Tag: language revitalization

Catherine Rhodes on her book, Undoing Modernity

July 7th, 2025

https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330579/

Interviewed by Kristina Jacobsen

Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up two longstanding interests of anthropology: Indigeneity and modernity. Did you originally set out to study these topics or did they emerge through your research process? How is your book pushing beyond current thinking in anthropology on these two age-old topics?

Catherine Rhodes I did not set out to study Indigeneity and modernity specifically; these emerged as topics in my research. I originally set out to study whether there was a linguistic relativity effect from teaching linguistics about the Maya (Yucatec) language in the Maya language. Linguistic relativity refers to the idea that language, culture, and thought are in a mutually informing relationship; loosely, it is the study of how language and its use influences behavior, including thought. This led me to discover that there were more than the two widely known registers of Maya—the so-called purified version (jach maaya) and the so-called mixed version (xe’ek’ maaya)—and that Maya linguistics is not just an academic project but also a political project.

I was also beginning to see how this academic-political project depended upon modern ideas about who and what count as Maya. Depending upon the scale or interlocutor, Maya-ness was sometimes construed as Indigenous; at other times it was not. Maya-as-Indigenous is a useful frame when people want to engage in projects that have a broad-scale of recognizability, particularly within the Mexican neoliberal nation-state. I was finding that, the widely circulating stereotypes about who and what count as Maya typically associate “real,” “true,” or “authentic” ‘Maya’ (language, culture, or practices) with the past and critique present people and their practices as supposedly mixed or inauthentic versions of some past ideal. This often leads people to tap into and mobilize those widely circulating stereotypes to achieve recognition, particularly in institutionalized spaces, like government grant programs or state universities. Yet, I was observing how some students and faculty in the undergraduate program at the university where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork were doing something different. They were rejecting the dichotomies that modern thinking presented: past=authentic; present=corrupted. Instead, they were affirming their own and others’ contemporary practices as Maya; how they speak today, how they dress, and the activities they engage in (for example, doing linguistics) were being affirmed as Maya. The logics they were using refused to engage modern thinking, which assumed a rupture with the past and choosing between being Maya and being modern.

It was through these alternative logics—what I call ‘demodern’ logics—that I saw how modernity was part of how Maya was made and how Maya as this recognizable category of Indigeneity within Mexico (and beyond) was part of the neoliberal logics of the nation-state: Inclusion without representation (following Deloria). Understanding the logics of Maya-ness as modern also required me to engage with colonial theory for, as many critical Latin Americanist thinkers (such as Dussel, Kusch, Fals Borda, Gonzales Casanova, Ribeiro, Escobar, Mignolo, Quijano, and Walsh) argue, modernity’s onset lies in the colonization of what is now the Americas, not in the Enlightenment as is popularly thought. Thus, modernity and coloniality are intertwined and co-constitutive. If this is true, as I believe it is, then decolonial projects that proceed under modern logics are destined to fail. Thus, I propose demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality. Taking language politics projects—like creating dictionaries or writing or interpreting standards—as an example, these are premised upon modern ideas about the Maya language. But this modern version of the language is not what people use in their daily activities; thus, it contributes to the idea that they do not really speak or know the language. When, instead, vernacular language and other practices are taken seriously as Maya without their authenticity coming into question, then it changes who can engage in a range of activities. It is this shift—away from institutional lip service (or worse, purist language policies and practices that actively drive language disuse) and toward affirming and institutionalizing vernacular practices—in which my interlocutors are engaged and which I show is part of what is essential to a future for Maya people, language, and their practices.

Kristina Jacobsen: You are an interdisciplinary scholar, and your book engages interdisciplinary scholarship. Tell me about why you chose to engage the literatures you draw from in the book and what you hope to contribute by drawing them into conversation with one another.

