Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

In the borderlands of south Texas, the Mexican and Mexican American social practice of naming includes the use of English-language names and nicknames, anglicized pronunciations, and English-language spellings and “misspellings,” all of which potentially index at least two historically informed perspectives: (1) the hegemonic “white gaze”; and (2) a localized, interrogating gaze. In this article, I focus on local naming practices to advance an approach to what I call semiotic whitening—the indexical linking of any phenomenon to the idealized norms of whiteness—to better understand how whiteness works from the perspective of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in a geographic region (informed by colonial and white supremacist histories) where few white folks reside.

When the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990, it marked an important shift in relations between tribal communities and non-tribal museums in the United States. By listening to how different speakers at the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office talk about repatriation and reclamation, we can see that these processes involve more than the return of ancestors and belongings; they also influence how people speak about and express group identity. In discussions about repatriation, Hopi community members frequently talk to outsiders and adjust to their ways of speaking, if only temporarily. I compare two instances in which speakers creatively used possessive constructions to convey different scales of identity and argue that Bakhtin's concept of “addressivity” illuminates connections between the two. More broadly, I suggest that this concept is useful for thinking about how relationships between tribal and non-tribal institutions might continue to be transformed in ways that are responsive to contemporary Indigenous claims and presence.

This article examines how parent–teen texting enables family members to construct family relations and negotiate behavioral and communicative norms while being apart. The analyses of family texting focus on how teenagers and parents deal with issues of teenage independence and how this involves situated negotiations of teenagers being constructed as either able or unable to live up to family norms and the family's communication culture. Based on the analyses, I argue that digitally mediated interactions complement co-present contexts of family socialization and influence the relation between power- and solidarity-oriented aspects of everyday socialization practices, for instance, by blurring the boundaries between parental care and control.

This paper examines the enregisterment of white nationalist women's language as metapolitical seduction, in anti-feminist conversion videos designed both to seduce men and to restore them to their proper place—above women. First, the paper analyzes the metapragmatics of submissive femininity, then the characters this far right fairy tale invents, and finally how they come to represent a metapolitical order which aligns gender, nation, tradition, and language. Women's language contributes to the white nationalist metapolitical project of resurrecting white masculinity and re-gendering the world, also revealing mechanisms by which white supremacy is made to appear not only normal, but desirable.

The distributive political economy of contemporary Arab Oman yields a status-differentiated social infrastructure composed of elites who distribute and non-elites who, in many ways, rely on those distributions. The construction of communicative links within social infrastructures via the performance of sung poetry depends on the phaticity of the link being activated. For Omani poets, different linguistic performance genres telescope the vast social distance between elites who listen and non-elites who sing in different ways and with different results. Omani poets from the rural north of the country conduct cross-class social contact—conceptually “vertical” social infrastructural movement—by way of two contrasting genres of Arabic praise poetry: a one-off request or statement, the solo qasida, and a recognitive, addressive choral form that reciprocally establishes and evaluates such vertical relationships, the 'āzī. I argue that the metapragmatic distinctions that Omani poets draw between these two genres reveal a subtle phatic ideology that allows certain modes of communicative contact to index deeper, cross-class social ties within grand public performances, while simultaneously reinforcing tacit norms of elite avoidance of non-elites in everyday social intercourse.