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MICHICAGO 2002
MAY 10-11, CHICAGO
“NEW MEDIAS, NEW PUBLICS”
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: VICENTE RAFAEL
FRIDAY MAY 10TH: AFTERNOON SESSION
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: VICENTE RAFAEL
SATURDAY MAY 11TH: MORNING SESSION
SATURDAY MAY 11TH: AFTERNOON SESSION
Please scroll down for paper abstracts
PANEL I: GOVERNING PUBLICS
ALAINA LEMON, DISCUSSANT
Domesticating New Publics: Polling and the Politics of Revelation in Post-Soeharto Indonesia
Ben Zimmer, University of Chicago
bgzimmer@midway.uchicago.edu
Immediately after the fall of Soeharto and his New Order regime in May 1998, Indonesian print and broadcast media outlets began exploring the newly opened terrain of political discourse by conducting innumerable opinion polls. The vast majority of the new polls addressed political questions that were long off-limits in public debate, from the credibility of national leaders to the effectiveness of student protests. It is tempting to view the polling vogue as a belated realization of a Habermasian "public sphere" after decades of censorship and political suppression, revealing the silenced vox populi. I argue, however, that despite tropes of revelation the opinion polls of late 1998 were also deployed for suppression of a different kind. The polls built a public only by harnessing middle-class anxieties of dangerous, "shapeless" forces: rural and urban underclasses, and disaffected elements in the transitional government and military apparatus. Particularly evident in surveys relating to the mysterious "ninja" killings of East Java, polling constructed a middle-class public united by one common bond: fear.
“First-Class Lives”: Insurance Classifications and Marketing in Contemporary Mumbai
Mark Koops-Elson, University of Chicago
mtelson@uchicago.edu
In tune with larger political economic shifts, the Indian government liberalized the domestic life insurance market in 2000, allowing a small number of joint ventures between leading multinational insurance companies and their Indian partners to compete with the government-owned and long-time monopoly Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). This paper is about ways these new joint-venture insurance companies categorize the Indian population, and how through various media - from advertisements and brochures to agent-training seminars and architecture - these categorizations are mobilized in the production of a new urban Indian public. This presentation will focus on the articulations between actuarial grids of the Indian population with marketing departments’ segmentations of consumers. While actuaries demarcate categories of people according to statistical risk-profiles with necessary-and-sufficient conditions for membership, marketing executives segment the population around social prototypes in the manner in which we conceptualize prototype-driven stereotypy. Nevertheless, the classifications of actuaries and marketers converge at crucial junctures. At the two private joint-ventures I studied, the prototype of the segment targeted by marketers - upper-middle class urban professionals - was often indexed in representations of the actuarial class of “first-class lives,” the statistical category of people with low risk and long life expectancy. With the aid of linguistic anthropological theory and examples drawn primarily from a forty-hour agent training seminar, I will discuss the dynamics of these converging representations and their relevance to the production of hierarchy and difference in the urban Indian public emerging with economic liberalization and globalization.
Creating a ‘People’s Europe’: EU Cultural Policy (re-)examined
Vanessa Will, University of Michigan
vwill@umich.edu
During the past two decades, the European Union has emerged as a powerful player in local, regional, and transnational politics, while remaining notoriously slippery and elusive to the its constituency and the analyst alike. This paper analyzes the way EU policy instantiates the EU as a political actor through texts that are constantly circulated between the various participants in the interactions framed by the EU. It identifies some of the discursive devices and processes that characterize policy as a distinct form of linguistic practice to offer a more productive account of the emergence and micro-level manifestation of institutions than Foucauldian models of governmentality commonly used in anthropological inquiries of policy. My analysis utilizes three interrelated areas of linguistic anthropological inquiry: poetics, textuality, and language ideology. One, policy constitutes a specific genre of linguistic practice whose generic qualities allow it to gain political force. Two, policy documents, as texts, inscribe as well as produce policy. The continuous re-entextualization and re-contextualization of these texts translates policy from the abstract into actual frames of references for the actions of local actors. ‘Textuality’ thus provides both the frame and method of policy as a form, object and instrument of political force. Three, the set of documents constituting ‘policy’ act as repositories of language ideologies in two respects: policy documents encode and distribute beliefs about language(s) and its relationship to individuals and their aggregates as evidence and motivation for its stated goals and objectives, while presupposing a specific ideology of language, in the form of text, to claim authority for itself and generate its force on the ground.
