MICHICAGO 2001

MAY 11-12, ANN ARBOR

“POLITICS AND POETICS”

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: SINFREE MAKONI

FRIDAY MAY 11TH: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL I: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC LANGUAGE
• PANEL II: DECOLONIZING LANGUAGES

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: SINFREE MAKONI

SATURDAY MAY 12TH: MORNING SESSION

• PANEL III: INSCRIPTIONS
• PANEL IV: MIND IN ACTION

SATURDAY MAY 12TH: AFTERNOON SESSION

• PANEL V: META-HISTORIES OF ETHNIC AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES
• PANEL VI: AGENCY AND THE POETICS OF MAGIC

Please scroll down for paper abstracts



PANEL I: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC LANGUAGE


“Developing" A Functional Linguistics: Prague Circle Theories of "Language Culture"
Jonathan Larson, University of Michigan

Prague Linguistic Circle theories, conveyed to North American audiences mostly via the work in English and presence of Roman Jakobson after World War II, are a well-acknowledged intellectual source for contemporary linguistic anthropology. However, while linguistic anthropologists have contributed to the historical political economic contextualization of, for example, dialectology with Orientalist ideologies, little work has been produced about the historical context of the Prague Circle’s linguistic theory in interwar Czechoslovakia. This paper explores the significance of discourses of development for the Circle’s functionalism.
Intellectuals of interwar Czechoslovakia participated in discourses of development that were both transnational in their modernist tone and local in their historicity. The creation of a Czechoslovak state in 1918 from disparate portions of the Habsburg Empire demanded nation-building that the state partially attempted to resolve by sending Czech administrative, business, and educational professionals on “missions” to Slovakia.
A core category of the Circle’s linguistic theory is largely unknown to American scholars: “language culture” or “language cultivation” (jazykov� kult�ra). Language culture was an activist theory designed to rationalize national languages based on investigations of functions in spoken and written language. I explore similarities between assumptions of “language culture” and local political economic discourses of development as a means of examining the contextual origins of linguistic theory fundamental to contemporary linguistic anthropology.


Political Language and Post-socialist Publics in Eastern Germany: Research Proposal

Deanna Poos, University of Michigan

Statements issued by a national government generally imply that their addressees belong to a single public. When the addressees of the statements engage in everyday conversation, they often display a sense of “we-ness” that may or may not resemble the public described in official language. Given the swift and substantial change in the official government discourse of post-socialist eastern Germany, how, and to what extent, do German citizens represent a sense of coherent national community in their everyday speech? The proposed project will track the linguistic creation of publics by determining how government-sponsored rhetoric and naturally circulating discourse work together to construct a political audience. This paper will outline a theoretical approach to studying political language and will suggest a methodology for examining the role of political language in the creation of political publics. These methods will take into account the poetics of political language; the ways in which aspects of political language become entextualized in multiple contexts and media; the fact that such texts have complex histories; and the importance of multiple players in the production of texts, including diverse authors, animators, and addressees, and audiences. The proposed methods are designed to address each of these issues, focusing especially on the role of audiences in the manipulation and circulation of political language. Ultimately, this study should contribute to an understanding of the work of language in naturalizing political ideology and creating alignment within political groups.


Hope for the Future, Nostalgia for the Past: Imagined Polities in Tatarstan Letters to the Editor (1990-1993)

Helen Faller, University of Michigan

My paper examines Letters to the Editor published in the two Communist Party Organ newspapers of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia) between 1990 and 1993. It argues that the referential worlds imagined by the writers whose Letters get printed in the Russian- and Tatar-language newspapers, respectively, are not equivalent. Although much of this lack of equivalences lies in Whorfian effects, it is not to these that I pay attention here. Rather, I demonstrate that generic differences in how writers constitute the polity/polities in which they live reveal not only a probable divergence in how loyalties to community and state are being constituted, but also a possible reconstitution of Tatarstan’s bilingual Tatar-Russian and monophone Russian speech communities themselves as irreconcilably differentiated.