Catherine Rhodes: Yes, I am a semiotic and linguistic anthropologist and an anthropologist of education; I consider myself firmly rooted in both anthropology and education, hence my decision to study an educational context ethnographically. In order to conceptualize much less to conduct my field research, I needed to have a firm foundation in sociocultural and linguistic anthropologies and the anthropology of education, knowledge of the history of the Yucatan Peninsula and also how the Peninsula relates to Maya peoples and their histories in other parts of Mesoamerica, historical and contemporary scholarship on the Maya language and its speakers and their practices, as well as an understanding of learning theories and pedagogical approaches in the context of higher education, which is where I was primarily conducting participant observations. I also needed to speak Spanish (Yucatecan) and Maya (Yucatec) and to understand linguistics, given that my study was sited in an undergraduate program in linguistics. This was all very well, but as I was reanalyzing my data in the writing of this book, I found the need to also engage modernity theory, which as I mention above, led me to (de)colonial theory and the relationship of both to the idea of Indigeneity in the Americas.

Much of the scholarship in Native American and Critical Indigenous Studies carefully details how coloniality and modernity are intertwined and how both make the category Indigenous. This also necessitated engagement with literature on neoliberalism and nation-states as well as with how Folklore Studies engages ideas about authenticity. I used linguistic anthropology as a guiding lens through this diverse literature because it provides me with a framework for understanding language use as a form of social action in the world; as something we do, not something we have. It also provides me with the concept of language ideologies, which refers to the relationship between people’s ideas about language, its practice, and its users and observable examples of these in the world; language ideologies link these and through interpretive and evaluative judgments. Language ideologies helped me to show how linguistics specifically and academia more broadly are necessarily political projects and what the stakes are for my interlocutors who are engaged in doing academics in Maya. I believe that it was precisely engaging this interdisciplinary scholarship that allowed me to theorize demodernity as the counterpart to decoloniality and to understand how the work in which my interlocutors are engaged is producing this new theoretical perspective in praxis (that is, the wedding of theory and practice). It also allowed me to see how some Maya scholars in Guatemala have been using demodern logics for decades, but they had never been framed as such.

By bringing these diverse literatures and ethnographic/geographic contexts into conversation, I hope to show the value in thinking across geopolitical regions and languages in our scholarly engagement as well as in interdisciplinary ways, for this opens the door to pushing our thinking past the logics in which we were trained and typically operate and toward new logics that create room for conceptualizing the world differently. This is so important, I believe, because what is at stake under modernity/coloniality for Indigenous people (not all of whom would use this word) is precisely the present and possible future.

Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up the concepts of time, space, and scale, key analytics in linguistic anthropology. You argue that the project your interlocutors are engaged in—centering their Maya-ness in the present—is not a utopian project. You also argue that it is one that hinges upon its ability to be “scaled up.” Tells us more about how you think this scaling-up might happen, why it is not a utopian project, and what consequences both have for your interlocutors.

Catherine Rhodes: The demodern project in which my interlocutors are engaged is taking place primarily in one undergraduate program in one university on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Of course, some of my interlocutors are trying to spread their demodern thinking beyond this undergraduate program, such as in their binational collaboration with Guatemalan scholars or in the language workshops they offer for schoolteachers in the Yucatan State’s capital, Mérida. For example, the proposal that people be called máasewáal (‘Indian, peasant’, from Nahuatl) instead of Maya circulates beyond the campus already. The question is, can the demodern logics that students and faculty are employing—affirming vernacular practices in the present—begin to circulate more widely as well? So far, we do not have good evidence of such projects being institutionalized beyond this one undergraduate program. I am part of a binational, multidisciplinary project team that is trying to create a dictionary that is developed using demodern logics. It would document the breadth of variation—not prescribe a norm—and provide examples from use in daily life. Once funded, we hope this project will be part of scaling up these new logics of understanding the Maya language, which, of course, we hope will also have effects on how people understand Maya language speakers. We hope the project will influence widespread ideologies about what counts as the Maya language and who count as Maya speakers and foster increased use, in all its variation. By scaling up, I am following Carr and Lempert (2016) in the idea that scaling is something that one does and that scales do not exist a priori (Wortham 2012); instead, resources are construed as of a scale through a process of scaling. I understand scaling to be a shift in indexical order (Rhodes and Leiter n.d.). This refers to the process whereby a sign can become (re)contextualized, thus shifting the social-organizational context within which the sign points to its object. Scaling up considers whether resources used to construe some social phenomenon as meaningful can circulate more widely and hold that same kind of meaning for a greater number of people across different contextualizations.