Foreign media for local claims: the discursive possibilities of legal courts in Ranongga (Solomon Islands)
Debra McDougall, University of Chicago
debra@uchicago.edu
Many of my informants from Ranongga, an island on the western edge of the Solomon Islands archipelago, say that everyone who has fought about land in legal courts has suffered sickness or early death. Going to court is morally questionable according to both Christian and ‘custom’ tenets: good Christians ought to live together and love one another as brothers and sisters; the true people of the land ought to generously welcome ‘other’ people rather than reminding them of their inferior status. Yet, throughout the period of British colonial government and continuing until the independent government stopped funding local courts in the mid 1980s, Ranonggans have actively sought legal adjudication for land disputes. In the absence of government coercion, and given people’s beliefs about the ill-effects of court disputes, this use of the courts as a means of dispute settlement is puzzling indeed. Why did Ranonggans chose court adjudication, which is thought to cut the disputants off from one another, instead of mediation by Christian pastors or lineage chiefs, which are thought to re-establish good relations between the disputants and their relatives? Holding with the larger theme of the conference, I consider legal courts as a new medium for articulating relationships among persons via property and ask what possibilities this ritual, political, and discursive form offers Ranonggans. Courts are markedly foreign institutions that demand an explicit statement of claims that are directed toward theoretically objective third parties. I will suggest that this allows Ranonggans to make claims that are impossible in other, markedly local, contexts.
PANEL II: MEDIA VOICINGS
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN, DISCUSSANT
Voices of Dravidianist Social Critique in Parasakti
Frank Cody, University of Michigan
fcody@umich.edu
I will analyze two short selections from the 1951 Tamil film Parasakti in order to explore the role of linguistic practice in an explicitly Dravidian nationalist textual production that became hugely popular. My analysis is grounded in a theoretical approach that is concerned with the social constitution of ‘voice’ and participant roles (Bakhtin 1981, Goffman 1981, Hill 1995, Irvine 1996, Keane 2000, Volosinov 1986[1929]). Such a theoretical framework will be used to speak to related questions concerning issues of ideological power in processes of ‘entextualization’ and in textual models of culture (Bauman & Briggs 1990, 1992, Silverstein & Urban 1996). The most general level of description in my account will sketch the socio-political context of Dravidian nationalism and Tamil language devotion in which this film was produced and watched. Parasakti was written by M. Karunanidhi of the DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – Dravidian Progress Association) party. He went on to come Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu State and has been one of the most vocal leaders of the Tamil nationalist movement in India. When Parasakti was released in 1951, the Dravidianist movement had only just begun to enter into official politics as the DMK party which was the first party in South India to use popular film as a medium for explicitly political rhetoric (Sivathamby 1981). The production of films and street dramas (Parasakti is adapted from a play) was thus part of a larger populist political agenda based on a Tamil ethnic identity that is constructed in opposition to Sanskritic and North Indian culture and language. I will argue that, in addition to creating narratives that explicitly lamented the decline of Tamil society because of North Indian and “Aryan” domination, the DMK was able to use popular cinema to create contemporary entextualized models for Tamil culture and language that could circulate beyond the literate segments of society.
Papa Corn�lio: Foundation-Myths, Independent Production, and Redemptive/Destructive Technologies
Alex Dent, University of Chicago
alcachorro@netscape.net
In this paper I scrutinize the origin-tale of Brazilian m�sica caipira (roughly, 'country' music), in which folkloricist, brick-factory owner, story-teller, elementary school gym-teacher, and poet Corn�lio Pires is deemed to have created Rural Music by being the first to record it for phonograph record in 1929. I argue that current opposed opinions on Pires's recordings - opinions on the role of phonographic-mediation -- participate in a dialogue over the Brazilian approach to the transformation of urban/rural relations. Within this dialogue, the dichotomizing discourse of country/city becomes the means to critique Brazil's ostensible loss of culture in the face of homogenizations associated with globalization. Scholars and musicologists opt for a critical-theoretical take on the Pires tale, proposing that by recording Rural Music on records, Pires speeded the demise of Rural Culture. A group of revivalist practitioners intent upon composing music that they consider simultaneously traditional and original argue that Pires's recordings fathered both their genre and their current performance-practice. In order to explicate the current vilifications and deifications of Pires, I will consider the way that Pires modified the generic features of existing Rural Musical practice for phonograph, the transforming economy of the interior of the state of S�o Paulo, where the early records were sold, and the effects of the electrification of recording and play-back techniques on the three international phonographic companies operating in Brazil in 1929. Further, I will consider Pires's development of a distinctive voicing in which the ostensible na�vet� of this music's bumpkin speaker allowed him to critique national oligarchic politics and the rapid urbanization of the nation.
