having struggled for decades to reveal and challenge the blind spots engendered by subdisciplinary boundary-work, this chapter has enabled me to bear witness to the growing ranks of emerging scholars whose path-breaking research is helping erode the three-centuriesold divide between science and medicine versus language and communication. In trying to bring both specific, proximal issues—particularly those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic—into dialogue with broader issues of theory, research design, and practice, I have provided a sort of guidebook that I hope may be of value in identifying obstacles and conjuring innovative points of departure. Crossing boundaries between linguistic and medical anthropology in such a way as to challenge established premises in each field is not the endgame, at least in my view. Creative scholarship and contributions to health/communicative justice that go beyond slogans and provocative statements on institutional websites require, in my estimation, deep and long-term collaboration with social movements, health, journalism, and other professionals, policymakers, and people who have spent decades scrutinizing and challenging the health/communicative inequities that they experience daily. I hope that this rising tide of scholarship and engagement will inspire readers to uproot foundational principles and practices, forge new analytics, and help lay the foundations for more equitable, healthy, and just worlds.

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33

The Force of Indexicality

Alessandro Duranti Introduction The term indexicality is understood within linguistic anthropology and related fields as the general property of anything that acquires a meaning thanks to its existential relation (in space, time, or through memory) with its referent. Although the study of indexicality has a long history within modern western philosophy, the use of it made by linguistic anthropologists is most commonly associated with two relatively recent traditions. One is the study of a particular set of linguistic expressions, including demonstratives like this and that, place and time adverbs like here and now, personal pronouns like I and you, and tense and aspect markers, whose meaning shifts across contexts (Jakobson 1957). Linguists have called these expressions shifters (Jespersen 1923) or, most commonly, deictics (from Greek δεῖξις, ‘display, demonstration’) (Anderson and Keenan 1985; Lyons 1977; Nunberg 1993), while contemporary philosophers have preferred the term indexicals (Braun 2017; Kaplan 1989). I will refer to them with the more general term indexes. The second tradition is the one directly or indirectly inspired by the classification of signs found in the Collected Papers (1931–58) (hereafter “CP”) of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839– 1914). Peirce distinguishes among icon, index, and symbol based on “the relation of the sign to its object” (Peirce CP 2.243). The icon (or likeness) is said to represent by means of some similarity with its object, as in realistic pictorial representations of people or sonic imitations of natural or cultural phenomena, and the symbol represents thanks to an agreed-upon “law,” convention, or “contract,” as in the arbitrary names given to things, activities, emotions, or physical conditions (e.g., house, eat, happy, tired). The index (plural indices in CP) for Peirce represents thanks to its being “physically connected with its object” (Peirce CP 2.299) or “by virtue of being really affected by [its] Object” (Peirce CP 2.248). Peirce’s definitions of index go from succinct ones like those just mentioned to more complex ones, where a “mental” connection to the referent is recognized and more subtle distinctions are made. Echoing the classification of signs found in Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ([1880] 2006), Peirce distinguishes between designations (e.g., personal pronouns, demonstratives, and proper names), which “act to force the attention A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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CHAPTER

to the thing intended” (Peirce CP 8.368 Fn 23), and reagents, which indirectly show evidence of some quality or state of affair, the way, for example, “smoke signifies fire” (see also Kant [1880] 2006, p. 86) or water on the kitchen floor may indicate that there is a nearby leak in a pipe. Peirce thought that designations are “absolutely indispensable both to communication and thought” (ibid) because they are needed for defining “what one is talking about” (Peirce CP 2.295) and in this sense, they help direct the focus of human interaction and thinking. Reagents, on the other hand, are interpreted by means of inferential thinking and resemble in many respects what is usually called a clue, whose relevance may not be immediately evident to everyone in the same way, requiring at times what Charles Goodwin (1994) called a professional vision. Just like archaeologists can see in the dirt indexes of past activities that other people cannot see, historical linguists recognize borrowings from one language into another as indexes of cultural contact (e.g., through commerce or military conquest) of which native speakers may or may not be aware. Reagents, therefore, might not be defined by widely shared conventions and are more likely to be interpretable on the basis of personal experience or socialization. For Peirce, anything, including material objects, can be an index and an “indexical quality” is likely to be found in the other two kinds of signs, icons and symbols (Peirce CP 2.306), which means that combinations of two or three types of signs in one token are possible and, in fact, common. Figure 33.1 shows footprints and tracks that are indexical of their objects (Peirce CP 5.473) because they are physically “connected” (in place and across time) to the birds, humans, and vehicles that caused those objects to come into existence.

Figure 33.1  Indexes–icons found in the sand. Source: Photo by Alessandro Duranti.

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The same footprints and tire tracks also qualify as icons because they have qualities (e.g., shape) that resemble those of their object (Peirce CP 2.299).1 As we shall see, despite the wide range of things and events that Peirce identified as signs with indexical qualities, the study of indexicality within linguistic anthropology at first followed the lead of linguists by starting from linguistic units as the focal point of the investigation (Levinson 1983: Chapter 3). The contributions by ethologists (e.g., Kendon 1973, 2004) and anthropologists documenting body techniques (Mauss 1935) or the expression of respect (e.g., Firth 1970, 1972) remained mostly confined to a parallel disciplinary discourse about the human body (Polhemus 1978) or non-verbal communication (Hinde 1972). Over time, however, as discussed below, linguistic anthropologists developed theoretical concepts and methods to include in the study of indexicality the human body and the surrounding material world.

Foundational Studies of Indexicality within Linguistic Anthropology One of the earliest contributions to the study of indexical meanings from an anthropological perspective is the essay “Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description” by Michael Silverstein (1976), who built on his teacher Roman Jakobson’s use of the notion of “shifter” (originally introduce by Otto Jespersen) and Peirce’s above-mentioned classification of signs to propose a cross-cutting four-way distinction between referential vs. non-referential and presupposing vs. creative (which he later called entailing) indexicals. Within this conceptual grid, deictics like the demonstrative this or that and the personal pronouns I or you (Peirce’s designations) are said to be referential indexes, with the added distinction between those that presuppose the existence of the object referred to, as in this table, and those that bring about or perform a particular role in the on-going speech event, like the pronoun you in establishing the role of the addressee (Silverstein later clarified this distinction as nonexclusive2). Non-referential indexes are special phrases, words, morphemes, and more generally styles of speaking (Irvine 1985) used to recognize the presence of certain (types of) people (e.g., kings and queens, chiefs, heads of states, heads of households, parents, in-laws, children) without directly referring to them or addressing them, the occurrence of a particular type of event (e.g., formal, institutional vs. informal, intimate), or the adoption of a particular interpretive key (e.g., serious vs. playful). As an example of indexes that have a non-referential function (in addition to a referential one) Silverstein often mentioned the so-called “mother-in-law” or “brother-in-law” languages (read “vocabularies”). These are sets of words, documented in some Australian aboriginal languages, that are expected to be used in the presence of in-laws to show them deference (Dixon 1971; Haviland 1979). Such expressions are considered non-referential indexes because they are triggered or justified by the mere presence of certain individuals, regardless of whether they are being talked about. The closest approximation in English would be the avoidance of profanity in the presence of one’s parents (Haviland 1979, p. 211). 1

  “In so far as the Index is affected by the Object, it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object, and it is in respect to these that it refers to the Object. It does, therefore, involve a sort of Icon, although an Icon of a peculiar kind; and it is not the mere resemblance of its Object, even in these respects which makes it a sign, but it is the actual modification of it by the Object.” (Peirce CP 2.248) 2   As I was reminded by Nicco La Mattina (p.c.), this is made explicit in Silverstein (2003, p. 195) where he defines socially conventional indexicals as always “balanced between indexical presupposition and indexical entailment.”