My colleagues and I do not describe the slow scaling up of demodern logics about the Maya language, Maya people or their practices as a utopian project precisely because demodern logics attempt to obviate the kinds of modern ruptures that utopianism engages. For example, scholars like Joanne Rappaport, in her discussion of the intercultural project in which her Nasa collaborators are engaged, or Arturo Escobar (2007), in his discussion of the “political desire” reflected in his Afro-Columbian intellectual-activist interlocutors’ alternative modernities, express a “utopian imagination” not, as Escobar points out, “a statement about the real, present or future” (206). Instead, my interlocutors are trying to center the here-and-now; to make a statement about the real present, and the kind of future that could make possible. Here, I am thinking with Jessica Hurley’s (2020) work. She describes how apocalypse, as a narrative device, “negates both the future and the present’s claim upon the future” (29). Apocalypse creates a rupture between the present (and any claims on the future) and the past; in this way, it is modern. The counterpoint to utopia—dystopia—“see[s] the future evolving unavoidably from the worst conditions of the present” (Hurley 2020, 30). “Instead, apocalyptic present‑ing ‘imagine[s] a present that neither abandons the past nor is determined by it’” (Hurley 2020, 30 in Rhodes 2025, 50). This creates the possibility for stepping outside of a path in which “…pasts are defined by destruction and…futures promise to perpetuate that destruction” (Hurley 2020, 30; see also Kolopenuk 2020; Povinelli 2011; Sam Colop 1996).

Kristina Jacobsen: You have a decades-long relationship learning and speaking Spanish as a second language and have also studied Maya for many years. Can you talk about your felt experience of speaking Spanish, and then of speaking Maya? Do they feel different in your body and in your mouth? How does speaking English, Spanish, and Maya feed into your affective approaches to the research we read about in your book?

Catherine Rhodes: It is in fact my relationship with speaking Spanish that led me to graduate school in linguistic anthropology. Since becoming a Spanish speaker—at age 16—I had a persistent feeling that I was someone else when I spoke English or Spanish. My experience of the world was different and led me to want to understand why. My novice search on this topic eventually led me to the theory of linguistic relativity and to John Lucy’s work and to the field of linguistic anthropology. When I found linguistic anthropology, I felt that I had found something that I had been looking for for a long time. I applied to graduate programs and was fortunate enough to work with John in developing a project that addressed some issues raised under the paradigm of linguistic relativity. John and Suzanne Gaskins were also my first Maya language teachers, and they helped me explore the possibilities of conducting research on the Yucatan Peninsula.

When I arrived in Yucatan, I not only had the opportunity to use Maya in daily life, but I was also immersed in Yucatecan Spanish, so my Spanish-language learning continued. Today, my experience with Spanish is full bilingualism with English; it is difficult for me to disentangle these languages in my lived and academic practice—and in fact I am actively working to further entangle them in my teaching in two new bilingual binational linguistic anthropology courses I am developing (more on that below). There were times when I was conducting active fieldwork that I could do all my daily activities in Maya. Once I was on a bus and some French speakers were on the bus. They got off in a small town where I was making a bus transfer. I approached them to say hi and they stared, befuddled. In my head, I had been speaking to them in French (my third language before Maya), but, apparently, I had been speaking to them in Maya. Maya had boxed French out of the way as my third strongest language, and any time I actually produced French, it was riddled with Maya discourse markers. Unfortunately, I am not able to speak Maya on a daily basis now, so my speaking skills are rusty. What is interesting when I speak Maya or Spanish, however, is how my speaking body is read in the world. In Spanish I am so often heard with my interlocutor’s “eyes”—despite speaking Spanish like a Yucateca, I don’t always look the part, so me and my Spanish are often located elsewhere. (For example, as a tall, blonde woman, I’m often asked if I am Spanish or Argentine even though my accent sounds nothing like an accent from these places.) In Maya, my interlocutors so often forgive or ignore my intermediate skills, given that so few foreigners speak Maya. This has led my language use to be read as more expert than that of speakers who have grown up speaking the language, with the consequences of devaluing their everyday speech and, by extension, this can contribute to devaluing those speakers. So much work is done in these different ideological positionings of the speaking body, which is something I attend to in my work and life.