With Love from the Invisible Author: On the linguistic life-cycles of greeting cards
Laura Brown, University of Michigan
brownlc@umich.edu
This paper explores the ways in which greeting cards draw on ideologies of affectionate language expressed in newspapers and popular television programs to do social work as commodities, intimate speech, and tokens of affection. Using cards available in local stores and on the web, discussion of cards in popular media, and a sample of greeting cards sent to undergraduate students at a large west coast university, I investigate the ways in which the texts of greeting cards are designed to undergo 5 life-cycle stages and depend on participation in or the possibility of such stages for their meaning. I then sketch the ways in which linguistic features of the greeting card genre work with the system of social relations in which they are imbedded to produce and reify types of persons and relationships.
Macedonia Calling: News Media and the Politics of Belonging in the New World Order
Andrew Graan, University of Chicago
apgraan@midway.uchicago.edu
Similar to the other states that emerged from the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia continues to experience challenges to its lasting stability as actors from diverse local, national, and international positions vie for competing visions of its political and social future. Furthermore, just as the presence of western political organizations has become a political reality in the region, western-based media have similarly become a representational one. The result has been the development of a shifting representational field in which a m�lange of discourses is both recruited and objectified in the processes of voicing public news and opinions both within and about Macedonia. Critical studies of the history of the modern state have, of course, placed media institutions at the center of the affective organization of polities (e.g., Anderson 1991, Habermas 1989). Therefore, this project shall use media institutions and the dissemination of “news stories” through and beyond different media contexts as a point of entry to examine the sedimentation of categories of identity and political belonging within the Republic of Macedonia. Centrally, the project will explore how, in a political and representational environment saturated by competing domestic and outside interests, "international" media organizations become a site of knowledge for and about Macedonia, and how this then affects political and representational practices within Macedonia.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Generation 'Txt': The Cell Phone and the Crowd in the Contemporary Philippines
Vicente Rafael, University of California, San Diego
PANEL III: LINGUISTIC IMAGINARIES
ROBIN QUEEN, DISCUSSANT
'Gaelic Doomed as Speakers Die Out': Scottish Gaelic and Discourses of Language Death
Emily McEwan-Fujita, University of Chicago
e-mcewan@uchicago.edu
For the past decade, concerned linguists have been using print media to issue dire warnings about the rapid loss of small languages worldwide. These warnings feature a number of recurring tropes: vivid anthropomorphizing metaphors of death, statistics and numerical estimates, and comparisons of linguistic diversity with biodiversity. This paper examines how Scottish and English newspapers--and the Royal Anthropological Institute's newsletter--started to take up these warnings in 2000, in a way that transformed the concerned warnings of linguists into pronouncements of the imminent death of Scottish Gaelic. Semantic and pragmatic aspects of the use of the anthropomorphizing trope of language death, the use of numbers to describe and predict the situation of languages, and the growing popularity of the biodiversity metaphor will all be examined, and the effect of such tropes on Gaelic language planning efforts in Scotland will be considered.
