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MICHICAGO 2004
MAY 7-8, CHICAGO
“EVIDENCE, AUTHORITY, LEGITIMATION”
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: AMANDA ANDERSON
FRIDAY MAY 7TH: AFTERNOON SESSION
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: AMANDA ANDERSON
SATURDAY MAY 8TH: MORNING SESSION
SATURDAY MAY 8TH: AFTERNOON SESSION
Please scroll down for paper abstracts
PANEL I: PURITY, PLANNING, REVIVAL
SUSAN GAL, DISCUSSANT
Linguistic Purism and the Legitimation of Pueblo Language Revitalization Projects
Erin Debenport, University of Chicago
erin@uchicago.edu
Recent efforts at language revitalization at both Sandia and Nambe Pueblos in New Mexico have focused primarily on dictionary creation, with the goal of documenting the particular form of Tiwa or Tewa, respectively, used at each pueblo. In both of these projects, varying degrees of importance has been placed on only including lexical items agreed to be indigenous to each language, resulting in purging loan words from English, Spanish and other native languages of the area, or creating new forms to replace those currently in use. This approach seemingly contrasts with revitalization efforts at Cochiti and Acoma Pueblos, both of which have rejected using written materials and have stressed emersion in the Keres language as the central tenet of their curricula. This report examines these divergent techniques used by Pueblo tribes, arguing that all projects reflect components of a shared linguistic ideology of purism, as described by Kroskrity in his work with the Arizona Tewa, but that this ideology is manifested differently and at contrasting levels within each Pueblo. In addition, these instantiations of ideologies of purism can all be seen to contribute to discourses within these communities that seek to explain and legitimate the particular approach each pueblo is taking to promoting indigenous language use. Thus, ideologies of purism, as interpreted locally, have both shaped revitalization efforts and provided a frame for promoting the efficacy of such projects to members of each community.
The Semiotics of Socialization: Gaelic-Medium Education and Language Revival in Scotland
Vanessa Will, University of Michigan
vwill@umich.edu
In the past two decades, Gaelic-medium education (GME) in primary school has come to bear the brunt of the language revitalization project in Scotland. Yet, older speakers of Gaelic often claim not to understand Gaelic-medium educated children and actually refuse to speak Gaelic with them. My research seeks to explain this issue by investigating the transformations of the ways Scottish Gaelic speakers have not only acquired a linguistic code, but have also learned to use it in socially appropriate ways. I posit that one of the results of these transformations is the socio-political marking of the Gaelic children learn in GME, turning it into an inappropriate form of interaction for other members of the speech community. To become legitimate speakers of Gaelic accepted by the speech community, children need to develop pragmatic awareness of the social power of these marked linguistic forms and the ability to use it appropriately in order to be recognized social actors(Ochs 2000, Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). I will investigate how children do or do not develop this semiotic knowledge as part of their socio-linguistic repertoire by examining the ways in which socialization activities may or may not allow novices to become legitimate members of the speech community and social actors. My research will investigate the currently unexplored semiotic aspects of socialization and identify their role in language maintenance and shift. This will allow me to approach language maintenance and shift as instances of larger processes of cultural reproduction and change in communities of (linguistic) practice.
Who owns Catalan?: The polemic Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana
Susan Frekko, University of Michigan
serekko@umich.edu
Paper Headlines in the Catalan press of the late 90s announced that the Institut d'Estudis Catalans' (IEC) 1995 Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana was "an intellecutal fraud," "old-fashioned and full of errors," "fraudulent and poorly done." The IEC (the Catalan equivalent of an academy of the language) reported receiving anonymous threats. This dictionary was the first official dictionary published since the 30s, when the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Franco dictatorship interrupted the standardizing work of the IEC. The intellectual community greeted the 1995 dictionary with a barrage of criticism that continues to linger in the popular press and academic journals nearly a decade later. Fieldwork among professionals of the Catalan language revealed that while most have the dictionary, few consult it. Non-professionals tend not to own it, preferring smaller, less-expensive dictionaries instead. In short, the dictionary failed to meet the goals (as stated in its introduction) of acting as "a service of the Institut to Catalan society" and "seeking maximum diffusion in all territories of the Catalan language."
