MICHICAGO 2000

MAY 10-11, CHICAGO

“ANTHROPOLOGIES AND HISTORIES OF LANGUAGE”

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: MICHAEL WARNER

FRIDAY APRIL 14th: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL I: EPISTEMOLOGIES & PUBLICS
• PANEL II: IDENTITIES & SUBJECTIVITIES

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: MICHAEL WARNER

SATURDAY APRIL 15th: MORNING SESSION

• PANEL III: SUB-STATE LINGUISTIC NATIONALISMS
• PANEL IV: LINGUISTIC NATIONALISMS & INTELLECTUALS

SATURDAY APRIL 15th: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL V: CATEGORIES & IDEOLOGIES
• PANEL VI: NARRATIVES
• PANEL VII: MONEY, VALUE, & COMMODITIES

Please scroll down for paper abstracts



PANEL I: EPISTEMOLOGIES & PUBLICS

JOHN LUCY, DISCUSSANT


Between the Real and the Unreal: Bounties and Beaches

Alexander Mawyer, University of Chicago

For many in the 20th century, the Pacific islands largely exist as a product of their representations on film and thus play a significant role in the construction and experience of the real. The different treatments of the Bounty tale demonstrate this constructive process as a confluence of the historical, the contemporary, and conceptions of the future. By examining the structure of this conjuncture, one explodes the role of the cinema in the textual production and reproduction of the real or, to put it another way, of existing material relations between persons and places. By appreciating the function of film as an active production of possible worlds in these two senses, one is in a better position to consider the space in which Tahiti and the Bounty 'exist' as a product of the many layers of their representations. The relation of these layers should not, however, be understood as one of superposition even though they can be placed within a linear differentiation of 1) the different historical moments of their productions, 2) the actual material relations between peoples and places, practices and objects in the contemporary moment and, perhaps surprisingly, 3) a particular imagination of the future. The relation of the Past to Present is played out in the discursive movement in which the fantasy of the film's production is brought to, or calibrated with, the real-present-space of an audience in a viewing. The relation of the Past/Present to the Future is played out as the product of the availability of the presupposables which the Past to Present produces are made available to real practices as kinds of mythic structures, charts, schema, or charters for the navigation of our relation to given objects in the movements of the everyday in, for example, moments and movements of tourism or the formulation of cultural literacy.


Politicking in Terminator Technology: Constructed Dialogue and the Responsibility for Knowledge

Stephen Kingsley Scott, University of Chicago

This paper looks at ecological advocacy literature produced in the campaign to end development by agribusiness of “Terminator Technologies” – a biotechnology that renders second-generation crop seeds sterile, thus providing a biogenetic means to require farmers to purchase seeds annually from industry producers. In particular, this paper takes up one genre of text influential in the campaign, considering the text’s production, narrative form, and ‘pragmatic force’. First, I explore the use of constructed dialogue as a ‘figure’ for strategically embedding the reporting of facts in the reporting of speech – a strategy I argue contributes to the performativity of the text as a summons-to-action on the basis of a responsibility-for-knowledge. Second, I explore how direct and indirect reported speech frames are manipulated to differentially index evaluative stances towards facts and their proponents. I show how these (pragmatic) distinctions between report frames create an interpretive space that dynamically figures an implied addressee as a ‘responsible interlocutor’ in an ongoing global debate. Importantly, the epistemological commitments of the implied addressee are mediated into a set of structured deontic commitments.
I will also have something to say about the much larger vision of “Global Civil Society” invoked by advocacy literature of this kind. I argue that it is exactly along the lines of responsibility-for-knowledge and the necessary imbrication of epistemological and deontic commitments that this vision of Global Civil Society is conceived. Textually, however, this implies something quite different from the speech conditions/productions of a Habermasian public sphere. Thus, this paper will ultimately have something to say about the textuality of emergent “epistemic communities” – what may be a more effective framework for conceiving the Global Civil Societies invoked by advocacy literature.


The Pragmatics of Language and Violence in Mozambique’s War of Counter-State Terror, 1975-1992.