Chinglish, one code or two codes? The ideologies of linguistic codes, code-switching and identities in Hong Kong
Katherine Hoi Ying Chen, University of Michigan
hoiyingc@umich.edu
I will discuss a preliminary set of data I collected in the last few months on Cantonese-English code-switching and metalinguistic comments on code-switching in Hong Kong. My research questions include the following: What linguistic codes are considered separate and what codes the same in Hong Kong and from whose perspectives? How are boundary practices such as borrowing and code-switching considered in Hong Kong? How can some currently available frameworks (such as Blommaert 1999 on macro-political dimensions of code-switching, and Irvine 2000 on style as distinctiveness) help to understand what Hong Kong people are doing when they code-switch and what such linguistic practices mean to them? The use of code-switching in Hong Kong, in particular by university students, has been noticed and studied as early as in 1979 (by J. Gibbons). I suggest that the emergence of such linguistic practice is tied up with the political and social contexts of Hong Kong in the last 30 years or so. That Hong Kong people, educated youth in particular, are engaged in a constant process of in-group identity negotiation by differentiating themselves from people who did not partake in the same social experience. Code-switching, just as individual codes, is one of the available linguistic resources people in Hong Kong can draw upon in such process. This is a work in progress and my next step is to conduct a structured research in Hong Kong this summer.
English, the Imagined Language
Simon Hawkins, University of Chicago
sohawkin@midway.uchicago.edu
The phenomenon of the global spread of English has attracted attention from scholars, journalists, and travelers, yet it remains remarkably under analyzed. The overwhelming assumption is that English is instrumentally useful to those who know it. It is, we constantly hear, the language of business, science, and the Internet. One would be hard pressed to argue against the increasing dominance of English internationally. However, this dominance is not the same as usefulness for individuals on the ground. This paper, drawn from a dissertation chapter, examines the case of Tunisia, where interest in learning English has mushroomed recently. However, despite the fact that its usefulness is constantly touted by learners, it rarely plays a role in individuals’ material lives. French is the language used with technology (computers, cell phones, etc.) and English does not particularly help job prospects. Certainly it is useful for some people, but nowhere near the number who are trying to learn it. Those who actually need English (apart from tourist workers) are the cultural and economic elite. The appeal of English lies not in its practical, but its symbolic power. It is not so much that people need to know English, as they want to be seen to need to know English. Studying English then, requires a new approach to language, one which looks not at actual usage, but at imagined usage. Language ideology reveals itself not in speech acts, but in the imagining of what they may be. Learning English is an attempt to shape a future image of oneself.
'Language Ideology' As a Solution to the Micro-Macro Problem: Some Doubts and An Alternative
James Herron, University of Michigan, Anthropology
jherron@umich.edu
During the last decade or so the study of language ideology has taken on increasing prominence in linguistic anthropology. Although researchers have proposed a wide range of definitions and approaches, what seems to unify this literature is the claim that language ideologies mediate between situated micro-interaction and large scale social relations, institutions, and cultural patterns: language ideologies are responsive to 'macro-level' social relations (generally social division of various types) and at the same time impinge on micro processes of interaction. In this paper I argue that the analysis of language ideology, though itself interesting, does not provide a adequate way of linking micro-interaction with broader social relations and cultural wholes. Rather the invocation of language ideology simply pushes the issue of linkage back one step, since the notion of ideology itself lacks micro-foundations. It is precisely the nature of the linkage between ideology and social formations that has been the most enduring theoretical problem in the literature on ideology. Thus linguistic anthropologists may have more or less coherent ideas about how language ideology structures micro-interaction, but what is much less clear is how language ideology emerges from social relations generally. This gap in the theory of ideology makes it an unlikely candidate for linking linguistic practice with social wholes. I propose an alternative framework for understanding the mediation of linguistic practices by larger social relations based on the notion of discourse genre and using ethnographic materials from my research in Cauca, Colombia.
PANEL IV: TEXTUAL AUTHORITIES AND AUTHORIZING TEXTS
JUDITH IRVINE, DISCUSSANT
Knowledge Production and Intertextuality in Science: A Sociocitational Network Analysis of 1970s Cellular Immunology
Gail Brendel Viechnicki, University of Chicago
g-brendel@uchicago.edu
Following Latour (1987) and others, I assume that science is a form of social action the goal of which is the production of knowledge. To maximize the chances that their claims will become facts, scientific research articles (RA’s) indexically presuppose and create links to corroborating work, and distance from contradictory claims, through citation practices. In this paper I attempt to illustrate this process as it occurred in the discovery of T-cell subsets in 1970s cellular immunology, using two kinds of sociocitational networks representing the connections among a set of 1,000 RA’s. Three examples represent visually the highly performative and intertextual nature of the “blackboxing” process, and their implications are discussed. First, two examples illustrate the process by which a particular RA becomes an icon for some fact, and it is suggested that the position of an RA in the networks is connected to its scientific “success.” Second, a mismatch is discussed between the socio-conceptual world as drawn by one RA’s bibliography, and the world to which other researchers believe that RA belongs, illustrating the performativity of citation, and its dependence on perlocutionary success/failure. Finally, diachronic evidence suggests that the carving up of the social world into several different subdisciplinary research groups or “invisible colleges” (Crane 1972) results in the carving up of the natural one, giving rise to different ‘versions’ of the fact under investigation. The idea that a single “black box” is both opened and closed is thus problematized by these data.