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Silverstein’s discussion of indexicality inspired the research projects of several of his students at the University of Chicago and stimulated the development of a semiotic approach to linguistic and sociocultural anthropology (Mertz 2007; Parmentier 1994). Among Silverstein’s students, William Hanks explored the phenomenology of referential indexes by investigating in great detail the complex system of deictic particles in Maya, a language spoken in the Yucatán. In addition to rectifying some long-held and faulty assumptions about referential indexes and demonstrating the value of connecting the grammatical structure of a language to the lifeworld of its speakers, Hanks imported into linguistic anthropology two important concepts: deictic field, from the writings of psychologist Karl Bühler (1982, 1990), and schéma corporel ‘corporeal scheme’ from the work of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962). Through these concepts and his own detailed ethnographic analysis of the use of deictics across situations, Hanks demonstrated “the embodiment of language in the social world” (1990, p. 466) by connecting the use of specific linguistic expressions to the lived experience of Maya agricultural practices, ritual food offerings, and the artifacts that are talked about while being used. Starting with the detailed examination of Maya spatial coordinates of bodily orientation such as the expressions for “up,” “down,” “front,” “back,” etc., Hanks uses the language of time, space, and participation in Maya to reveal the rich cultural and ethical life of its speakers. Through his unique blend of linguistic analysis and ethnography, Hanks shows how the Maya deictic system relies upon and simultaneously makes relevant speakers’ positions within interactive frameworks (1990, p. 84) built upon a continuous interplay between linguistically encoded egocentric and sociocentric dimensions of context (ibid, p. 94). Throughout the book, Hanks revisits the same deictic terms e.g., way eʔ ‘here,’ to demonstrate how their use relies on the cognitive dimensions of the corporeal scheme as well as the historically grounded personal understanding of one’s access and rights to a place (from locations inside a house to a plot of land). Through the careful analysis of how particular deictic terms are employed by the same speakers across situations and speech events readers become familiar with the rich Maya universe while getting a sense of the intricacy of reference as a cultural practice. A new theoretical contribution to the role of indexes as a constitutive force of social constructs was provided by Elinor Ochs in her 1992 essay “Indexing Gender.” Starting from the observation that the languages associated with men and women in societies tend to “have as their core social meaning a particular affective stance” (Ochs 1992, p. 341), she proposed a distinction between direct and indirect indexicality that recognized a hierarchical relation between the core indexical meaning of a given expression and its derived, higher level indexical meaning. Linguistic features such as certain sentence-final particles in Japanese may directly index certain affective stances like speaking coarsely or speaking gently and indirectly index speaking like a man or speaking like a woman. These types of linguistic indexing (e.g., the use of affective stance for the constitution of social identity) were later defined as constituting a core component of language socialization and a universal set of semiotic resources variously distributed across communities (Ochs 1996). Other important contributions to what we now think of as indexicality were also at the core of the work of researchers working within different theoretical and methodological premises. One of them was from Charles Goodwin, who in the 1970s started to examine the coordination of speech and gestures in video recorded spontaneous interactions. Informed by the work of conversation analysts, Goodwin, working closely with Marjorie H. Goodwin, was concerned with capturing the moment-by-moment unfolding of human social interaction and the role of the recipient in shaping a speaker’s utterances—what Harvey Sacks described as recipient design (Sacks 1992). By focusing on social action, rather than only or mostly on speech, Goodwin stressed the importance of understanding what is

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done and attended to by all those who are involved in the activity at hand, including speakers, hearers, and bystanders (see also C. Goodwin and M.H. Goodwin 2004). He showed that in face-to-face interaction, speaking is an interactive process ordinarily augmented, adjusted, or corrected not only by the talk of other participants but also and crucially by their embodied actions, including eye gaze. When they do not get the attention of a given recipient, speakers may shift the direction of their eye gaze and body orientation to find an alternative recipient, a move that affects the syntax and content of the utterance that is ultimately produced (Goodwin 1979, 1981). Over the last two decades, some of these theoretical contributions have been further elaborated by their original authors or by other scholars. For example, Ochs’ distinction between direct and indirect indexicality was applied by a number of authors, including Jane Hill (1998) who used it to reanalyze her own earlier identification of “Mock Spanish” as mere “racist discourse.” Hill argued that the occasional imitation by Whites of the accent of Spanish speakers in the US or their use of some Spanish words in their negative connotation (e.g., el presidente for ‘corrupt politician’) could be interpreted as a direct index of a speaker’s cosmopolitanism (or familiarity with or affiliation with the US Southwest, California, or Florida) and, at the same time, as an indirect index of “covert racist discourse” (1998, p. 683), understood as an implicit stereotypical association between certain Spanish expressions and social qualities imputed to its speakers (see section on “Racial Identification and Indexical Inequality”). Goodwin combined his earlier analyses of interaction with new data organized into a general framework called co-operative action based on the idea that people build their meaningful actions, utterances included, “by decomposing, and reusing with transformation the resources made available by the earlier actions of others” (Goodwin 2018, p. 1). Silverstein continued to write extensively about indexicality from the point of view of the consequences of speakers’ limited awareness of the pragmatic effects of certain linguistic expressions (e.g., Silverstein 1979, 1981, 1993). His introduction of the concept of indexical order was meant to capture the often hidden dynamics between specific indexical meanings and their ascension into higher levels of ideological abstraction through which types of acts (e.g., describing the taste of a wine) is turned into a type of person (e.g., the connoisseur whose qualities “subtle, balance, intriguing, winning, etc.” match those of the wine) (e.g., Silverstein 2003, p. 226). Some of Silverstein’s key concepts were adopted and integrated with other concepts by Asif Agha in his Language and Social Relations (2007), a treatise on indexical meanings as constitutive of everyday social encounters and social identities. Agha built on his own earlier work on the concept of register and its dynamic formation over time, namely, enregisterment, a process through which a repertoire of (often a few) linguistic features can evoke an entire register, language variety, or dialect, as is the case for Standard British English, also known as Received Pronunciation (Agha 2003). The notion of enregisterment is offered by Agha as an empirically robust alternative to cultural models of self, role, relation, and identity, and also as a critique of the unreflective use of units of analysis like “language” or “conversation,” which Agha considers ideological constructs based on what speakers can label and analysts can isolate through their methods of inquiry. For Agha, indexicality is pervasive in semiotic activity and constitutive of demeanors, types of persons, and relationships (see section on “Indexes of Social Identities in Time and Space”). More recent literature has expanded the range of phenomena covered by indexicality with an explicit focus on the sensuous qualities (qualia) of indexes (Harkness 2015) and on the complex relation between language and materiality (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017). These new studies have further altered the older language-centric view of indexicality by

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recognizing the ideological exclusion of the body (Bucholtz and Hall 2016), the materiality of writing (Irvine 2017; Sterponi 2008), and how sensuous qualities like, for example, the taste of wine, may resist linguistic representations (Manning 2012) or how the human voice may resist religious-ideological purification (Keane 2007).

The Temporality of Indexes The phrase “spatiotemporal” is frequently used in the theoretical discussions of indexes but little is said about the lived temporal unfolding of indexical meanings, which supports a moment-by-moment accrual of sedimented and deeply rooted historical traditions, memories, and habitus (Duranti 1997, 2009a). Believing that this is a limitation of our very own reliance on the de-temporalized language conceptualized by structuralist linguistics, I will next elucidate the key meaning-making role of temporality through the analysis of a pointing gesture used during a cultural activity where speaking is typically absent, namely, a jazz band’s performance of a tune in front of an audience.

The Temporal Unfolding of a Pointing Gesture during a Jazz Performance

The temporal unfolding of a spontaneous pointing gesture can be documented by means of anthropological methods like participant-observation, aural or visual recording, interviews, and reliance on historical records (e.g., previous recordings, transcripts, or publications). In our case, the context is a concert in a jazz club, attended and photographed by the author as part of a research project on the socialization into jazz aesthetics (Duranti 2009b; Duranti and Burrell 2004; Duranti et al. 2021). In addition to providing empirical support for the claim that “… the ground of deixis is the gesticulating body,” where “the physical situation” matters (Hanks 2005, p. 196), the situation described below is meant to show how a so-called referential pointing gesture acquires a pragmatic meaning—that is, it becomes a social act with consequences—during and thanks to its temporal unfolding within a particular type of cultural practice. It will be suggested that in addition to presupposing the (physical) existence of a referent, in this case a particular member of the band, the gesture also performs the action of creating (or, rather, constituting) the role of soloist for that member at a particular and appropriate time. By indicating, the gesture brings to the foreground necessary shared cultural knowledge and individual memories of past musical performances that are the foundations for projecting and then enacting the next-relevant activity, namely, soloing. The scene is captured in a photo (Figure 33.2) where trumpet player and bandleader Bobby Rodriguez is shown during a performance in a jazz club in Hollywood, California. The photo captures the moment in which Rodriguez is extending his right arm and pointing with his index finger while simultaneously looking in the same direction toward something or someone in the scene (the simultaneous use of gesture and gaze is common in the use of indexical signs of this kind). Figure 33.2 shows a relatively small stage crowded with musicians, some of whom, like the tenor saxophone player markedly leaning to his left while standing, are playing while others are not (for example, on the left, Kenny Burrell can be seen holding his guitar while looking attentively to what is likely the written score of the musical arrangement that is being performed). The interpretability of the pointing gesture despite its “fundamentally underdetermined, ambiguous, shifty” nature (Nakassis 2018, p. 287) is here being tested. The gesture provides an indication of a direction by suggesting an imaginary line “drawn in the air”

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Figure 33.2  Band leader Bobby Rodriguez points during a performance at Catalina’s Bar & Grill, Hollywood, California, April 7, 2014 (photo by Alessandro Duranti).

