MICHICAGO 1999

MAY 14-15, ANN ARBOR

INAUGURAL CONFERENCE

FRIDAY MAY 14TH: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL I: ANDEANIST PERSPECTIVES: TEXT, FORM AND SOCIAL ACTION
• PANEL II: MESO-AMERICANIST PERSPECTIVES ON GRAMMAR AND COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES

SATURDAY MAY 15TH: MORNING SESSION

• PANEL III: CONSTRUCTING PERSONHOOD: NARRATIVE, SOCIAL REGULATION AND REPRESENTATION
• PANEL IV: COMMUNICATIVE NORMS AND IMAGINING SOCIAL GROUPS

SATURDAY MAY 15TH: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL V: CATEGORIES, BOUNDARIES AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES
• PANEL VI: POETICS, RITUAL MEANING AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCE

Please scroll down for paper abstracts



PANEL I: ANDEANIST PERSPECTIVES: TEXT, FORM AND SOCIAL ACTION


Two configurations of code-switching in Andean vernacular culture: A working hypothesis

Bruce Mannheim, The University of Michigan.

Although most linguistic features vary irrespective of national borders, contemporary Andean vernacular musics in Peru and Bolivia show different patterns of code-switching between Native Andean languages (Quechua, Aymara) and Spanish. Code switching in Southern Peru embeds a Quechua text in a Spanish-language context of production, rekeying relations of participation hierarchically across the performance. Similar embedding of languages does not occur in Bolivian vernacular music; rather code-switching is a poetic resource, and occurs without a corresponding rekeying or change in voice. These configurations are attested as early as the middle of the 18th century for southern Peru, and the middle of the 19th century for Bolivia, and correspond to other patterns of cross-ethnic and cross-linguistic interaction in the two republics.


Speaking Quichua: Language, Identity and Socio-Economic Transformation in Northern Highland Ecuador

Viviana Quintero, The University of Michigan.

Over the past three decades, Otavalo, a popular weaving and commercial region in northern highland Ecuador, has experienced an economic boom largely dependent on the production and sale of textiles. This region is home to approximately 70,000 indigenous weavers, farmers, and textile dealers who are known as Otavale�os and live in Quichua-Spanish bilingual communities in and around a relatively prosperous market town. I propose that this economic boom with its ensuing transformations, such as the growth of tourism, improvements in infrastructure (e.g., roads and bus transportation), and out-migration and commuting of Otavale�os from their rural communities to the market town, have directly affected the types of social networks they have created and sustained and the linguistic accommodations they have made with each other and with others. For my dissertation research, I will explore how Otavale�o weavers, farmers, and textile dealers index, create, and negotiate their social and linguistic identities in the face of emergent and continuous socio-economic differentiation and transformation. Through analysis of detailed ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and social network data, I will illuminate the processes of language maintenance and shift for the Otavale�o communities, which include both intra-Quichua variation as well as contact variation with Spanish.


Southern Peruvian Quechua evidentials: grammar, genre and colonial translation

Alan Durston, The University of Chicago

This paper discusses how Southern Peruvian Quechua evidential (source of information) marking may have functioned in some historical genre contexts. I will begin by discussing the grammatical and linguistic-anthropological literature on present-day Quechua evidentiality, noting the inconsistencies between the grammarians’ definitions of the categories and their use in some published oral narratives. The variety of implications which can be attached to the use of a given marker brings in broader problems regarding how such highly metapragmatic grammatical categories relate to genre frames. I will then focus on the apparent breakdown of the evidential paradigm in doctrinal Quechua texts generated by the Catholic Church between 1580 and 1650 (these texts almost invariably use first-hand witness marking). I will discuss how evidential marking was used at different distributional levels in catechisms, hymns and sermons–the question being to what extent these categories were rendered "exuberant" (or superfluous) in the new genre frames.


Proposal for Research in Chile: A study of inequality through comparative pragmatics

Nicole Berry, The University of Michigan

The purpose of my research is to examine the processes through which interactional mechanisms in natural conversations between development workers and their clients reproduce structures of inequality. Development agencies have taken for granted that problems of inequality can be effectively addressed without understanding the mechanisms of interaction themselves. A better comprehension of these problems and their influences upon everyday conversations could contribute to the success of international economic development. Toward this end, my dissertation explores the interactional mechanisms in natural conversations between small loan officers in Chile and their clients. This information could be used to further understand how development does work and could increase its success on the level of face-to-face interaction.