Indigenous Rights and the Poetic Possibilities of “Povos”

Sue Chlebove, University of Chicago

The “Estatuto do �ndio e das Comunidades Ind�genas” (Indian and Indigenous Communities Act) has generated considerable controversy since it was first introduced to the Brazilian Congress in 1991. The proposed legislation is meant to replace previous assimilationist policies with a text that is consistent with more contemporary frameworks of indigenous rights. While many objections to specific provisions of the proposal have been overcome, no resolution has been achieved in regard to one highly contentious issue: what lexical item, if any, should be used to denote indigenous groups. Some indigenous organizations maintain a position in this debate that insists upon the use of “povos” (“peoples”) to denote indigenous groups whose social organization exceeds the boundaries of a community. That position rests on the claim that it is necessary to use the term “peoples” in order to authorize the legal standing of indigenous groups with respect to diffuse rights. In effect, this claim poetically establishes a hierarchy of social entities – individuals, communities and peoples - which can constitute the legitimate subject of corresponding indigenous rights. This paper traces the way in which the poetic function of this legal claim opens up referential ambiguities that support the opposite view: namely the counter-claim that legal recognition of “peoples” creates a basis for claims to indigenous political sovereignty. The debate about the grounds for a refiguring of “Brazilian” and “indigenous” social relations thus becomes a struggle over the groundedness of texts and the semantic limits of peoplehood in the institutional space of the legislative process.


The Pronomial Collective: The Politics and Poetics of Economic Transformation in Ukrainian Market Workers’ Narratives

J. Dickinson, University of Michigan

During the Soviet period, the work collective served as a focal point for the political organization of the workplace and the perpetuation of Soviet ideologies of economics, society and labor. Over the last ten years in post-Soviet Ukraine, work collectives have evaporated or transformed radically as the state-run economy floundered and the disorganized move towards a market economy advanced. This paper considers linguistic evidence for the endurance of the collective as a model for the organization of work and workplace relationships in a situation that is usually framed as aggressively post-socialist, the "bazaar" or marketplace where independent merchants sell their wares in an enactment of (supposedly) cut-throat capitalism. Reference to the collective as a model for workplace interactions appears overtly in interviews with market workers, in which many of them make comparisons between life at the market and factory or other kinds of Soviet-era workplaces. However, the grammatical structuring of these workers narratives of daily life at the market also contain important cues to how the collective model is insinuated into and perpetuated in their images of market work. This paper focuses on one such structure, the use of pronoun choice as a means of framing participation in the market and the generalizability of one person's narrative as indicative of collective experience. Evidence drawn from approximately thirty interviews with bazaar workers from southwestern Ukraine demonstrates the range of possible pronominal stances available to workers describing their daily life, and remarkable consistencies in how participation in the market is grammatically constructed as individually, collectively, or generally experienced. Sometimes in direct contrast to the explicit declarations of interviewees, this analysis of the underlying grammatical structure reveals that a new form of the collective has re-emerged as a model for workplace interaction among these post-Soviet, post-socialist, Ukrainian workers.


Mississippian Mounds – Make Know Bones About ‘Em

Sudha A. Shah, University of Michigan

The structure and meaning of Muskhogean mound building practices after European contact is examined using linguistic, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic data. This semantic framework is used to illustrate the socio-political dimensions of mound-building activities among pre-historic Choctaw, Creek, Koasati, and Alabama.




