Monthly Archives: March 2022

Aurora Donzelli on her book, One or Two Words

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One or Two Words

Interview by Nicco La Mattina

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/O/bo68162961.html

Nicco La Mattina: A principle theme running throughout One or Two Words is that of “collective belonging” and how forms of collective belonging are crafted, achieved, maintained, and transformed discursively in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia. What is “collective belonging” and how is this concept developed in One or Two Words?

Aurora Donzelli: You really hit the nail on the head: that collective belonging is indeed a key and perhaps under-theorized theme in my book. One or Two Words draws on almost two decades of intermittent fieldwork in a relatively peripheral region of the Indonesian archipelago to describe how, after the collapse of Suharto’s military regime (a.k.a. New Order), individuals make use of words and things to re-imagine their position within a fast-changing multilingual nation and manufacture new forms of participation in the immediate community of consociates. Since the turn of the millennium, Indonesia has undergone a major transition from a highly centralized autocratic state to a network mode of neoliberal governance. After three plus decades under General Suharto’s authoritarian rule, the Reform Era (or Era Reformasi) has prompted substantial changes, ranging from a gradual but drastic administrative devolution to the privatization of large sectors of the country’s economy. My main goal in this book is to explore how these structural and institutional transformations are at once enabled by and reflected in the open-ended recalibration of the power relations between the national language (Bahasa Indonesia) and a multifarious variety of vernacular idioms and registers. I use the concept of collective belonging as a lens to chart out how my interlocutors in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi craft emergent forms of membership in their daily interactions in both the local community and the post-Suharto nation-state.

But to fully answer your question, I have to make a confession. My use of “collective belonging” is an implicit attempt to suggest an alternative to “identity”—a term I generally try to avoid. My focus on collective belonging is an invitation to look at how individuals use language to variously give shape to their experience of being part of a group, which, far from being a matter of solipsistic self-representations, always entails stance-staking processes and forms of metapragmatic participation in different scales of collective membership. My reservations about “identity” are both theoretical and political. Nowadays, whenever the term is invoked, be it in scholarly debates or quotidian conversations, it has become almost cliché to add that identities are positional, fluid, and intersectional. And, yet, perhaps due to the fact that it originates from the Latin demonstrative pronoun/adjective idem (“the same”), the term seems to inherently aspire to fixity and to imply an entity that remains the same under changing circumstances and situations. Since the mid-1990s, linguistic anthropologists and ethnographers of language have shown how identities are unstable and interaction-specific configurations discursively produced through complex assemblages of multimodal semiotic practices (think, for example, of the work done by Mary Bucholtz, Kira Hall, Penny Eckert, Norma Mendoza-Denton, but also Ben Rampton, Charles Antaki, and Peter Auer, among the others). Such scholarship has enabled us to think in more sophisticated terms about “identity” and represents one of the most significant (and probably under-acknowledged) contributions offered by scholars of linguistic interaction to social theory. And yet, as the term “identity” travels outside the realm of fine-grained analyses of communicative exchange to enter into other domains and debates, some of this sophistication is flattened or even lost.

The contemporary resurge of identity politics displays what to me appears as a problematic proprietary twist and is part of a broader ideological and semiotic shift towards a possessive notion of meaning and an individualist view of the hermeneutic processes of social life. As the Italian hip hop artist Marracash has eloquently put it in his recent song cosplayer: Perché tutto è inclusivo a parte i posti esclusivi, no?/Oggi che tutti lottiamo così tanto per difendere le nostre identità/Abbiamo perso di vista quella collettiva (Because everything is inclusive except from exclusive places, right?/Now that we strive so hard to defend our identities/we have lost sight of the collective). I too have strong reservations against this cultural drift, for it seems to pivot on the model of the contractarian individual and self-contained rational subject underlying most of contemporary public discourse. As a result of these trends, the complexity of a nuanced and positional notion of identity is often reduced to a perfunctory acknowledgment. My emphasis on “collective belonging” is a product of these concerns.

Nicco La Mattina: In your book, you discuss the contestation of “tradition” or “custom” [adat] as a category in colonial, national, and local discourses of differentiation. What is the relevance of discourses about “local traditional culture” and the usage of the regional language (Toraja) in the formation and transformation of forms of sociality?

Aurora Donzelli: I appreciate your question as it underscores the historical dimension of the ethnographic account I sought to provide in my monograph. Archival work has always been a fundamental component of my approach to the study of the interface between language and social relations and speaking as a cultural practice. One or Two Words aims to explore the process whereby my Toraja interlocutors have gradually developed a sense of themselves as an indigenous community. To this end, it is essential to pay attention to historical documents and analyze the cultural politics developed during the one hundred plus years that stretch from the late Dutch colonial period (from early 1900s till the Japanese invasion of 1942), to the post-independence phase (1945-1965), to Suharto’s New Order regime (1966-1998), through the advent of the Era Reformasi. This historical perspective reveals how the production of an earlier discourse of cultural distinctiveness framed through the colonial category of customary traditions (adat) has gradually morphed (during the last two decades) into a self-reflexive cosmopolitan idiom of indigeneity. My account is thus driven by the attempt to combine the longitudinal analysis of these larger discursive formations with the fine-grained analysis of how individuals, during the course of their daily interactions, positions themselves with respect to these different and somewhat coexisting versions of ethno-linguistic distinctiveness.

As Arjun Appadurai suggested, locality should not be equated or reduced to the mere demographic and geographical dimension of a spatially bounded territory, but rather has to be understood as a form of social experience produced through the work of imagination and interaction. One or Two Words explores how people, within the highly multilingual environment of the Toraja highlands (and the Indonesian archipelago at large), enact locality (and broader forms of subjectively experienced groupness) through situated acts of discourse. By attending to concrete instances of communicative exchange, I aim to problematize simplistic sociolinguistic models based on a direct correspondence between language choice and social affiliation. Indeed, participation in a socially shared sense of belonging to a group is hardly an all-or-nothing business. The transcribed excerpts presented throughout the book show how performances of locality may at times result in proud invocations of ethno-linguistic distinctiveness, while, other times, the local language may be presented as an index of provincial backwardness. In a similar fashion, the use of Indonesian is not always and not necessarily an appeal to the higher authority of a supra-local national code. Speakers may switch to Indonesian to assert a peripheral position of metapragmatic criticism against established linguistic hierarchies and thus highlight, in a parodic key, the paradoxes of the rhetoric of development typical of the New Order.