This paper examines the circulation (or lack thereof) of the dictionary and the intertexual web surrounding it. I unpack the language ideologies underlying the criticisms lodged against the dictionary in order to illuminate the social force of this controversial text and explain why reactions to the dictionary were so bitter. At stake are not only linguistic opinions and personal and institutional power, but also "ownership" of the Catalan language and ideas of Catalan nationhood.
Diglossia as Language Ideology: The Case of Arabic
Jonathan Glasser, University of Michigan
glasserj@umich.edu
Arabic was a key example in Ferguson's initial formulation of the concept of diglossia. It has also given rise to criticisms of that concept, with some Arabic linguists asserting that the classical/colloquial binary should be replaced with a continuum model, with the classical and colloquial constituting opposing nodes. Niloofar Haeri has pointed out, however, that while the continuum may exist, Arabic-speakers generally conceptualize the language in strictly binary terms. Drawing on Haeri's observation, I treat Arabic diglossia as a particularly robust example of language ideology. My guiding question is how and why the classical/colloquial boundary is constructed and maintained.
Through an examination of speech-a domain in which this boundary is often blurry-I contend that the diglossic construct is conceptually rooted mainly in practices closely associated with Quranic recitation. Intonation, exactitude of pronunciation, and, above all, presence of case endings are the chief means of positing and monitoring the classical/colloquial boundary.
This language ideology approach to Arabic diglossia in turn helps illuminate its more explicitly political elements in the modern period: the debate over the merits of classical versus colloquial can be traced to the beginnings of Arab nationalism, and these opposing sides are in fact unified in their rejection of the diglossic model dominant since the early Islamic period. Nevertheless, despite the vociferous attacks on it in intellectual circles, the traditional diglossic model appears to be solidly entrenched through everyday practice, thus suggesting that language ideology is far more resilient in its implicit than in its explicit forms.
Street as dictionary? Translating Texts, Making Publics and Representing Markets in Postsocialist Romania
Emanuela Grama, University of Michigan
egrama@umich.edu
The paper will focus on the debates in the Romanian mass-media surrounding "the law for the usage of the Romanian language" that is in the process of potentially being endorsed by the Romanian parliament. If, initially, the law asked for the translation into Romanian of "any text produced or uttered in the public space", the last version of the law aims asks for the mandatory translation of any public text produced for promotional purposes. As the author of the law put it, "I want to give the street back to those who used to own it", alluding to the foreign ads in Romania's cities, which supposedly could not be understood by "the majority of Romanians".
One of the points this paper will make is that the controversies Pruteanu's law triggered and the heat surrounding them are to be understood within a larger ideological context of postsocialist Romania, in which the very relationship between 'language' and 'public' was being redefined. Moreover, this public was not only defined in relation to language and politics, but also to consumption. Thus, the second point of this paper is that the law and the debates around it have not only signified larger redefinitions the relationship between language and the public, but also reconfigurations and reassessments of the social value of consumption and of the relation between 'language', 'public', and 'market.'
I will thus argue that the law for the usage of Romanian in public spaces and the whole debate that it has generated indexes larger processes of power negotiation between various social and political factions, in which ideologies of language are called upon to legitimize bitterly tasting discourses of collectivism, unity, national homogeneity, state-controlled markets and state-controlled publics.