E. Lee Skjon, University of Chicago

Soon after Mozambique achieved independence, in 1975, it was engulfed in an uncommonly cruel war of counter-state terror. By the time the General Peace Agreement was signed in 1992, it was estimated that over a million people had died and about a third of Mozambique’s population of 15-17 million had been displaced. Dominant interpretations of the war’s extreme violence have tended to view it either as simply ‘senseless’, or as mere instrument of popular rebellion and/or South African destabilization against the Mozambican state’s socialist policies and ideology. In contrast, this essay argues (i), that the violence of Mozambique’s postcolonial holocaust must be understood as we would any other communicative practice and social act, as expressive and transformative as well as instrumental, and (ii), that the ‘balance of causes’ shifted during the war, as the violence that prevailing interpretations have identified as solely determined by state-level causes became contextualized in Mozambique’s diverse societies, wherein it animated and was animated by their myriad political tensions, sociological fissions, and sub-national ideologies of authority and legitimacy. This argument draws on Silverstein’s tripartite typology of pragmatic calibration—the reflexive, reportive, and nomic—and his definition of ideology as a socially-positioned, default metapragmatic construal of indexicals. It shows how violence was variously calibrated to constitute a variety of forms of power and affiliation, and concludes that the dominant histories’ embedded ideologies of violence and causality share remarkable indexical affinities with the language ideology involved in the postcolonial state’s discursive construction of a Mozambican national public: they are all derivative of a thoroughly modernist ideological understanding of subjectivity, intentionality, and rationality that is radically disjunct from those found in Mozambique’s more endogenous ideologies.


Public Speaking: Indonesian as a language of modernity

Webb Keane, University of Michigan

Abstract not available


PANEL II: IDENTITIES & SUBJECTIVITIES

MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN, DISCUSSANT


Styles of Tribalism in Highlands Yemen

W. Flagg Miller, University of Michigan

Early social anthropologists studying culture in the Middle East devoted much attention to delineating social groups by idioms of descent (through segmentary lineage theory), by occupation (through situated economic anthropology), and by status (through honor systems and learned hierarchies of Islam). While their models have enabled pioneering work in political anthropology and religion, they have poorly theorized how individuals construct these models in verbal practice. One result is an over-simplistic correlation between social groups and styles of talk: the "tribesmen" (qabili) uses the performative markers of an oral tradition marked by a specific set of moral values, the "religious elite" (sayyid) uses the linguistic markers of a literate tradition associated with a different set of moral values. In suggesting little about how social categories are constructed in daily talk, such models risk being functionalist. In my paper, I would like to discuss how an historically informed, stylistic approach to discourse can help nuance the contours of social identity and affiliation in the Middle East. I will situate my analysis of style by focusing on a specific epistolary genre of folk-poetry in Yemen called bada` wa jawab "initiation and response" poetry. Used for over 350 years by rural notables who corresponded with one another through writing, this genre provides a splendid opportunity to examine the discursive negotiations that correspondents were continually making within and between salient "literate" and "tribal" styles. Since I consider my work on style in progress, I will be especially interested in discussing some of the challenges I have confronted in trying to integrate the "stylistic" approaches of both literary critics and sociolinguists.


Culture, Conversation Style, and Carl Rogers: the healing force of speech

Ben Smith, University of Chicago

Conversation styles are features of both everyday speech and more specialized contexts such as psychotherapy - also, conversation styles within both contexts may index notions about selfhood and appropriate interpersonal relations. In this paper, I analyze Bert Peeters' characterization of the English conversation style and its implicit conception of selfhood and compare it to the conversation style of the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers and his theories about healthy psychological functioning. I argue that Rogers' psychotherapeutic conversation style is designed as if to provide a safe environment for English speakers to experience (or, at least, to speak as if they were experiencing) the sort of selfhood that Rogers considers most normal, that is, one of radical autonomy. In addition, I argue that Rogers' early descriptions of the therapeutic process constitute a type of pragmatic ideology in which the way that someone speaks has direct effects upon their addressee's psychological state.


The pragmatics of inequality: A model for research

Nicole Berry, University of Michigan

My research centers on the investigation of linguistic mechanisms through which social inequality is reproduced in conversations between Kaqchikel Maya and state health workers in Santa Cruz de la Laguna, Guatemala. In this presentation, I will explore how social inequality can be manifest in the pragmatics of language and how the details of inequality are recoverable through conversational analysis. My paper will begin by grounding my discussion in data from conversations between social workers and formerly homeless clients in the U.S. This data will demonstrate how power differentials in an institutional setting can create a certain speech pattern. I will then evaluate the implications of the findings of that data to create a model for a methodology for my dissertation project in Guatemala.