Nicco La Mattina: You mention that the post-Suharto era is often represented as a radical rupture with the past, and yet the discursive and aesthetic forms associated with the New Order proved to be of continuing relevance to your work. How does the idea of “aesthetic crossovers” contribute to understanding the articulation of global processes in a neoliberalizing Indonesia?

Aurora Donzelli: Like my first monograph (Methods of Desire, 2019), One or Two Words revolves around the core questions that have driven my research and my thinking for several years now: To what extent structural changes may reconfigure entrenched linguistic political economies? What happens when the implicit routines informing what Harvey Sacks called “doing being ordinary” are somewhat disrupted by novel political practices and ideologies? How shall we approach from a theoretical and methodological standpoint the relationship between the given (that is, tacit procedures) and the categorical (that is, explicit paradigm shifts)? What units of analysis should we use to describe and understand the linguistic implications of events locally perceived as “reform” of the sociopolitical order? Unlike my previous book, however, the focus here is not so much on the language-mediated shifts in structures of feelings and moral reasoning, but rather on the re-articulation of the relationship between national and local languages in a country renowned for its great linguistic diversity; and on the parallel transformation of forms of political imagination in the aftermath of the collapse of an authoritarian regime.

I use the musicological concept of crossover (understood as the blending of different genres targeted at a new audience) as an allegorical framework to describe the interplay of continuity and change that characterizes present-day Indonesia. Indeed, contrary to the representation of the post-Suharto transformation as radical rupture with the past, the contemporary moment in Indonesia appears as a complex transitional phase, in which different genres and registers overlap, producing unexpected constellations of speech forms and political practices. The Toraja Highlands (and Indonesia at large) have been exposed to apparently contradictory strands of discourse: the promotion of local customs and the diffusion of transnational ideologies of democracy; the celebration of pre-capitalistic communal values and the neoliberal extension of market principles into every aspect of cultural and socio-political life; the push toward political renovation and the revival of indigenous political and linguistic practices. By focusing on the blending of continuity and change, my analysis tries to show how contemporary appeals to transnational discourses of indigeneity should be understood in relationship with (and as a challenge to) pre-existing constructions of the ‘local’ modeled on the cultural politics of colonial and developmentalist regimes. This analytical perspective reveals novel forms of empowering positionality based on a new aesthetics of “the vintage”—mediated by references to early post-colonial discourse and images—and “the peripheral,” expressed through the valorization of regional codes. While, during the New Order, the use of vernacular languages within institutional settings was stigmatized as a marker of backwardness and illiteracy, now the switch to local languages may project a trendy (at once cosmopolitan and indigenous) speaking subject.

Nicco La Mattina: You attend to the distribution and exchange of meat, meals, and cash between landowners and sharecroppers and between islanders and the diasporic community. How does the circulation of material language, cattle, and cash contribute to the production of indigeneity and the cultivation of collective belonging?

Aurora Donzelli: One or Two Words is in strict conversation with the emerging interest in linguistic materialities and the material components of signification, but also with previous studies on the intersection of speech and things (e.g., Malinowski’s Coral Gardens, Nancy Munn’s The Fame of Gawa, Webb Keane’s Signs of Recognition). The different chapters describe how—in the remote and primarily rural region of eastern Indonesia where I conducted my fieldwork—people use spoken words, digitally transmitted messages, cash, and other material things to produce novel ways of imagining the local community and the nation-state. In spite of their apparent geographic isolation, the Toraja have a long history of encounters with exogenous cultural and socio-economic forces, which can be properly understood only if we consider both the circulation of words and the exchange of things. In this perspective, the Toraja highlands should not be seen not a remote region inhabited by an ethno-linguistic and religious minority, but rather as a site of cosmopolitan intersections. By bringing together within the same analytical field linguistic and material activity, the book aims to offer an interaction-centered approach to indigeneity—a semantically and politically complex term whose minimal definition entails material and symbolic forms of attachment to a specific land, collectively imagined as homeland.

As I am further learning through my new project on the relation between language and indigenous foodways among Italian neo-rural entrepreneurs and hobby farmers, objects (e.g., regional food-items, indigenous horticultural varieties, organically produced seeds, etc.) mediate forms of symbolic and material attachment and enable culturally distinctive forms of sociality. In a similar way, in Toraja, material items are key in producing forms of collective belonging and indigenous imaginings. Of special relevance is the local system of ritual gifts and counter-gifts based on the purchase, slaughtering, and exchange of pigs and buffaloes. Regulated through complex social norms, active participation in these exchanges is a sine qua non condition of belonging in the Toraja community. In this light, the Toraja gift system is a core semiotic technology for establishing the individual’s membership within a transnationally imagined local community. To be Toraja means to owe and be owed, and to be implicated in a web of interpersonal expectations that only become visible through funerals, weddings, and house-ceremonies. This powerful social logic constitutes the bedrock of the strict relationship between the Toraja dwelling in the highlands and the large diaspora who live in other Indonesian and overseas locales. Therefore if we want to fully understand the ongoing recalibration of power relations between rural peripheries and global metropoles we need to attend to the semiotic practices of exchange and translation of both words and material objects: how are vernacular idioms converted into national and transnational codes? Which types of (in-person or digitally-mediated) speech acts are needed to exchange the meat of ritually slaughtered animals?  How are ritual offerings of pigs and buffaloes translated into monetary equivalents? How is the affective labor of hospitality and social solidarity traded for payments in kind and translated into sharecropping arrangements? To understand the diasporic social connections that structure the Toraja imagined community my ethnographic account seeks to provide snapshots of the actual semiotic labor that people perform in their daily lives as they deal with a complex social grammar of reciprocal exchange.