Kristina Jacobsen: How does this project contribute to taking you where you plan to go next?

Catherine Rhodes: This project takes me to two new projects, both of which I have alluded to above.

The first is a dictionary of the Maya language. Currently there are no dictionaries of Maya. There are many books called “dictionaries,” but they are just glossaries that provide word-for-word equivalents in other languages (for example., Spanish, English, French, and so on). My colleagues and I are applying for funding to create a dictionary in Maya that provides definitions in Maya of the Maya-language terms it contains, and which has a Maya-language meta-structure (that is, terms for organizing the dictionary, for classifying parts of speech, and so on). The dictionary will be freely available on the Internet, and it will include sociodemographic and linguistic ideological data about users and use. It will also include audio recordings of examples of use. We plan to collect data in all three Mexican states on the Yucatan Peninsula—Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo—and in previously un- or under-documented micro-regions of these three states. Further, we will develop software for collecting the data for the dictionary and then turning those data into the public-facing dictionary. We will then create a public-facing presentation of our data collection, analysis, and dictionary production process and the open-source software we developed for the project and make these freely available on the web. We will also present on this work in a range of contexts throughout the Americas to share the work and make it available to other language communities to support their own work in creating dictionaries in their languages.

The second project is the creation of linguistic anthropology courses and an introductory book in Spanish. Under a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship during the 2024-2025 academic year, I produced the Spanish-language first-edition of Laura Ahearn’s Living Language, which we are now co-authoring,and pilot tested it in the classroom at a university in Yucatan State. Laura and I are co-authoring the forthcoming fourth edition of Living Language in English as well. We will then have the book and my undergraduate course design in both English and Spanish, which I will use to teach the undergraduate course Language and Culture, on an ongoing basis as a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course between my home university, the University of New Mexico, and collaborative partner in Mexico, the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (UADY), on an ongoing basis. Students will be able to engage the course in English or Spanish or to translanguage between these languages. They will work together on binational projects that employ core concepts in linguistic anthropology. This is a mission-driven project for me as a UNM faculty member, given that New Mexico has the highest percentage per capita of Spanish-speakers of any U.S. state, that UNM is a Hispanic serving institution, and that Spanish-speaking and Hispanic enrollments are growing in academia in the U.S. For students at the UADY, the course provides then with the opportunity to engage their English-language skills on anthropological theory and projects, and it provides access to training in linguistic anthropology in Spanish. Linguistic anthropology is a U.S. phenomenon that has been increasingly growing beyond the U.S.—as we discussed in 2025 at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference in Chicago and at the American Association of Applied Linguistics meeting in Denver. There is great interest in linguistic anthropology in Latin America and Mexico specifically, but faculty are trained in cultural anthropology or linguistics, given that no programs exist in Spanish for training linguistic anthropologists. This course and the new graduate seminar I am developing under the same format, will provide entry points into the literature and practice of linguistic anthropology for Spanish speakers and contribute to training the next generation of scholars who can build programs in linguistic anthropology and develop this field beyond the United States.
Gerald Roche on his book, The Politics of Language Oppression in Tibet

January 6th, 2025

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777783/the-politics-of-language-oppression-in-tibet

Shannon Ward: Your book deals centrally with the biopolitics of language oppression, charting how techniques of governance institutionalize the elimination of Manegacha. In Chapter 6, in particular, you show how biopolitics reaches into interpersonal relationships. I was struck, however, with the book’s opening scene, where a girl insists she understands her father’s Manegacha, and with the survey data you present that emphasizes the enduring significance of Manegacha to its speakers. Do you see any social spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized, perhaps subtly and even in response to efforts for elimination?