PANEL II: CROSSING BORDERS, CROSSING GENRES
RICHARD BAUMAN, DISCUSSANT
On the Border of the European Union: Language Contact in Goerlitz, Germany
Emily Carter, University of Michigan
carterej@umich.edu
The act of translation is never neutral, but it constructs two separate languages and mutually unintelligible and in need of translation. This paper considers the practices of translation found in the public sphere in Goerlitz, Germany from this perspective. Goerlitz is on the border between Germany and Poland and is the German part of the 'European City Goerlitz-Zgorzelec' which is being built for 2010. This city was divided in 1945 following one of the largest forced migration movements in history. Today, Polish-German bilingualism in Goerlitz is linked to particular places: the border, Silesia, the Catholic Church, and the European Union. The kind of bilingualism found in these spaces erases considerable linguistic diversity. It also re-enforces assumptions of cultural unity on either side of the border as opposed to across the border. The history of the region makes it particularly susceptible to such processes. Precisely those linguistic moments constructed as crossing the border are reproducing it. The use of standard Polish and German as translations in other-than-national spaces implicitly makes the overarching orientation to national space the correct one and perhaps a necessary pre-condition for entry into the European Union which can reinforce national unity rather than dissolve it.
Foucault and the Lepers: Leprosy, Caste, and Schemes of Meaning in Nepal
Peter Graif, University of Chicago
pjgraif@uchicago.edu
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that "the image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects of exclusion". This paper examines the structural implications of this claim upon the relationship between leprosy and ideologies of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Nepal. Particularly, it treats the existence of leprosy as something profoundly anomalous to the community that experiences it, mandating mutually contradictory social obligations. Orthodox Hindu and Buddhist notions of leprosy's pollution, on the one hand, demand that people marked by the disease be systemically excluded from social life. Yet, at the same time, lepers are not only lepers, but also wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. With these relationships come other, similarly unbreakable obligations. Leprosy requires a response from the community, but one that cannot be easily imagined. In these moments, ideologies and practices more typically associated with the caste system are often invoked, not because leprosy is considered to be the same thing as caste, but because it has symbolic similarities with caste's categories that make caste-oriented exclusion models work to normalize leprosy. Leprosy patients are not simply "cut off from all human contact", but are excluded in a way that simultaneously reincorporates their anomaly into social discourse. The structural parallels between these different "projects of exclusion" indicate an underlying semiotic and diagrammatic relationship between caste and leprosy, one that speaks to the inventive capacities of ideology and practice. This process of symbolic transfer across domains of meaning is essential to the place of leprosy in Nepal.
Publics and Pronouns: Overhearing in Tijuana
Rihan Yeh, University of Chicago
rihan@uchicago.edu
As 'Tijuana' emerges as an object of discourse, it circulates through an outwardly-spiraling system of overhearings. These overhearings, which take the object of discourse and put it back into circulation through repetitions, quotes, and reinterpretations vulnerable to being overheard themselves, operate according to an ideology of mis- or under-representation. Signs must be read as shreds of something larger. Representations of Tijuana as a city of vice and crime, a site where illegal traffic is both ubiquitous and covert, all thrive on a logic according to which the object of discourse can only be represented as somehow beyond the possibilities of representation. This circulation of overhearings is also the circulation around which a Tijuanense public is constituted.
This paper examines a popular song and an excerpt of personal narrative to show the tension between a mass-mediated and a local public, which develops out of face-to-face overhearings. Overhearing as a practice develops in the framework of pronoun-usage, the relations between first, second, and third persons. As with the "we"-oriented publics of Urban's Metaculture, pronouns are central to the way the circulation of overhearings constitutes a public, but the pronouns function and relate to each other somewhat differently. "I" and "you" come together around 'Tijuana,' the always receding third person that communication must be heard through to if one would participate in the Tijuanense public.