Nicco La Mattina: In One or Two Words, as in much of your work generally, you attend to translation practices and ideologies about translation, in particular between the national Indonesian language and Toraja, a regional language. What is the role of translation in your work and in the discursive enactment of collective belonging?

Aurora Donzelli: Translation is indeed central to this book and to my work in general, which is, of course, hardly surprising for a linguistic anthropologist working in a highly multilingual environment like Indonesia. This is a very good and extensive question: let me begin by noting that the very title of the book “one or two words” is a somewhat clunky English literal translation of the Toraja expression “sang buku duang kada,” which, in turn, is an imperfect rendering of the Indonesian term “pidato” (“oration,” “public address”). So, in a way, the entire book can be read as an attempt to reflect on the cultural and ethnopramgmatic implications of this lack of direct correspondence. One of the main points that I try to make as I attend to this task is to show how translation cannot be understood as a naturalistic operation undertaken in a political vacuum. As Elinor Ochs noted in her seminal article about the practice of transcription, translation is never a neutral and straightforward endeavor. Not only any actual exercise of translation is always inflected with theoretical goals and assumptions, but translations (even when only potential and imagined) are always embedded within power-laden relations between codes and registers, which inform language ideologies and are affected by larger semiotic ideologies—a term Webb Keane coined to refer to the often implicit but always meaningful and effectual assumptions about what signs are, how they function, and how they are linked to their objects.

Translation is one of the fundamental tropes in the history of anthropology as a discipline. However, I find that, somewhat paradoxically, the linguocentric and philological bend that at times characterizes linguistic anthropological work may occlude our ability to appreciate more inclusive and extensive notions of translation, which encompass not simply translation between idioms, but also between audiences, discursive genres, semiotic modalities, cultural frameworks, pragmatic contexts, and, perhaps even more importantly, between different ideologies and practices of (in)-translatability.From a methodological standpoint, there is a common and often unspoken preference among linguistic anthropologists to prioritize monolingual work in the target language. This, of course, goes all the way back to old debates (such as the one that took place in 1939-1940 between Margaret Mead and Robert Lowie) on “native languages as fieldwork tools” and on the degree of linguistic fluency required by ethnographers. In the highly multilingual environment where I undertook my fieldwork I was often confronted with translanguaging practices whereby my interlocutors would draw upon different codes within their repertoire (Indonesian, English, Bugis, etc.), both during the course of transcription sessions and in casual conversations. Although it meant departing from the imperative of monolingual fieldwork, switching across different languages and metalanguages provided me with valuable insights into the local ideologies of translation, linguistic competence, grammaticalness, and collective belonging. One or Two Words is thus an attempt to explore notions and practices of (in)-translatability as a way to understand the political economies of language and their ongoing recalibration in an Indonesian periphery.

Beth Povinelli on her book, The Inheritance

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The Inheritance

Interview by Randeep Hothi

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-inheritance

Randeep Hothi: The Inheritance is about many things — inter alia, your family’s migration to the US, your two parents and five siblings, childhood in Louisiana, your ancestral village at the juncture between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy, trauma, melancholy, brutality, patriarchy, and (as you say in the preface) what Hortense Spillers calls the American grammar of race. At its most explicit, the book argues that, “Inheritance doesn’t come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.” (p. 315) Elaborating on this, you conclude The Inheritance by explaining that: “While my family’s psychic disturbances are real and undeniable, they lie within a racial and settler infrastructure that dismisses an entire host of systematic social harms. All of us travel along this infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or with both feet on the brakes.” (p. 312)

I think of queer theoretical criticisms of biological kinship, or what you elsewhere have called the “genealogical grid” (Povinelli 2002), and wonder whether The Inheritance might be suggesting a politics of un-inheritance, insofar as this structure of care might be re-made. On the other hand, it seems that our political horizon allows some to un-inherit what others cannot (family, religion, nation, race, and so on). Does The Inheritance point to something like un-inheritance as a project?

Beth: I am not sure in hindsight either one of us will like the words un-inherit and un-inheritance. Their sounds are wrong in an unrecoverable way. But their discordant phonologies touch on, in ways that the terms disinherit and disinheriting do not, crucial issues at the center of The Inheritance and Between Gaia and Ground, both of which came out in 2021. On the surface, Between Gaia and Ground is nothing like The Inheritance. It is a theoretical intervention in how ontological claims about entangled existence are being articulated to human and more-than-human histories of colonialism. I won’t take up space summarizing the details of the argument. But one strand in Between Gaia and Ground may be useful here, namely, the contrast I draw between the way Édouard Glissant begins Poetics of Relation and the way Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari begin What is Philosophy? The latter asks what should be the proper relation between disciplines (philosophy, science, and the arts) and their productions (concepts, functions, affects). The former begins on a slave ship in the middle of the Atlantic in order to anchor a theory of Relation to the play between the specific and infinite differences that emerged from the belly of this monstrous trade, including how this place changed our concept-work. I suppose it should not surprise me how tightly connected the two books are, given they were being completed at the same time. Still, it wasn’t really until I was talking with my friend, the wonderful curator, Vivian Ziherl, that I really thought how much both books are born along by the same question—namely, how do we anchor specific inheritances to the ongoing spiraling sedimentations of the Indigenous and Black Atlantic and Pacific?

