Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

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.

This article analyzes institutions as sites for political and social change by looking beyond regimentation and fixedness as the central discursive features of institutionalization. Drawing on research at the European Court of Human Rights—one of the world's most extensive human rights courts—I analyze how human rights actors redeploy normative institutional logics through creative approaches to institutional categories. I argue that lawyers and advocates working within the Court and Convention system naturalize and fix boundaries of law and politics and use that distinction to activate an excess of potential meanings and intertextual connections in legal judgments. This involves using institutional affordances to keep cases open and structure collaborative waiting. These strategies allow people to mutually inhabit open-ended relationships to texts in intentional ways. In so doing, lawyers and activists defer resolving legal judgments—until new coalitions take political power, there are generational shifts in attitudes or shifts in geopolitical power arrangements that render state actors subject to diplomatic pressure. Analyzing how people improvise, learn, and teach others to manage institutional channels and excess opens up the black box of institutionality as a site for social transformation.