PANEL II: DECOLONIZING LANGUAGES


Language Planning in the Era of Development

Courtney Handman, University of Chicago

In the post-World War II era of development, sociolinguists began to conceptualize and influence the linguistic shape of the decolonizing “new nations”. An analysis of the literature on language planning suggests that two main themes oscillated in tension with one another in this attempt to map out the relationship between language and the post-colonial nation: on the one hand, a concern for the rationalization of languages that seemed necessary for participation in the “community of nations”; on the other hand, a concern for a burgeoning sense of a specific national unity and identity. For many of its practitioners, the project of language planning had the grandiose task of endowing communities with the linguistic conditions of possibility to sustain both universalized participatory government as well as particularized folk poetics. Each of these strands of language planning can be correlated, respectively, to Lockean and Herderian philosophies of language, and to Euro-American models of the relationship between language and the nation-state more generally. Using Bauman and Briggs’ recent analysis of Locke’s and Herder’s language ideologies, in conjunction with a survey of some of the most influential works from the language planning literature, this paper will examine some of the complications that language planners faced when confronted with communities that seemed to lack both the political and the poetic traditions needed to suit these models of linguistic modernity. Moreover, this paper will address some of the ways in which the notions of transparency or translatability (particularly between First and Third World nations) were integral to the distinction language planners made between political and poetic language.


Language Standardization and National Boundaries in Early 20th Century Catalonia

Susan Frekko, University of Michigan

The First International Congress of the Catalan Language took place in Barcelona in 1906. The conference’s stated aim was the “scientific” study and standardization of the Catalan language. In this paper, I argue that an equally important, if implicit, aim was the invention of a mark of Catalan distinctiveness. The academic papers nearly invariably propose orthographic and morphosyntactic solutions that distance written Catalan from written Castilian. Furthermore, they portray Castilian as a corrupter of Catalan rather than as a closely related language that shares Catalan’s Latin descent. In proposing a standard maximally different from Castilian, I argue that they were constructing an overt sign of difference between native Catalan speakers and native Castilian speakers in order to justify Catalan claims to national self-determination. The participant Pompeu Fabra adamantly rejects his colleagues’ distancing maneuvers in instances where the languages agree because of their shared Romance heritage. Fabra was concerned with constructing a standard that would distinguish Catalan from Castilian, but he argued for one that would remain faithful to etymology and not reject forms that Catalan had inherited from Latin simply because Castilian had inherited them as well. Through Fabra’s work, a Catalan standard emerged in the decades following the conference, and speakers today continue to orient to it as a mark that distinguishes them from Castilian speakers.


Scottish Gaelic and the Poetics of Translation in the New Scottish Parliament

Emily McEwan-Fujita, University of Chicago

Before the July 1999 opening of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, the devolved Scottish government agreed that the Scottish Gaelic language, a minority language spoken by less than 2% of Scotland’s population, would have some place in the new Parliament. During 1999-2000, Gaelic’s new public role in the Parliament was negotiated through a series of performances, including a debate in March 2000 called the “first Gaelic debate.” Through this event and others, the poetics of translation and the negotiation of political authority, authorship, and audience both highlighted and transcended the idea of Gaelic as a “token” linguistic/cultural element in the Parliament. These events represent early attempts to work out the practical and ideological implications for Scotland of a European Union-inspired model of multilingualism and translation. The ways in which Gaelic and English “speeches” and simultaneous English translations were performed in the “first Gaelic debate,” and the ways the performances were interpreted and entextualized in subsequent written accounts, demonstrate the potential impact of minority language revitalization on the poetics of public discourse and the imagining of political communities in Europe today.




KEYNOTE ADDRESS:


From Misinvention to Disinvention: An Approach to Multilingualism

Sinfree Makoni, University of Cape Town




PANEL III: INSCRIPTIONS


Reading Linguistic Hierarchies in the Poetics of (Un-)Translatability: Sundanese Orientations to Islamic Texts in West Java, Indonesia

Benjamin Zimmer, University of Chicago

Sundanese Muslims in western Java generally hold that the holy language of the Qur’an can only receive interpretations in their vernacular language, never translations, as only Arabic can fully express the revealed word of God. But rather than precluding the possibility of comprehensibility across an inviolable linguistic divide, the doctrine of Qur’anic untranslatability raises new questions for scholars of Islamic discourse in non-Arab lands. First, to what extent does the localization and interpretation of Arabic allow the language of the Qur’an to become “domesticated,” and to what extent does it remain distant? Second, how have local interpretive methods of metalinguistic glossing been employed to explicate Qur’anic Arabic word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, or verse-by-verse? And how has this exegetic power been socially distributed in local hierarchies at different historical junctures and in different cultural milieux? In this paper I reflect on these questions as they relate to the Sundanese-speaking population of Indonesia, the second largest ethnic group in the world's largest majority-Muslim nation. I argue that Sundanese interpretations of scriptural Arabic, whether by full translations of the Qur’an or by explication of individual lexical items, index hierarchical ideologies of language forms (roughly gestured by the term “diglossia”) via framing and other techniques of entextualization. By analyzing the micropractices through which Islamic texts are approached in pedagogical and devotional orientations, we can appreciate how the “politics” of linguistic differentiation can be inscribed in the “poetics” of translation (and its failure).


