Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Hồ Chí Minh's extended essay Fixing the Way We Work, written in 1947 after he and other high-ranking members of the recently formed DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam; Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa), had been forced to retreat from Hanoi to the uplands of Thái Nguyên province, elaborates on organizational and practical problems within the party and obstacles to mass mobilization. The final chapter describes a way of speaking HCM refers to as ba hoa and which he sees as a “speech sickness” afflicting many low and middle ranking cadres who are in direct contact with the masses. In the first part of this essay, I argued that the largely proscriptive and negatively formulated instructions articulated in this context cohere by virtue of a common focus on problems of action. Specifically, ba hoa names a stereotyped speech register in which the connection between speaking and doing comes undone. In what follows, the second part of the essay, I describe the other, positively formulated half of the larger project of register formation: the elevation of HCM's own mode of expression (phong cách diễn đạt) to the status of an exemplary model that all Vietnamese people are expected to emulate. This involved extensive metasemiotic elaboration and (re)framing which was accomplished, in large part, through the writings of contemporaries and later interpreters. A consideration of this literature along with an analysis of the continued spectral presence of HCM in contemporary Vietnam allows for a specification of the semiotics of exemplarity.

The question of how to understand the relation between language and action lies at the heart of both philosophical pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. This same question, although framed in a very different way, also emerged as a basic concern for communist revolutionaries in Vietnam in the mid 1940s and, I contend, continues to exercise the imagination of party members and others up until the present day. Drawing inspiration from Asif Agha's definition of a (semiotic) register as a “cultural model of action,” in this essay, I consider the ways in which Hồ Chí Minh along with other high-ranking party members sought to reform Vietnamese through a project of register formation, and thereby to transform the language into an effective instrument of mass mobilization. I suggest that this project centrally involved reconceptualizing the relationship between language and action and was pursued by, on the one hand, identifying and proscribing ways of speaking in which the connection with action was seen to be broken such that speech amounted to “mere words” and, on the other, by promoting a way of speaking in which, as the frequently used Vietnamese expression has it, “speaking goes hand-in-hand with doing” (nói đi đôi với làm).

This article analyzes the role of emotion in narrations about the past, understandable as familial, intergenerational, or national. I examine how participants report and display affect in narratives about Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul of Bordeaux who issued thousands of lifesaving visas in June of 1940. Three sets of participants (descendants of visa recipients, Sousa Mendes' descendants, and Portuguese institutional representatives) each explicitly report and implicitly display how the Sousa Mendes story moves them emotionally. I then discuss how the emotion in these narratives may be circulated and taken up by broader audiences. Building on Irvine's discussion of the heteroglossia of affective expression (1990), participants may attribute emotion to others, signal emotion as occurring in the present or in a prior space–time, or merge emotional past and present in various types of emotional “reliving.” By treating emotion as eventlike, it can thus be considered chronotopic. I analyze the relationships between (re)presentation of emotion across multiple narrated and narrating chronotopes. This approach reveals how differently positioned participants' cross-chronotope alignments yield particular types of affective displays and experiences that others can then take up and recontextualize.

Few Sino-Tibetan bilingualisms are celebrated in Amdo Tibet. Registers like “mixed language,” “peasant language,” and vernacular Mandarins are denounced through their perceived association with Chinese colonial influence. However, Putonghua-Tibetan “bilinguals” are revered among the same demographic. When Tibetan and Chinese language communities intersect each other, a concern for many arises as to how one calibrates one's own “bi-ness” as a Tibetan bilingual. In this paper, I explore how “Sinicized” figures are configurated for Tibetans. I argue that language works in many ways to disrupt previously stable ethnoracial identities as well as to mediate ethnoracial alignment or a lack thereof. Intersectional personae—binding intersections of linguistic repertoires with biographic fractals like gender, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, profession, and many more—personify such disruptions for users of languages. I also describe the affective motion—or ethnoracialized anxieties and aspirations— in adopting or sidestepping these intersectional personae for a population that feel they are going through racialization (for different publics) in many aspects of their lives. Attending to intra-ethnoracial evaluations, I also delineate and compare vernacular colonialism and Putonghua colonialism in showing that “same but different” registers might be a vantage point to a more empirical understanding of Sino- as well as other forms of colonialism.

This article examines how elderly rural Sicilians recall the meanings of words rendered obsolete by infrastructural, technological, and economic changes that occurred in their lifetime. I examine conversations from my 2016 and 2019 fieldwork on Pantelleria, Sicily, characterized by what I term recuperated attentionality, speaking from erstwhile attentional circumstances. To unpack the meanings of words, elderly islanders employ transposition, contextualizing their attentional guidance from a moment of reference anchored in the remembered past, orienting to an obsolete way of being in the world. Socio-biographical discontinuity means that acquaintance and familiarity with the denotata of these words is asymmetrical, once accessed by participating in island life, issuing and responding to directives, attending to tasks, and so on, but now accessed principally by memory. I examine conversational discourse in which transposition is used to unpack word meanings, which clashes with elicitation norms that request translational equivalents for words.

This article explores the term “sunu coosan” as a Senegalese trope of self-articulation and as a semiotic strategy in contemporary discourses surrounding nationhood. The term, meaning "our tradition" in Wolof, is used by professionals as well as lay people in their promotion of the national sport, Làmb wrestling. By examining this phrase within the broad repertoire of Senegalese wrestling songs, I show that the musical commentary performed in the sport of Làmb situates it within a narrative of traditional continuity, subsequently producing a modern tradition for the consumption of the Senegalese nation. I argue that this collection of songs is a performative embodiment of a modern state's struggle to form its national identity. In Senegal's national wrestling arenas, ongoing lyrical engagement with the themes of history, heritage, and morality in genre-specific, stylized formats, makes these songs the site of both ‘traditional discourse’ and a ‘discourse about tradition’. In this article, I explore three central features of Làmb songs: the use of poetic personas; "out of time narration"; and the recitation of praise poetry. By implementing these stylistic techniques inside and outside of the arena, local musicians continually create a meta-discourse about the meaning of tradition.

A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the “Limits of Awareness,” set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' “awareness” of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential “awareness” of aspects of language has since been foundational to linguistic-anthropological understandings of language ideologies. Here we consider Silverstein's argument with reference to our research in Laos, exploring the limits of metalinguistic discourse. We argue that the apparent constraints on our capacity to talk about aspects of language do not evidence limits of awareness of elements of language, but rather constraints on our ability to thematize those elements, that is, to bring them into joint attention. The central issue is thematization, and the relation of interest is a relation of joint attention between speakers. Metalanguage is thus constrained not (only) by psychological limits but by the social and semiotic limits on what people can bring into mutual focus within interactions. To present our framing of the issue and show what it helps us see, we distinguish two kinds of thematization and describe their subtypes, affordances, and constraints. We then demonstrate how social conventions—broadly understood—can circumvent these constraints, allowing people to thematize otherwise difficult to thematize forms.