starting from Bobby Rodriguez’s extended arm, but it does not contain the key information about where the line is supposed to stop. What we do know is that, using the above-­ mentioned categories proposed by Silverstein (1976), Rodriguez’s pointing gesture qualifies as an index that can be said to be both referential and creative because it is meant to identify the addressee among the possible ones while at the same time establishing the context-­ relevant role for that addressee. As a gestural equivalent of the second person pronoun you, the conductor’s pointing is both an attention-getting device (as predicted by Peirce) and a performative act to establish an identity-role of the relevant party within the activity. In the absence of an explicit speech act, to know what that identity-role could possibly be, we certainly need to take into consideration, as suggested by Goodwin (2003, p. 219), “the larger activity within which the act of pointing is embedded.” But which “larger activity,” given that there are several possible candidates? We could hypothesize, for example, that one “larger activity” is the public performance of a jazz tune, which entails the alternation between written or previously memorized music and improvised music (e.g., melodic lines different from the melody of the tune but in accordance with the harmonic structure of the piece). But the performance of the jazz tune as such is too “large” an activity for helping interpret the full force of Rodriguez’s gesture. With the proper cultural knowledge, which we can assume to be shared by the musicians and some of the audience members, we can infer that by pointing Rodriguez was likely to be calling upon one of the players to “improvise next” or, to use jazz musicians’ register, “take the next solo.” As an illocutionary act (Austin 1962), this kind of pointing gesture, then, acts as an invitation or request that, to be felicitous, that is, to properly work in this context, needs to happen at a particular moment in the performance of the piece. This very fact introduces temporality not as past, present, and future but as a sequence of moves or turns. Borrowing from conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974), we can thus interpret the pointing gesture as happening at a possible moment of transition between the end of one turn at soloing and the beginning of the next turn. By identifying one particular recipient as the candidate next player, the gesture invites and authorizes that player to perform a next possible and likely action, while simultaneously (and indirectly) announcing-requesting the end of the currently on-going solo (most likely by the saxophone player shown standing in Figure 33.2). But now a different and more encompassing sense of temporality must be evoked because the pointing act can only be made sense of

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by invoking, as I have so far partly done in an implicit way, the history of jazz as a cultural practice and the specific style and organization of this particular band as previously prepared, practiced, and tested during their rehearsals. When I later asked Rodriguez about whether the players in the band shown in Figure 33.2 were expecting to be called to solo,3 he responded that they “practiced three of four times to have everyone comfortable with the feel of the band and the arrangements.” When I asked, more specifically, whether there was a pre-arranged and agreed-upon sequence of soloists, Rodriguez answered: “In a Jazz band like this one there could be assigned soloist(s) or everyone needs to be ready to solo (improvise) at the leader’s [request].” This means that Rodriguez’s pointing gesture presupposes a shared culture of music-­ making with its notions, among others, of sequential order (i.e., solos follow one after the other) and hierarchy (e.g., someone decides who plays when), reproduced in rehearsals and live performances. But the same gesture also simultaneously performs its on-the-spot actualization (and testing) of that shared culture. In addition to being sequentially placed at a culturally recognizable and possible point of transition, the type of action entailed by the gesture needs reference to different scales of “larger activities.” As an answer to the implicit question “who is next?” the pointing gesture shown in Figure 33.2 is simultaneously future and past oriented. It indexes who will be playing a solo next while evoking past expectations about such possibility. The gesture is, thus, interpretable and interpreted as the latest instantiation of a historically extended series of similar gestures by the same individual (Rodriguez) and others before him. It is the tension between what is possible according to the jazz musicians’ shared, or, more likely, distributed knowledge4 and the contingencies of the moment that gives meaning—or rather force (in Austin’s 1962 sense)—to the gesture by activating memory associations and context-specific expectations about what and who will be next. Pointing is in, of, and about time not only in the sense that its referent can shift from one moment to the next, but also in the sense that the temporal horizon of pointing as a cultural practice is always historically and biographically defined and therefore likely to be sensitive to changing individual and collective memory.5

Beyond Reference: Deictics with Affect

Deictics have been known to encode and evoke an affective stance, like when they are used in place of personal pronouns, as shown by Robin Conley’s (2016) research on court proceedings involving decisions about the death penalty in Texas. Using a third person deictic (e.g., he, she, this man) in contexts in which a second person pronoun could have been possible makes someone who could have been an addressee (a you) into an overhearer or someone who might not be worth talking to; in other contexts, the third person instead of the second may index that it is not appropriate to address someone directly. When the use of the third person is accompanied by a facial expression that makes visible an iconic affective stance like puzzlement, disapproval, disdain, or outrage, the overall effect can be rhetorically powerful. One example is provided below from the 2019 congressional hearings of Michael Cohen, former attorney of then-President Donald Trump.

3

  During an email exchange between February 20 and February 21, 2021.   By “distributed knowledge” I mean partly shared among the band members but with sufficient overlap to allow for proper coordination of actions. For a discussion of the partly shared knowledge of the jazz repertoire, see Robert Faulkner and Howard Becker (2009). 5   For the use of pointing and other gestures to help establish temporal continuity across separate life experiences during a criminal trial, see Gregory Matoesian and Kristin Enola Gilbert (2019). 4

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After having pleaded guilty to several charges including lying to Congress and violating campaign finance laws, on February 27, 2019, Cohen appeared in front of the Committee on Oversight and Reform. While the Democrats on the committee aimed at extracting from Cohen more revelations about Trump’s character flaws and allegedly illegal activities (e.g., in his dealings with Russia), the Republican members worked at demolishing the character of the witness, whose credibility was undermined by the conviction he had already received. Transcript (1) contains an example of the deictic expression this witness used by Representative Carol Miller (Republican from West Virginia) who is visibly and audibly reading from a written text in which she directly challenges the reliability of assertions previously made by Cohen in his opening statement. After asking a rhetorical question in which she addresses Cohen in the second person and immediately answers it (“how can we believe anything you say? the answer is we can’t”), thereby taking away the addressee’s right to give his own answer, Miller shifts to ask additional rhetorical questions directed this time to the audience, followed by statements aimed at shaming the Democrats on the committee for holding the hearing instead of being focused on “actual issues that are facing America.” She then returns to speak about Cohen. As shown in Transcript (1), it is in this context that, while looking down at her written statement, she refers to him as “this witness.” Transcript (1) (Rep. Carol Miller at Michael Cohen’s Hearings, February 27, 2019) CM;  We are supposed to take what you say Mr. Cohen, at this time. about President Trump, as the truth (1.0) but you’re about to go to prison for lying. how can we believe anything you say? the answer is::. we can’t. this begs the question. why are those in the majority holding this hearing? I am appalled. We could be focused on actual issues that are facing America. like the border security. neonatal abstinence syndrome. or improving our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. Instead the Democrats are trying to grasp at straws. Let’s talk about this witness.

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In this case, this witness functions in an exclusionary, distancing way. By being talked about in the third person, Mr. Cohen, who has come to speak and answer questions, is made into what Emile Benveniste (1971, pp. 221–222) called a “non-person.”6 When Rep. Miller switches from the second person singular (you in “you say Mr. Cohen”) to the third person singular (this witness in “Let’s talk about this witness”), she not only makes Cohen an overhearer, she also turns him into something more akin to a material exhibit in a trial than a person worth of human understanding and empathy.7 Furthermore, the shape of Miller’s mouth in the photo after Transcript (1) suggests a negative affective stance, thereby producing what Agha (2007, p. 25–26) called a laminated interactional trope, that is, the superimposition of “two distinct tropes—one performed through a linguistic sign, the other through a kinesic act” (other scholars have used the term “composite” for this type of complex sign). This example shows that even typically referential indexes like demonstratives can acquire additional, non-referential indexical meanings when they reveal the attitude the speaker has or wants to show toward a given referent. Reference in such cases functions simultaneously as an act of identification of, say, a particular person and a moral evaluation of that person. An act of reference done through a deictic becomes, thus, effectively performative or creative. This coexistence of semiotic functions permeates referential choices of all kinds, including those that index ambivalent stances toward social identities (George 2019). Finally, even though a bit earlier in the same proceedings, another member of the committee, Representative Mark Meadows (Republican from North Carolina) had accompanied the same expression (this witness) with a pointing gesture, Miller’s use of it without the pointing gesture shows that the demonstrative this can be used indexically—to identify someone spatially proximate—without the “associated demonstration” posited as necessary by David Kaplan (1989, p. 490).