PANEL II: MESO-AMERICANIST PERSPECTIVES ON GRAMMAR AND COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES


The Periphrastic Expression of Modality in Qeqchi Maya

Paul Kockelman, The University of Chicago

Within this paper I offer an account of the periphrastic expression of modality in Qeqchi, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. I show that there exists a set of modal particles, generally cliticized to the verb-complex and sensitive to syntactic phenomena, which have epistemic, pragmatic, and expressive functions ranging from counterfactuality and possibility, to rhetorical questions and requests, to sarcasm, admiration, and doubt. To show this, I analyzed conditional frames, syntactic movement, scope constraints, and situated discourse. I determined distributional regularities not only within sentence-scope contexts (focusing thereby on paradigmatic relations and semantics), but also with respect to discursive functions (via syntagmatic relations across clauses), and pragmatic functions (via adjacency pairs). As such, besides the well-known paradigmatic relations elicitable via minimal pairs, much analysis was done with regard to syntagmatic relations via the co-occurrence of elements and figure-ground dynamics. The data itself is taken from a corpus that includes texts ranging from a late 19th-century legend recounting the marriage between the sun and the moon, to a recent oral recounting of the violence that occurred in a Qeqchi town during the 1980s, to interview material and contextualized utterances gathered while working as an anthropologist for eight months in a Qeqchi-speaking village. As such, it spans genres as varied as highly entextualized prayers and legends to highly contextualized commands and wishes. I argue that while the members of this set span the real-irrealis scale offered by Akatsuka (1985) (and independently by Givn (1982)), their functions only appear scalar when projected through an epistemic and referential lens. I argue that not only are their pragmatic and expressive functions as prominent and regular as their epistemic ones, but that their epistemic functions have features which are not linear as seen via their combinatoric possibilities, qualitative rather than quantitative inter-relations, and expression by non-commensurate grammatical means.


The Grammar and Sociolinguistics of K’iche’ honorification

Rosa Maria Rodriguez, The University of Chicago

Several dialects of K’iche’, spoken by approximately a million people in the western highlands of Guatemala, have formal second person pronouns (honorific pronouns). The use of honorific pronouns appears to involve voice morphology in interesting ways. Certain restrictions on the use of honorific pronouns with transitive verbs have been noted for certain dialects, such that intransitive verbs, derived by both passive and antipassive voice morphology, are sometimes preferred over simple transitives when using honorific pronouns. The research proposed aims to develop a more detailed understanding of the morphosyntactic and interactional features surrounding the use of honorific pronouns in K’iche’ Mayan. Unlike previous studies of K’iche’ morphosyntax, which have focused on questions of voice, agreement and transitivity, this project seeks to determine the extent to which the co-presence of honorific pronouns, transitive vs. intransitive verb forms and other linguistic forms constitutes an ordered/layered set of socially indexical variants within an [emergent] honorific system, thus revealing the grammaticalized nature of K’iche’ honorification, on the one hand, and the creative social action embedded in its grammar (Agha 1993, 1994, Duranti 1981, 1990, Errington 1985, Hill & Hill 1986, Silverstein 1996). During the course of my fieldwork, I will investigate not only the way speakers use honorific pronouns and voice alternations to index deference in real-time conversation, but also local interpretations of the pragmatic effect that various combinations and distributions of (in)transitive verbs, honorific pronouns, and interrelated grammatical, lexical and morphological features may have. I am also interested in determining the effects that current efforts to standardize K’iche’ may have on honorification in K’iche’, i.e. what implications the current pan-Mayan/ nationalist movement has for changes in local usage and ideologies of usage.