Ambiguous Transparency: Resum� Fetishism in a Slovak Workshop
Jonathan Larson, University of Michigan
jllarson@umich.edu
The curriculum vita is an instrument for translating the subjectivity of the job seeker into the terms of the employer. How might this linguistic genre also obfuscate the nature of circumscribed personhoods in the act of making them transparent? This paper explores how instruction in a Slovak workshop in how to write a Western CV reconfigures individuals and the nation in space and time, yet masks significant dimensions of contemporary social life in Slovakia. I apply tools of linguistic anthropology including work on language ideologies, literacy in post-colonial settings, and the pragmatics of semiosis and social events to unpack contradictions in forces of the post-socialist “transition.” The workshop that I analyze was conducted by a Slovak NGO in the summer of 2001 with technical assistance from the U.S. Peace Corps. In teaching how to write a CV, the instructor posits a meritocratic society in which individuals must commodify themselves by detaching themselves discursively from existing social relations. At the same time, this construction of a CV embeds Slovaks within new transnational networks of production and representation. Instruction in the CV constructs new models of Slovak personhood as it constructs a new Slovak nation ready for Western investment. The reality that the neoliberal ideology of this workshop projects, however, is quite different than current conditions of the Slovak labor market.
"We Have a Very Big Debt": The Missionized as the Missionaries in Papua New Guinea and Beyond
Courtney Handman, University of Chicago
cjhandma@midway.uchicago.edu
At the influential Christian Leaders' Training College in Papua New Guinea both students and their expatriate teachers believe that Christianity in that country has reached a new level of maturity. After 100 years of European missionization the time is ripe for Papua New Guineans themselves to start spreading the Gospel. As part of a larger effort among Evangelical institutions to transform the missionized into the missionaries, Papua New Guinean Bible college students are now asked to consider missionary work in Africa, particularly Muslim Africa, as part of their "calling." Here a new public is constituted as it begins to spread the message of one of the oldest books. This paper will examine the tropes through which Papua New Guineans are asked to imagine themselves as actors on the global stage of Christian evangelization. In particular, the paper will look at the bifurcation of the role of "missionary" when it is taken up at once by the colonized and the colonizers. Prominent in this new organization of roles is the reconfiguration of "debtor" relationships in the Christian imagination: in addition to the debt owed to Jesus Christ for having died to take away man's sins, Papua New Guineans are now in debt to the martyred – more importantly, cannibalized – European missionaries who first brought the Gospel to that country. Missions work, and the risk of one's very own martyrdom in Muslim Africa, is the currency with which this debt is paid.
PANEL V: PROJECTIONS OF GRAMMAR JOHN LUCY, DISCUSSANT
Language Grooves: the Sensing Body in an Example of Cameroonian Pop Singing
Simon Keeling, University of Michigan
skeeling@umich.edu
In this paper, I take an "anthropology of the senses" approach to poetics and music. Linguists interested in poetics have tended to focus on sound (rhyme, meter, etc.) or image (organization of markings on a page) and their affects on the axis of combination. What I suggest is that we ought to be as attentive to the sense of touch. I will attempt to show that the literal physical sensations of such events as vowel lengthening or creative variation of glottal state--as Peircean signs--undergo iconization and thus enter into the semiotic system of an ethnopoetics. One of the implications of this is that the singer becomes as crucial a contributor to musical drive or groove as rhythm section instrumentalists, such as drummers or bass guitarists.