Text and Attribution: Observations on the Twentieth-Century Bible Translation Wars

Brian Malley, University of Michigan

In 1997, controversy erupted among American evangelicals over plans to produce an Inclusive-Language Edition of the popular New International Version of the Bible (NIV): the translators were trying to produce a more accurate translation; Bible consumers were trying to protect the Bible from merely trendy revision. I argue that this and other earlier conflicts arose from the dual nature of texts as both objects and ideas, with consequent slippage between poetic and eidetic views of Bible translations. The dual nature of texts thus opened up an epistemological rift which participants subsequently overlaid with other, politicized dichotomies: snooty scholar/ignorant layperson, greedy business/dishonest reporter, feminism/patriarchy.


Text-in-context and Text-in-circulation: Authority of Genred Text-Making in Japanese Literacy

Shunsuke Nozawa, University of Chicago

This paper analyzes a particular text-artifact, the cover of a Japanese magazine. The cover has at the center one kana, a Japanese syllabic letter, representing a syllable ma and at the bottom a phrase saying, "Q. Please write 'ma' in kanji [logograph]. [It] is the aesthetics peculiar to the Japanese people." A few pages into the magazine, we find an 'answer' page, which has, in a parallel fashion, a kanji (the 'answer') and a phrase, "A. 'MA': Interval into which images, previous and subsequent, are melted together." First, the text is analyzed in terms of text-in-context: How does the text's formedness involve discursive interaction ('reading') formed around it? I demonstrate the metapragmatic nature of the text vis-a-vis Japanese 'mixed' writing, and the co-textuality peculiar to this text-artifact. I argue that such poetic co-textuality coupled with the metapragmatics of Japanese writing evokes imagination (of a particular sort) in the 'reader.' Second, this imagination, I further argue, is fostered through institutional loci of genred text-making that involve mass circulation. I locate such genre in the educational discourse of schooled literacy, or 'learning kanji,' constituted by ritual(-like) routines of classroom (and other didactic) interaction where text-artifacts with similar (iconic) textuality as the magazine cover are used. The political authority of 'textbook' and valorization of education are discussed. The dialectics between context and circulation is examined as the mediation of a specific kind of imagination concerning the metapragmatics of schooled literacy.


Oral Poetry, Inscription, and the Problems with Circulation in the Middle East

Flagg Miller, University of Michigan

Poets using audiocassettes in Yemen express extraordinary uncertainty about the valuation of their words in markets of cassette-music. They also create new representations of community, place, and person in their efforts to seek more expansive "grounds" that can bring stray words full circle. To what extent are their pre-occupations with circulation a condition of inscriptive ideologies in the Arab-Islamic world at large? I would like to use this paper to present a hypothesis in-progress which draws from papers on trends in representation that I am currently developing.


Blue Prints, Red Tape and Black Markets: The Social Life of Maps in Islamabad, Pakistan

Matthew Hull, University of Chicago

This paper describes the social life of official maps in and of the Islamabad, Pakistan metropolitan region. Recent treatments of maps criticize realist views of maps as representing an independent reality. Yet such approaches still focus on the relation between representation and referent, describing the varying perspectives embodied in maps and how these perspectives shape understandings of and transform what they purport to reflect objectively. This paper approaches maps as material artifacts and argues that their control, circulation, and relations with other graphic artifacts are central to their social significance. In the city planning corporation of Islamabad, cartographic artifacts are bureaucratically authorized through articulation with linguistic graphic artifacts such as files and letters. This authorization process has grown more elaborate as the political position of the bureaucracy within the Pakistan state has weakened, increasing organizational incoherence and, consequently, the interests of functionaries in practices generating collective authority. Beginning as representations of land holdings, residential and commercial structures, mosques, and the like, maps have increasingly become representations of other graphic artifacts rather than their purported referents. This mediation of maps and their purported referents facilitates the referential "incorrectness" of maps necessary for fraudulent activities.


