This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.
这篇文章探讨了在玻利维亚高地，性别如何与种族、语言和阶级差异的象征联系在一起。我研究了民族志和调解的时刻，在这些时刻，双语及其痕迹有助于种族化羞辱的轮廓，或者，反种族主义的种族肯定。在某些时候，la biling成为种族和性别差异的代名词，包括当la biling表示种族化的、性别化的、雇佣劳动的类别——在富裕的白人家里工作的佣人。印度女佣的形象既是历史和文学的隐喻，也是当代反对虐待劳工、种族羞辱和性暴力的政治动员。“chola”的形象既是殖民时期组织种族和性别等级的人格类别的残余，即“sistema de castas”，也是融合了语言、种族和性别的当代社会和人口类别。电视喜剧和其他流行话语中的反印度漫画将双语语言的特征与对印度身体的预设联系起来。以乔拉为中心的选美比赛复制了公开庆祝白人女性气质的形式，就像环球小姐选美一样，但有其他标准，包括土著安第斯语言的口才。
{"title":"Gender, Class, Race, and Region in “Bilingual” Bolivia","authors":"Karl F. Swinehart","doi":"10.1086/699668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699668","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how gender becomes tied together with emblems of racial, linguistic, and class difference in highland Bolivia. I examine both ethnographic and mediatized moments in which bilingualism and its traces contribute to the contours of racialized humiliation or, alternately, antiracist ethnic affirmation. In some moments la bilingüe becomes a metonym that stands in for racial and gender alterity, including when la bilingüe denotes a racialized, gendered, wage-labor category—the domestic servant working in the home of wealthy whites. The figure of the Indian Maid is a figure of historical and literary tropes but also of contemporary political mobilization against labor abuses, racial humiliation, and sexual violence. The figure of the chola is both a remnant of categories of personhood that organized racial and gender hierarchies during the colonial period, namely, the sistema de castas, and a contemporary social and demographic category that fuses language, ethnicity, and gender. Anti-Indian caricatures in televised comedy and other popular discourse connect features of bilingual speech to presuppositions about the Indian body. Chola-centric beauty contests replicate the form of public celebrations of white femininity, like Miss Universe pageants, but operate with other criteria, including eloquence in indigenous Andean languages.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699668","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45834115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article takes interest in reocentric thinking, as well as in the ways such thinking is brought to bear on research on language and social life. Reocentric thinking, understood as referential theories that treat words as standing for things, is pervasive throughout the history of (Western) linguistic thought. Yet, its manifestations in descriptive linguistic research are scantly explored. Seeking to account for how a reocentric vision of language and social life is realized and concomitantly adapted in scholarly practice, the article analyses the research of Swedish linguist and folklorist Lars Levander (1883–1950). Levander spent most of his life documenting the vernacular languages and peasant life of Sweden’s Dalarna province. His assumptions about the relationship between words and things, as this article argues, significantly guided his research practice. Furthermore, they served to conceptualize, and concomitantly capture, certain configurations of time and vernacular authenticity. The article seeks, accordingly, to grasp the dialectic between Levander’s epistemic presuppositions and his scholarly production. More broadly, the article’s historical, epistemological mode of engagement exemplifies how early and potentially ingrained apprehensions of language, as well as their epistemic prerequisites and effects, can be understood and rectified.
{"title":"Linguistic Prerequisites to Cultural Analysis: Lars Levander’s Reocentric Vision of Vernacular Language and Swedish Peasant Life","authors":"D. Karlander","doi":"10.1086/699662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699662","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes interest in reocentric thinking, as well as in the ways such thinking is brought to bear on research on language and social life. Reocentric thinking, understood as referential theories that treat words as standing for things, is pervasive throughout the history of (Western) linguistic thought. Yet, its manifestations in descriptive linguistic research are scantly explored. Seeking to account for how a reocentric vision of language and social life is realized and concomitantly adapted in scholarly practice, the article analyses the research of Swedish linguist and folklorist Lars Levander (1883–1950). Levander spent most of his life documenting the vernacular languages and peasant life of Sweden’s Dalarna province. His assumptions about the relationship between words and things, as this article argues, significantly guided his research practice. Furthermore, they served to conceptualize, and concomitantly capture, certain configurations of time and vernacular authenticity. The article seeks, accordingly, to grasp the dialectic between Levander’s epistemic presuppositions and his scholarly production. More broadly, the article’s historical, epistemological mode of engagement exemplifies how early and potentially ingrained apprehensions of language, as well as their epistemic prerequisites and effects, can be understood and rectified.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699662","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43086029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Austin’s explicit performatives (e.g., “promise,” “bequeath”) in terms of (i) the orders of regimentation between semantic-symbolic and pragmatic-indexical functions, (ii) the indexical anchoring of pragmatic effects within either denotationally mediated events-of-narration (En) or interactionally mediated events-of-signaling (Es), and (iii) the articulation of indexical function with speech participant roles. The article concludes with a reflection on how the architecture of the phonology-semantics interface (or duality of patterning) safeguards symbolism by impeding the processes of runaway semiotic naturalization that produce rigid performativity.
