Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

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.

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.