Where Can Dust Alight?: Poetics in Context in T’ang Buddhism

Christopher Ball, University of Chicago

In the construction of the history of Ch_an Buddhism in China from the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma, there is a reflexive focus on poetic performance in legitimizing and traditionalizing the lineage of transmission. A split occurred in the T_ang period (618-704) producing the Southern school of Sudden Enlightenment, founded by Hui-neng (638-713), and the Northern school of Gradual Enlightenment, founded by Shen-hsui (605-706). The division between the two institutions is traditionally traced to a battle between Shen-hsui and Hui-neng. This was a battle without blood, a battle of words, a contest of verse. The Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen (601-675) issued a challenge to his disciples. "He who is enlightened use his perfect vision of self-nature and write me a verse. When I look at his verse, if it reveals deep understanding, I shall give him the robe and the Law and make him the Sixth Patriarch. Hurry, hurry!"(DeBary et. al, 1960). We will consider the role of this single contextualized poetic event in determining the political ascension of the Sixth patriarch of Ch_an Buddhism and subsequent quasi-mythical representations of that event within the schema of master student relations as a vehicle of transmission. To what extent poetics, particularly the irrational as poetic, was an integral ideological component of monastic training and politics will be a central question. The importance of instantaneous apprehension of the truth through wordplay as religious / philosophical method will be explored. We will compare the original poems to English translations with an emphasis on message and verbal artistry.




PANEL IV: MIND IN ACTION


Number Words and Number Concepts: What Semantic Development Can Tell Us About the Language-and-Thought Relation

Barbara Sarnecka, University of Michigan

In the first part of the talk, I will be presenting on my Psychology Master's research project (still in the piloting stage) about children's early understandings of number words and what they can tell us about number concepts. The study evaluates four theories about what numerical concepts underlie early number word meanings. The study is experimental and I don't have data yet but I can talk about the design. The second part of my talk will be about how this research bears on the language-and-thought question. Specifically, the psychological evidence for language-dependent representations of number provides a new kind of evidence (or at least a particularly clear illustration) for linguistic relativity-- this is a slightly different formulation than Lucy's obligatory-grammatical-categories-and-habitual-thought approach (although the two complement each other), as it focuses on evidence that the actual formation of (at least some) concepts is nontrivially language-dependent.


A Communicative Ideology of the Mind-Brain: The History and Practice of Meta-Linguistic Structuring in Psychiatric Discourse

Matthew Wolfgram, University of Michigan

This paper examines the discursive construction of psychiatric institutional practice, centering especially on the relationship between the local management of meta-communicative activity and explicitly formulated ideologies of language. First I consider psychiatric textbooks and other textual materials in which meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic commentary are the explicit focus of discourse. Psychiatric language ideology is characterized by a belief that the patient's communicative practices, when meta-linguistically standardized, can be taken as a transparent medium of the speaker's internal psychobiologic state. Second, I present transcript data from psychiatric encounters of the micro-interactional practices that underlie this language ideology. Clinicians employ pragmatic features such as question/answer adjacency pairing, standardized questionnaire instruments, and the sequential structure of the interview to construct a meta-pragmatic frame for understanding the patient's communicative practices as indexical of a pathological state of the mind-brain. Lastly, if time allows, I will trace the historical development of psychiatric language ideology. An historical approach exposes the mutually contingent relationships between beliefs about language and ideologies of scientific authority, psychiatric theories of the mind-brain, and psychobiologic theories of illness.