{"title":"Undecontextualizable: Performativity and the Conditions of Possibility of Linguistic Symbolism","authors":"Luke Fleming","doi":"10.1086/699599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699599","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I argue that the canceling out (or defeasing) of performative indexical functions is a condition of possibility on linguistic symbolism. I show this to be the case by looking at words and expressions—like curse words and name taboos—whose performative functions can be canceled out only with the greatest of metalinguistic labor. I show that these indefeasible or rigid performatives are the semiotic-functional converses of J. L. Austin’s explicit performatives (e.g., “promise,” “bequeath”) in terms of (i) the orders of regimentation between semantic-symbolic and pragmatic-indexical functions, (ii) the indexical anchoring of pragmatic effects within either denotationally mediated events-of-narration (En) or interactionally mediated events-of-signaling (Es), and (iii) the articulation of indexical function with speech participant roles. The article concludes with a reflection on how the architecture of the phonology-semantics interface (or duality of patterning) safeguards symbolism by impeding the processes of runaway semiotic naturalization that produce rigid performativity.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699599","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45104088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The practices involved in forensic investigation center on a search for physical clues and traces that may be used to reconstruct past events. The forensic corpse is therefore involved in a materially grounded semiotics, which provides the basis for making claims about the past. Using the examples of forensic pattern matching (such as craniofacial mapping and fingerprints) and forensic entomology, I explore the different life worlds that emerge after a person’s death and how they are mobilized by forensic investigators. In this form of inquiry, claims to the real are articulated through the signs that different beings—whether human, insect, or microbe—perceive inhering in the corpse. Such forms of forensic investigation offer a productive site for thinking about the ontological status of fact and of the corpse in the context of posthumanism. Forensic signs stretch across our divided categories of the living and the dead, human and animal, nature and culture, providing alternate ways to conceptualize the relationships at play in such assemblages.
{"title":"Forensic Afterlives","authors":"Zoë Crossland","doi":"10.1086/699597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699597","url":null,"abstract":"The practices involved in forensic investigation center on a search for physical clues and traces that may be used to reconstruct past events. The forensic corpse is therefore involved in a materially grounded semiotics, which provides the basis for making claims about the past. Using the examples of forensic pattern matching (such as craniofacial mapping and fingerprints) and forensic entomology, I explore the different life worlds that emerge after a person’s death and how they are mobilized by forensic investigators. In this form of inquiry, claims to the real are articulated through the signs that different beings—whether human, insect, or microbe—perceive inhering in the corpse. Such forms of forensic investigation offer a productive site for thinking about the ontological status of fact and of the corpse in the context of posthumanism. Forensic signs stretch across our divided categories of the living and the dead, human and animal, nature and culture, providing alternate ways to conceptualize the relationships at play in such assemblages.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699597","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47236391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Using ethnographic field notes on the media circulation and uptake of two specific government orders in Hyderabad, India, I propose a semiotic approach to looking at how emblems of citizenship are not simply products of state ideologies, but rather products of a dialogic relationship (sometimes contentious, often ordinary) between “state” and “citizens,” and always with reference to a history of communicative events between the two. I argue that citizenship should be understood as a communicative effect that is mediated not solely by sovereign power and strident collective movements, but more often through everyday processes by which emblems of citizenship are entextualized and the discursive interactions through which substantive claims are mobilized, negotiated, and contested. Such an approach can add both epistemological and methodological specificity to political anthropology and push it beyond the limitations of an anthropology of the state.
{"title":"Citizenship as a Communicative Effect","authors":"Indivar Jonnalagadda","doi":"10.1086/699539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699539","url":null,"abstract":"Using ethnographic field notes on the media circulation and uptake of two specific government orders in Hyderabad, India, I propose a semiotic approach to looking at how emblems of citizenship are not simply products of state ideologies, but rather products of a dialogic relationship (sometimes contentious, often ordinary) between “state” and “citizens,” and always with reference to a history of communicative events between the two. I argue that citizenship should be understood as a communicative effect that is mediated not solely by sovereign power and strident collective movements, but more often through everyday processes by which emblems of citizenship are entextualized and the discursive interactions through which substantive claims are mobilized, negotiated, and contested. Such an approach can add both epistemological and methodological specificity to political anthropology and push it beyond the limitations of an anthropology of the state.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699539","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44511612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own “structural oblivion”—that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.