Subjects of Conquest: The Role of the Subjunctive in Spanish Colonial Texts

Paja Faudree, The University of Chicago

Ideologies of conquest played a critical and complex role in the Spanish project to possess the Americas. These ideologies appear in a variety of forms in documents from this period, in many cases taking on quite explicit expression. This paper explores a much more implicit encoding of such ideologies in the very grammatical structure of these texts. The discussion centers on an examination of the alternation between the indicative and subjunctive mood in the Requeriemiento, a document which, read directly prior to initiating military hostilities, explicitly required the indigenous peoples of the Americas to submit to Spanish rule or suffer the consequences. The subjunctive mood is employed at three points in the text. First, in outlining the development of Christianity, the subjunctive is used to draw out the implications of this history for the existence and fate of the indigenous peoples. Second, in establishing the authority of this prior (Christian) history, the subjunctive is used to allude to the evidential basis for this authority, suggesting that the addressees could examine this corpus if they so wished. And third, in articulating the implications of the encounter between the Spanish and the Indians, the subjunctive is used to lay out the potential consequences of either compliance or noncompliance. In short, in all three cases, the subjunctive is used to present material that appears to be simple inferences from facts, but actually constitute ideologically-motivated discursive moves.


Pu ti!’ On the spread of the dismissive particle "pu" in Totontepec Mixe (Oaxaca, Mexico)

Daniel F. Suslak, The University of Chicago

Too often studies of small linguistic communities undergoing language shift have neglected innovative patterns of language use, choosing instead to dwell on loss and obsolescence. Or else the focus has been limited to a consideration of those innovations which map most easily onto an argument about external (linguistic) dominance and local resistance. This report outlines the (re)birth and spread of a linguistic form in the Mixe-speaking community of Totontepec, Oaxaca and considers it within the context of the changing patterns of language use and adolescent socialization taking place there. The form in question is the particle "pu" which combines with relative and interrogative pronouns to jokingly dismiss an interlocutor’s question. Its new life began last year in the speech of a young man who would habitually mine his grandmother’s linguistic repertoire for vintage Mixe forms and then use that linguistic material to express a youthful sensibility heavily influenced by Mexican and American mass media. Thanks in part to his prominent role in the town’s band, it spread rapidly through the band’s youthful following and then through wider adolescent networks. The young Totontepecanos who use this form so fondly are being encouraged by their elders to maintain local values and practices. At the same time they are exhorted to acquire the skills and experience (e.g. Spanish literacy) which will enable them to defend the community and finance its future development. Their playful use of "pu" exemplifies their search for creative (linguistic) resolution to the tensions and contradictions they face.




PANEL III: CONSTRUCTING PERSONHOOD: NARRATIVE, SOCIAL REGULATION AND REPRESENTATION


The File: Agency, Autography, and Representational Technologies in a Pakistani Bureaucracy

Matthew Hull, The University of Chicago

The paper will analyze (1) formal, pragmatic, and metapragmatic aspects of discourse mediated by and concerning files and (2) non-discursive practices involving files in a Pakistani bureaucracy. Files are made up of note sheets, letters, drafts, forms, memos, plans, and lists/schedules with specific figurations of author, addressee, and audience, composition structure, discursive styles, temporality, scripts, languages, and organization of textual space. The file is not only a medium of representation, but is also a complex object in itself, with norms of use and non-semiotic qualities which shape the discursive and non-discursive practices in which it is involved. Multiply-authored, file-mediated discourse is dense with explicit co-textual and contextual indexing (including metapragmatic commentary) which situates actors and particular segments of discourse within the discourse of the file as a whole and other realms of action. Officials and staff enact (and subvert) organizational hierarchies through "notings" (serial entries of different functionaries including commentary on the file topic, directives, responses), "markings" (entries identifying the official position of the next individual to receive the file), stamps (which indicate the date an office received the file and the office "diary" in which it was registered), signatures, and physical conveyance and concealment. Control over the notings and the movement of a file is means by which officials exercise power over people and things and is a criterion by which officials are evaluated by others as powerful. The paper criticizes the simplistic characterization of bureaucratic discourse as "impersonal" by arguing that there is a dialectic between, on the one hand, official procedures of file production designed to determine absolutely individual access, authorship and agency and, on the other, the discursive and circulatory practices that construct corporate authorship and agency. In the role of authors, actors strategically try to weaken the bond between authorship and agency strongly presumed in official ideology.