"Contact genres: a proposal for studying subjectivities in a global ecumene, with examples from Latin American foreign workers in Israel
Alejandro Paz, University of Chicago
aipaz@uchicago.edu
Many anthropologists have been turning their conceptualizing attention to how texts and people circulate across what were previously assumed to be static state, national, ethnic, and/or cultural boundaries. This paper--drawing examples from preliminary fieldwork but drafted as part of a proposal--suggests analyzing this cluster of issues under the rubric of "contact genres," thus placing them on the familiar terrain of dialogical relations. "Contact" here is analyzed in terms of a relation between (a) an entextualization produced upon social categorially-differentiated footings and (b) a second entextualization which draws on (a) for its evidence and some authority to either (i) explain social difference (as we do for example in ethnographies) or (ii) reproduce the practice modeled by (a) (as we do when for example we try to "blend in"). It is argued that the differentiated footings can be drawn along any of the socially relevant lines that Bakhtin presents in his analysis of heteroglossia--that is, it is the fact of differentiation of speech and of other shared group practices that comes to be presupposed in discursive interaction where contact occurs. "Cultural" contact genres are then a sub-type of a more general phenomenon. How text is decontextualized--even presented as decontextualizable, as in "elicitation" genres--from (a) and re-entextualized and re-contextualized in (b), it is further argued, is the crucial aspect to research in order to conceptualize such globalizing practices as the circulation of text and people. That is, historically speaking, sujectivities analyzed through concepts such as "ethnolinguistic identities," "cultural hybridity," "diasporic public spheres" are partially structured by and can emerge from within contact genres.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS:
Beyond Authenticity and Sincerity: The Way We Argue Now
Amanda Anderson, The Johns Hopkins University
PANEL III: INSTITUTIONAL GENRES
JOHN LUCY, DISCUSSANT
Consensus, complexity, and chaos, or why "Taiwan is too democratic"
Anya Bernstein, University of Chicago
abernst@uchicago.edu
Clearly the largest political change in recent Taiwanese history has been the end of martial law. Discursively, Taiwan's democratization process combined a rhetoric of ethnic awakening and empowerment with a selective presentation of the virtues of freedom as found "outside the country" (guowai -- shorthand for western Europe and especially the US). The process has been remarkably successful: freedom of speech, movement, and association, as well as contested multi-party elections at all levels, are now the norm. However, the details of democratization -- in terms of practical changes at the level of everyday political administration as well as of discursive figurations of the new Taiwanese socio-polity -- are still being worked out. Using interview and participant observation data, I examine the terms in which Taipei city government administrators typically present democracy, as ideal and as actually-existing. I focus especially on their emphasis on consensus as the only legitimate decision-making process; on complexity as a dangerous and potentially befouling state; and on chaos as the appropriate description for the current state of things. I then discuss how these three terms are representative of larger, society-wide styles of arguing about and validating both political systems and actions, suggesting that popular conceptions of democracy in Taiwan owe more to ethno-nationalism than they are typically thought to do in discussions of Taiwan's political miracle.
The "Critical" in Critical Thinking: Legacies of Socialism and the Transformation of Public Speech in Slovakia
Jonathan Larson, University of Michigan
jllarson@umich.edu
Educated Slovaks use concepts of critical thinking to evaluate problems that Slovakia faces in joining Western Europe. I explore two aspects of a socialist era linguistic practice, kritika, and the influence many Slovaks perceive it to have on present practices of public language. First, kritika was often demanded in social settings that could make people reticent about speaking their opinions, intolerant of other's opinions, or defensive in the face of critique. Second, socialist practices of kritika may have encouraged stark views of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, that also avoided "root causes" to problems. In the view of the educated Slovaks who form the basis for my research, such outcomes are still present in behavior today. Problematizing ideologies of the speaking subject and notions of public and private, this paper summarizes these two main claims about kritika under socialism as they are used to explain problems of "critical thinking" in the present.
The role of language interviews in asylum applications: a case study of a Sierra Leonean refugee in The Netherlands
Chris Corcoran, University of Chicago
c-corcoran@uchicago.edu
This paper presents a detailed examination of the case of a Sierra Leonean refugee in The Netherlands who was denied asylum based on a series of four language reports generated by the Dutch Immigration Service. I investigate the conflicting demands made on the asylum seeker to participate in the construction of an asylum-language-interview genre. In lieu of paper documentation, the immigration service instituted a language-analysis interview. There is a growing literature concerning asylum seeker interviews (Blommaert (2001, 2003), Maryns (2000), and Maryns and Blommaert (2002)). However, this literature addresses the process in Belgium and the production of autobiographical narratives relevant to the asylum claim. In the Netherlands, the interview is not an oral review of the facts of the case. Instead, it is characterized as an examination of the applicant's language, and applicants are instructed at the outset not to discuss the reasons for seeking asylum.