Gerald Roche: I think there are still a few social and physical spaces where the value of Manegacha is emphasized. These spaces are really important, because they essentially act as life rafts for the language. Unfortunately, I think they’re also decreasing. Here, I’ll just focus on one example of a physical space.

The most significant space for the language is the four villages where the majority of Manegacha speakers live. I think it’s important to emphasize that people choose to speak the language in those spaces, as a reflection of the values they expressed in the household surveys I conducted. Most adult Manegacha speakers today are at least bilingual, in Manegacha and the local variety of spoken Tibetan. Many of them also know some form of Mandarin as well. So, with the exception of some members of the eldest generation who really rely only on Manegacha to communicate with people, it would be possible for pretty much everyone in those villages to stop using Manegacha with each other, and to communicate only in other languages. I think we need to recognize this for the decision it is, and for the fact that people make it every day, in the context of immense pressure to eliminate Manegacha.

I’m not sure if resistance is the best word to use to describe this situation, however. Resistance, to me, implies a level of collective organization and an explicit oppositional stance of some sort, and I didn’t see much of either of these. So instead, I described that decision as a practice of endurance, taking the term from Elizabeth Povinelli’s work. Although I think that term works fine in the book, more recently I’ve been reading the social movement literature, and there are several useful terms there that apply equally well, such as Asef Bayat’s concept of a non-movement, or the anthropologist Julia Eckert’s concept of practice movements: “forms of unorganized, collective action, which are distinct from conventional social movements in various ways, first and foremost by their direct expression of goals in their practices.”

Villages provide a safe space for these practice movements, where Manegacha speakers have some relief from the relentless everyday discrimination they face from other Tibetans. Of course, those spaces don’t completely isolate the community from those pressures, and that’s why so many families are choosing to withhold Manegacha from their children now. But they do provide some relief. However, the villages are being swallowed up by the growth of a nearby town, and so those safe spaces are being dismantled. That’s partly what the image on the book’s cover shows us – how the presence of Manegacha speaking communities is erased by the construction of Tibetan space and identity.

Shannon Ward: You trace chronological changes from the mid-20^th century, when Manegacha speakers used their language in a rich range of cultural practices, to the present, when dynamics of language oppression overdetermine speakers’ decisions to use Tibetan (or even Mandarin). In Chapter 5, for example, you describe how state-building has advanced elimination. Yet, there are possible worlds where Manegacha could have been included in state-building (pp. 116-117). In these pages, you assert that describing such possibilities helps to illuminate the violence of erasure. Are there instances, however, in which these possibilities are actively articulated or reflected on by Manegacha speakers? And, are there areas outside of the purview of the state where these possibilities could be actualized?

Gerald Roche: Manegacha speakers do articulate these sort of alternative possibilities – not necessarily the full range that I described, but there are examples.

One of the things that came up in my conversations with Manegacha speakers was a range of vernacular writing practices in the language. There’s no standard written form of the language encoded in textbooks or taught in formal contexts. But people in the community have repeatedly been motivated enough to develop their own systems to write the language and use it to communicate with small networks of friends. Some people use Tibetan script, some use Chinese characters, and others use the Roman alphabet.

Another example came from social media. When I started doing this research, just over ten years ago, smart phones and social media were still somewhat recent. There was a fair bit of enthusiasm among Manegacha speakers for making little media clips in the language: dubbing over a cartoon for example. I haven’t been able to see how this has developed since the growth of platforms like Tiktok, and it would be fascinating to see how Manegacha speakers are using that.

Anyway, in both cases, I think we see examples where people are motivated to try out pushing the language, at a very small scale, into spaces where it has been excluded from, such as formal education and mass media. If we take that together with the strong attachment to the language that I recorded in the household surveys, to me it raises an important question about how things could have been otherwise, under different conditions. Prompting the political imagination in those sort of ways not only helps bring to the forefront the current oppression that exists, which is what I try to do in the book, but it also hopefully helps create a sort of current where the practice movement amongst Manegacha speakers might grow to become something else.

Shannon Ward: In your writing, you made an active choice not to openly depict slurs against Manegacha and other minoritized language speakers, instead describing the general translations of these terms or representing them as slashes. Can you say more about how and why you made this decision in representation?