The Boundaries of Dialect in Japanese Discourse
Christopher Ball, University of Chicago
cgball@uchicago.edu
Dialect is recognized by language users and linguists alike as identifying speakers as being from certain regions or social strata within larger sociolinguistic unities. Following Blom and Gumperz (1972) I use discourse data to argue for the treatment of dialect as a variety in a repertoire whose primary function is microcontextually socioindexical. I further argue that the association of dialect features with regional provenance is parallel to the association of honorific forms with social status. Following Agha (1993), I argue that just as honorific forms do not directly encode social status, dialect forms do not directly encode regional provenance. Rather, as honorific forms encode deference entitlements, dialect forms encode stances of alterity between interactants. The projection of the indexical values of such registered linguistic units in use from interactional contexts to the social order is the domain where assignments of politeness are made for honorifics, and where judgments of regional identity are made for dialect forms. Such overt judgments I treat as a linguistic ideological process. I also account for the less conscious interpretation of dialect forms in use as interactional altering devices through a specific Japanese linguistic ideology involving uchi ‘in group’ and soto ‘out group’ boundaries. Uchi and soto are Japanese cultural concepts which are grounded in the core semantic notions inside and outside and which operate in structuring Japanese notions of language, self and society. Uchi and soto groupings are recursive, moving from Japan as uchi and the world as soto down through regional identities and intimate social relations.
Voices and Methods: Writing production and language awareness
Mark Sicoli, University of Michigan
msicoli@umich.edu
This talk presents forthcoming dissertation research that questions the limits of awareness of the various functional strata effective in the language practice of a prosidically complex speech area of Southern Mexico. The research employs methodologies including ethnographic interviewing, participant-observation, and experimental literary production by assistants and participants in writing workshops. This talk will be limited to discussing the third method involving the reflexive task of a speaker-interpreter beginning to practice representing any of several levels of prosodic contrast which are not traditionally represented in European and American traditions of orthographic design. I will present data on Coyachila Zapotec prosodic features as used in conversation and storytelling genres to index changes of voice, or provide metalinguistic or metapragmatic information. I invite suggestions and warnings in developing methodologies to approach language awareness.
From Ritual to Grammar: Sacrifice, Homology, Metalanguage
Adi Hastings, University of Chicago, Anthropology & Linguistics
amhastin@midway.uchicago.edu
Primarily as outlined in the later hermeneutic literature, the Vedic doctrine of homologies asserts that it is possible to correlate corresponding elements of the macrocosmos (the world of the gods), the ritual sphere, and the microcosmos (the world of man). Connections made and found among the divine, ritual, and human spheres are not designed solely to reduce these levels to any one, nor are they simple metaphors. Such homologies enable the expression of metaphysical truth and the mutual explication of all three realms. The efficacy of Vedic ritual is centered on these correlations - a tightly woven system of superordinated indexical icons. In later genres of literature, specifically the ritual sutra-s, this principle of signification is elaborated into a system of text-structure and textual interpretation. This paper considers the development of metalinguistic devices, specifically the lexicalization of Sanskrit phonemes and morphemes in the Sanskrit grammatical tradition, as a continuation of this method of meaning-making.
PANEL VI: MODALITIES OF WRITING
SUSAN GAL, DISCUSSANT
Language Standardization and National Sentiment in Catalonia
Susan Frekko, University of Michigan
sefrekko@umich.edu
In Catalonia, Spain, speaking the Catalan language (as opposed to Castilian Spanish) habitually is an overt sign (Barth 1969) of Catalan identity. However, widespread bilingualism in Catalan and Castilian Spanish results in language mixing that blurs the boundaries between the two languages in speech. Therefore, it is standard written Catalan-the product of conscious efforts to distance the language from Castilian by the standardizers of the early 20th century-that becomes the clearest mark of the distinctness of a Catalan people. Discrepancies between the Catalan written standard and spoken Catalan and between different kinds of writing raise several questions for researchers concerned with the role of language ideologies in the imagination and performance of national identities. What ideologies of the relationship between the Catalan written standard and spoken Catalan exist among native and second-language speakers of Catalan? Do language users apply the standard uniformly in different writing activities? How do speakers' views of these relationships relate to their national loyalties? I propose research in Barcelona, Spain to explore these questions. Because the research seeks to capture a range of literate practices and ideological positions, I will focus on the following types of activities: 1) activities in which language users convert writing into speech, like television dramas 2) activities in which language users convert speech into writing, like newspaper journalism and 3) writing activities that form a part of daily life. Through this research, I hope to refine theories of the role of language standardization in the development and maintenance of national sentiment.