Self-Help Anthropology: NLP as Communicational Practice

Ken McGill, University of Chicago

NLP—Neuro-Linguistic Programming—is a therapeutic and self-help technique founded in the early 1970s by students of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Today, NLP practitioners bear some resemblance to us, their cousins: they have a view of language as communication tempered by a rather worldly understanding of power; they are highly interested in pragmatic interactional efficaciousness and deeply suspicious of any model of "mind" or "consciousness" separate from interaction; and last but not least, they are organized hierarchically between teacher and student. My paper will examine issues of methodology for the anthropologist of NLP, focusing on the difficulties of examining a field of knowledge that purports to be as technically proficient as any academic discipline. I am particularly concerned to find out the categories of economic well-being that are, in this case, impacted into a quasi-therapeutic model. If NLPers suppose that a technical mastery of interaction (including everything from powerful semantical practices to "mirrored" patterns of eye-movement) is the royal road to happiness and well being, then how does their stance differ from the linguistic anthropologist's utopian yearnings, embodied, on the one hand, by a sincere desire for a more poetically perfect polity based on an understanding of interaction unblemished by ideology and, on the other hand, by his own striving for "tenure"? Where, in other words, does the rubber of a (purportedly) purely pragmatic paradigm meet the road of economic security? Answering this question is as necessary for defining our own endeavor as it is for understanding emergent social formations.




PANEL V: META-HISTORIES OF ETHNIC AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES


The Modalities and Potencies of the Mozambican Nation-State: Mwani Ethnicity as a Negative Value

E. Lee Skjon, University of Chicago

All social forms emerge through the social production of signs, a value-creating dialectic of similarity and difference. Value in its symbolic forms of representation orients and defines the meaning of social life; value as it circulates or is substantiated in practice, through various semiotic media, constitutes social structure. Any social form, then, may be viewed as a value regime, a differential calculus of social spacetime that contextualizes relations and provides the principles for their entextualization. I take ethnicity to be one such social form, and, further, assume that the value regimes that regiment ethnic identity/substance are different from, yet in part subsumed within, the value regimes of national identity/substance. Participation by subjects in these substances through social action grounds subjects in these substances’ respective form or spacetime (positive value) in contrast to other kinds of spacetime (negative value). However, although different groups may have the same signification (e.g., ‘ethnic’) vis-�-vis the nation-state, they do not necessarily have the same value (cf. Saussure’s ‘sheep’ versus ‘mouton’ example). I take the Mwani of northeastern Mozambique as a case in point. Mwani geo-historical membership within a pancoastal Swahili community is independent of Mozambican history and territoriality. In fact, the Mwani are often viewed as foreign. Thus the contradictions between these competing value regimes are reduced to norm/imagined unity and its (simplex) negative—foreignness. In my dissertation I propose to analyze how Mwani otherness and Mozambican nationality are mutually regimenting by attempting to identify their significant value measures and modalities of social production in embodied practices, forms of representation, and identity registers.


Where Have All the Local Men Gone? Language, Practice and the Semeiosis of Variety in the Historical Caribbean

Mark Sicoli, University of Michigan

Early writers on the speech of people who came to be known as Island Caribs drew attention to distinct speech varieties in which one was exclusive to adult men, and another to women and children. The accounts of European historians and missionaries, as well as more recent texts by linguists and anthropologists, explain the presence of these speech varieties by reference to an invasion. In this European account of an invasion, men of a victorious mainland nation killed off the Island's males but preserved the women as wives.
Several unique European nationalisms were developing contemporaneously to the production of that history and prehistory for the Caribbean. In this talk, I examine the role of language ideologies extended from a social field of developing European nationalisms in the production of discourses on the Caribbean. I argue that the various metalinguistic statements on the practice of Island Carib language compartmentalization demonstrate a common positioning in the trope of language as a sign of nation and of origin. I suggest that for the early writers, the presence of a multilingualism in part organized by gender evoked a response of national origins and an accounting of a prehistory that brings the men and women to the Lesser Antilles from different places. This history has been reproduced many times to the present day as a constituent of other works and even cited in the self-accounts of Garifuna descendants of the Island Carib populations.
In re-examination of European descriptions of speech in the Lesser Antilles, I consider that, as well as men's and women's speech, several other varieties were used in the same multilingual communities. These varieties included forms for elder's speech, council speech, and several trade languages. I analyze the practices of code alternation as indexing salient metapragmatic features of Island Carib speech events, and how the compartmentalization of these codes functioned in the construction of local, private spheres and multiple public spheres of exchange. Comparisons are drawn with speech levels of Javanese, multilingual compartmentalization among Garifuna of Central America, and marriage exchange and the maintenance of ethnicity between mainland Cariban and Arawakan speakers. I suggest that rather than indicating a recent invasion, the performance of Island Carib multilingualism functioned in the cultural reproduction of patterned exchange, and was itself a practice extended to a new social field of exchange with European nationals.