Irony as Cultural Critique: Parallels between the Life of a Story and Stories of Life

Laura Kunreuther, The University of Michigan

In most poststructuralist cultural accounts, following the paths of Nietzche and Foucault, irony has become the dominant rhetorical style and tone adopted to expose the contradictions of social life. Too often this stylistic tool is seen only as the property of the analyst. The subjects we study appear deaf to the ironic contradictions that echo through their world. While I am not proposing that cultural critics lose their cutting edge, in this paper I show that irony is also an important rhetorical device that people use to describe and critique their own worlds. I focus on a story told to me by a Newari woman, Astamaya, from the town of Patan, Nepal in which she describes the "traditional" path of a woman’s life. Astamaya uses irony to expose the contradictions between her personal desire in the face of the brutal forces of tradition, and thereby transforms this seemingly static tale into a moment of social action and innovation. Combining the tools of fine-grained linguistic analyses with the Bakhtinian concern for the battling voices within language itself, I identify several ideological perspectives that Astamaya invokes in her characters. These different voices enable her to provide a message for her daughter, who is a listener and participant in the story, and to make a trenchant and ironic critique of marriage. In conclusion, I argue that attention to irony as a rhetorical and linguistic strategy within people’s everyday speech immediately suggests a theory of culture that recognizes the entangled and contradictory voices that make up people’s own accounts of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’.


Naming and Negotiated Reference: Mapping Relationships in Zakarpattja (Ukraine) Dialect Conversations

J.A. Dickinson, The University of Michigan

This paper considers the social importance of conversational naming practices in a Ukrainian dialect-speaking village near the Romanian border. In the first part of the paper, I review the naming system of this dialect, and review several means by which conversational participants establish shared meaning (reference) for names introduced into conversation. In the second part of the paper, I argue that while negotiation of name referents usually occurs in conversational side sequences, these sequences serve a social function far beyond that of a simple repair routine. By examining and comparing the economic, spatial, and kin relationships mapped by participants in identifying absent others, I demonstrate that these side sequences serve as a site for the declaration and display of those relationships. Furthermore, differences in the relationship maps that participants use to identify the referent of a name in conversation point towards an interpretation of names more than simple rigid designators in this community. I argue for an interpretation of names as flexible designators of the relationships into which a name-bearer is mapped by conversational participants. This flexibility not only encompasses differences in perspective but also allows for the introduction and incorporation of new means of representing identity




PANEL IV: COMMUNICATIVE NORMS AND IMAGINING SOCIAL GROUPS


The King’s Red Tongue and Other Transformations of Tamil Political Discursive Interaction

John Bernard Bate, The University of Chicago

In 1893 Sundaram Pillai published his epic drama, Manonmaniyam, in which for the first time in 2,000 years of Tamil literature a king delivered a ‘heroic oration’ to his troops massed before him. Over the next half century political oratory in Tamilnadu began to instantiate the new model of discursive interaction inherent in new modes of ‘rhetorical’ practice in formal political activities. As the advent of such a model in Manonmaniyam implies, nothing like it had been seen before in South Asia. Precolonial models of political communicative practice, in effect for at least a thousand years, involved poets praising relatively silent kings as god-like beings. In praising them, the ‘red-’ (or ‘fine-’) ‘tongued poet’ expressed an emotional, bhakti-like relationship to his ruler and thereby also expressed his desire to participate in his realm. Though today speakers stand on stages and deliver heroic orations to the masses, like Cicero or Manonmaniyam, the new rhetorical model of discursive interaction does not merely replicate western ideologies or poetics of speech; rather the new model combines the aesthetic of the old in practices associated with the new. Contemporary political speakers now stand at the juncture of two modes of communicative practice in which they manifest an emotional bond between themselves and their leaders thereby evoking a similar response from their audience. In this paper I will interrogate the notion of ‘rhetoric’ and alternative modes of political discursive interaction in an examination of Sundaram Pillai’s epic, public speaking manuals, and an exemplary oration that instantiates this bricolage of models.


Performing reconciliation: The vicissitudes of commemorating national guilt in Kristallnacht

Jonathan Larson, The University of Michigan

In 1988, the West German Bundestag commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht with a speech by its President, Philipp Jenninger. Jenninger faced a difficult task: whereas most commemorations have a positive connotation for national identity, observing remembrance of Kristallnacht takes the unusual course of commemorating national crimes in the Holocaust. It is thus a central location of debate on German narratives of the Nazi era and of present German identity. Jenninger’s speech was quickly eclipsed by the overwhelmingly negative response of his audience in the Bundestag and his subsequent resignation. How did his speech fail as a speech act? Was there an authorization of him as a speaker that his audience, as representing to a large extent the diversity of German post-War narratives on the Holocaust, was prepared to grant? In answering these questions, this paper investigates the necessary conditions for performativity in a commemorative political speech.


