Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

With the dissolution of an authoritarian regime, novel semiotic technologies are mobilized in the service of producing new political imaginaries. Through what visual and discursive practices can “democracy” be made visible? How can “good governance” be convincingly attested? This paper explores the evidentiary infrastructures of Indonesia's s-driven democratic transition to introduce a broader reflection on the role of graphic artifacts in disseminating neoliberal ideologies of transparency and managerial notions of “good governance.” Since the end of Suharto's authoritarian regime, a new genre of graphic artifacts has proliferated within Indonesian government offices: colorful vinyl banners with flowcharts and diagrams illustrating institutional mission statements, bureaucratic procedures, and administrative structures. Marking a clear departure from the traditional iconography of the mandala-like pre-democratic state, these flowcharts are only partially successful. Their aspiration to be iconic materializations of an efficient new mode of governance betrays widespread anxieties that the Reform Era has fallen short of its reformist promise.

This paper explores the evolving, adaptive, and self-making characteristics of how the Chinese state accesses and governs postcolonial Hong Kong, focusing on how the state develops ways of hegemonic simplification and projects of legibility through performances and political rituals. While drawing inspirations from Scott's classical concepts, the paper contends that the Chinese state's ways of knowing about Hong Kong are dynamic and performative rather than static and representative. The analysis identifies two primary models of state performativity in postcolonial Hong Kong. The first model, which emerged in the initial years after Hong Kong's reunion to China in 1997, focuses on semiotic mapping between sociolinguistic differentiation and sociopolitical boundary making through improvisational and interactional performance. The second model, which the state began to increasingly develop in the late 2000s, engages in a dialectic of boundary making and boundary breaking through scripted political rituals, aiming to both harmonize and subjugate the local within the state's cosmos. Broadly, this paper emphasizes the importance of viewing the state's performances and rituals as laminated and scalar processes and movements of knowledge making and re-making across sociocultural and sociopolitical timespace.

Listening practices among kindergarteners in a two-way bilingual elementary school reveal how asymmetries between incoming “English speakers” and “Spanish speakers” shape children's emerging language attitudes. My ethnographic study of a US Midwestern public school (2013–2017) shows that objectifying the two languages was a central project of the school that children embraced. This metapragmatic understanding is most evident in their listening, as opposed to speaking, practices. I argue that a hegemonic aurality privileging English and monolingualism emerges in students' differential attunements to language as sounds or as a communicative code, thereby reinforcing the social dominance of English monolingualism over Spanish bilingualism.

This article takes a magazine for Esperanto youth as an entryway to explore the links between language ideologies and censorial practices. During the Cold War, Esperanto print media sought a connection with the Third World to present Esperanto as an alternative to US-led English and USSR-led Russian. With anti-imperialism gaining ground in these magazines, their editors struggled to adhere to the ideology that posits Esperanto as a neutral and international language. Analyzing the editorial work behind the magazine Kontakto, I explore how partly silencing anti-colonial perspectives worked to safeguard Esperanto's neutrality, ultimately asking: how can language ideologies act as mechanisms of censorship?