The recontextualization of the interview in the reports of Dutch officials necessarily invokes issues surrounding the differential access to power; however, this paper focuses on the issues of the differential access to power and entailments of role recruitment starting with the entextualization process. I investigate what the consequences may be for the interview and explore the tension between the refugee's position as one who is subordinate and unratified as an active creator of the language-analysis-interview genre and at the same time as one who must necessarily participate in entextualization where the fullest participation is interpreted as cooperative behavior in the asylum seeking application process.
Evidence and Audience
Nicole Berry, University of Michigan
berryn@umich.edu
I am really concerned about the connection between "evidence" as conceived of in linguistic anthropology and having one's work "cross-over" both within the different subfields of anthropology and without. As I write my dissertation it seems to me that the linguistic data that I have, particularly long transcripts in Kaqchikel Maya, severely restrict my audience, the same way that including lengthy mathematical formulas would repel potential readers. I would like to have an informal discussion addressing the following questions: In what ways does a conception of "evidence" as informed by training in linguistic anthropology possibly prevent your work from either being accessible or interesting? How can you be rigorous in the presentation of your linguistic data and still appeal to a diverse audience? These are not questions that I am going to answer, but would like to explore them through examples of quandaries appearing in my own dissertation work.
PANEL IV: LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC CLASSIFICATION
JUDITH IRVINE, DISCUSSANT
How Mangarevans Think, About Mana and Possessives For Instance
Alex Mawyer, University of Chicago
admawyer@midway.uchicago.edu
This paper proposes to spill yet more ink over mana, one of the classic terms of 20th century anthropology. After all, what do a few more drops matter after the spilling of such an ocean of disputation? Lest you should ask why cry over spilled disputation, for French Polynesia's Mangarevans, like other Eastern-Polynesians, mana is not just a prominent feature of the interpretive landscape or merely a keystone of purported Polynesian categories of being. Rather, this term presents a profile of regular distribution in everyday speech-denotationally cross-cutting notions of evidence, authority, and legitimacy-that is most curious when compared with much of the historical commentary on the term though not at all at odds with the elaborations of some of its earliest investigators (e.g. Hocart and Rivers). At the same time, features of the linguistic subsystem of Mangarevan grammatical possession bear an uncanny resemblance to more typically posited characteristics of mana as an ethno(high)theoretical concept. Consequently intrigued by Mauss' analysis of mana in which possessions and not grammatical possession serve as a key feature, this paper thus speculates whether the particular manner in which possession finds grammatical expression is regularly mystified, experienced and understood as mana or, alternately, whether some inchoate principle of mana does indeed govern the grammatical expression and disposition of possession for Mangarevans and others in the South Pacific.
Notes on Classification and Cosmology in the Upper Xingu
Christopher Ball, University of Chicago
cgball@uchicago.edu
In this paper I discuss the theory of Yawalapiti (Arawakan) linguistic classification and cosmology outlined in Viveiros de Castro(1978, 2002). I compare the results of his work with other reports on human- animal relations and categories of living things in the Upper Xingu region(Basso 1973, Seeger 1981). I outline an approach to the questions raised by these analyses that emphasizes two points that require further development in order to approach explanatory adequacy in the description of systems of classification. The first point is the structure of linguistic systems ofnominal classification (Lucy 2000), especially those of Arawakan languages(Aikhenvald 1996). The second point relates to the semiotic properties that form the basis of the contextualized realization of human-animal relationships as theorized by Brightman (1993). I aim to build a set of questions, and perhaps predictions, that I may take to the field in my dissertation research with the Yawalapiti.