Nostalgia for the Modern and Privatization of Ataturk’s Cult in Turkey

Esra �zy�rek, University of Michigan

In the 1990’s as East Europeans were shattering statues of Lenin and Stalin, increasing number of Turks were purchasing pins, posters, and colored photographs of Ataturk, the authoritarian founding father of Turkey. Although the images of the leader has never been scarce, they became a much demanded commodity and were circulated outside the monopoly of the state for the first time in Republican history. In this presentation I explore the transformation in the production, circulation, and consumption of the images of Ataturk. Turkish citizens who purchased Ataturk paraphernalia, carried his image from the public halls to the privacy of their homes. In the newly popular images, Ataturk appeared as a human who had a social and emotional life rather than a semi-God. Miniaturized representations of Ataturk replaced the gigantic ones both figuratively and metaphorically. As souvenirs, the commodified and personified images of Ataturk both authenticated the past and at the same time discredited the present. They did not represent the contemporary state but rather invoked a nostalgia about the mythical utopia of the 1930’s when the young Turkish Republic was strong, fully independent, and citizens were in unison with the modernizing state. They also pointed to a strong desire to domesticate the image of the founding father in order to protect it from the present state which was believed to be contaminated by practices of Islam, corruption, and increasing submission to globalization.


Consent in Fact: Evidentiality and the Performance of Ethnic Identification in the Canadian High Arctic Relocation 1953-55

James Slotta, University of Chicago

This paper examines the politics of indigenous recognition in Canada through the government's effort to determine its legal and moral responsibility for the relocation of Inukjuak Inuit from Northern Quebec to the High Arctic in 1953. Pressure from Inuit NGOs in the mid-1980s resulted in a series of reports commissioned by the government which take two divergent views on the factuality of two recognized types of texts: historical documents and oral history. These evidential ideologies are grounded in beliefs about entextualization which locate factuality in texts inscribed at the time of the relocation and ossified in text-artifacts on the one hand, and on the other hand factuality is dependent on the voicing of various perspectives, conceived of in terms of ethnic identity, which may harmonize (most likely on points of referential fact) or not (most likely on points of (meta)pragmatic fact). Focusing then on the later view, I examine the voicing of 'consent' in a report written by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The government was legally responsible for obtaining the consent of those relocated, which was done felicitously according to the interpretation of historical documents. Testimony by relocatees, anthropologists and Inuit NGOs imply or claim on the other hand that this was an infelicitous performative. The re-entextualization of these historical documents and oral histories in the report creates a voicing dynamic between narrated voices in which the seemingly contradictory claims of metapragmatic fact are resolved into the identification of two separate cultural voices which do not necessarily need to be reconciled. At the same time this voicing dynamic depends upon the identities of the spokespeople narrating these events (from anthropologists, to government officials, to personal experience narratives). The resolution of (meta)pragmatic fact at once produces ethnic identities, present and past, and has significant political and legal consequences.