Pronominal Shift and the Discourse of Individualism in Sermons of the Min Region of Papua New Guinea.

Courtney Handman, University of Chicago

It is frequently asserted that one of the key changes that accompanies modernization is an increasing focus on the individual person as the primary unit of social life. In the Min region of Papua New Guinea, a move toward individualism has been prompted in large part by people’s conversion over the last several decades to a very sophisticated form of charismatic Christianity. This paper examines the use of pronouns in sermonic discourse as a key to the changing notions of person that seem to have accompanied the entrance of Christianity into these communities. What would otherwise be considered aberrant uses of Tok Pisin personal (primarily second person) pronouns are found to be employed almost exclusively in the Christian sermons preached in the Min region. Second person plural pronouns are supplanted in sermon discourse with singular forms that are used both with or without plural vocative address of the congregation members. This kind of pronominal usage appears to be a device specific to sermon discourse, with shifts from and into standard second person pronoun usage appearing at the beginning and end of a sermon. Analyzed here as a kind of ‘interpellation’, these discursive practices direct congregants to new, Christian understandings of the person. In conclusion, we will discuss other pronominal uses in sermons that appear to index existing tensions between the individualist message of quotidian Christian practice and the more collectively-focused ideas that surround apocalyptic discourse.




KEYNOTE ADDRESS:


Publics and Counter-Publics

Michael Warner, Rutgers University




PANEL III: SUB-STATE LINGUISTIC NATIONALISMS

TONY BERKELEY, DISCUSSANT


In Search of Symmetry: Language Choice and Language Policy in Catalonia

Susan E. Frekko, University of Michigan

A decade ago Woolard (1989) wrote of an emergent ideal for interaction between Catalan speakers and Castilian speakers in Catalonia, which she called the "bilingual norm." According to the norm, each interlocutor spoke his or her own preferred language. Woolard reported that despite popular support of the new norm, only seldom did she witness a bilingual conversation. Instead, interlocutors remained faithful to the traditional norm of linguistic accommodation. The exception was encounters that took place in institutions with an overtly Catalan identity, for example a Catalan bookstore. My paper examines language choice in another overtly Catalan institutional context, the call-in show "Mentre sigui fosc" (While it's dark), which airs on the Catalan-language radio station "Com Radio." I have chosen for analysis calls between the host Virtu and monolingual Castilian speakers. The Castilian speakers clearly have passive competence in Catalan but at no point do they address Virtu in Catalan. Virtu, on the other hand, employs a combination of Catalan and Castilian, the result being moments of talk that adhere to the bilingual norm, and others that adhere to the accommodation norm. This paper seeks to uncover patterns in Virtu's codeswitches, in particular whether the notion of competing "shadow conversations" (Irvine 1996) or even "shadow genres" can help account for them. Finally, I address issues underlying language policy in Catalonia. Despite the bilingual norm that seemed to be emerging in the late 80s, the 1997 Llei de Politica Linguistica asserts that public employees must speak both Catalan and Castilian, so that they can linguistically accommodate to clients. This insistence on symmetry demonstrates that the aims of language policy go beyond simply ensuring the public use of Catalan or guaranteeing comprehension between Catalan speakers and Castilian speakers. In fact, deeply embedded in the policy are ideologies that legitimate nation by means of a single shared language.


The "Revival" of Sanskrit in Modern India.

Adi Hastings, University of Chicago

Attempts in India to promote and broaden the use of spoken Sanskrit represent one of the most extraordinary language "revivals" in recent-era politics of language and culture. This project examines two organizations which, imagining Sanskrit as the future lingua franca and emblem of a specifically Hindu nation, are attempting to turn Sanskrit into a truly "popular" language by encouraging the use of "simple Sanskrit" in everyday conversation. Through a careful ethnographic and linguistic study of Sanskrita Bharati, an organization based in Bangalore, and Mattur, a "Sanskrit-speaking village" in central Karnataka, the project (1) examines the emblematization of Sanskrit in the rhetoric and practices of these two sites and (2) documents the structural and sociolinguistic aspects of the variety of Sanskrit being promoted, including the methods by which it is taught, learned, and used in actual sites of practice. With regard to the first point, this project scrutinizes the ways in which Sanskrit is being transformed from a symbolic resource of a restricted elite status group into an emblem for a primordial, generalized Hindu cultural past. On the second point, this project focuses on the formal strategies of simplification and the functional contexts to which it is applied. These two issues will be exemplified and related through a close scrutiny of both the institutional, prescriptive contexts and the actual communicative contexts of use. The goal here is to understand the relationships between Sanskrit as symbolized and promoted and how this vision of Sanskrit is understood and enacted.