{"title":"Listening versus Lingwashing: Promise, Peril, and Structural Oblivion When White South Africans Learn Indigenous African Languages","authors":"J. McIntosh","doi":"10.1086/699250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699250","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the liberal South African whites in Cape Town who mediate their crisis of national belonging through newfound enthusiasm for indigenous Southern African languages. After contextualizing white aspirations to linguistic belonging, some semiotic shifts in how whites have represented isiXhosa, and various white metapragmatic judgments, I discuss promising experiences of white isiXhosa speakers, then argue that language learning invites a reckoning in which whites grapple with questions of interracial dynamics in the new South Africa and their own “structural oblivion”—that is, their failure, as elites, to understand precisely the reasons for which they are resented. Some critics charge that white self-congratulation can amount to what I call “lingwashing”: using language learning as a moral cover for enduring inequities. I suggest a potential remedy is to conceptualize language learning as a process not of self-comforting but of self-discomfiting, requiring both listening and humility.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/699250","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46282668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The poetics of openness, as formulated by Umberto Eco in his pre-semiotic work The Open Work (1962), has already been useful and applicable to cultural studies and textual analysis. I propose that this poetics of openness be applied to critical educational practices as well. In this article, I argue that a poetics of openness when coupled with active ‘on the ground’ “critical public pedagogics” can provide a flexible framework for approaching the education of interpretation. Through this framework, a text or sign system is understood as ‘closed’ if it elicits univocal meanings: expecting a predetermined response from a generic/average reader. A text is ‘open’ when it fosters a plurality of interpretative possibilities that actively engage the “existential credentials” of the interpreter. Aesthetic openness is part of adopting a semiotic perspective toward educational processes. A theory of model reader pedagogically helps protect against the kind of radical constructivism this interpretative approach can seem to foster. Openness is not presented as a system or methodology of education, but as a pedagogical value: encouraging both educators and students to bring a perspective of critical openness to all the sign systems and discourses they engage with.
{"title":"Educating Openness: Umberto Eco’s Poetics of Openness as a Pedagogical Value","authors":"Cary Campbell","doi":"10.1086/695567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/695567","url":null,"abstract":"The poetics of openness, as formulated by Umberto Eco in his pre-semiotic work The Open Work (1962), has already been useful and applicable to cultural studies and textual analysis. I propose that this poetics of openness be applied to critical educational practices as well. In this article, I argue that a poetics of openness when coupled with active ‘on the ground’ “critical public pedagogics” can provide a flexible framework for approaching the education of interpretation. Through this framework, a text or sign system is understood as ‘closed’ if it elicits univocal meanings: expecting a predetermined response from a generic/average reader. A text is ‘open’ when it fosters a plurality of interpretative possibilities that actively engage the “existential credentials” of the interpreter. Aesthetic openness is part of adopting a semiotic perspective toward educational processes. A theory of model reader pedagogically helps protect against the kind of radical constructivism this interpretative approach can seem to foster. Openness is not presented as a system or methodology of education, but as a pedagogical value: encouraging both educators and students to bring a perspective of critical openness to all the sign systems and discourses they engage with.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/695567","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41448098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romantic notions that the advancement of archaeological knowledge depends on the thrill of unanticipated discoveries departs from the standard practice of interpreting data according to impartial research designs. However, the unexpected find commonly stymies the deductive testing of hypothesis, and the material traces (signs) upon which research relies often disrupt the course of archaeological investigations. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that the distinct semiotic affordances of material remains can significantly affect archaeological interpretations. The undertheorized epistemological problems of revelation in archaeology are brought to bear through an examination of the spectral quality of graffiti etched onto the walls of the Moche ceremonial site of Huaca Colorada in northern Peru (CE 650–850). An interpretation of the graffiti in relationship to rituals of human sacrifice and architectural renovation demonstrates that the power of the monument was founded on its semiotic density; the complex layering of signs—that continually spawned new signs—created a place of limitless discovery and affect that profoundly shaped perceptions of the huaca for both Moche visitors and later archaeologists alike. Ultimately, the graffiti provide a rare data set that permits a consideration of the effects of signs as “intepretants” in the tradition of Peirce.