Proposal for Research in Japan: Folk Sociolinguistic Essentialism

Barbara Sarnecka, The University of Michigan

This presentation will offer an outline for a proposed predissertation research project examining ways in which ideologies of English, propagated through particular metalinguistic practices, may rely on a psychological mode of construal known as cognitive essentialism. This project will be a precursor to dissertation research on Japanese ideologies of language, and will explore ways of combining research methods (ethnography, conversation analysis and experimental psychology) for interdisciplinary work on language and society.


New Normative Grammars and Efforts to De-Sovietize Tatarstan

Helen Faller, The University of Michigan

The Soviet policy concerning language was that Russian should serve as the means for communication between nationalities. Moreover, education in Russian was the unspoken requirement for ascending the Soviet hierarchy. Thus Russian language became the norm against which other languages were measured. In some cases, Russian also was considered a window on European languages, and therefore, on so-called progressive ideas articulated through Soviet socialist bureaucracy. Since Tatarstan’s declaration of sovereignty in 1990, there have efforts on the part of the government in Kazan and local intellectuals to shift the hegemonic status of Russian as the normative language in the region. Thus the Tatarstan Constitution (1992) was written in both Russian and Tatar; the Tatarstan national anthem (1993) was composed by a Tatar; and Russophone children living in Tatarstan are now required to study Tatar as a second language. In this paper, I examine the ways in which language ideologies have affected the presentation of Tatar in textbooks and normative grammars from 1960 through 1997. I consider the ways in which each of these texts approaches grammatical categories and the social worlds they imply or describe.




PANEL V: CATEGORIES, BOUNDARIES AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES


Linguistic ‘NIMBYism,’ and other tales from the boundaries of language

Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago

The figure is inscribed by the image of the politically correct individual in relation to a social good about to happen–cf. the bumper sticker–in too close proximity: "Not In My Back Yard!" Similar things seem to happen in realms of language, and particularly at boundaries of subordinated language communities. We can recognize this as a Bakhtinian cultural "voicing" of the self’s lived interest in society, a way of aligning that self to sociocultural forces shaping language as part of the experience of identity. We can, moreover, note the recurrence of such a voicing in several distinct language communities, each with its distinctive cultural discourse of NIMBYism. All of this is part of the linguistic anthropological study of the social organization of language ideologies. Indeed, ideologies of ‘locality’–and hence of self-location–increasingly dominate complex, plurilingual speech communities everywhere in the contemporary world, so as to (re)energize language communities that may be in various stages of subordination and/or moribundity. Anthropological linguists are drawn into these processes as ideological actors no less than ethnolinguistically identifying ‘locals’, as I–one among many–can attest.


Making Bhojpuri Hindu: Language shift and unsuccessful standardization in Mauritius

Patrick Eisenlohr, The University of Chicago

My main purpose in this paper is to look at the failure of attempts to standardize Mauritian Bhojpuri in the context of ethnic conflict and a growing Hindu nationalism in Mauritius. Hindu activists in religious organizations, state and para-state bodies, at the same time involved in a network of Hindu nationalist organizations between India and Mauritius, are very concerned about rapid language shift from Bhojpuri to Mauritian Creole. Interpreting the language shift as a "danger" to Hindu identity in Mauritius, they have arranged for use of Bhojpuri on national TV and radio in an effort to reverse the shift to Creole. Opening up the state-controlled sector of mass media for Bhojpuri has gone hand in hand with the promotion of a new linguistic model, characterized by extreme purism and Sanskritization, erasing lexical items of Creole and Perso-Arabic origin, which are very common in Mauritian varieties of Bhojpuri. The new linguistic model also involves structural novelties, especially the universalization of the honorific level and the introduction of Hindi 3rd person honorific pronoun "aap", while at the same time Mauritian Bhojpuri is undergoing wholesale loss of the honorific level in the process of language shift towards Creole. This is amounts to an attempt to turn the register of Hindu religious discourse and sermons into a standard. I argue that this standardization project is failing because it is ultimately accelerating the language shift it is supposed to stop. Especially the changes on the lexical level are locally interpreted as assimilating Bhojpuri to Hindi. Hindi has been for a long time promoted and taught as an "ancestral language" of Mauritian Hindus, the cultivation of which is presented as preserving a "pure" Hindu identity in the uncertainty of a diasporic setting which is perceived as impure and "creolized." By thus "Hinduizing" Bhojpuri, the "new standard" is excluding non-Hindu speakers of Bhojpuri, most notably Muslims. It is also identifying Bhojpuri with the established category of "ancestral languages," thereby turning it into an object be to venerated, but not to be used on a regular basis.