Indexes of Social Identities in Time and Space A considerable body of research has been dedicated to the use of expressions that index social identities and social relations. Much of the early work in this area has been done on honorifics (Agha 1994), that is, lexical or morphological distinctions as well as styles of speaking (Irvine 1985) and registers (Agha 2007) that mark, in some languages more elaborately than in others, the (relative) status of the person who is being talked about, of the addressee, of some specific bystanders, or of the occasion (Levinson 1983, pp. 89–94). In the 1960s, special attention was devoted in anthropology and linguistics to the elaborate systems of honorification that are typically found in many so-called stratified or hierarchical societies, where the expression of deference or respect is expected and demanded especially, but not exclusively, in public settings.8 Early descriptions of the Javanese and Korean “speech levels” (Geertz 1960; Martin 1964) and lists of vocabularies “of respect” (e.g., Milner 1961) were followed, starting in the 1970s, by a number of empirical studies by linguistic 6

  Benveniste’s argument is based on the observation that in many languages, the third person is expressed by either a zero-form (that is, no personal pronoun exists in the language to express the third person) or by importing a term from a different grammatical category, e.g., a demonstrative. Over time, the demonstrative can be reanalyzed as a pronoun, as in the case of Italian pronoun lui ‘he/him’ from Vulgar Latin *illui, derived from the dative case illi of Latin demonstrative ille ‘that (one)’. https://www.wordsense.eu/lui/#Latin. 7   On the social meaning of demonstratives for personal reference in Italian conversation, see Duranti (1984). 8   See Irvine (1998) for a discussion of cases in which social stratification did not produce honorific language.

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anthropologists to examine exactly when honorific or deference-giving expressions (phrases, words, morphemes) were actually used and by whom. A number of these studies were done in stratified societies in the Pacific region, where some languages have honorific lexicons, that is, lists of words that are considered appropriate for referring to people of high social status, their actions and feelings, and their relatives and possessions. My own audio recordings of spontaneous interaction among individuals whose presence may be expected to trigger the use of such expressions in Samoa have shown that the mere physical presence or absence of a person deserving “respect” is not a sufficient or necessary condition for the use of respectful words (ˋupu faˋaaloalo) (Duranti 1992a). It is often the type of activity or speech act (e.g., greeting, request, offer, rejection, compliment) rather than the type of person that triggers the use of honorifics so that status-specific expressions might be used for people who do not have the presupposed status, but assume or are given the type of authority that is usually associated with those individuals who have such status (Keating and Duranti 2006, p. 149). Honorifics are also typically accompanied by other types of communicative behaviors (e.g., gestures, postures) that should be considered co-constitutive of the expression of respect. For example, in the case of what I called Samoan “ceremonial greetings” (Duranti 1992b), the actual exchange of verbal greetings that makes use of honorific expressions is sequentially anticipated and made appropriate (or “felicitous” in Austin’s (1962) sense, see above) by the place that a person goes to occupy when entering a house where others are already gathered. Before words are uttered, then, where one sits in a Samoan house is always already a visible index of that person’s known (or presupposed, in Silverstein’s terms) status or rank (with orators, chiefs, and untitled people sitting in different parts of the house) as well as a performed index of the newcomer’s readiness to be the recipient of a ceremonial greeting, to which he or she will be expected to respond. Whereas avoiding the spot that one is expected to occupy according to one’s status and rank might be treated as an index of modesty, it might also be interpreted as a person’s unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of someone with the status or rank ascribed by the honorifics (see Irvine 1974 on negotiations over status). In these cases, indexes can be said to pile up on top of or next to one another, inviting analyses based on Ochs’ (1992) distinction between direct and indirect indexicality or Silverstein’s (2003) indexical order. Routine as well as creative uses of honorifics have been showcased in the study of politeness, where respect given through language to one’s interlocutor has been interpreted as a strategy for compensating face-threatening acts by suggesting that the indexed high status of the addressee guarantees him or her freedom from imposition (Brown and Levinson 1978). In fact, the opposite is also possible. Just like the giving of a gift obliges the recipient of the gift to reciprocate (Mauss 1923–1924), the giving of respect is also constraining by obliging the person being honored by speech (and other codes) to live up to the expectations associated with the indexed social status (Duranti 1992a; Irvine 1974).

Racial Identification and Indexical Inequality

Much literature in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics has been dedicated over the years to the role of language in identity formation (Bucholtz and Hall 2004; Kroskrity 2001), a social process that has been shown to be sensitive to historical events, the contingencies of the moment, and the medium of communication, from face-to-face talk to YouTube videos (Mendoza-Denton 2016). The more recent contributions to this area of research have benefited from a combination of different theoretical, historical, and analytic approaches to the study of speech communities and the inner and outer forces that define them (Morgan 2014). The constitution of gender identity has been informed by Judith Butler’s (1988, 1990) phenomenological-performative perspective and Miyako Inoue’s

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(2006) historically and ethnographically informed analysis of narratives of personal experience illustrating the Japanese notion of “woman’s language.” The critique of the conaturalization of language and race common in the US has been a running theme of recent research on the stereotypical characterization of African Americans, Asian Americans, or immigrants from Latin America and their descendants in the US. As pointed out by Jonathan Rosa (2019, p. 7), “particular linguistic forms are constructed as emblematic of particular racial categories, and vice versa” even when speakers (e.g., those who grew up speaking English) do not actually use those forms but phenotypically index membership in certain groups (see also Bailey 2002). A new field, raciolinguistics, has been developing “to ask and answer critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power across diverse ethnoracial contexts and societies” (Alim 2016, p. 27n). A range of methods of linguistic analysis have been put to work to document and analyze recurrent situations where entire communities or individuals suffer marginalization due to repeated negative assessments of their ways of speaking (Alim et al. 2020). A wide range of phenomena have been shown to persist in all kinds of practices that take for granted and reinforce the idea of the intellectual superiority of the phonology, lexicon, and syntax of one particular dialect called “Standard” over the dialects of minority, non-dominant groups (Rosa and Flores 2017). One such practice recently analyzed by Mary Bucholtz (2016) is the mispronunciation of names in the US that do not conform to the phonology or spelling of Standard English. Bucholtz argues that whether or not people decide to change the pronunciation of their names to make it more easily understood and repeatable by their classmates, teachers, coworkers, or bosses, the experience of having one’s own name mispronounced or officially altered can lead to a sense of loss of one’s identity. The loss of the original sounds in one’s name is, thus, lived as a weakening of the indexical link between the name and its place and time of origin, a phenomenon that Bucholtz considers similar to what Lauren Squires called indexical bleaching, the outcome of the recontextualizations of a given expression that leave behind “some attributes of its earlier context” but not others (Squires 2014, p. 44). This widespread process foregrounds the historicity of indexical meanings and the fact that they are originally born out of a “baptismal event” (Agha 1993, p. 161) or, in some cases, of multiple (and competing) events. Over time such events may be forgotten and their indexical meaning ignored by the majority of the population, unless new circumstances bring a dormant indexical meaning to the fore. This has been the case, for example, with the protests in the US against statues and names of schools commemorating Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Virginia (The Washington Post, October 8, 2017) or with the recent debate in France about whether to celebrate or condemn Napoleon Bonaparte on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his death given some of his infamous actions, including the reinstatement of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1802 after its post-revolutionary abolition in 1794 (The New York Times, May 5, 2021). When the past is reread in light of current social movements, the indexical field becomes a field of struggle.

Limits of Our Control of Indexical Meanings Indexes that are reagents in Peirce’s classification can be detected in speakers’ accent, their choice of words, or the prosodic and paralinguistic features of their speech, including voice quality, which contribute to how a given utterance as a whole is interpreted or the type of persona the speaker is assuming or projecting (e.g., Mendoza-Denton 2011; Sicoli 2010). To the extent to which their indexical meaning is conventionalized, such features can qualify

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for what John Gumperz called contextualization cues, understood as “means by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes or follows” (Gumperz 1982, p. 131). An important issue raised by this concept is the extent to which speakers can control the indexical meanings of their speech—the same question can be extended to the indexical meanings of a person’s material possessions (e.g., clothes, car, house, furniture) or taste (e.g., in music, books, movies, television programs). We might consciously and purposely produce indexes by means of what we wear, do, and say in order to project a certain image of ourselves, as part of what Erving Goffman (1959) called “impression management,” but there are limits to our ability to anticipate or monitor the indexical meanings others might read into what we do. For example, as discussed by H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman (2012), while President Barack Obama was able to easily shift from Standard English to Black English—as shown by his famous reply “Nah, we straight” to a Black cashier captured on YouTube—thereby exhibiting a conscious control of which of his multiracial identities to turn on and when to do it, Obama could not predict or control the negative and often racist interpretations of his adoption of African American communicative conventions, as shown by some of the reactions to the “Pound” (misnamed “fist bump” in the popular media) he exchanged with his wife Michelle at a campaign rally in 2008 (Alim and Smitherman 2012, Chapter 4). These situations of Black vs. White indexical meanings of a phrase, pronunciation, or gesture make evident what Constantine Nakassis (2018) has called the “contestable ground” of indexicality and the difficulty of relying at times on speakers’ intentions as a necessary or sufficient criterion for the interpretation of any given act (Duranti 2015 and Chapter 17 of this book).

