Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

This paper develops the concept of “indexical deprivation” from the experiences of English learning in relation to cochlear implant use among Taiwanese deaf adults. Based on the framework of language ideological assemblage, this paper traces how institutional discourses and practices at different levels contribute to the indexicalization between cochlear implants and elevated proficiency in English as a global language. By examining the top-down discourses and bottom-up narratives of two Taiwanese deaf women, the study demonstrates how enhanced English proficiency has been linked to cochlear implants and how individuals are deprived of the capacity to recognize alternative links. This paper highlights how global English has promoted the status of cochlear implants in a sociolinguistic context where English is spoken as a foreign language and increasingly gains prominence at multiple societal levels.

Building on scholarship on the politics of listening and the listening subject, this article proposes re-hearing as a listening practice where empowered actors assert that various qualities of personhood are hearable or perceivable in relation to what marginalized persons say, do, or are otherwise associated with. Although there is an expectation that in US courts lay actors can have a hearing and a voice before the law, I identify how practices of re-hearing shaped how parents and their narratives were heard (or left unheard) in a California child welfare court. My ethnographic research examined the listening and entextualization practices of judges, attorneys, and social workers involved in child welfare case management in California. I found that re-hearing practices co-constructed the continued marginalization of lay actors within contexts of state surveillance by attributing suspicion to parents and their silences in ways that exceeded and constructed evidence collected against them. Ultimately, I argue that child welfare courts and professional actors within them collectively comprise a listening institution that normalizes re-hearing low-income and racialized parents through frameworks of deficiency and risk.

This paper examines the relation of affordance and enregisterment in the socialization of users through the popular 4chan phrase “kek.” This word, overwhelmingly used as an equivalent for “lol” (netspeak for “laugh out loud”), has taken up several other meanings within “/pol/,” the politically incorrect subforum on 4chan, an anonymous imageboard forum. Drawing from both enregisterment and affordance theory, I claim that the processes of mobilizing kek in very community-specific ways allow for users within this digital media space to not only enregister what a /pol/ user should “sound like,” but that it creates an environment which socializes a very specific kind of user itself. These branching paths of kek explored in this article situate kek as first, an affective assessment marker within interactive speech; then, as a lamination of the word, and deification of chaos magic and mischief celebrated on 4chan, represented by the frog-headed Egyptian god Kek; and finally, as a sovereign nation, known as “Kekistan.” Through these examples, I argue that a “creature of kek” is a socially constructed, enregistered framework of “knowing,” by which users on /pol/ legitimize themselves to new users, and in broader digital spaces.

Amid its superdiverse population, the call to prayer, the adhan, identifies the UAE as an Arab, Muslim nation state while forming discrete ethno-class publics around its numerous urban mosque calls. I conceptualize the adhan as a soundmark, which functions as a vital sonic place-maker and orients listeners' attendant actions through a series of scaled chronotopes. I posit two intersecting umbrella chronotopes, masjid and jāmi‘, which frame how each adhan is listened to and taken up. For autochthonous Emiratis, the chronotope of masjid opens up a portal of copresence with God and attendant rituals of ethical self-formation. Meanwhile, the chronotope of jāmi‘ positions Emiratis in the iterative constitution of their nation, community, and family. Through these chronotopes, I examine how members of an extended Emirati family use the adhan to reinforce discourses of ethnonational and gendered socialization within their cloistered urban tribal enclave in the capital, Abu Dhabi. However, as the state gradually divests from full economic dependence on oil, infrastructural transformations are leading young Emiratis toward two-income single-family homes in multiethnic suburbs. Accordingly, I show how the marked reduction in the adhan in new developments becomes a synecdoche for sociopolitical changes and Emiratis' ambivalence toward them.

Linguistic authority, though generally understood as the right claimed by some people and institutions to regiment language use and representation, has also been conceptualized as the power of languages to command respect and attention from community members. To explore these two aspects of linguistic authority, this article examines how the producers of a popular Chinese talk show use on-screen text to construct authority both for themselves and for Putonghua (standard Mandarin) in situated moments of interaction. It focuses on an episode of the show in which the Putonghua-speaking host interviews a Hong Kong actor/director known for his Gangpu (Hong Kong Mandarin). Through the strategic use of traditional subtitles and impact captions, the show's producers position themselves as anonymous listening subjects who not only provide running commentary on what viewers hear, but also contrast Putonghua with Gangpu and Cantonese, and affirm its legitimacy by presenting it as the unmarked, anonymous language against which these minoritized varieties are compared. To fully understand the (de)legitimation of linguistic authority in media productions, we need to consider both aspects of linguistic authority, examine how they are connected to each other, and attend to the array of contrasting relations that subtitling practices create among linguistic varieties.

This article develops the concept of an ear with power. An ear with power works through listeners who can, by listening, alter people's speech and other actions. It does so in ways that suit the institutions on whose behalf the listener acts. Unlike approaches focused on the effects of listening in interactions, an ear with power is a triadic relation in process, requires listening to listeners, and shows how absent listeners affect social relations. The article traces the implications of a complaint filed against Buddhist “active listening” volunteers in Japan after the 2011 disasters. Despite not using “Buddhist language” while volunteering, they were reported for “religious-sounding speech,” which led to the temporary hiatus of their volunteer activities. Analyzing the distributed listening that led to that censure, this article demonstrates how linguistic anthropology might reframe critical analyses of power and governance, which have tended to rely on vision and speech. More specifically, it considers the ramifications of acts of listening that precede the speech that they are imagined to follow, the process whereby listeners come to hear themselves through the ear of another, and the ways that policing listening can alienate listening from listeners.

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.