So, yes, The Inheritance stages my family’s history—the affects and narratives about our ancestral village—in order to unwork their affective, social, economic, ecological common sense. It tries to do so by articulating the stories little Elizabeth hears about her village to the racial and colonial worlds she is actually living in. The specificities of the family histories sketched in The Inheritance act as a sort of limit case. How do I frame the disturbances that rumbled through my family based on their dispossession in relation to the dispossessions they were able to take advantage of without thought? How do we tell these stories in such a way that they do not reinforce the white nativism running rampant in the US and Europe or the soft sell of DNA capitalism? It’s all too easy to reduce such stories to something like, “See we were also dispossessed.” How to produce, instead, a framework in which one feels the deep history of dispossession that marked Europe’s emergence from within its colonial actions, and yet still demonstrate how these European dispossessions are connected to the great machinery of settler capitalism? How are Europe’s dispossessed related to that slave ship whether or not they were steering it, landing on Plymouth Rock, or fleeing endless European wars. All the violence in the book is meant to stage a simple question. What do you do with violence done to you?

The great unsaid of the book is, of course, the nearly thirty-year old relation I have with my Belyuen/Karrabing family, colleagues. I mention Belyuen once in The Inheritance, near the end of Gramma’s section (“Then you died. Then Papa died. By that time, I was far away. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Belyuen, Australia”). My earliest conversations with now deceased Belyuen women were about their lands and how they “picked them up” through kinship with and descent from specific placed based therrawin (Dreamings, clan totems), and how one could come to belong to a place through mirrh (conception spirits). I have written about this in other places—especially in Labor’s Lot and The Cunning of Recognition. When they asked me where my family was from, I sketched out my family’s history, some of which you see in The Inheritance. I talked about how Povinellis and Ambrosis, like many families from the region had, and still have, clans; how I am a Simonaz Povinelli through my grandfather; and that my Gramma was a Bartolot Ambrosi. When a group of Karrabing travelled to Carisolo in 2020—Linda Yarrowin Rex Sing, Aiden Sing and I—we had a good chuckle watching the village genealogist work with me on my clan lineage. So, contrary to a critique of genealogy as such, we found a commonality in clan- and place-based forms of belonging.

But the genealogical grids that we met each other through were refracted. How to say this? Even as we found a space of shared relation to clan-based place-belonging—my family has clans too; my family belonged to land in common too; my family was dispossessed by the unfolding tsunami of European capital too—it was also easy to see that another grid disarticulated this relation, namely the racial grid of white supremacy and settled colonialism. Linda Yarrowin and I are leading a Karrabing project that emerged from our visit to Carisolo. We are calling it the “two clans” project. It tracks how my family clans and Karrabing Indigenous clans were inserted into the infrastructures of settler liberal capitalism. We aren’t thinking of it as a comparative history of abstracted forms, but a history of how these different clans maneuvered within the very different opportunities afforded to them. For example, “Povinelli” emerged as a cognomen, in the mid to late 15th century. The first clans of Povinelli, including the Simonaz, emerged at the turn of the 18th century. Family lineage and clans were important in Trentino in part because of system of semi-autonomy governance that emerged in 12th century, called the carte di regola system. In the carte system, male heads of families, cognomen and then clans, were given the power to decide who was part of the vicini and who was a stranger and thus who and how they could use common lands and smaller private gardens. When Napoleon conquered the region in the turn of the 19th century, he abrogated the carte di regola system in order to free the region of feudalism. We were freed from our common freedom so we could possess ourselves as individualized subjects and other things as purchasable objects. Of course, what happened was that others with capital swooped in and bought village lands and resources forcing villagers into intensive wage labor. Nice studies have been done showing the effects on local mortality—it plummets. By the early to mid 1900s, the Simonaz and Bartolot clans are largely gone from Carisolo, no longer able to survive within the village. They take up knife grinding. This is where The Inheritance commences.

Of course, at the same time that Napoleon is liberating us from our autonomy, he is refusing to allow Haitians to be liberated from their enslavement. The Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard puts the difference perfectly. Europe’s dispossessed become proletarianized, and as proletariats and then petite bourgeoisie my ancestors made a beeline to the lands of the Seneca. Europeans did not merely dispossess Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples, they tried to exterminate them. As my ancestors are flocking into Seneca lands in Buffalo, New York, the first settlers are reaching Darwin having poisoned, shot, and interned a multitude of Indigenous people along the way. As my family is being inserted into whiteness, Karrabing families are struggling to survive within it. In other words, the two clans project is a sort of prologue to The Inheritance even as The Inheritance is a sort of prologue to my relation to Belyuen/Karrabing. When placed together the American grammars of race meet Australian grammars of settler colonialism.

But I want to come back to what you quoted above about the structures of care. These weren’t the actual final words of the book. The last words are, “My Gramma offered me an avenue into this insight. It took many others to force me to begin to use it.” I think these words are as crucially important as the ones that come before then. It wasn’t the responsibility of these Belyuen women to educate me. But equally, I did not educate myself. I think these two points are important for all the reasons, issues, raised in the Act III, namely—and this is hardly a new insight—at the core of settler and racial power is the amnesia, blindness, and disregard it produces for those who benefit from it. On the one hand, this structural blindness was turbo charged in my family because of the intensity of our own dispossession narratives. On the other hand, this blindness is just a typical feature of the US grammar of race.

Randeep Hothi: If you are interested in learning more, I want to direct readers to check out the full film version of The Inheritance for a limited time here. I also direct readers to check out Professor Povinelli’s podcast with New Books in Anthropology and interviews with Duke and Columbia.

And for more of this interview — go to this link.

Beth Derderian takes the page 99 test

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Why do some things count as art and go in museums, and other things don’t?

“Exhibition organizers in the UAE often requested proof of citizenship status as part of open call or exhibition applications, a primary and material instance where citizenship status came to the fore in the art community. Curators revealed that their supervisors leaned on them to increase the visibility of Emirati artists, whether by restricting funds or by ‘suggestion.’”

Page 99 meets Ford’s test: it discusses citizenship, hierarchy and power (here in terms of visibility), and art in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which were key themes in my dissertation, “Displaying Culture: The Politics of Art, Liberalism, and the State in the UAE.” I wrote about the politics of art-making and exhibiting in the UAE during a decade of widespread transformation, between the Emirati government’s 2006 announcement that they would build a Louvre and a Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s 2017 opening.