Categorization in Ideological Process: Teaching Grammars, Ethnicity, and the Francophone Grassfields
Simon Keeling, University of Michigan
skeeling@umich.edu
In this paper, I show that certain teaching materials for the Bantoid language, Mèdûmbà, implicitly posit a theory of culture. They do this insofar as categorizations of lexical items and lessons necessarily both reflect and influence thought and practice: the context here being Bamiléké territory in Cameroon. I analyze these materials using (among other means) Gal and Irvine's three semiotic processes, iconization, erasure, and fractal recursivity, to show how ethnic and national discourses are linked to metalanguage and linguistic form. National politics and nationalist discourses in Cameroon are characterized by the recognition of a large number of ethnic groups, which results both in a discourse of respect for distinctiveness, and in intense essentializing of, and competition between, these groups. So distinctiveness and theories of culture are of great significance in Cameroon, particularly for any who identify with Mèdûmbà and other Bamiléké languages, since the Bamiléké ethnic group is a frequent target for attack.
Language Ideology and Fractal Recursivity: "Griot" and "Noble" Speech in the Context of Bambarization in Mali
Heinrike Florusboch, University of Michigan
jflorusb@umich.edu
A particularly salient distinction in Manding ideologies of language is the distinction between "noble" and "griot" speech, in which linguistic differences are understood in terms of a link between social identity and verbal conduct. Using the concept of fractal recursivity (Irvine and Gal 2000), I discuss how this distinction becomes reconfigured in the context of contemporary processes of "Bambarization" in Mali, where Bambara is becoming the dominant language in most regions of the country. While the differences between "griot" and "noble" speech are almost completely ignored in linguistic descriptions of Bambara and Malinke (two closely related Manding languages), contemporary speakers of Bambara/Malinke take up these linguistic distinctions to apply these to the differences between these respective languages. Paradoxically, the application of the distinction between "noble" and "griot" speech to this other level of difference (i.e., "between" languages) leads to an erasure of this very difference when the two languages are considered as a whole. Scholars and speakers alike construct the difference between Bambara and Malinke as the crucial distinction, while the internal differentiations within these languages, such as the griot-noble distinction, are portrayed as no longer relevant. Thus this case exemplifies how both linguists and participants fashion descriptions of language and linguistic differences that are mediated by certain ideologies of language. Moreover, it shows how contemporary Bambara and Malinke speakers construct an image of these languages as two separate and homogeneous entities while using the very notions of linguistic differentiation that are denied relevance in this particular ideological perspective.
PANEL V: COMPETENCE AND STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN, DISCUSSANT
"Face" and Scandal in Taiwanese Democracy
Jeff Martin, University of Chicago
jtmartin@uchicago.edu
Taiwan's democratization (1986-1996) deregulated commercial media at the same time it opened the formal political arena to popular participation, resulting in a social environment that is as intensively mediated as it is highly politicized. As the country's media metabolism has accelerated, so too has the overt political use of scandal-mongering, becoming a conventional aspect of political contestation. This paper considers some recent examples in which mass-mediated scandal has been used as a political tactic, examining how these events can be understood as taking shape as a form of combat in which attacks are directed to the "face" (mianzi) of opposed political figures. Considering how the idiom of "face," as a culturally distinctive idiom of individual status, has been adapted to public-sphere politicking, suggests some more general lessons for how Taiwanese democracy takes shape as a logical progression of historically continuous cultural forms.
The Translator's Task and the Translator's Theory: The Construction of a Professional Identity
Suzanne Unger, University of Michigan
sbu@umich.edu
While translation as a profession has existed for a long time and in many different societies, translators have only recently been recognized as professionals in their own right. The occupational term "translator" is not legally protected in many countries, and despite the presence of professional associations, there often does not exist a standardized course of training or system of accreditation (cf. Baker 1992, Kiraly 1995b). In the absence of formal or binding guidelines, translators have to continually explain and legitimize their work and establish themselves as competent authorities in their field. In this paper, I investigate how translators construct and establish themselves as professionals, and how they legitimize their claims. In so doing, I highlight assumptions about translators and their tasks, and the way in which they manifest themselves in the language of the texts which describe their work. Moreover, I explore how translators may negotiate customer expectations and their own experience as translators by drawing on material from an international translators' listserv. I also examine how handbooks on translation position translators as agents, professionals, and participants in the free market economy. How do authors of translation handbooks construct the notion of a "competent translator" and who is authorized to make such claims? What are some of the expectations which translators bring to a translation, and what decisions enter the translation process? The ways in which translators construct their professional identities and their work provide an interesting perspective from which to investigate larger practices and understandings about language and culture both at the local and at the international level.