Conclusions The notion of index has become a powerful tool for the anthropological study of language and other semiotic resources. A pointing gesture and a demonstrative like that or this immediately draw our attention to something that is likely to be relevant to the ongoing activity, but our attention can also be alerted by an unknown accent, the unexpected loudness of a person’s voice, or pieces of broken glass on the sidewalk. These are all potential indexes, that is, entities of our lifeworld waiting for a meaning, regardless of whether or not someone will give one to them. In this respect, indexicality can be thought of as the ground of meaning-making, omnipresent and open-ended because of the constitutive ambiguity of indexes (see section on “The Temporality of Indexes”). For this reason, indexes make evident the very mechanisms through which meaning is given to particular experiences. Their temporal unfolding makes room for the quick peeling off of cultural-historical knowledge and individual or shared memories that make their interpretation sufficiently specific for those whose successful next moves depend on it (see section on “The Temporal Unfolding of a Pointing Gesture During a Jazz Performance”). Indexicals—like deictics—can also display affective stances whether or not they are combined with gestures and iconic facial expressions (see section on “Beyond Reference: Deictics with Affect”). Some indexes share with symbols the property of being conventional, law-like. This is the case for the verbal or gestural deictics that direct someone’s attention toward a particular place, person, object, or verbal expression. Many indexes, however, are not due to firmly established code-specific conventions. They arise, instead, out of particular interactions we have with people and with the natural or built environment, like, for example, when an object on the ground, in the water, or in the air is interpreted as an index of a past, current,

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or future event. Indexical meanings are also parasitic on other signs, like when the choice of a particular symbol (e.g., the word for a type of food) may be used to infer the country, region, or city where the speaker grew up or lived. Much of the literature in linguistic anthropology of the last fifty or so years is dedicated to the analysis of these non-conventional and yet easily recognizable and effective indexes. They have been shown to be involved in all kinds of socially consequential acts such as the performance, selection and inspection of social identities, the display of ideological stances toward the value of different languages, dialects or ways of speaking, and the monitoring of individual or group access to socioeconomic resources, from job opportunities to levels of education and housing, as in the case of what John Baugh (2003) called linguistic profiling. Not only are our linguistic choices of all kinds potential sources of indexical meanings, but a much richer semiotic treasure is available from the many details of our life experiences that can be interpreted in an indexical way, like, for example, the job we have, the neighborhood where we live, our friends, the books we read, our food habits, and what kinds of clothes we buy. These and other aspects of our typically taken-for-granted lifeworld are usually in the background but can purposely or inadvertently be brought into the foreground. It is to the exploration of this emergent force of indexicality that many recent studies are dedicated.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Nicco La Mattina, Alessandra Laurer Rosen, Alan Rumsey and my two co-editors Rachel George and Robin Conley Riner for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any remaining errors or misinterpretations of the literature remain mine.

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Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures; those in bold to tables. activist anthropology, 255, 263, 543–544 activists, language, 24, 26–27, 51, 56–57, 59, 62–63, 152, 258, 262, 269, 354 affordances, 9, 300–301, 319, 329, 343 digital, 215–230 passim, 236, 238–239 ethical, 301–302, 308–310 media, 277, 284, 288 Agamben, Giorgio, 344 agency, 8, 140–141, 147–148, 150, 152, 217, 277, 338, 386, 423, 589 agency, distributed, 6 Agha, Asif, 180n, 207, 428n, 504, 600, 605 agoraphobia, 347–349, 579 alignment affective, 355–356, 360–361 passim, 363–366 attentional, 418–419, 424 discursive, 72–74, 77–78, 80, 305–306, 433 interactional, 90, 167, 226, 228, 394, 397, 466 See under chronotope; voice (characterological) See also footing; stance alimentary ideologies. See under ideologies Alim, H. Samy, 562, 608 analogy, 126, 181–182, 187–189, 437n See also transduction  anonymity, 240, 249, 304, 309, 498, 503, 505

anti-Blackness, 258–259, 505, 526, 528, 530–537, 546, 562, 564, 570–572, 586 Appadurai, Arjun, 4, 6, 9, 141, 145 Aristotle, 318, 391 aspect-seeing, 319, 320n, 336 assimilation, 28n, 81, 357 assimilationist policy, 22 attention  collective, 366 design, 386 ecologies of, 411, 423–424 education of, 410n getting, 101, 602 joint, 397, 410–424 reflexive, 198 directing, 280, 284, 324, 378, 403, 466, 596–597, 608 See also attentional pull.  See also under alignment; socialization  attentional pull, 319, 530n audience coalescence, 544, 546, 547, 551 Austin, J. L., 320–321, 339, 529 authenticity, 28, 112, 145–146, 228, 325, 337–341, 363, 467, 484 authority, authorities  academic, 4 of ancient writings, 189 biomedical, 580–581, 588–589, 591

A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, First Edition. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Index

colonial, 50, 114 cultural, 24 decentralization of, 140 ethnographic, 262–263 linguistic, 363, 484 protest about, 228 religious, 236–238, 240–242, 247–249, 430, 433–434 seniority, 219–220, 229–230 struggles for, 181, 185, 187, 480 state, 60 autism, 414, 424, 579 Avineri, Netta, 2, 357–358, 543–551 axes of differentiation, 110, 112–113, 115, 187, 579 baby talk. See under recipient design; registers Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 180, 195, 206–207, 257, 302, 317, 324–325, 428, 513 baptismal (name-conferring) events, 518, 607 Barrett, Rusty, 530–531 Basso, Keith, 52, 161n, 216, 230, 255, 497–498 Bateson, Gregory, 196, 204, 254, 262, 446, 579 Bauman, Richard, 91, 180n, 195, 335, 434, 498 Benedict, Ruth, 299, 543 Benveniste, Émile, 605 Besnier, Niko, 111, 323, 498–499 biocommunicability, 581–582, 585–591 See also communicability  biomediatization, 587, 591 biomedical ideologies. See under ideologies Birdwhistell, Ray, 444n, 446, 447, 448 Blommaert, Jan, 5, 91, 140, 150, 226 Bloomfield, Leonard, 445 Boas, Franz, 16–17, 51–52, 56, 445, 461, 543 body language, 444n borrowings, 87, 88, 89, 100, 147, 184, 185, 241, 244, 486, 597 Bourdieu, Pierre, 43, 326, 355, 491 Brentano, Franz, 318–320, 323 Briggs, Charles, 91, 180n, 195, 335, 434, 579 Bucholtz, Mary, 3, 563, 607 Bühler, Karl, 434, 599 Butler, Judith, 339, 529, 530, 606–607 calibration, 201, 206–211 passim, 257, 260, 454 calquing, 184–188 passim, 465 Canagarajah, Suresh, 483 capital, 111 linguistic, 3, 111 symbolic, 463, 491

carnivalesque, the, 195, 206, 207, 210 catharsis, 197, 210, 392 Cavanaugh, Jillian, 365, 466–468 Chomsky, Noam, 52, 355, 448 Cicourel, Aaron, 579 citationality, 179–180, 260 citation practices, 530, 538, 555, 572 chronotope, 1, 2, 5, 201–202, 206–211, 257 alignment, 207–210 See also transposition: deictic  clarification, 321, 327 co-authorship, 162, 228, 329 See also cooperation  codemixing. See language mixing codeswitching, 25, 59, 87–93, 97–99, 102– 103, 241, 246–248, 303n, 324, 358, 464, 467 See also language alternation  colonialism, 16–17, 23–24, 27–28, 42–43, 49–59, 72, 108–117, 152, 225, 256–257, 354, 480–481, 491, 498, 561, 564, 571, 578 commensuration, 183, 184, 189 communicability, 580–582, 587, 589–591 See also biocommunicability  communities of practice, 66, 127–128, 143, 159, 161–162, 172, 549, 551 competence  communicative, 216–217, 228, 231, 258, 463, 472–473, 578n cultural, 462 linguistic, 109, 361 models of, 230 multilingual, 88 participatory, 411, 417 keyboard, 219 See also technobodily literacy  concealment, 488, 494–506 See also secrecy, secrets  contextualization cues, 89, 372, 395, 608 See also metapragmatics: cues  Conversation Analysis, 67, 90, 128, 258, 324, 448, 449–452, 510, 583, 602 cooperation  in creole genesis, 38, 43–44 frameworks of, 413 See also co-authorship  co-operative action, 8, 343, 444n, 454, 600 corporeality, 276, 279, 392–399, 414–419, 423, 599 corporeal scheme (schéma corporel), 599 counterpublics, 240–242, 248–249, 500 Covid-19 pandemic, 4, 269, 273–274, 279, 288, 300, 309, 398, 473, 506, 532, 580–582, 588–592