“Corinne, another curator, remarked that she was encouraged to show ‘only 100% citizens’… those who possessed both an Emirati passport and khulasat qaid”

 In the UAE, one is only a citizen if they hold both a family card (called a khulasat qaid), tracing their paternal lineage to a recognized Emirati family, and an Emirati passport. Showcasing artwork made by Emirati citizens was important to the state’s larger project of presenting a civilized, cultured state to play suitable host to a Louvre and a Guggenheim. Many of my interlocutors were not citizens, but had resided in the country for much – if not all – of their lives, and it was their work, both artistically as well as professionally, that laid most of the foundation of the UAE’s burgeoning art scene. Some variation of this tension over belonging and representation – whose art counts as real art, both historically and in the present? Whose work will be exhibited? Who represents the Emirati nation? – undergirds every chapter of the dissertation, and remains at the core of my research.

Beth Derderian. 2019. “Displaying Culture: The Politics of Art, Liberalism, and the State in UAE.” Northwestern University, Phd.

Anna Marie Trester on her book, Employing Linguistics

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Interview by Ilana Gershon

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/employing-linguistics-9781350137950/

Ilana Gershon: In writing a book about how linguists get jobs outside of the academy, what kinds of misreadings or misconceptions were you trying to avoid?

Anna Marie Trester: By sharing stories that focus on moments where people really come alive in their work, I hope to give a glimpse to the multifaceted, complex, and challenging nature of the myriad worlds of work (both “outside” and inside the academy) where linguists are finding professional expression of their skills and training. I want to active dispel the misconception that working as a professor is the only kind of meaningful work for someone with a PhD in our field.

In the book, I explore the difference between working like a linguist, and working as a linguist.  Most of us won’t have the job title “linguist,” but that doesn’t mean that we won’t be addressing important challenges, and using our brains, and working with smart colleagues and collaborators.  Nor does it mean that we can’t bring specific skills and abilities that we cultivated over the course of academic study.

NB: I specifically profile some people in the book who work as linguists, but I bring focus to how they work and think like linguists within these jobs. I like to find unusual ways that our ways of thinking can show up and shape how we work (what we choose to focus on, how we frame problems, and so on).

Ilana Gershon: What aspects of people’s Phd training or experiences working as a professor proved helpful to them in these other jobs?

Each of the approximately 40 stories builds around a spark – something that I heard as a listener when the teller really came alive as they talked with me. Many of these sparks had to do with content-area knowledge, for example micro-level linguistic features like “adjacency pairs” – which knowledge comes to bear in work in conversation design work for artificial intelligence; or more macro-level questions like ensuring language access. Other north stars pointed to broad social aims like making workplaces more equitable and inclusive, looking for ways to make our field anti-racist, and confronting legacies of white supremacy and sexism. Still other linguists really shone when they talked about job-crafting (actively choosing and shaping jobs) to have more time or flexibility for family or work-life balance.   

I should mention, I was insistent on the ambiguity in the word “employing” for the title of the book because I wanted to include examples of people using linguistics outside contexts of work. There are stories of self-advocacy at the doctor’s office, or speaking up on the bus when the linguist heard hate-speech being used during the course of everyday commuting. I see value in these moments of employing linguistics as well.

Ilana Gershon:  What would you like people to know about LinkedIn as a medium?

Anna Marie Trester: That it’s a great research tool.  I was talking to a history PhD the other day who was telling me that she’s interested in UX research, but all the positions listed social science disciplines, and she wanted to know how humanists made themselves interesting to employers in this sector.  I fired up LinkedIn and popped in search terms like “history” “humanists” “user experience” and all these really interesting people with really interesting-sounding jobs returned.  Those are the people to whom she needed to bring that question. 

When it comes to LinkedIn, I find many academics to be overly focused on the profile and being found, when it is at least (if not more) about using LinkedIn to find things: conversations that you might want to join, events to attend, people to connect with, updates about your network, etc. etc.

One last thing (I can’t help myself – I love to talk about LinkedIn!) there is no better source of data for professional self-presentation. Say you’re applying to work at an organization like The Wikimedia Foundation. You can go on LinkedIn and find the linguists who work there and see how they describe their background, their experience, their current tasks.

Ilana Gershon: What should people know about how informational interviews function as a genre?

Anna Marie Trester: In the book, I use the metaphor of “charting the constellations” to make sense of all of the activities that professionals do as part of career development, activities like self-reflection and yes, the all important informational interviews. For those of you who haven’t heard the term: informational interviews are conversations with people about their work. And the bottom line is that you need to do a lot of them before you start to see patterns. Informational interviews only really become helpful in sense-making (giving you perspective and clarity) when you have much fodder for reflection and can put what you learn from these conversations into context with what they reveal to you about your own interests and curiosities. They also give you feedback on how you are likely to be understood and valued in fields of interest, which can then point you towards organizations, people, and projects that inspire you to learn more.  

Ilana Gershon:  What do you wish academic advisors knew about how their graduate students could get jobs outside of the academy?

Anna Marie Trester: I wish advisors would approach finding jobs as a research project, and frame them as such for their students. The great news is that we are very well-trained as researchers! There just are different sources of data when it comes to learning about career – alumnae being probably the most valuable one. And because it takes very little effort to keep track of all the places graduates go after they leave campus thanks to LinkedIn, I wish more professors would take a few minutes when people are graduating to make that connection (so that they can invite them back to talk to students about their work down the road).

I wish more advisors would encourage their students to take advantage of the expertise on campuses over at the career centers and alumni offices. Simply helping students formulate better questions would go such a long way. Just as one would advise someone formulating an actionable research question for a thesis or dissertation project, students need to move from “how do I find a job in industry?” to a question like “where could I find application of my research in language and gender in public policy world?” Just like a good lit review, researchers will know that they are getting somewhere when they start to get to the same source multiple ways!