The Look of a Public and the Cosmetics of Japanese Literacy: The Case of the Saitama Unification
Shunsuke Nozawa, University of Chicago
snozawa@uchicago.edu
This paper analyzes the relationship of forms of literacy use to representation of public-ness. The case of the unification project of the city of Saitama, Japan, is discussed as an example. In 1994 three major cities in Saitama prefecture (just north of Tokyo), Omiya, Urawa, and Yono, launched a unification project that would create a new city, with a population size large enough to be qualified for subsidiary money from the central government. This involved transformations in economic, political, and judicial structures. However, one issue that was particularly crystallized and widely taken up by media concerned how to name the new unified city. After a series of debates and a national poll, the three cities ended up naming the would-be city after its prefecture, 'Saitama,' but it was to be written exclusively in hiragana, one of the two sets of Japanese syllabary, unlike the prefecture's name, which is in kanji or Chinese characters. The hiragana appearance was thought to somehow 'improve' the image of the Saitama vicinity as a whole. I analyze how the script choice draws its effect of cosmetic 'makeup' from various iconicized meanings and to what extent the choice was or was not effective. What sorts of assumption lie in the literacy users' awareness? What exactly gets 'represented' in this christening event, and for whom? More generally I hope to touch upon the question of forms of representation enacted and made effective through such cosmetic use of literacy and other forms of displayed/performed iconic indexical semiosis.
Performing Technical Affiliation: How Tech Talk is Shaping Communication
Patricia Gonzalez, University of Michigan
pgonzal@umich.edu
Scholars often claim that the anonymous "nature" of the computer causes agonistic debate in computer-based communication. Yet such claims do not adequately account for argumentative phenomena across the Internet's myriad social arrangements and diverse levels of anonymity. An email sent to a coworker, for instance, is not an anonymous encounter. A more fruitful lens for understanding online arguments is a concept I call performing technical affiliation. During such a performance, interlocutors demonstrate affiliation to a set of beliefs, values, and practices about technology and techno-social culture that speakers code as "normative" in order to jockey for position in techno-social hierarchies. Those who do not demonstrate alignment to dominant positions tend to lose techno-social capital vis-a-vis their opponents. The sociolinguistic and cultural techniques that performers of technical affiliation use to win arguments often stem from the belief that the Internet should be made "safe" for democratic expression. Ironically, however, such techniques often make it difficult for participants to express complex or non-normative beliefs. This paper will explore the techniques (such as strategic use of non-lexical items and innuendo) that members of two online communities use to perform technical affiliation. The paper will show how these techniques necessitate a reformulation of our theoretical understanding of the difference between virtual versus actual social identity. The paper will also investigate the larger ramifications of such practices, including how participants outside the communities studied-including non-technical groups-are adopting the frame of performing technical affiliation, which may result in forms of self-censorship across the Internet.
"...mich_wunder_nix_mehr...": online-communication - a new German?
Vera Eremeeva, University of Michigan
veremeev@umich.edu
The development of digital media allows one to talk about the significance of the written language in today’s society. However, this development brought drastic changes into the way people use their language. Often being referred as “incorrect”, this “new language” of online communication is usually seen as the result of the technical limitations of the new media. Sometimes it is even explained through lacking writing skills of the participants. Despite previous research done on this language variety, there are still issues that need to be clarified. The present paper looks at German in chat room communication while trying to answer following questions: What factors play a major role in shaping the chat room language?; Can the chat room variety be seen as a separate language?; What would be the place of the chat room German on the language continuum scheme?; Are there parallels between the status and structure of the chat room German and similar variety of English? The analysis is based on two corpora of data, which are examples of German and English IRC (internet relay chat) communications. The data were collected from chat rooms with similar general settings (nonmoderated programs with similar technical outlines), as well as with contextual similarity such as non-specified topic of the chat room, gender and age of participants (general chat rooms).
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