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index  615

creaky voice, 395, 397, 428 creolization, 9, 34–46, 130 cultural relativity. See under relativity DeafBlind languaging, 127–128 deaf languaging practices, 122–123, 133–134 decolonization, 3–4, 7–9, 26–28, 91, 102, 107–109, 257, 263, 269, 525, 544, 547–548, 562, 564–565 deep play, 196–197 deficit models, 4, 80, 90–92, 231, 546, 587–588 deictic field, 599 deictics, deixis, 70, 73, 97, 260–261, 344–347, 419, 465, 596, 598–599, 603–605, 608 See also index, indexicality  See also under transposition  denotation  analysis not limited by, 117, 355, 566 meaning beyond, 179, 181, 365, 429–430, 438, 462, 466 text, 204, 208 diabetes, 578, 583 diagram. See under icon, iconicity diaspora, 19, 36, 66–82 passim, 134, 139, 141, 196, 206, 243–244, 449, 530 dictionaries, 17, 51, 57, 60, 124, 126–127, 360, 500–502 digital publics, 240–241 diglossia, 88 directives, 400–405, 413, 417–419, 461 discretion, 488, 498, 500–501, 506 discursive tracks, 73, 78 documentary regimes, 467–468 doubt (religious), 235–236, 240–245 passim, 247–250 Duranti, Alessandro, 7, 150, 337n, 393, 414, 416n, 451, 452, 506, 510, 512, 572 dynamic figuration. See figuration: dynamic eavesdropping, 373, 374, 381, 489, 497 See also whispering  Eckert, Penelope, 527–528 ecological huddles, 392, 413, 424 Edwards, Terra, 127–128, 397, 455 electroreception, 374, 376, 385 elites, 111 colonial, 111, 117, 480 and food, 463–464 literate, 160, 165, 219 postcolonial, 108, 110–117, 261, 481 emblems, 16–24 passim, 59, 80, 108–117 passim, 172, 200, 203, 206, 484, 607 embodiment, 237–238, 443–456 passim dispositions, 300 experience, 201–203, 260, 521, 570–571

knowledge, 172, 295, 463 practices, 161, 163, 216, 222, 235–236, 276, 318, 411, 468 skills, 275 stance, 180, 511 subjectivity, 392, 406 use of body, 97, 127, 222, 254, 256, 260, 274–280, 308, 318, 346, 355, 401–405, 413, 419, 423, 443, 600 See also voice  emergence, 101–102, 131–132, 609 emojis, 276, 277, 536 emotion aesthetics, 247 attachment, 6, 54, 73, 354 catharsis, 197 experience of, 201, 342, linguistic expression of, 246 genres of, 215 enchrony, 101 Enfield, Nick, 92–93, 101, 455 enregisterment, 110, 261, 428, 501, 600 See also registers  entextualization, 110, 151, 195–196, 202, 204, 209, 261, 433–434, 517, 571 equivalence, 181, 182, 184–185, 191, 586 erasure, 21, 27, 125, 472, 516, 518, 526, 562, 566, 585 Ervin-Tripp, Susan, 448 ethnographic film, 253–255, 258, 261–263, 266 ethnography, video-cued, 261-263, 269–270 ethnomethodology, 90, 258, 411, 488 ethnomethods, 98, 284 technobodily, 278, 290, 291, 293, 295 evidentiality, 186–187 exosomatization, 273 expertise, experts, 189–190, 405, 545, 553–555 anthropological, 4, 8 linguistic, 362 musical, 204 redistribution of, 4, 544–545, 549, 552–554 translational, 263, 513, 519–520 fashions of speaking, 325 Feld, Steve, 430, 438 figuration, 111–116 passim dynamic, 196, 197–201, 208, 210–211 film dubbing, 26, 181 film, ethnographic. See ethnographic film fonts, 229, 247, 258, 319 food (inter)activism, 464, 471–472 footing, 90, 97–98, 167, 257, 373, 466–467 See also alignment; stance  See also under index, indexicality  foreigner talk. See under recipient design

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616  index

format tying, 226 Foucault, Michel, 43, 276, 300, 334–335, 338 fractal recursivity. See recursivity: fractal Frege, Gottlob, 320n Gal, Susan, 7, 18, 43, 53, 110, 496–497, 499–500, 513, 577, 579, 589 Garfinkel, Harold, 258, 448 Garro, Linda, 579 gaze, 97, 276, 342–343, 348, 372, 393, 411–423 passim, 443, 449, 453, 462, 600–601 Geertz, Clifford, 196–197, 249 gender, 152, 521, 525–538, 599 betrayal of, 113 legal bias, 513, 519, 521 division of labor, 471 hierarchies, 563 identity, 325, 339, 503, 606–607 and literacy, 240–243, 250 normativity, norms, 127, 527 performativity of, 152, 529–530 roles, 51, 54, 61 socialities, 236–237 stereotyping, 111, 128, 182 and stigmatization, 307 gender (noun class), 41–42, 527 genres  affective, 214, 217, 226, 357 blurred, 347 cinematic and photographic, 259–263, 269 events, 202–204 literary, 183–184, 186 musical, 203–204, 206 performance, 531–521 poetic, 150, 432–433 religious, 235, 247 sociality, 468, 470 speech, 178–180, 301, 356, 365, 494–506 passim speech (revitalization of), 54, 59, 61 writing, 160 Gershon, Ilana, 73, 236, 237, 239–240 Gibson, James, 9, 301, 319 GIFs, 276, 277 global linguistic flows, 143, 150, 151 global style community, 141, 145, 148, 150 Goffman, Erving, 90, 196, 204, 258, 369–370, 373, 392, 393, 428, 434, 444n, 447–451, 466, 608 Goodwin, Charles, 8–9, 202, 254–255, 258–259, 270, 342n, 343, 405, 449, 452, 454, 579, 588, 597, 599–600, 602 Goodwin, Marjorie H., 202, 226, 341, 449, 599 gossip, 188, 248, 328, 341, 463, 470, 496–499

graffiti, 141–142, 146, 165, 169 greetings, 15, 17, 24, 167, 383, 393–398, 400, 451, 486, 569, 606 Grice, H. P., 323, 326, 370 Gumperz, John, 89, 98, 370, 372, 608 Habermas, Jürgen, 239 habitus, 43, 326, 355, 464, 601 Hall, Edward T., 445–447 Hanks, William F., 188–189, 583n, 599 haptic visuality, 260 haptic sociality, 394–398, 415 Haviland, John, 70–71, 73, 341, 510, 513 health/communicative inequities, 579–582, 587–592 hegemony, 43, 125, 325, 564–565 Heidegger, Martin, 317, 324, 337–341, 342–346 passim heritage learners, 20–22, 53, 63, 357, 360, 549 heteroglossia, 300, 302, 303–308 passim, 324–325 Hill, Jane H., 3, 53, 302, 499, 563–566, 600 Hillewaert, Sarah, 239, 249, 394 hiphopographies, 139, 142 HIV/AIDS, 300, 303–309, 578, 588, 591–592 Hoffman-Dilloway, Erika, 257–258, 270, 455 homophobia, 8, 151 honest signaling, 371 See also index, indexicality  honorifics, 167, 605–606 hugs, hugging, 394–398, 400 Hurston, Zora Neale, 461 Husserl, Edmund, 317–320, 323–324, 329, 335–338, 342, 348, 416n Hymes, Dell, 8, 52, 150 hypercorrection, 80, 221, 526 icon, iconicity, 197–198, 430, 432, 596, 598 diagrams, 115, 183, 197–201, 207, 211, 435, 437n facial, 603, 608 gesture, 97 of identity. See emblems relation, 110, 112, 201, 256, 437 signs, 220, 433, 462 See also rhematization  iconization. See rhematization ideological work, 577, 579–582 ideologies  alimentary, 463 biomedical, 587 language. See language ideologies media, 224n, 236, 239, 248, 249, 430, 587 technological, 223 raciolinguistic, 528, 564–567, 570 semiotic, 236–241, 244–245, 249