Danko Šipka on his book, Lexical Layers of Identity

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Lexical Layers of Identity

Author Interview by Nikolina Zenovic

Nikolina Zenovic: You have written extensively on lexicography, lexicology, and lexical conflict, particularly in the context of Slavic languages. How does Lexical Layers of Identity build from your previous work? Also, could you please summarize your main argument in Lexical Layers of Identity for readers who are less familiar with Slavic languages and linguistics?

Danko Šipka: This book is a direct product of years of my work on compiling various dictionaries and studying how the lexicons of various Slavic languages interact with their respective cultures. The main claim that I am advancing in this monograph is that the vocabulary of our first language (and then of any other languages that we speak) gives us an identity of its own, independent of a myriad of other identities that we may possess. There are three major ways in which the vocabulary of our languages assigns an identity profile to us. First, there is what I call the deep layer of identity. It concerns, among other things, the way in which our words carve out the conceptual space of our language. For example, Slavic speakers do not have to differentiate between foot and leg, hand and arm, finger and toe, skin and leather, and so on, as they can use one word for each of the aforementioned pairs of words in English. On the other hand, some Slavic languages will have four words for the English verb to go (depending on whether the action is repeated or not and whether you are going on a means of transportation or on foot). These, and many other distinctions, are deeply rooted, and the speakers and language authorities alike do not have any agency in modifying them. The second lexical layer of authority is the incorporation of the vocabulary into various cultural circles. I call it the exchange layer. This layer of identity is a result of the historical development of languages and their cultures. Slavic languages are mostly defined by borrowings from Western European languages (most notably German, French, and relatively recently English). Many of these words come from the common European Greek-Latin heritage. Some Slavic languages are additionally marked by Near Eastern words (most of which came with the mediation of the Turkish language). In this layer of identity, we are marked by the cultural circle to which we belong. Despite the anti-European sentiment in some Slavic cultures, the identity that Slavic vocabularies give us in this aspect is clearly pan-European. Finally, there is the surface lexical layer of identity, which is defined by the prevailing attitudes of the speakers toward linguistic norms. One can see how this identity can be different when comparing the English-speaking cultures, where linguistic authorities are unknown with Slavic cultures, where linguists are rock stars. While the norms of the standard varieties of English have been maintained by an army of copy editors, teachers, lexicographers, and so on, without any generals, the presence of linguistic authorities in Slavic cultures is very prominent. This prevailing attitude toward the sources of linguistic authority (whether it is the acceptance or contestation of their proposals) contributes to the linguistic profile of the speakers of Slavic languages and thus to their linguistic identity.

Nikolina Zenovic: What motivated you to pursue this project and focus specifically on lexical layers as opposed to other linguistic layers of identity?

Danko Šipka: There is a distinction in historical linguistics between internal linguistic history (those changes in a language that cannot be tied to processes in the society, for example, the fact that a language loses diphthongs, such as sounds like ou in the English word about) and external linguistic history (those changes that result from processes in the society, for example, lexical borrowing which is typically a consequence of conquest, patterns of economic dominance, and so on). The fact is that the lexicon is inextricably embedded into the fiber of the societies that use the language or languages in question. Other linguistic structures may contribute to the linguistic identity of a person (for example, the sounds of Slavic languages may sound to the speakers of non-Slavic languages like rustling leaves). However, given that the lexicon is the main interface between the language and society, it is that segment of our language that is the primary source of our linguistic identity. In my latest book titled The Geography of Words I have shown (in an accessible way and using material from various languages across the globe) that it is impossible to separate the lexicon from the non-linguistic entities to which its words refer.

Nikolina Zenovic: Lexical Layers of Identity concentrates on multiple Slavic languages. Why did you decide to focus broadly on Slavic languages rather than discuss a particular Slavic language? What advantages did this comparative approach bring to your findings?

Danko Šipka: Slavic languages are interesting, especially given that they relate to Slavdom, a type of identity that is different from ethnic identities of any given Slavic language. The word Slav is not exactly a household name in English-speaking cultures. A much higher name recognition is enjoyed by the subordinated concept of Russians and superordinated concept of Eastern Europeans. In the perception of an average English-speaking person, Russian culture eclipses all other Slavic cultures by the size of the country, the number of its speakers, and the prominence of Russia’s historical figures, from Ivan the Terrible to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and cultural icons, from Pyotr Ilyich Tschaikovsky to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. At the same time, Russians and other Slavs are typically construed as Eastern Europeans. In addition to the Slavs, the category of Eastern Europeans encompasses a diverse assembly of non-Slavic languages, such as Lithuanian, Latvian, Romanian, Albanian, Hungarian, and Estonian. This perception might have been amplified by the fact that all major Slavic nations were a part of the so-called Eastern Bloc during the 1945-1989 Cold War period. It is certainly so that each particular Slavic language gives its speakers an identity of its own. However, there are also elements of identity that Slavic languages share across the board. Focusing on Slavic languages gives us thus an opportunity to study what they have in common and what differentiates them. More importantly, it enables us to concentrate on linguistic identity by detaching it from ethnic identity of various Slavic nations. How linguistic identity is separate from the ethnic ones, can be seen in the case of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants to the United States. There are places of high concentration of these speakers (such as Brighton Beach, New York, also known as Little Odessa, and Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, nicknamed Little Moscow), where they maintain their Russian language as a clear maker of their identity, although they are not ethnically Russians. They do have Russian and Slavic linguistic identities without Russian or Slavic ethnic identities.

Nikolina Zenovic: In your elaboration of the deep layer, you provide rich data sets detailing lexeme- and lexicon-based approaches to studies of this layer of lexical identity. The chapter “Stability and Change” notes that such deep layer analyses can be used to study dialects as well as standard languages. According to your findings, how might methodological approaches differ when studying dialects compared to other dialects or the standard language? Can analyses of the exchange or surface layers also contribute to studies of dialects?