Gerald Roche: I thought about this in relation mostly to one particular term that is used to describe Manegacha speakers. It took a lot of time and reflection to come to the conclusion that the term was in fact a slur. When you are in a different social and cultural context, in a different language, problematic terms don’t always necessarily jump out at you as they would in more familiar circumstances, and that’s especially true when those terms are normalized in the local context, even by the people who are labelled with the slur.

Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks really helped me think through how slurs work – the “crushing objecthood” that they impose on people. I also found Jane Hill’s writing on the topic in The Everyday Language of White Racism helpful, as was some of Judith Butler’s writing, for example Excitable Speech. In the end I described a slur as a sort of ‘semiotic landmine’ that releases a sudden, harmful blast of negative associations and implications, and I think that’s a reasonable description of how this term works in practice.

Once I concluded that the term was a slur, the decision that I found myself faced with was – do I want to introduce this term into the English language? There are important debates to be had about how slurs in English can have complex social lives and sometimes allow for what Michael Hertzfeld called ‘cultural intimacy’: the use of sources of stigma to foster collective belonging. But the slur I was dealing with would be unknown to pretty much anyone reading the book, so why create knowledge of a harmful term where none existed, and run the risk that the harm of the term was amplified, showed up in new spaces, and so on? Similarly, I tried to imagine, while writing the book, how it would be read by someone from the Manegacha speaking community. Why go to the trouble of explaining how this everyday term is actually a slur, and then just repeatedly expose them to it? That seems callous to me.

In addition, I also think that eliding the term dramatizes it and gives the reader increased impetus for reflection. Because I do that explicitly, in a novel context, and because the absence of the term is visually striking, the reader is forced to slow down, and hopefully to consider their own stance on the politics of slurs.

Shannon Ward: In the Introduction and Conclusion, you write about the shift in your approach from endangerment linguistics (pp. 5-6) to one of decolonizing solidarity (pp. 154-156). What do you see as the role of language documentation and other traditional language revitalization tools in decolonizing solidarity?

Gerald Roche: The traditional suite of methods and techniques that have emerged in linguistics and allied fields since the late 1980s and the emergence of endangerment linguistics are not the most effective tools for bringing about the changes that are required to secure language rights and end language oppression. However, sometimes they are the only tools we have.

One reason that we have access to a limited toolkit is that most of our work is done at the behest of donors, whether private or public, and also requires some kind of institutional buy-in from a university. Shrinking funding pools and the neoliberalization of the university creates a bad environment for coming up with new ideas, but does create lots of incentives to tweak and redeploy existing tools. This set up also encourages people to use toolkits that seem, superficially apolitical, though of course they have their own politics.

A second reason why it is important to rely on this toolkit is that in large swathes of the world, basic civil and political rights do not exist. If they did, people would be more likely to already be agitating for the change they need, and our job would be to support that. But in China, for example, that’s not possible. So we can either abandon communities in those situations to state violence, or we find other ways to work with them. I think finding other ways is the right choice. So we take the superficially apolitical tools we have and do what we can with them in those contexts.

If we use them mindfully, those tools can help build decolonial solidarity in several ways. Maps, for example, are one way of countering hegemonic efforts to erase particular groups, such as Manegacha speakers. They help render visible what the state attempts to destroy, and create a permanent, public record that counteracts denial and diminishes impunity. Surveys provide a chance to counter harmful assumptions that facilitate assimilation, for example, the data I collected showing people’s deep attachment to their language contradicted victim-blaming narratives which suggested that the community simply didn’t care enough to maintain their own language. Finally, research activities also provide opportunities for the redistribution of material and symbolic resources, for example, I tried to make sure that I spent my research funding in ways that supported Manegacha speakers.

Shannon Ward: In the Conclusion, you draw a distinction between settler colonies and exploitation colonies (pp. 151-152). Do you see each of these contexts as lending itself to a particular form of decolonizing solidarity? That is, are there particular approaches to decolonization required in exploitation colonies that have not been adequately recognized or supported by scholars?