Bevormundung-a problem in the anthropology of language of the former East
Germany
Kenneth McGill, University of Chicago
kbmcgill@uchicago.edu
The party-state of the former DDR was famous not only for its repressive secret police apparatus, but also for a specific relation to its subjects known as Bevormundung. Translated often as "paternalism," the word implies both (in contrast to the notion of mündig-enfranchised) political disenfranchisement and, literally, the notion of speaking for someone else (bevor=before, in front of; Mund=mouth). This paper will examine forms of political authority in the historical DDR and in its present-day territorial successor in relation to the act of utterance, particularly highlighting the way in which particular types of speech acts and particular "voices" were distributed across both an apparatus of state power and a (in comparison to the former Western Europe) manifold of sociological class relations that are quite unusual.
I will also be concerned to compare the desiderata of this analysis to various conceptions of "communicative competence"-suggesting that the notion of competence is in many ways inadequate for the forms of subtle strategizing that are available to participants in interaction. Consequently, I will be drawn to consider the ways in which the materialized result of such strategic interaction leaves a residue of interaction that is unsurprisingly often theorized as competency. Finally, I will attempt to model how Mündigung [enfranchisement] can be theorized as a form of historical social change outside of the subjective paradigms that academic observers are often drawn into in regards to such an analysis.
"Country folk like it told simple": building "plain talk" in rural American Evangelical projects
Gretchen Pfeil, University of Chicago
pfeil@uchicago.edu
Though often figured as a transnational project, Evangelical Christian missionary work is also targeted domestically. This paper focuses on one such current project, evangelization to poor rural "Western Americans" via the construction of "Cowboy Churches." These churches, often built and run by graduates of (semi)urban bible colleges, and recently publicized in Christianity Today, are designed to reach rural "Western Americans" by catering to their specific, simple and messy tastes and "culture." This paper discusses how this encounter between highly-educated (semi) urban evangelists and rural "cowboys" serves to construct rural american "simplicity" through elaborately constructed "simple speech" and "authentic barns," all the while deeply entrenched in Protestant (and American?) ideologies of authenticity and sincerity. The central concern of the discussion is to unpack the ways in which this elaborate construction of "uncomplicated" and "unpretentious," that is un-artful, non-ordered, practices and artifacts, might complicate our sense of the status of both "verbal art" and "disorder" as both a material object of inquiry and as an ideological category and product.
PANEL VI: SPEAKING FOR OTHERS
BRUCE MANNHEIM, DISCUSSANT
"Listening to the heart": a compelling moral discourse of mothering through breastfeeding in La Leche League International publications
Cecilia Tomori, University of Michigan
ctomori@umich.edu
La Leche League International (LLLI), a secular non-profit organization founded by seven Catholic women based in the United States, produces a wealth of publications to convey its "message" of good mothering through breastfeeding. I suggest that in this effort, LLLI relies on two interrelated set of discourses that I will call the "discourses of sentiment" and the "discourses of information." The aim of the discourse of sentiment, in which the "heart" and "listening to the heart" figure prominently, is to generate positive emotions that enable women to breastfeed in a cultural environment not supportive of breastfeeding; while through the discourse of information, the League presents scientific information about breastfeeding. Through its indexical and iconic connections, the heart provides a powerful and deeply historical moral trope that the League can harness to convey its "message." By focusing attention on the primacy of decisions made and actions taken by "listening to the heart," the discourse of sentiment is privileged and the discourse of information ultimately serves to provide further reasons for decisions and actions already known to be morally correct. The specific social positions of the founders as well as those who encounter the League through its publications directly influence the efficacy of these language ideologies. LLLI publications reveal that mothers actively negotiate their own and the "heart's" participant roles in these communications, and thereby continue to mold LLLI's "message" to make it suitable to their own circumstances.