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index  617

socialization, 411, 419, 423 ideologizing, 491, 579 illocution, 602 imagination, 4, 9, 67, 69, 73, 148, 151, 191, 222, 255, 269, 318, 337, 344, 347, 454, 473, 548 imagined community, 66 improvisation, 152, 190, 317–318, 325–326, 341, 602 index, indexicality, 89, 179–180, 197–198, 259–260, 464–466, 514, 527–529, 566, 596–609 honest signaling, 371 identity, 90, 141, 149–150, 181, 228, 468 indirect, 186, 583n, 599–600, 606 in-group, 80 footing, 98 genre, 260 metonymic, 228 pointing with finger, 417 presupposing, 518 social distance, 394 social relationship, 497 solidarity, 86 spatiotemporal, 207, 211 stance, 90, 181, 466, 496n status, 18, 72, 81 stereotypic, 81, 110, 569–570 transduction. See transduction See also deictics; reagents  indexical bleaching, 529, 532–533, 607 indexical field, 527–529, 607 indexical order, 583–586, 600, 606 indexical selectivity, 227 inequality  educational, 483 health/communicative, 579–582, 587–592 indexical, 606–607 linguistic, 480–481, 487, 490 medical, 577–592 obscuring, 463 postcolonial, 116–117 social, 480–484, 491, 513, 543–545, 549, 553, 559 systemic, 511–513, 529, 537 Ingold, Tim, 366, 410n Inoue, Miyako, 186, 528, 606–607 inscriptive practices, 167, 216 intentionality, intentions, 295, 301, 317–329, 386–387 communicative, 373, 375, 386–387, 498, 528, 566, 608 religious, 236, 240–241, 245, 247 as state of mind, 188, 318, 320, 325

intercorporeality, 276, 415n, 342 artifacted, 276, 291 See also intersubjectivity: intercorporeal  interdiscursivity, 24, 69, 72, 110, 257, 462 intersectionality, 525–526, 529–530, 536, 538, 560, 563 intersubjective attunement, 326–327, 410 procedures, 278, 295 intersubjectivity, 274–280 passim, 327, 329, 336, 342–346 passim, 398, 454, 455 intercorporeal, 415 primary and secondary, 412 intertextuality, 180, 184, 195, 226, 230, 257, 364 inverted Spanglish, 80 Irvine, Judith, 18, 53, 110, 142–143, 326, 355, 496–497, 513, 577, 579, 589 iterative reflexivity, 542n, 544–545, 549–551, 554, 555 Jaffe, Alexandra, 483 Jakobson, Roman, 180, 182, 305, 355, 430, 449, 598 Jefferson, Gail, 448 Jones, Graham, 495–496, 498 Kant, Immanuel, 596 Keane, Webb, 237, 302 Kendon, Adam, 415n, 444n, 447, 449 keyboards (for text input), 215, 219–223 kinesics, 230, 254, 393, 444n, 446–447, 605 kinship, 73–74, 129, 132, 197 vocabulary of, 17, 25, 39–42, 46 kisses, kissing, 392, 394, 398, 503 kitchen languages, 361–363, 365–366 Kockelman, Paul, 585 Kroskrity, Paul, 16, 241, 326, 547, 548n Labov, William, 448, 449 Lacan, Jacques, 338–339, 429 language alternation, 88, 90, 168 See also codeswitching; language mixing  language contact, 25, 86–87, 91, 124–125, 133 language endangerment, rhetoric of, 50, 53, 358, 565 language games, 336, 338 language gap, 231, 423, 463, 544, 546, 550 language ideological assemblages, 23, 261 language ideologies, 124, 179–180, 235, 483, 511–512 colonial, 42–43, 53, 102, 108, 561 of compartmentalization, 19, 24, 25, 241 hegemonic, 152 Indigenous, 15–28, 495

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618  index

of inter-translateability, 183–185 of language acquisition, 262 of language boundaries/distinctiveness, 182, 303 of languagelessness, 80 of language ownership, 358 legal, 511, 512–515, 520–522 of monolingualism, 16, 87, 91 and power, 480–484, 490–491 of purism, 19, 53, 185, 241, 243–244, 246, 358, 366 racialized, 82 and secrecy, 495, 499–500 sign, 123, 125 of standardization, 182, 544 of writing, 161, 166 language mixing, 25, 44, 87, 89–93, 97–103, 246, 303n, 305–308, 362n, 467 See also language alternation  language, not. See not language language policy, 16n, 18, 23–24, 71, 479–491, 563 language remixing, 147–149 language revitalization, 15, 16n, 20–23, 27–28, 53–54, 58–63, 256, 360, 551–553 language shift, 6, 17–25 passim, 35, 45, 67, 74, 80–81, 93, 354–366, 483–484 languages ideology, 92 languaging, 87, 92, 98, 122, 124–126, 147, 150, 339–340, 343, 568 legal language, 512–522 Levinas, Emmanuel, 327–328 liminality, 45–46, 195, 201, 338, 341, 346, 348 lingua franca, 36, 41, 150, 354, 497 regional, 21, 185, 359 linguistic anthropology  applied, 4, 255, 542–544, 546 engaged, 1–2, 4, 8, 308, 542–555 event-responsive, 2, 7–8 public, 243, 255, 262, 543, 547, 548–549 linguistic emergency, 2 linguistic profiling, 609 linguistic relativity. See under relativity listening subject, 528, 532, 564 literacies, 216, 277, 501–503 cultural, 58, 63 digital, 215–231, 249, 277–278 print, 25, 216–217, 221, 249, 362 religious, 238–241, 243–244 technobodily, 274–295 literacy practices, 55, 159–172, 217, 221, 224–225, 228, 231, 236, 240, 248–250 Locke, John, 179, 189, logocentrism, 275, 400, 428–429, 433 Luhrmann, Tanya, 495–496

Mahmud, Lilith, 498 Malinowski, Bronisław, 52, 461, 522 materiality, 5–7, 236–238, 246–247, 600–601 See also sonic materiality  Mattingly, Cheryl, 579 Mauss, Marcel, 326, 445 Mead, Margaret, 254, 262, 543 media ecologies, 228–229, 237 media ideologies. See under ideologies media switching, 239 medicalization, 123, 578, 580, 586, 589, 591 medical profiling, 579, 586, 591–592 Meek, Barbara, 52, 54, 364, 365, 546–547, 570 memes, 80, 215, 217–218, 225–229, 270 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 335–338, 342n, 392, 415n, 431n, 599 Mertz, Elizabeth, 514–516 metalinguistic communities, 66, 357–358, 549, 551n metapragmatic  cues, 202, 204, 590 discourse, 19, 246, 586 framing, 204–205, 580 regimentation, 584–585, 591 See under reflexivity  See also contextualization cues  microaggression, 584 mimicry (biological), 374–375, 377, 378 mobile matrices, 140, 145–147, 150 mock languages. See registers: mock Mondada, Lorenza, 398, 415n, 416n, 452 monoglot standard, 16 motherese. See recipient design: baby talk multilingualism, 36, 38, 71, 87–92, 124, 147, 152, 303, 355–356, 480, 482, 490 multimodality, 6, 141, 159, 162–163, 254, 276, 369, 412–416, 443–456, 549, 550 multisemioticity, 276, 278, 295 multisensoriality, 254, 269, 276–277, 279, 295, 382, 400, 406, 412, 415–416, 423–424, 462–463, 468 museums, 253, 496 Black History Museum, 142 British Museum, The, 164, 165 Louvre, Musée du, 164 Sierra Mono Museum, 17 Nakassis, Constantine, 8, 115, 180n, 260–261, 270, 455, 608 narrated community, 5, 66–82 narrative, 67–71, 325, 336–348, 579, 585 culturally specific, 5, 66, 68, 70 historical, 19, 24, 206 life history, 548

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index  619

oral, 52 personal, 66, 68–69, 72–73, 75–77, 347–348, 606–607 trickster, 28n visual, 260 natural selection, 369–371, 373 noesis, noema, 320 nostaliga, 228, 241, 357, 361, 365 not language, 444–450, 455 Ochs, Elinor, 68, 321–322, 347, 406, 414, 527, 529, 566, 579, 583n, 599–600, 606 oinoglossia, 463, 600 ontologies of language, 7, 91–102, 512, 520 oralism, 127 oratory, 235, 321, 433, 455, 461, 510 parallelism, 167–168, 183, 325 participation frameworks, 98, 203–204, 392, 413, 422–423, 584 participation, regimes of. See regimes of participation participation structures, 224, 237 pathology, 123, 563, 578, 584 patriarchy, 151, 521 Paz, Alejandro, 4 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 110, 180, 197–198, 259, 596–598, 607 Pennycook, Alastair, 92, 123, 140, 145n, 146, 148–149, 150 percepaction, 279–287, 293–295 Perley, Bernard, 26, 50, 52, 256–258, 270, 546 Perrino, Sabina, 207, 451 phenomenology, 275, 295, 318, 329, 334–349 passim, 392, 399, 406, 415n, 416n, 428–431, 438, 599, 606–607 pheromones, 369, 374, 376, 383–384 philology, 108 piety, 235–236, 244, 245, 247, 429, 432–434 poetics, 146, 150, 179, 260, 355 prayer, 26, 51, 59, 149, 235, 237–238, 242, 247, 348, 486 precision, 514–515 professional vision, 102, 254–255, 258–259, 263, 405, 597 promise, 188, 320, 321, 550n proxemics, 230, 254, 446–447 Psychoanalysis, 197, 210, 338, 429, 587 public/private, 187–188, 236, 393, 495, 499–500, 506 qualia, 6, 110, 349, 430, 600 queer linguistics, 526, 530 racialization, race, 196–208 passim, 261, 531–534, 560–572, 578, 583–591 discursive, 512, 517, 521