The Textual Production of the Sorbian Nation.

Deanna Poos, University of Michigan

This paper analyzes a corpus of documents addressing the themes of language and nation in relation to the Sorbian ethnic and linguistic minority in the German Democratic Republic. The documents, which include minutes of private meetings, transcripts of public debates, and copies of official statements, are part of the archives of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). They serve as record of the actions and statements of this organization as it negotiated its official political association with Domowina, the printing press and cultural/political organization of the Sorbs between 1947 and 1989. They are also "text artifacts," "interdiscursive with respect to other text occasions," and quite visible in contemporary texts dealing with "the Sorbian question" (Silverstein1996). Through these documents, I have charted the dialogic resolution of "the Sorbian question"-the question of the production of the "cultural and political rights of the Sorbian people" (Elle 1995, my translation). Though they superficially serve to document decisions made about the cultural and political rights of ethnic Sorbs, they simultaneously fix the meaning of "culture" and "nationhood." In this textual dialogue, authoring participants such as Marx and Herder often contribute through the animating voices of representatives of the SED and Domowina (Goffman 1979). The legal texts these participants have produced, in tandem with documents recording their less public words and actions, result in the fixing-entextualization-of "the Sorbian nation," "the Sorbian language," and "the Sorbian people."


Pure Mixe, mangled Spanish and incipient bilingualism in retrospect

Daniel F. Suslak, University of Chicago

Richard Diebold's (1961) article on "incipient bilingualism" among the Huave in an important landmark because it represents the first serious attempt to apply Weinreich and Haugen's theories of language contact to a Mesoamerican case. Unfortunately, Diebold leaves the reader with the impression that his Huave-speaking informants were turning into Spanish speakers without even realizing it. There exists a genre of tragi-comic narratives told throughout indigenous Latin America (probably in Huave country, too) that paints a very different picture of incipient bilingualism. In these tales, ignorant but well-meaning protagonists get into serious trouble because they are unable to speak Spanish effectively. These incipient bilinguals are painfully aware of the limits of their linguistic competence. Their tales reveal and comment ironically on the tensions provoked by the drastic reorganization of their local communicative economies. This report from the field focuses on one of several such tales recorded over the past two years in the Mixe community of Totontepec, Oaxaca. This particular performance is especially intriguing because it provides a vehicle for the narrator, a devout Mixe language purist, to contrast the inarticulate Spanish of the protagonist with the expressive power of Mixe.




PANEL IV: LINGUISTIC NATIONALISMS & INTELLECTUALS

SUSAN GAL, DISCUSSANT


Language, Nation, Albania: Toward a Historical Rapprochement

Andrew Graan, University of Chicago
Throughout the history of nationalism in Southeastern Europe, conceptualizations of language have played a central role in the articulation of ethno-national identities. In fact, many of the first nationalist organizations in this region were focused around linguistic and orthographic formalization and dissemination. This paper, through an analysis of the Albanian case, stands as an attempt to understand the socio-historical conditions leading to the centrality of language in nationalist rhetoric. Two historical moments, orthographic selection (culminating in 1908) and language standardization (during the 1950s), form the focus of the analysis. In the first case, I argue that an intensional and extensional gap between the symbolic casting of an orthographic ideal and its referent in the nation grounded a public sphere in which a more general nationalist discourse could flourish. In the latter case, I discuss how the forced implementation of a language standard across public media collapsed the space for nationalist contestation by neutralizing the points of debate. Although the role of state power in this period cannot be underrepresented, I claim that the particularities of the selection of the language standard speak to the indexical linkages that had made language so salient in the earlier period. The paper concludes by suggesting that it was the very underspecificity of language as an indexical symbol that enabled it to be positioned as a national marker for a population--that is, language provided a center in which a diversity of positions contributed to rather than dissected a national unity.


Archaism and Authenticity: Polish Linguistics and the Tatra Highlanders.

