American Anthropologist最新文献

In recent years, anthropologists and theologians have been engaging in conversation with one another. Building on, and branching out from, that conversation, this article calls for a careful ethnographic engagement with not just “God talk” (the literal meaning of theology) but also with the figure of God itself. Such a shift can take us from theology as an abstract, scholarly, discursive realm to the messy and often-unpredictable ways in which God shows up in the world. It can attune us to how God appears in concrete social, material, and historical contexts by way of divine interventions, modes of presence, and different forms of mediation. I suggest that the genre of ethnography—skilled at paying attention to the fleeting and emergent and characterized by a generous openness and curiosity—is uniquely suited for engaging with an object like God. Working through some common objections and suggesting ways forward, this article proposes as one possibility an apophatic ethnography—a humble mode of writing that does not insist on proclaiming truths but acknowledges the limits of human knowledge. Without ever being able to capture its object, an ethnography of God can offer glimpses of how the divine is entangled with social and material worlds.

This article examines the contested status of “sign language” in Singapore by exploring deaf people's experiences of the “Mother Tongues”—the state's designation for the official languages of Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil—with a particular focus on the relationships that deaf Chinese Singaporeans have with Mandarin. The term “sign language” in Singapore simplifies a complicated linguistic ecology that includes signing varieties that range from styles that follow English grammar and structure more closely to styles that are more visually and conceptually accurate. Under Singapore's bilingual education policy, all Singaporeans must learn English as well as their “Mother Tongue”; however, deaf people are exempt from this policy. Because sign language in Singapore defies ethnic categorization, it presents a challenge to the state's raciolinguistic claims to multiculturalism, which conflate ethnicity with language. Sign language is thus rendered ideologically suspect: a “mother tongue orphan,” uncomfortably located in the state's language schema. Interlocutors express a sense of alienation from both the “Mother Tongues” and from Singapore Sign Language (SgSL), although in recent years more deaf Singaporeans are coming to reclaim SgSL as their own. This case demonstrates how raciolinguistic ideologies might be reinforced even through those to whom such language policies are not meant to apply.

In this essay, I draw on both autoethnography and ethnographic research among college students studying their Heritage Language (HL)—or Heritage Language Learners (HLLs)—at a US university. I explore the felt contradictions and tensions that get voiced when attempting to navigate the uneasy relationship between two terms: “mother tongue” and HL when invoked either together or separately. While both terms can refer to the same language, the choice of one term over the other is used to emphasize different orientations. Whereas “mother tongue” is rooted in notions of kinship, HL constructs a relationship to the language that is largely external to a familial domain. As I suggest here, this distinction is made and collapses situationally as I and my research collaborators attempt to use them to explain the relationships among language and kinship, literacy, and religion.

In the Sicilian town of Palermo, two main languages are spoken, Italian and Sicilian. But people are often unwilling to consider Sicilian a language, taking it instead as an inferior “dialect.” Linguistic choice is associated with two broad, competing discourses about Sicilian culture and ethnicity: discourses of heritage on the one hand and discourses of backwardness on the other. This essay examines how linguistic practices using these two languages evoke generalized affects that derive from a history of colonization of Sicily; a racialization of Sicilian ethnicity; and a subsequent association of the place and people with low education, poverty, and criminality. Through autoethnography and fieldwork encounters, I discuss how people use, refuse, avoid, or reclaim Sicilian in everyday contexts and track how discourses of the ‘lingua madre’ (mother tongue) are differently negotiated across these practices. I suggest that these negotiations are acts of commensuration through which people navigate emotions of pride and shame and locate themselves within their social worlds.