enregistered emblem of, 80, 526, 606–607 metrics of, 27 naturalization of, 108 stigmatization, 307 raciolinguistic ideologies. See under ideologies raciontologies, 561 racism, 530–534, 560–572 beliefs, 516 covert, 522, 526, 565, 600 discourse about, 206, 245, 499, 536, 578 ideological, 463, 521, 551 public, 546, 551 scientific, 16–17, 107, 113–114, 561 tropes, 533 rationality, 239–240, 324, 328, 334–335, 513–515, 578, 589 reagents, 597, 607 See also index, indexicality  recipient design, 324, 326, 588, 599 baby talk, 326, 417 foreigner talk, 44, 578 recontextualization, 110, 143–144, 150, 179, 209, 215, 305, 430, 607 recursivity  colonial, 110 fractal, 18, 110, 117, 500, 587, 589 referential triangle, 412, 423 reflexivity  awareness, 198, 295 critical, 107, 109, 257, 262 ethics and, 300–301, 302–307 passim iterative, 542n, 544–545, 549–551, 554, 555 metapragmatic, 196–197, 210 methodological, 254, 258, 263, 547 narrative, 70, 72–74, 77 self, 277, 278, 340 See also metapragmatics  regimes of participation, 214–215, 223–225, 227, 230 registers, 89, 102, 110, 180, 181–189 passim, 339, 600, 605 affective, 217, 355, 357 avoidance, 497–498, 598 baby talk, 417 creolized, 25 elite, 18, 111–117 ethical, 494–506 passim food-focused, 463 formal, 247 literary, 362 medical, 586 mock, 464, 489n, 566–571, 600 musician, 602 prestige, 111, 112 gender, 61–62 written, 167 youth, 143–145, 151–152

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620  index

See also enregisterment  relativity  cultural, 51 linguistic, 51–52, 317, 324 moral, 299 repair, 98, 101, 323, 327 resistance, 28, 43, 46, 56, 57–59, 141, 145, 472, 525, 562, 585 revelation. See concealment Reyes, Angela, 114, 202, 261, 270 rhematization (iconization), 19, 25, 53 ritual  cleansing, 77 documentation of, 52, 71 encounters, 393–394, 398 food offerings, 599 insults, 498, 533n objects, 172 performance, 160, 179, 183, 198 practice, 189, 498 shamanic, 364 specialists, 165 speech, 188 Rosa, Jonathan, 4, 7, 9, 80, 259, 522, 528, 564, 566, 578, 607 Rosaldo, Michelle, 321–322 Sacks, Harvey, 69, 448–449, 599 salvage anthropology, 16, 51, 59, 61, 358, 565 Sapir, Edward, 51–52, 62, 355, 445, 447 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 51, 91, 338, 355, 372 savage slot, 256–257, 261 Schegloff, Emanuel, 448 schéma corporel (corporeal scheme), 599 Schieffelin, Bambi, 185–187, 217, 244, 249, 416–417, 419 Schutz, Alfred, 328, 342, 448 script communities, 8, 159–172 Searle, John, 320–322, 324–325 second stories, 69, 72, 74 secrecy, secrets, 494–506 language, 358 networking in, 240 practices, 498, 500, 503 spread of, 248 secret languages (argots), 498 secret societies, 497 segregation, 127, 306, 482, 490 semiotic ideologies. See under ideologies sequentiality, 279n, 602–603 and codeswitching, 89 conversational, 274, 276, 279–295 passim, 302, 417, 419, 452 and emergence, 101–103 haptic, 396, 406 See also temporality (as unfolding)

settler-colonialism, 15–16, 24, 27–28, 81, 108–109, 152, 255, 548, 561, 565, 567, 570–572 sexuality, 152, 525–538 disclosure of, 499 identity, 127 shifters. See deictics signing practices, 122–134 Silverstein, Michael, 16, 17, 53, 91, 140, 150, 181, 196, 198, 506, 517, 583–584, 598–600, 602, 606 sincerity, 187, 320–321 Simmel, Georg, 495 slang, 89, 114, 143, 490, 511, 531–533 passim snobbishness, 115, 487 social drama, 194–211 socialization, 411, 414–415, 597 attentional, 410–424 language, 133, 217n, 243, 249, 299, 303, 321, 411, 417, 549, 599 food, 461, 463, 471 moral, 400–401 narrative, 69 sociality, 254 socialization ideologies. See under ideologies social media, 7, 26, 127, 190, 217–220 passim, 224, 226–229, 237, 239, 241, 244, 247, 249, 270, 273, 323, 494, 497, 498, 505, 529, 533–535, 546, 565, 580, 581, 587, 588 Facebook, 26, 218, 227, 237, 239, 503–505 Instagram, 227, 462 Tumblr, 270, 309–310 Twitter, 7, 26, 217, 227, 533, 535–536 YouTube, 25, 228, 472, 606, 608 sonic atmospheres, 430–433, 439 sonic events, 431–432, 435, 437–438 sonic materiality, 238, 428–432 passim, 434–437, 438 See also materiality  Spears, Arthur, 326, 562–563 speech act, 188, 372, 529, 536, 602, 606 Speech Act Theory, 317, 320, 323 speech community, 5, 51, 54, 63, 66–67, 140, 143, 162, 172, 553, 606 speech styles. See under styles Spitulnik, Debra, 140, 223, 228 stance, 180–181, 302, 304, 466, 496n affective, 217, 355–356, 365, 406, 423, 599–608 passim emotional, 247, 396, 400 identity, 504–505, 527–528 ideological, 609 interactional, 69, 89, 90, 428, 433–434 moral, 73, 77, 309, 505 See also alignment; footing  See also under index, indexicality 

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stance accretion, 528 styles, 140–151, 511–512 cultural, 445 signing, 127 speech, 89, 180–181, 303n, 494, 497, 504, 598, 605 vocal, 433 See also registers  subject, listening, 528, 532, 564 superdiversity, 88, 91–92, 97, 102 syncretism, 17, 63, 90, 114, 463, 470

transliteration, 227, 245–246 transphobia, 534–536, 537n transposition  deictic, 68, 70–71, 345–347, 348, 434 discursive, 300–309 passim viewpoint, 258, 260 See also chronotope: alignment  tropes, 16, 27, 68, 227, 429, 533, 605 Turner, Victor, 194–197, 207, 210–211 turn-taking, 44, 274, 279n, 282, 284, 324, 326–327, 419, 602

taskscapes, 366 techniques of the body (techniques du corps), 393, 406, 445, 598 techno-fetishism, 254 technological ideologies. See under ideologies temporality (as unfolding), 210, 275, 334, 342–349, 411–412, 601–603, 608 text. See entextualization textualist theory, 516–517 tonal semantics, 530 touch, 128, 346, 382, 383, 391–406, 414–415, 454–455, 585 trans-affirmation, 536–537 transcripts, 254, 257–262 passim, 456, 601 transduction, 181, 186–187, 189–191, 305n See also analogy  translanguaging, 88, 92–103 passim, 93, 126, 339–340 translation, 178–188, 190–191, 303, 305, 465n in interaction, 235–236, 241, 489 into legal terms, 516–520 and missionization, 58, 181, 185–188, 244, 318 online, 242–243, 245 professional, 585–586 production of, 263, 362, 554

Umwelt, 284, 290, 295, 387 Urciuoli, Bonnie, 483 video-cued ethnography, 261–262 video games, 257, 567–571 voice, 228, 428–439, 451, 532, 601, 608 diacritics of, 489, 526–528 tone, 433–435 quality, 394–395, 398, 406, 607 voice (characterological), 62, 112, 257, 302, 307, 531 alignment, 198, 434 whispering, 397, 488, 497 See also eavesdropping  white supremacy, 3, 152, 529, 537, 545n, 562–565, 568n, 570–572, 578 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 51, 324–325, 445, 447 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 319, 320n, 336–338, Woolard, Kathryn, 484, 499 writing systems, 55, 57, 60, 159n, 160n, 163, 219–220, 227, 241, 552 Zentella, Ana Celia, 90, 546, 563n Zoom, 283–286, 302, 506

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622  index