Danko Šipka: In my book, I focused mostly on standard languages, given that the vast majority of speakers of Slavic languages command the standard language variety. This is a consequence of high-achieving educational systems in all Slavic countries. Some of the speakers of standard languages are also speakers of dialects, but many of them will be just the users of the standard language variety. In the deep layer, dialects can certainly make distinctions in the vocabulary, have different associations tied to the words, use different idioms, etc. A wealth of dialectal dictionaries and atlases in Slavic languages attest to that. For example, you can see it in this wonderful recent Macedonian atlas. For dialects, the data from this layer comes from previous language documentation and from interviewing the speakers. If the dialect in question is well-documented in previous work, the methodology of studying this layer is not substantially different than in the standard language form. If, however, there is no previous documentation, then surveys of speakers take a much more prominent role than when studying the standard language. The exchange layer is also important for dialects as they also borrow words. For example, the Kajkavian, northern Croatian dialects, contain a substantial portion of German and Hungarian loanwords. On the other hand, the Čakavian, southern Croatian dialects, have numerous Venetian borrowings. This makes these two dialects spoken next to each other mostly incomprehensible. The surface layer is about the dynamics between linguistic authorities and the general body of speakers. As such, it is less relevant for dialects, where there are no professional linguists, university professors, various bodies such as academies of sciences, and so on. Linguistic authority in dialects is much more difficult, if not impossible, to trace.

Nikolina Zenovic: Your discussion of attitudes in Chapter 12 highlights speakers’ perceptions of lexical macro maneuvers. Can you elaborate on the agency of speakers in responding to shifts in value judgments proposed by elites in this layer? What advice or methodological approaches would you further recommend to students interested in understanding speakers’ attitudes?

Danko Šipka: There is a late medieval Latin proverb, Caesar Non Supra Grammaticos – the emperor is not above grammarians. It goes back to the situation in the early 15th century when the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund unsuccessfully tried to intercede into a linguistic dispute. In Slavic languages, some grammarians would like to be emperors, but one should expand this proverb and say that the grammarians are not above the speakers. One can try to enforce certain political solutions on languages, but if the speakers find them unacceptable, they are destined to fail. This disconnect between normative enforcement and real-life has led to a rather curious situation in Croatia, involving Serbian and Croatian, the two standard language varieties that are less different than British and American English. There was a 1989 movie titled Rane (Wounds), a rather gritty drama about the underworld of the Serbian capital Belgrade. The Croatian distributor decided to subtitle the Serbian movie, as it is customary to do with other foreign languages. The result of this decision was that the viewers all around Croatia were bursting with laughter while watching a very serious movie. Most of the time, the “translation” looked like close captioning for the hearing impaired. The viewers found those funny, just like those instances where there were some differences between the two varieties – even in these cases, the words from the Serbian variety were perfectly comprehensible. Imagine having a British movie subtitled in “the American language.” Needless to say, this Croatian movie-theater subtitling was done once and never again.

For years, Slavic languages were used in authoritarian societies, first royalist and right-wing dictatorial, then communist. Accordingly, there was a top-down transmission of linguistic authority. Things have started to change some thirty years ago. It seems that speakers of Slavic languages and Slavic linguistic authorities alike are becoming increasingly aware that a top-down, authority-based model of maintaining the standard language variety needs to be replaced with a partnership, feedback-based model.

I would see this shifting landscape of how linguistic authority is transmitted as promising ground for further research. Those who are interested in the attitudes toward linguistic authority have a variety of datasets available. There are numerous newspaper columns, visual media shows, social media groups, and so on, where these attitudes are exhibited. The speakers of Slavic languages maintain a keen interest in the issues around the standard language variety. So, there are rich datasets waiting for their miners. Needless to say, surveys of the speakers and linguistic authorities alike are also a rich source of data. In that regard, there is a silver lining to this Covid 19 pandemic. We are so used to doing everything online that it is increasingly easy to survey the participants from all around the world from one’s own home using Survey Monkey, Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, and so on.

Bonnie Urciuoli reflects on her new co-edited volume, The Spanish Language in the United States

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https://www.routledge.com/The-Spanish-Language-in-the-United-States-Rootedness-Racialization-and/Cobas-Urciuoli-Feagin-Delgado/p/book/9781032190556

The Spanish Language in the United States: Racialization, Rootedness, and Resistance, edited By José A. Cobas, Bonnie Urciuoli, Joe Feagin, Daniel J. Delgado, has just been released by Routledge. The project was initiated by Cobas, who stressed the importance of bringing together in one edited volume, the socially rooted nature of Spanish in the U.S., how it has been racialized, and how that racialization has been resisted by its speakers. Hence the volume’s emphasis on the intersection of racialization, rootedness, and resistance in ways not previously dealt with; hence also the volume’s focus on the importance of seeing these processes in relation to the long history of U.S. relations with its Spanish-speaking periphery: its quasi-colonial relations with Mexico and its flatly colonial relations with Puerto Rico.  These concerns come out of previous collaborative writing projects. Cobas, Feagin, and Delgado, along with Maria Chávez, edited the Latino Peoples in the New America: Racialization and Resistance. Cobas and Feagin, both sociologists, have collaborated on multiple works on race and whiteness; Feagin is well known for his work on the white racial frame. With the focus on language in this volume, Cobas invited Urciuoli on board as co-editor.  