But when we went to Bill and Doreen’s we had to talk a wee bit more proper’: Identity and Community Building in a Scottish/English Dialect Contact Context

Judy Dyer, The University of Michigan

Situated within a contact situation typical of today’s floating labor population, but little investigated, this paper proposes a new framework for analyzing dialect formation in a transplanted community. Corby, in the English Midlands, grew from a village of 1,500 in the 1930s to a steel town of 36,000 by 1961 with over half its population coming from Scotland. An impressionistic auditory analysis of speech data reveals the focusing (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) of a dialect over three generations, with the English born third generation speaking a dialect characterized both by Scottish variants (despite the fact that they may have no Scottish ancestry) and more general South East English variants. I ask whether dialect leveling processes (the eradication of socially or regionally marked features due to social and/or geographical mobility, Milroy 1997; Britain 1997) can explain the outcomes of contact in this situation. I also explore individual variability in the use of characteristically ‘Scottish’ versus ‘English’ variants and explore the usefulness of constructs such as ‘community affiliation’ rather than ‘ethnic identification’ in accounting for such variability.


The Vanguardist Imperative, State-ment of Nation, and Language Question in Mozambique, 1975-85

Erik Lee Skjon, The University of Chicago

This paper synthesizes Marxian and Saussurean concepts of value or valeur (henceforth simply valeur, distinct from ‘values’, below), taking as presuppositions: (i), that structural valeur can only realized in-and-through social relations, even though it may be fetishized or misrecognized as a relation between things, persons, or words that have intrinsic qualities; and (ii), that realization of valeur requires its circulation as specific valeur-forms, constituted in-and-through various semiotic media. The paper argues that during Mozambique’s first ten years of independence, the production of social persons rather than the material means of subsistence provided the dominant logic of social organization at the national level. Nationalist ideological objectives were defined and legitimated by this production because it generated a surplus of modernist social(ist) values–e.g., universal rationality–appropriable by the vanguard. These values, and the imperative to have them circulated, can be traced to the vanguard leadership’s assimilado (assimilated) roots in the colonial era, particularly its modernist education in Portuguese, and attendant cultural alienation from both indigenous social formations and Portuguese civilization. After independence, schools continued to provide the principle means of production or assimilation to these values, and Portuguese, supported by many modernist ideological entailments commonly associated with standardized languages, served as the principal semiotic medium through which these values could circulate. The vanguard’s control of the forms and conditions of the reproduction of the relations of production of social persons–school programming, literacy campaigns, villagization, etc.–realized the surplus as vanguardist superiority in modernist social(ist) values, and thus substantiated the vanguard’s structural position–its valeur–in a hierarchy.




PANEL VI: POETICS, RITUAL MEANING AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCE


Reading the House: Cultural Exegesis and the Constitution of Maoriness in New Zealand

Daniel Rosenblatt, The University of Chicago

In the wake of a vast migration of the Maori population to cities, "marae" complexes centered on Maori carved meeting houses have become symbols of Maori culture and sites for its propagation and performance. Once confined to rural, "tribal" communities, marae are now found in urban centers, and in Pakeha (white settler) institutions such as universities and schools. Their presence in such places is seen as central to the preservation of Maori culture among urban youth, who often have little other contact with Maori traditions in everyday life. As a result, many people, both Maori and Pakeha, are introduced to Maori culture through visits to marae. Seated inside the meeting house, the guests are usually given an explanation of its symbolism by a Maori person knowledgeable in the culture. The houses themselves are complex symbolic objects, elaborately carved and painted. They are thought of as ancestors and talked about as representing both kinship based groups and the cosmic order. This paper explores the way Maori culture is constructed in these discursive "readings" of meeting houses. What conception of "Maori culture" is constituted by these readings? What sorts of connections and contrasts are drawn between Maori culture and the rest of New Zealand life, and how do these place Maori culture within the modern world and respond to the colonial encounter? How do specific rhetorical strategies (including code-switching) contribute to the linguistic work these discourses accomplish?