Affecting the Nation: Spiritual Performance in Settler Tours

Alejandro Paz, University of Chicago

Religious-nationalist settlers consider negotiations for a Palestinian state to threaten the sovereignty of the Jewish nation over Jerusalem—the center of Jewish national spirit. Since the early nineties, one group, which calls itself “Elad,” has been using tours to a national-historical archaeological site, “The City of David,” as part of its public campaign to consecrate and justify its controversial settlement in an East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood. In other words, settlers utilize a well-established institutional form, the archaeological tour, to perform a consciously different nationalism in their attempt to redefine the territorial limits of the nation.
As Nadia Abu El-Haj has shown, Israeli archaeologists have been authorized since the state’s inception to excavate and baptize material artifacts as symbols and evidence of Israel’s ancient history. The settlers seek this authority in public debates and on their tours to defend their settlement. However, archaeologists challenge their tours—and thus settlers’ claims to represent the nation—as “political” and “biased.” Settlers agree their tours are different: they consider themselves to address the Jewish national public through spiritual means, which creates a stronger connection to territory than a “dry” archaeological tour.
By engaging recent literature on performance and the creation of publics, this paper investigates how the settlers reframe archaeological narratives as performances of spirit for their Jewish-Israeli audiences. It is argued that the poetic dramatization of biblical scenes within the deictically created spacetime of archaeological narratives constitutes the affective state that settlers believe to index the spirit which is/should be shared by all Jews and which does/should reign over all Jerusalem.




PANEL VI: AGENCY AND THE POETICS OF MAGIC


Pragmatics of Rational Choice and Its Failures: The Allais Paradox Revisited

James N. Rizzo, University of Chicago

This paper investigates the striking parallels between rational choice models of economic behavior and speech act theory, in particular with respect to how both describe failures of subjective intentionality like irrational decision making, or what Austin described as performative "misfires." As both a method and an ethic, rational choice theory defines rational decision making in terms of a pragmatic calibration that strictly determines the relevance and irrelevance of temporally-expressible contexts of given decision problems. Decades of empirical studies by psychologists and economists have shown that rational choice models of behavior fail around the ways either that agents factor temporal interests into decision problems, or that the decision-making process itself gets temporalized . This paper evaluates the result of one such series of studies, the eponymous "Allais Paradox" for which, in part, Maurice Allais was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1988. I show, first, that the Allais Paradox demonstrates the minimal characteristics of real-time textuality and poetic regimentation. Second, I show that it is in precisely the absence of the formal (con)textualization described by Allais' data that rational choice theory locates a rational agency analogous to the folk efficacy of speech acts. The general argument of the paper is that continuity between the forms of pragmatic calibration characteristic of poetics, on the one hand, and speech acts, on the other, can be used to define a cline of subjective intentionality that is valid not just for linguistic but microeconomic analysis, as well. That intentionality can be so defined has methodological and critical implication for an ethnography of capitalism.


Making A Little Agency: Gender and Salvadoran Crime Experience Narratives

Ellen Moodie, University of Michigan

This paper explores the cultural frames through which gendered agency and responsibility are understood in narratives of crime experiences told by young men and women living in San Salvador, El Salvador, in the 1990s. The most common conversational crime stories circulating during the first postwar decade described encounters with criminals on the street—usually victimizing encounters. Yet over and over, in what I argue is a heavily gendered move, most men's presentation of self demanded that they maneuver the narrative circumstances so that they could in some small way assert an active, male personhood. This contrasts with a gendered female construction of crime, which tended to focus on the responsibility for the event, distributing blame among the self, the state (or rather, its absence) and the community (and, often, its lack of solidarity). Inspired by the work of Jane Hill, I will consider the rhetorical devices speakers use to construct themselves as gendered agents or patients, focusing on narrative detail and constructed dialogue.


Speaking Magic in Anthropology

John Thiels, University of Michigan

Despite the disappearance of "magic" as an analytic concept, exploration of the ways linguistic and other anthropologists have treated magic and magical rites brings out a number of emergent themes, most prominently the relation of an agentive, often desiring individual within a collective tradition, the relationship between intelligibility" and "rationality," and tensions between referential and multi-functional language ideologies.


SUMMARIZING COMMENTS

Sinfree Makoni, University of Cape town