This book shows how English became the invisible background and racialized Spanish the visibly marked foreground figure, a process rooted in fifteenth century European colonial expansion and its involvement in the African slave trade. Although Spanish speakers in the U.S. come from a wide range of countries, the U.S. racialization of Spanish-speakers grows specifically from its resulting political, economic, and social relations with Mexico and Puerto Rico. This racialization is a sociohistorical process that takes place when a social group maintains a position of structural dominance (social, legal, political) over another group or groups on the basis of supposedly natural and inherited signs of inferiority. Such signs of difference may be physically visible (skin, hair, facial features), non-visible but assumed (intelligence, character), behavioral (language) and so on; in that sense, such signs of difference are racialized. Once race is assumed, any such signs may be imputed; indeed, racialized people are often assumed, in the absence of material evidence, to have a darker skin tone or a foreign accent. The privileged group uses such signs and their imputed meaning to justify the denial of belonging or participation, oppressing and containing people displaying such signs, especially through use of force. In the United States, those claiming racial privilege have defined themselves as white, and have defined the racially unprivileged in terms of the conditions through which the privileged came into contact with them: as slaves and slave descendants, indigenous people, inhabitants of what had been Spanish colonies, indentured and exploited labor. Hence the white racial frame that assumes white possession of such superior traits as an attractive phenotype, superior language, high morality, intelligence, work ethic, and restrained sexuality and fertility while subordinate racial groups have opposite and inferior traits.

This is what racialization is all about: the mismatch of historical and social reality on the one hand and powerfully held naturalized assumptions on the other. It operates not only through bright lines, but also through misrecognitions and loose alignments, ignoring some things and exaggerating or inventing others, pulling them together in affective associations that routinely overpower facts that are under people’s noses. Realities lose definition and disappear before sets of associations in which the racist gaze seeks a coherence that validates its assumption of power. If the markedness of blackness echoes a past of slavery, in which African-descended people were regarded only as appropriated labor, the markedness of colonized Puerto Ricans and Mexicans (and by extension other Western hemisphere descendants of Spanish settlement) were marked as inhabitants of extensive real estate acquired through conquest, the proper function of which was the enhancement of white U.S. wealth. What the Mexican and Puerto Rican colonial projects did was set the terms for the racialization of Spanish: speakers of Spanish are foreign, dangerous, and invasive, and so is Spanish. Puerto Ricans and Mexicans came to occupy a position of oppressed markedness just short of blackness and by association so generally do Spanish speakers, and Spanish. The realities of their former situation, the events that brought them into the U.S. orbit, the nature of their current lives, and the varieties of Spanish that they speak disappear in the face of whites’ racialized fantasies of language that play out in multiple ways including as public performance by self-styled language police. In the volume’s first chapter, Cobas and Feagin use Bourdieu’s take on the economics of linguistic exchange to examine the assumed authority and unchallenged exercise of whiteness through English and the social dynamics through which the place of Spanish is kept firmly subordinate and silenced, while keeping Anglo language power invisible behind an ideology of language standardization with Spanish accents a particular target. The remaining book chapters provide ethnographic perspectives on rootedness, racialization, and resistance.

The rootedness section opens with the historical, sociological, and language realities of U.S. Spanish in Rosina Lozano’s chapter, “The Early Political History of Spanish in the United States.” Spanish occupied colonial, indigenous, and immigrant since the U.S. began and, in some regions, long before English. Here we see the social and historical realities of Spanish political, economic, legal, and media legitimacy in contrast to white fantasies about English. In “The demography of Latino Spanish speakers in the United States,” Rogelio Sáenz and David Mamani lay out quantitative evidence for structural inequalities affecting Spanish speakers. Pointing out the sheer (and still growing) size of the U.S. Spanish-speaking population and noting their diverse nations of origin, they draw a detailed picture of social and geographical factors shaping Spanish rootedness and retention.

The problem of racialization – in which those realities of rootedness are ignored, reconstructed, or vociferously denied – is taken up in the next section. In “What anti-Spanish Prejudice Tells Us About Whiteness,” Bonnie Urciuoli examines the racialized imagining of Spanish from the perspective of U.S. whiteness, and what that says about white beliefs about race and language. In “A Language-elsewhere: A Friendlier Linguistic Terrorism,” Michael Mena describes a terrorism “friendlier” than that of Spanish as deficient, wrong, and so on, in his description of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley program that aligns a standardized, raceless Spanish with a neoliberal skill set disconnected from indexes of students’ own social realities and only obtainable through the university. The experience and nature of racialization projected onto Spanish speakers is explored by Alessandra Rosa, Elizabeth Aranda, and Hilary Dotson in their chapter, “‘You are not Allowed to Speak Spanish! This is an American Hospital!’” in which unfair treatment connected to accent also correlates with darker skin, education level, marital status, and place of birth, converging in a racialized perception of “accent” as judgment not simply of language but of speakers themselves. In “Black Spanish, White Leanings, Trigueño Mythologies in Puerto Rico,” Michelle Ramos Pelicia and Sharon Elise shift the critical gaze from English to Spanish, deploy a critical sociolinguistic approach that illustrates Spanish’s own European colonial legacy, showing uses of Puerto Rican Spanish discourse that can bring into being and naturalize the social category of blackness.

The final section documents strategies of resistance to the racialization of Spanish. Kevin Alejandrez and Ana S.Q. Liberato, in “The Enchantment of Language Resistance in Puerto Rico,” trace the policies and legislation through which American colonial administrators from 1898 tried to instantiate English in Puerto Rican institutional life as a mechanism of control and sign of loyalty, policies and legislation that were resisted and ultimately failed. In “Subtracting Spanish and Forcing English: My Lived Experience in Texas Public Schools,” José Angel Gutiérrez describes his acquisition of a Mexican American activist consciousness from childhood in Cristal (Crystal City), Texas (home of the La Raza Unida political party which Gutiérrez co-founded) where the white teachers and administrators in the segregated school system systematically and often punitively disvalued Spanish and every other aspect of being from Mexico.

Throughout the book, readers see how racialized language ideologies (like other ideologies of race) depend on loosely affiliated notions that reinforce the perspective of privileged whites played out in attacks on Spanish speakers, oppressive language policies in business and education, even neoliberally disguised as a Spanish from nowhere with nothing to do with racial outsiders, sending the message that if one were not born white, one should learn to act white and not do things pointing to one’s racial otherness.