Reviewing claims about the linguistic relativity/ies of intentionality
Ben Smith, University of Chicago
bksmith@uchicago.edu
An increasing number of efforts have been made to correlate various features of language and discourse to the cognitive ability to project another intentionality (a capacity variously construed as a "social cognitive ability" and sometimes more narrowly as a capacity to understand "false beliefs"). A whole range of linguistic features have been argued to have consequences for this ability: certain kinds of syntactic embeddings, "metacognitive vocabulary," and systems of evidentiality and epistemic modality. The current attempt aims to review critically the most prominent types of argumentation for such claims, systematizing them into claims, following Lucy (1996), about the semiotic relativity of the human linguistic capacity, the structural relativity of particular languages, and the functionally relative level of discourse. Taken as a whole, I argue that these claims suffer from many of the same defects Lucy (1992) identifies in regards to the historical attempts at outlining empirical demonstrations of linguistic relativity: in some instances, an unsophisticated concern for linguistically marginal domains ("metacognitive vocabulary" as a lexical field), and, more glaringly, a "domain-centered" approach that uncritically imports recognizably Western ideologies of intentionality (in particular, the naive epistemic realism that underlies the notion "false belief"). In my conclusion, I gesture to more defensible accounts of a relativity of intention and briefly consider the methodological difficulties that such a project will encounter.
Towards a new history of the Berlin Light Works
Deanna Poos, University of Michigan
dpoos@umich.edu
The former financial director of the Berlin Light Works, the major light bulb supplier of Eastern Europe from the 1950s to the 1980s, has been commissioned by the German Technical Museum to write a "new history" of his long-time workplace. This paper examines challenges to and acceptance of his history-making authority at a public meeting. At this meeting, before a crowd primarily composed of former employees, the director presented his history for the first time. In the following explosion of commentary, the group debated and ultimately endorsed his version of the factory's history, though never questioning his history-making authority. This paper examines how the author and audience worked together to differentiate outsiders from insiders capable of telling this history, to determine important forces in the factory's history, and to place blame on individuals and historical events for the factory's failure. Throughout the presentation and group discussion, participants repositioned themselves and others relative to events in the factory's development and German history. This paper examines the deeply political and personal aspects of writing history, and the force of affect, biography, and claims of objectivity in public discussion about the past.
Tasting the precipitates of discourse: interactional mise-en-scene and the social work of evidencing historicity
Shunsuke Nozawa, University of Chicago
snozawa@uchicago.edu
My first contact with members of a Japanese citizens' organization Fudangi 'Records of the Everyday' occurred in last July. Like many "citizens' movements" in the 1960s that attempted to mobilize 'ordinary citizens' for political goals, Fudangi, launched in 1968, aims to transform citizens into their own historians taking over the task of historiography from academics. Seeing writing, "like speech," as exercisable by "everybody," Fudangi encourages its members ("friends") to exchange short reportages on the trivia of daily life through the group's organ Fudangi. For Fudangi, the creation of "records" makes possible the foreshadowing of future contexts of reading in relation to which their creators secure the role of 'author' and 'principal' of histories even when they may not 'animate' them. Fudangi aims to create cumulatively an archive of people's histories-writ-strategically-small so as to safeguard potential revisionism � for even the dead will not be safe. I met with a son of Fudangi founder Yoshio Hashimoto (1902-1985), and his wife, at their residence in Hachioji city in west Tokyo, where the movement commenced. The couple have installed in the backyard a storage that houses an archive of Fudangi-related texts and their father's diaries, memoranda, and other items.
I offer one reading of the meeting's interactional textuality by considering its mise-en-scene and the summoning-up of text-artifacts. The revealing of the archive turns the event into one of text-artifact 'tasting,' where the hosts alternate between the roles of 'stagehand' and 'connoisseur,' trying to share with a stranger/philistine the archive as a ground for potential 'friendship.'
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