Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

This special issue proposes a non-binary semiotics of intersectionality to both draw attention to and unsettle binary participation frameworks of “the-West-and-its-others.” Contributors demonstrate how intersectionality can reconfigure scholarly approaches to the semiotic analysis of social life, expanding the bounds of the ethnographic as both genre and site of ideological work while also suggesting new stakes for conceptualizations of the personal beyond static, neoliberal presuppositions of the identity-bearing individual. This proposed reorientation has stakes for the study of race–language co-naturalizations in locations reflexively cast as beyond white settler-colonial contexts. We place the study of intersectionality within the historical socius of the colonial and its prefixes (de-, post-, and anti-) by engaging with the historical and material conditions of human capital and land enclosure out of which Kimberlé Crenshaw’s micro-interactional observations emerged as originary reflections on the concept of intersectionality. Together, we consider linguistic and co(n)textual phenomena that are left out of most contemporary intersectional and critical race analyses. The authors demonstrate an array of modalities through which we can analytically separate intersectionality-as-method, while not assuming American monolingual racial experiences as universal.

Many of Heidegger’s statements about language should sound familiar to linguistic anthropologists, starting with the pragmatic-indexical functions of speaking (in Sein und Zeit) and continuing, in later years, with something resembling linguistic relativity. But a comparison of Heidegger’s ideas with those of some of his contemporaries who wrote about similar themes reveals that he had different goals, first among them “the destruction of western metaphysics,” which he pursued by means of a new philosophical metalanguage, full of unorthodox etymologies, ambiguous metaphors, and linguistic constructions that gave agency to non-human entities (e.g., “the world worlds,” “language speaks”). While offering himself as the prophet of innovative thinking and speaking, Heidegger also endorsed a conservative language ideology whereby some languages and some writers were said to be better equipped than others to capture the truth about the human condition. His decentering of the human subject ultimately turned into an antihumanist and elitist stance whereby most speakers are inauthentic “sounding boxes.” Drawing from concepts and analytic tools familiar to linguistic anthropologists I offer ways to counter Heidegger’s apocalyptic language ontology, explain the reasons of his success, and reflect on our own language ontology.

Positioned at the island interface of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the east Malaysian state of Sabah bears witness to some of the largest clandestine cross-border flows across the globe. This article examines what a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah has called “an insidious problem which has turned out to be an all-consuming nightmare.” It highlights the situated (meta)semiotic work involved in determining and enforcing the state's seemingly indeterminate and unenforceable borders between citizens and suspected non-citizens, while also showing how inquiries into migrant illegality are ultimately inquiries into “excess.” It demonstrates how experiences of and orientations to excess take expressive shape in migrants and Malaysians' fashions of speaking and forms of life. It concludes by considering how these transnational dynamics across a sprawling archipelagic region lend a provincializing angle of vision on American(ist) anthropology's own hemispheric parochialism.

The long-governing People's Action Party in Singapore, cautious of the appeal of Marxist-type class analyses, recognizes political mileage in promoting the myth of a homogenous “class blind” society. Popular uptakes of this perspective are seen online in parodic uses of new terms high SES and low SES to counter the suggestion that socioeconomic status (SES) is a relevant distinction in Singapore. Such parodies are nevertheless deeply classed, as middle-class subjectivity emerges through the negation of class-based extremes (Hall, 2021). This article argues that Singlish has become a powerful instrument for sustaining middle-class normativity. Its positioning by invested listening subjects (Inoue, 2006) as a hybrid language that equally encompasses speakers of diverse linguistic backgrounds obscures not just class relations but also the central linkage that lies at the heart of a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa and Flores, 2017). Once class and race are co-naturalized in this way, speakers can use Singlish to perform an “authentic Singaporeanness,” but this performance is in turn facilitated by a metapragmatic narrative that motivates which forms become enregistered as Singlish.

This article explores how metapragmatic discourses on “good” and “bad” English in India are mobilized in ways that allow actors to negotiate their status as English speakers. Adopting an intersectional framework that highlights the relationality of colonial, racialized, and classed claims to authority, the article shows how the co-naturalization of language and race shapes assessments of competency and legitimacy and how this is mitigated through anti-Blackness and appeals to class status. These judgments of “good” and “bad” English work to reassert and undermine racialized authority over the language and position actors within an imagined, global stratified community of speakers. This ambivalent positioning not only helps actors negotiate relational legitimacy as English speakers but also works strategically to benefit certain speakers and reproduce colonial, class, and racial orders.

In India, where elementary education is a fundamental right, significant barriers stall the attainment of educational equity through linguistic inclusivity. This article explores student identities by examining intersections of language, caste, race, and socioeconomic class to make visible complexities of privilege, discrimination, and connections between social structure, identity, and language in education. From qualitative ethnographic research with a settled nomadic Tribal community in rural India, this article highlights contradictions between recent mother tongue language education policies and experiences of social disparities and stigma for Banjara Tribal youth, who speak a different mother tongue language than the language of education. I draw together theories of intersectionality and raciolinguistics to show how co-naturalized lines of language and identity are navigated through language ideologies to shift positions of Banjara student identities. Through learning Marathi, the regional lingua franca, students transform their marginalized sociolinguistic positions into mainstream aspirants of academic and social success.

Through the concept of the echo, this article examines how postcolonial Algerians discursively locate and orient themselves in relation to the materiality of “dead” colonialism, which I broadly define as the physical presence of objects, voices, and sensual qualities (accompanied by aesthetic, value, and moral judgments) that Algerians see as persisting from the colonial before. I argue that an echo in discourse hinges on a tripartite dialogic structure: the dynamic interplay of past voices/signs, present listeners, and the material surfaces that reflect these voices/signs with delay, distortion, and varied intensity. Through the narratives of three directors of three different iterations of a local newspaper in Oran, Algeria, I examine how past voices and sounds reverberate across the threshold of the colonial and postcolonial divide and create sociopolitical and interpersonal effects that often challenge the notion that colonialism is “dead and gone.” This article advances scholarship on language materiality by positing that the material world is more than just the setting in which material speech and social action occur; rather, the material world shapes how language is heard and stances are taken in concrete ways. I conclude that echoes are central to how people tell stories about their past that matter in the present.