Stephen Hibbard, University of Chicago

Over the past 150 years, the High Tatra region of Podhale in southwest Poland, and the language and culture of its Highlander inhabitants, have enjoyed an exceptional role in the Polish national imagination. Nineteenth-century visitors to Podhale frequently remarked on the peculiar properties of Highlander Polish, in which, it was said, one could hear echoes of the great writers of the Polish Renaissance and, indeed, sense the presence of the pure Polish spoken in "those days when all Slavic tongues, coming from the same source, differed less from one another." In the latter part of the 19th century, as Podhale was developing into the center of Polish political and intellectual life and as the Tatra mountains were being figured as "a grand national temple," the "Church of the Polish land," this folk-view of Highlander speech was explicitly and enthusiastically associated with independence propaganda and the project of national "re-awakening." And in the early part of the 20th century disciplinary linguistics framed Podhale as a relic area and aspects of Highlander grammar as "archaisms," reflexes of Old Polish or Proto-Slavic forms. But the most salient aspects of Highlander Polish (native word-stock, lexical stress placement, morphological features) are demonstrably--or at least arguably--either borrowings or innovations. The ideological construction of the Highlanders themselves as embodiments of ideal Polishness is similarly problematic, as their "ethnically" heterogeneous origins are well-documented and not seriously in doubt. Why the Highlanders? And what can this case tell us about how local, regional, identity may be produced directly through processes of nationalism, rather than as countervailing responses to them or as vestiges of a pre-national past?


Who’s the father? Of legitimacy and origin myths in the standardization of Slovak

Jonathan Larson, University of Michigan

Slovakia has streets and squares named for the 19th century standardizers of Slovak. Official historical discourse links these individuals to the existence of a Slovak nation-state and the development of national consciousness. I question the directness of the link between language and nation by recontextualizing the standardizers: who were they and what were their stakes? My inspiration on standards, their legitimacy, and whom they benefit comes particularly from work by the linguists Milroy and Milroy (1991 [1985]) and the sociologist Bourdieu (1991). Battles of legitimacy for a Slovak standard were waged on religious grounds among Catholic and Lutheran religious leaders and intellectuals, between “folk” Slovak and literary Czech. I examine “great individuals” of the history of standardizing Slovak for two purposes. The first is as representatives of ideologies of how written Slovak should look and represent a “nation.” The second is as bearers of an important myth of national origin that begs deconstruction: why do great individuals often receive credit for the emergence of a standard? I explore how mythologizing the codifiers Bernol�k, Koll�r, and _t�r has produced an “organized forgetting” of their motives. A recontextualization of standardizing Slovak in the 19th century sheds light on the reification of the relationship between language and nation, the contested processes of legitimizing standards, and the role of standardization in myths of national origin.


Peasant in form and Gentry in content: The representation and rhetoric of 'Terek-drinker' dialect in a Nineteenth century Georgian Gentry nationalist political manifesto.

H. Paul Manning, University of Chicago

This paper will show how the twentieth century discipline of dialectology in Georgia is intellectually grounded in the nineteenth century Georgian gentry nationalist valorization of folk dialects, looking at gentry nationalist Ilia Chavchavadze's political manifesto Mgzavris C'erilebi [Letters of a traveller], which purports to have as its primary goal merely the representation of the dialect of a mountaineer, Lelt Ghunia. This work is the manifesto of the new generation of Georgian romantic nationalist and cultural reformers of the 1860's, the terg-daleulni ('those who have drunk from the Terek river'), and the structure of the work is essential a series of rhetorical reversals of earlier Russian romantic allegorizations (Marlinsky, Lermontov) of the Caucasus and the Terek river. Nowhere is more clearly displayed the interrelationship of the gentry nationalist discourse on nationality and the return to the folk than this work, where the political ideology of terg-daleuli gentry nationalism is delivered in the dialect and voice of Ghunia, a Georgian mountaineer peasant who dwells beside the Terek, who is in effect a 'real' terg-daleuli ['Terek-drinker']. It is in this work the term terg-daleuli 'Terek-drinker' is first introduced, and it is precisely to such mountaineers that it is applied. Thus, terg-daleuli (in the sense of 'mountaineer peasent') dialect becomes a vehicle for terg-daleuli (in the sense of 'gentry nationalist') ideology. I will discuss the political significance of the extremely realistic portrayal of terg-daleuli dialect in the speech of Ghunia, and especially the way in which Terg-daleuli dialect is (re)presented.




PANEL V: CATEGORIES & IDEOLOGIES

JUDITH IRVINE, DISCUSSANT


ASL "textual phonology" and the social fact of language.

