Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

Research shows that structure and agency are components of both micro and macro articulations of identity (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). However, some scholars (e.g., Block 2013, 2015; Sealey and Carter 2004; Gao 2017) argue that structure and agency often receive unequal attention, with many studies focusing more on agency when examining identity work. This paper attempts to rectify this imbalance by adopting a chronotopic approach to examine quantitative variation in Chinese Indonesian college students' (non)-use of the Chinese discourse particle a to construct interactional positions. The resulting analysis highlights how speakers' interactional positions align with established macro structures of Chineseness and Indonesianness, and also present new local structures. Patterns in different speakers' invocation of structures in interaction correlates with their socialization histories, involving exposure to particular social categories and ideologies. Ultimately, this approach better represents structure and agency as mutually constituted factors in identity work.

This paper considers how Japanese futsuu “ordinary”-ness functions as a cultural logic that mediates aspirations and interpretations of a good life under conditions of socioeconomic risk and precarity. Invoking ordinariness can be a tactic for (re)-framing otherwise marginalized or marginalizing practices within the norm, shifting what counts as ordinary in the process, and pushing back against neoliberally inflected pressures toward marketable, financialized selfhood. Alignments toward ordinariness emerge across diverse discursive planes including political slogans, blogs, and natural conversations, where the ordinary is treated as aspirational under the shadow of its potential loss.

This article examines the language autobiographies of 12 Chinese-Canadians to address how topolects (Ch. fangyan)—spoken language varieties marking place-based belonging—formulate identity once removed from their original places. We found that narrators located topolects in their pasts and homelands, while associating standard Mandarin with mobility and the future. We argue that, by associating topolects and standard Mandarin with contrasting times and places, narrators reformatted prevailing standard language ideologies from mainland China to rationalize experiences of linguistic exclusion. Despite pressures for language standardization, the narrative grounding of topolects in kinship chronotopes offers possibilities for maintaining diverse Chinese languages amidst mobility.

Scholarship on publics has proliferated during the past two decades, especially in linguistic anthropology. Drawing on Michael Warner’s famous formulation, publics are now routinely theorized as a social form predicated on the reflexive circulation of discourse. This article, however, identifies a tension within Warner’s conception of publics. On the one hand, Warner levels a critique of liberal publicity, noting its exclusions and contradictions, but on the other hand, he models his own account of publics on the liberal public sphere and assumptions of voluntaristic, free speech. Working from ethnographic research on a government-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in Macedonia, the article develops a different perspective on publics and their politics. It examines how practices of marketing and strategic communication now pervade public spheres and valorize not voluntaristic participation but discursive engineering, that is, concerted efforts to determine how discourse can and will circulate in some public. When tethered to projects of centralized political control, as happened in Macedonia during Nikola Gruevski’s prime ministership (2006-2016), practices of discursive engineering can result in enclosed public spheres. Ultimately, the article asks, what can attention to elite efforts to engineer and enclose public spheres teach about struggles over participation in contemporary contexts of mass publicity?

This article theorizes classroom ethnography in the socio-historical context of the U.S. as a form of racialized surveillance which is calibrated by anti-Black colonial discourses, racially saturated perception, and one’s vulnerability to interpellation. Focusing on the interaction of “Dominic,” a Black focal student, which was documented through ethnographic fieldwork, I conduct a frame analysis to investigate how ethnographic surveillance, as a racialized technology of power, becomes relevant to the frames Dominic negotiated. The analysis demonstrates that a surveillance frame was consequential to Dominic’s interaction and that Dominic’s verbal behavior was sensitive to the racialized element of surveillance generally and to anti-blackness specifically. The analysis further shows how Dominic engaged in “dark sousveillance” (Browne 2015) as a form of ethnographic refusal, and the ensuing discussion considers aspects of reflexive practice by which ethnographer-surveillers in education may engage in “abolitionist” (Shange 2019) ethnography.