{"title":"Trace, Revelation, and Interpretant in Archaeological Research: The Graffiti of Huaca Colorada, Peru","authors":"Edward Swenson","doi":"10.1086/696799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/696799","url":null,"abstract":"Romantic notions that the advancement of archaeological knowledge depends on the thrill of unanticipated discoveries departs from the standard practice of interpreting data according to impartial research designs. However, the unexpected find commonly stymies the deductive testing of hypothesis, and the material traces (signs) upon which research relies often disrupt the course of archaeological investigations. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that the distinct semiotic affordances of material remains can significantly affect archaeological interpretations. The undertheorized epistemological problems of revelation in archaeology are brought to bear through an examination of the spectral quality of graffiti etched onto the walls of the Moche ceremonial site of Huaca Colorada in northern Peru (CE 650–850). An interpretation of the graffiti in relationship to rituals of human sacrifice and architectural renovation demonstrates that the power of the monument was founded on its semiotic density; the complex layering of signs—that continually spawned new signs—created a place of limitless discovery and affect that profoundly shaped perceptions of the huaca for both Moche visitors and later archaeologists alike. Ultimately, the graffiti provide a rare data set that permits a consideration of the effects of signs as “intepretants” in the tradition of Peirce.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/696799","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42648340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold resources. Analyzing these strategies is important to not naturalize the dominant meaning that is inscribed in the built environment. As a case study, we analyze spatial design in the city of Forlì, Italy, during the Fascist regime (1922–43). Through the case study, we delineate two complimentary design strategies: typification and environmental propaganda. Typification establishes and uses familiar types of buildings to channel individual interpretations; environmental propaganda spreads cultural artifacts and enacts political rituals about the built environment. Both of these strategies try to steer users’ interpretations of the built environment in everyday life. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of a particular built form in Forlì—the headquarters of the Opera Nazionale Balilla—showing how these strategies were deployed for this particular building.
{"title":"The Meaning Making of the Built Environment in the Fascist City: A Semiotic Approach","authors":"A. Nanni, F. Bellentani","doi":"10.1086/696850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/696850","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on interpretative semiotics to address how spatial designers endow the built environment with meaning. From a semiotic perspective, designing the built environment is an activity that extends beyond its physical reshaping. Designers use complex sociosemiotic strategies to funnel users’ interpretations, drawing upon their manifold resources. Analyzing these strategies is important to not naturalize the dominant meaning that is inscribed in the built environment. As a case study, we analyze spatial design in the city of Forlì, Italy, during the Fascist regime (1922–43). Through the case study, we delineate two complimentary design strategies: typification and environmental propaganda. Typification establishes and uses familiar types of buildings to channel individual interpretations; environmental propaganda spreads cultural artifacts and enacts political rituals about the built environment. Both of these strategies try to steer users’ interpretations of the built environment in everyday life. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of a particular built form in Forlì—the headquarters of the Opera Nazionale Balilla—showing how these strategies were deployed for this particular building.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/696850","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45881336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the reparticularization of Chinese language and culture in a teaching-learning context at the University of Rwanda. It critiques models of dissemination that suggest direct inscription of semiotic value onto local contexts of use. Ethnographically, the article demonstrates that students’ uptake of what their teachers deem real or authentic is in fact a metapragmatic reconstrual of teachers’ lexemic tokens “real” and “original” that teachers enact in their teaching activities. Students’ reconstrual incrementally alters teachers’ sign values and links their users to one other. Students’ reparticularized sign values, in turn, link their users to distinct activity routines beyond learning Chinese and kung fu in the classroom. The article argues that language and kung fu classes for students are one phase segment of larger sets of activities students undertake to become competitive in a challenging job market.
{"title":"Students’ Reparticularization of Chinese Language and Culture at the University of Rwanda Confucius Institute","authors":"A. Stambach, K. Wamalwa","doi":"10.1086/696798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/696798","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the reparticularization of Chinese language and culture in a teaching-learning context at the University of Rwanda. It critiques models of dissemination that suggest direct inscription of semiotic value onto local contexts of use. Ethnographically, the article demonstrates that students’ uptake of what their teachers deem real or authentic is in fact a metapragmatic reconstrual of teachers’ lexemic tokens “real” and “original” that teachers enact in their teaching activities. Students’ reconstrual incrementally alters teachers’ sign values and links their users to one other. Students’ reparticularized sign values, in turn, link their users to distinct activity routines beyond learning Chinese and kung fu in the classroom. The article argues that language and kung fu classes for students are one phase segment of larger sets of activities students undertake to become competitive in a challenging job market.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/696798","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41372970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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