Frank Bechter, University of Chicago

Since the 1970s, sign language linguists have generally held that two kinds of "signing space" exist. "Topographic space" accommodates iconic representation of objects and scenes, and exploits a repertoire of handshapes for classes of entities and contour. "Syntactic space," in contrast, is employed to signify propositions where the physical character of referents is not at issue. In syntactic space, signers are said to introduce dimensionless "points," or referential loci, on a non-topographic horizontal plane "in front of the signer." These loci correspond to referents, and are deployed along with signs directed between them to signify logical propositions such as Mary asked Robert, or I gave [it] to you. A recent school of sign language linguistics, however, has disputed this ontological divide, and the view that referential loci are linguistic elements. This new perspective hinges on two observations: 1) signs do not seem to be directed at points on a horizontal plane, but rather toward specific heights above these points, consistent with the way these signs move toward different specific locations on present referents; and 2) because a "potentially infinite" number of referential loci can be established, it is impossible to provide an acceptable phonological description of their form. These observations lead to the view that "referential loci" are in fact locations on minimally-specified maps, on which height-bearing "tokens" (conceptual, not linguistic, entities in a "grounded mental space") sit. In my paper, I criticize both "syntactic space" and "token space" models as being encumbered by a speaker-centered ideology of language, and I demonstrate that re-centering the phonological reckoning of ASL within the socio-physical parameters of the signing channel allows us to formally model referential loci in structural (i.e., "linguistic") terms.


Creoles and the Creation Myth: The relationship between the myth of standard English and the linguistic use of 'creole'

Chris Corcoran, University of Chicago

In this paper I discuss the history of 'creole' as it is used in the linguistic literature and argue that the result of this unexamined history has been to make linguists unwitting conspirators in the perpetuation of the myth of standard English. The term 'creole' has been lurking in public discussions of Ebonics as part of projects trying to employ linguistic terminology to legitimize the Oakland School Board claims and more central in the hypotheses of some linguists that African American Vernacular English is a decreolized variety of English, a position vigorously defended by Stewart (1967, 1968, 1969) and Dillard (1972, 1992) As has become evident by recent debates on the creole prototype (McWhorter 1998, 2000; DeGraff 1999, 2000), there is no consensus in the field on how to define creole languages or, perhaps, whether it is possible to define 'creole' linguistically or whether their status as languages is a function of the politically and economically marginal status of their speakers. For the most part creoles were not taken as legitimate topic of study in Europe, so I am able to cover three centuries in one brief paper. In my examination of why many late 18th century and 19th century philologists adamantly neglected the study of creole languages, I argue that the category creole as it was used in linguistic discourse was borne out of a desire to categorize some data unfit for the particular linguistic projects which focussed on reconstruction. Creoles or any language spoken by people who were not ethnically identified with the language they spoke were generally regarded as artificial (Vinson 1882). I explore how the adoption of 'creole' as a label within linguistic discourse is attached to the historical notion that some linguistic data is more fit than others and in turn how this has been translated in public discussions of Ebonics.


Indigenizing Hindi in Mauritius: Register Levels of Ethnonational Purity

Patrick Eisenlohr, University of Chicago

My paper addresses the attempt by Hindu nationalists in Mauritius to indigenize Hindi by presenting the widely spoken Bhojpuri as a local version of Hindi. Hindu nationalists seek to strengthen the base for the recognition of Hindi as the icon of a pure Hindu identity in Mauritius by trying to demonstrate a "rootedness" and presence of Hindi in Mauritius. The main avenue for these attempts is the dissemination of the idea that the locally spoken Bhojpuri, used by a little over a quarter of the population, who are almost all bilingual in Creole, is really a form of Hindi. In an effort to highlight the central role of Hindi for Mauritian Hindu identity and to present Hindi as a "native" language of Mauritian Hindus, Bhojpuri is declared a subcategory of Hindi. The performative enactment of this hierarchical subsumption of Mauritian Bhojpuri under Hindi is achieved in the context of a speech-level phenomena working on the basis of lexical substitution recalling the case of Javanese described by Errington (1985). In contrast to the Javanese case, however, the order of register levels analyzed here privileges ethno-national purity as the crucial dimension rather than honorification. Register levels known under the ethnopragmatic labels "Bhojpuri", "Bhojpuri-Hindi" and "Hindi" represent a cline of ideological valuation within a nationalist framework ranging from lexically "creolized" Bhojpuri to sanskritized standard Hindi. As I shall demonstrate, one of the effects of speech performance within this framework is to blur the boundaries between the overall categories Hindi and Bhojpuri.