From Poetic Feelings to Verseful Dealings: Transformations in a Discourse of Speech in Yemeni Audiocassette poetry

Flagg Miller, The University of Michigan

Popular culture in the Middle East has received very little attention by anthropologists, despite the critical role that it plays in shaping public opinion. One of the most influential mediums in this regard, both in the cities and especially in the countrysides, is the audiocassette. Attending to the emergence of in Yemen of a lively market for cassettes since the 1960s, I have been conducting research on discursive transformations in folk-poetry produced in a region of the south called Yafi`a. In my paper, I propose exploring how a discourse of speech found in much folk-poetry is being subtly modified by the new exchange-value and commodification of "cassette-poetry". According to a traditional, tribal ideology of speech, the voice is conceptualized as a sacred production that links the body to powerful forces of nature. Metaphors and symbolic tropes portray speech as at once eminently powerful, embodied, monologic. During the mid 70s, however, the voice begins to be discussed in terms of commerce. In these terms, the voice becomes represented as increasingly vitiated, alienated from the body, and dialogized. By examining this discursive transformation in several poems, I argue that the traditional, tribal ideology of speech is being recast in new terms especially by cassette-poets. As cassette-poets confront traditional stigmas against tribal speech "entering the market" and being given exchange-value, they become ideally positioned to explore the ambiguities and contradictions between conventional tribal identities and values and those of a modernizing world.


Video Irradient: Micronesia and Monsters in Post-War Japanese Film

Alexander Dale Mawyer, The University of Chicago

This project has three goals, one related to film studies, one related to anthropology, and one related to the history of Pacific film. (1) My film studies goal is to suggest how the semiotic claims typical of film theorists could be reconsidered from the perspective of linguistic anthropology, for example in the mode of Michael Silverstein’s metapragmatics. (2) The related anthropological goal is to show how a ground for an analysis of film consumption in particular cultural and social spaces can be excavated from actual film texts. (3) The historical goal of this paper seeks to locate post-war Japanese monster movies within a history robust enough to account for their surprising characters. With respect to the third goal, this paper makes three substantive analytical claims. First, the history of films in and about the Pacific islands has been misconstrued as exclusively American, with little consideration of such works as Japanese monster movies. Second, while analysis of these films has been predominately ‘about’ the nuclear age–of terror, catharsis, and so forth–I contend that, however, they are about much more. For example, they draw on multiple teratological traditions and parallel Japanese religious rituals of pacification and purification. Third, as such, I claim that these films are a complex neo-colonial fantasy of national recuperation of pre-war territories in Micronesia, which the Japanese had a mandate over for much of the first half of this century. With respect to theoretical issues, this paper assumes that the cinema is both a signifying practice and a built edifice. This ground suggests that to be properly understood the cinema must be examined as a quadruple phenomena, as 1) the industry which produces films; 2) the cultural context in which films are consumed, in the space of the event of viewing; 3) as film texts themselves; and, finally, 4) as inter-textual discursive formations which produce aspects of Japan, America, and Micronesia (then/now). This paper thus seeks to bring an anthropologically sensitive focus to these areas. For example, to consider a film a text, as an utterance, is to question how it becomes available for authorizing citation to particular persons in particular situations. In Japanese monster movies, such quotative chains can be shown to commence, at times, with earlier ‘ethnographic’ filmmaking. In this way, a genre which at first glance appears purely fantastic reveals itself as highly caught up in the real for particular viewers in particular times. A sense of this operation, in turn, suggests how similarly fantastic productions can be engaged in the media-industrial machine of global capitalism and, for instance, interleaved with commercial genres as in Coke or Pepsi advertising campaigns in Japan and the United States. An important question from the point of view of the study of the contemporary is how the organization and flow of images as representations has the power to invoke or entail cultural realities. Film both invokes and authorizes various social forces not intrinsically composed of mediating images which can become profoundly engaged in the establishment of social reality, in such divergent realms as tourism, ideologies of nationalism, and re-negotiations of history and its future invocation among others. Linguistic anthropology offers a rigorous methodological toolkit for recovering (ethnological-geographical-political) significant features of a film’s real out of the plausibly infinite number of quasi-significant interpretive ‘viewings’ of its text. It may be that a film’s textuality can be examined and held against and calibrated to other features of its instantiation, for example appropriateness-to-context in a real timespace viewing.