PANEL VI: NARRATIVES

BRUCE MANNHEIM, DISCUSSANT


Laughter in the Pursuit of Ethnic Hierarchy: Reinterpreting Soviet 'Equality' in the Post-Soviet Performance of a Soccer Game Narrative

J. A. Dickinson, University of Michigan

This paper examines a single instance of storytelling to demonstrate how formal features such as the establishment of participatory frameworks and the manipulation of backchannel cues can serve to structure cooperative reinterpretation of the past. The story in question was told at a party in rural Ukraine in late 1997. The narrator, now a retired forestry worker, recounts how, as a young man, he took the train to Moscow to see a soccer game between a Russian and a Georgian team. While the narrative is meant to be funny, and indeed evokes great laughter from conversational participants, a strong social commentary on the myths and reality of ethnic relations during the Soviet period also emerges as the story unfolds. Through his responses to and manipulation of audience reactions, the narrator juxtaposes three distinct views of ethnic hierarchy during the Soviet period: the official party line, declaring all ethnic groups equal; a tacit hierarchy that placed Russians over Ukrainians, and Ukrainians over "southern" nationalities like the Georgians; and the narrator's own interpretation, that all non-Russians were equally discriminated against by Russians, and were therefore the true champions of the philosophy of "the brotherhood of nations." This paper focuses on the juxtaposition of these three visions of ethnic hierarchy in the Soviet past, and compares evaluations of the hierarchies that the conversational participants deploy both above and below the threshold of awareness. My conclusions emphasize the challenges of analyzing narratives as both historically embedded, and emerging out of particular structurally and socially bounded contexts.


Fear, Faith and Fault: Shifting Responsibility in Postwar Crime Narratives.

Ellen Moodie, University of Michigan

In 1992, El Salvador emerged from 12 years of civil war. But since the "peace" accords were signed, violence in the country has increased. The murder rate during much of the 1990s surpassed annual wartime deaths. The crime wave dominates both public discourse and private talk. As such, most Salvadorans' stories of "peace" are shot through with fear. People of all social classes have been, or expect to be, victimized. Many attitudes they exhibit, whether resentment, indignation, gratitude, or optimism, embody presuppositions about responsibility of the self and other. In this paper I examine how speakers negotiate and deploy concepts of responsibility as they remember personal experiences with violence and discuss the national crisis. If "responsibility" can be considered a shifting historical-cultural variable, in El Salvador it is rooted in a strong Catholic tradition and a long history of internal repression and periodic violence. More recently, local understandings of self and intentional action have transformed with wartime trauma, revolutionary movements, peace-accords-propagated international human rights rhetoric and transnational currents that replace some notions of individual will with psychological and medical explanation. In their narratives, Salvadoran crime victims deploy a variety of techniques that distribute or redistribute responsibility as life expectations and the perception of the ability to control personal circumstances change. I suggest that by examining these shifting concepts and the conflicting voices that enunciate them in personal narratives, we can learn about how a local sense of self and will connects to national and transnational contingencies.


Entangled Stories: Life History Narratives of the Elderly Turkish Republicans

Esra Ozyurek, University of Michigan

During the heavily celebrated 75th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, the devoted witnesses to the foundation of the Turkish Republic frequently appeared in newspapers and popular and government TV channels. They were guests of honor at hundreds of meetings, dinners, and gatherings organized around the country. They were asked over and over by journalists, researchers, neighbors, and family to tell their stories about the early Republic. This paper is the analysis of narrative strategies through which, historical subjectivities are constructed by the first-hand witnesses of the Republican reforms. In the life history interviews I conducted with such elderly, I found that when they have a chance to tell about their lives or to appear in public medium such as a newspaper, popular book, or a dissertation, they weave their individual histories with the history of the foundation of the Turkish Republic. I suggest that the public and private selves of these people who are called "the children of the Republic" are well integrated and they believe the mere narration of their life stories are powerful to fight against the Islamists, Kurdish nationalists, and liberal secularists who challenge the nationalist historical narratives and the Kemalist ideology 75 years after its foundation.




PANEL VII: MONEY, VALUE, & COMMODITIES

WEBB KEANE, DISCUSSANT


Sociolectal Difference and Livelihood in Santa Catarina Palopo, Guatemala

Robert Hamrick, University of Chicago

This project investigates a sociolectal differentiation of Kaqchikel (Mayan) and its relation to a number of coinciding socioeconomic developments in Santa Catarina Palopo, a town of about 3000 on the eastern shore of lake Atitlan, Dept. of Solola, Guatemala. Since the end of the most violent period of Guatemalas civil war in the early-1980s, major improvements to the roads, a booming tourist industry, and the increasing local use of small stores (tiendas) for buying and selling cheap consumable goods all mark significant shifts in Catarinecos modes of livelihood and sociality. The stores - whose increasing importance in the community is suggested by their increasing numbers, from 2 in the 1980s, to 11 in 1995, to 47 presently, with more under construction - appear, moreover, to occupy a central position in an emergent field of economic, linguistic, and spatial relations that orients everyday practices in the community. The stores appear to serve as origos for the formation of patron-client networks; who identify themselves through the use of sociolectal difference and who spatialize their political interconnection as "neighborhoods" through a variety of physical and linguistic means of indexing spatial contiguity. Research will explore the formal, pragmatic, and ideological dimensions of language in this context over the course of a year, with special attention to its (in)effectiveness in such enterprises. It is argued that its findings will contribute to an understanding of the sociohistorical embeddedness of language, to theoretical formulations of language and political economy, and also to conceptual problems in political economy itself, such as those involved in accounts of the interaction of local, regional, and (trans)national institutional arrangements.


Talking to the Homeless: Money as Sign and Social Knowledge

Kenny McGill, University of Chicago

If Georg Simmel is correct that "[m]oney, as an institution of the historical world, symbolizes the behavior of objects and establishes a special relationship between itself and them," then how can we speak about money in relation to language—a historical institution itself of great objectivating and pragmatically presupposing power? Using examples from my own field work on the exchange of talk and money between the homeless and near-homeless vendors of a "street newspaper" and Chicago pedestrians and from the fieldwork of colleagues in Eastern Europe and Mexico, I will attempt to sketch a sociology of money that is 1) a calque on linguistics as the study of a certain type of pragmatically presupposing social interaction and 2) the study of a social institution that is itself heavily articulated with language use and deeply implicated in linguistic change. In doing the former, I will ask if money’s power to symbolize (commodify) objects is similar to language’s ability to pick out objects in the world while simultaneously pragmatizing the object’s existence in a universe of speaker-addressee interaction. In doing the latter, I will ask how processes such as those described by sociolinguists Jane and Kenneth Hill as "proletarianization" can be related to what sociologist Moishe Postone has called the "secularization" of commodity economies. Can such a combined viewpoint give us a better insight into the semiotic sociology that influences language shift? Can it provide us with the tools to analyze the pragmatic presuppositions that are imbedded in all monetary interaction?


Paradoxical Indexes (and Interests) in Nevada Casino Games.

James N. Rizzo, University of Chicago

This paper examines how Nevada casino games become interesting (i.e., interest orienting) activities for both recreational and compulsive gamblers. My analysis takes advantage of the disjuncture between two different approaches by which anthropologists might investigate casino games: (1) linguistic anthropology, for example, by analyzing how indexical and metaindexical relations constitute games as real-time, interest-orienting texts comparable to rituals or conversations; and (2) a critical analysis of the forms of "value" under capitalism, e.g., as articulated by Marx or Simmel. Methodologically, both these approaches constitute models of (folk) rationality by treating the formal relations they identify as socially immanent; theoretically, both conceptualize interest (or compulsion) as an indexically structured recognition. However, there is little or no overlap between the forms of interests identified by linguistic anthropology and value theory; thus the linguistic analysis can account for how casino games are interesting (or metapragmatically effective) as games, but not as gambling games, while the critical capitalist analysis can account for how jackpots capture the interest of gamblers, but not the specificity of the games themselves. My paper argues that what would appear to be a theoretical, even subdisciplinary, division between these two approaches in fact reflects a structural paradox, or antinomy, within the casino games themselves. This paradox bears a significant relation to both compulsive and non-compulsive gambling behavior. More generally, I examine how two very different conceptualizations of value (the linguistic and the economic) can be reconciled precisely by taking account of the impossibility of their reconciliation.