Gerald Roche: I think the debates around decolonization certainly have been patchy, though I’m not sure that the division necessarily lies along a divide between settler colonies and exploitation colonies. India is perhaps a good starting point to try and explain what I mean.

We have vast amounts of literature looking at India as a British exploitation colony, but discussion of India as a contemporary colonial state is less prominent, even though the relationship between the Indian state and Kashmir, the Adivasis, and the entire northeast (at least) are all classically colonial. Ethiopia is another good example. Before the modern nation-state of Ethiopia was formed, it was a classical colonial empire, with patches of settlement and exploitation, and yet a recent handbook on settler colonialism talked about Ethiopia only in terms of its invasion by Italian fascists, and much of the analysis of the recent Tigray war elided the roots of the conflict in Ethiopian empire building.

As these two brief examples hopefully suggest, we tend to take colonization as a sort of vanity project that only Westerners can engage in. If anyone else is doing it, then it’s just domination, or even worse, putatively national liberation. This is certainly part of the reason why the colonial relation between China and Tibet remains so under-analyzed.

On the other hand, when people do analyze Tibet as a colonial situation, there is a tendency to simply apply models of what happened in Canada, or Australia, or the USA. Instead of denying the colonial relationship, we erase its specificities. So, for example, although I think settler colonialism plays a role in Tibet, I think we need to look at how settlement by Han people is part of a broader, and unique, colonial strategy in Tibet.

Understanding the specificities of different sites and systems of oppression is essential to building thick solidarity as I discuss in the book’s conclusion. Refusing to impose historical and analytical templates developed in the Australia or the USA is also essential to building decolonial solidarity. Ultimately, I want the book to contribute to dismantling systems of language oppression that Manegacha speakers face. We can’t do that by cutting and pasting tactics and concepts from other places. Our solidarity requires us to do the work of understanding what we are actually trying to change.
Stuart Dunmore on his book, Language Revitalisation in Gaelic Scotland

July 20th, 2020

Interview by Christian Puma-Ninacuri

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-language-revitalisation-in-gaelic-scotland.html

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: Gaelic-medium education (GME) has been developed as an initiative to maintain the Gaelic language through education. The role of formal education as a tool for revitalizing a language has been widely studied and theorized; however, empirical research on the long-term outcomes of minority-medium education has been relatively scarce. What was your motivation to evaluate the revitalization of Gaelic from an empirical point of view? How does your study contribute to our knowledge of language revitalization processes?

Stuart Dunmore: I think my main motivation was, as you rightly say, the paucity of research evidence that has been brought to bear on long-term outcomes of minority-medium immersion education historically. In Scotland, GME receives a great deal of attention as the main means we currently have of increasing the numbers of speakers that exist in the world, since vernacular community use of the language continues to decline apace. Generally, Gaelic has not been passed onto a majority of the youngest generations in heartland areas, so school has tended to be used to plug that gap elsewhere in Scotland. The trouble was, we just had no real idea as to whether or not former students who have received an immersion education in Gaelic continue to speak it after completing their studies. So, my research set out to answer that question among a sample of adults who went through GME after it started in the 1980s.

I hope what the book contributes to the wider literature on language revitalization is its stress on the importance of critical, empirical approaches to evaluating language policy outcomes; when it comes to linguistic and cultural endangerment it’s not enough for policymakers to simply invest in new initiatives and hope for the best. Interventions have to be evaluated critically to ensure they are effective and to identify where and how they can be improved, as the stakes are so high for minoritized communities throughout the world.

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: The revitalization of Gaelic has faced different challenges over the years. On the one hand, policymakers made the language official, especially in the educational system, but on the other hand, it was initiative from parents who wanted to continue using the language that led to GME’s development. Taking this into consideration, how do you understand the participation of both policymakers and members of the community in revitalization processes? How does community engagement contribute to minority language education?

Stuart Dunmore: That’s an absolutely crucial point, that bottom-up, grassroots initiatives from within the minority linguistic community are vital for the long-term success of revitalization policy objectives. GME was developed in the 1980s as a consequence of Gaelic-speaking parents’ relentless campaigning for the establishment of immersion education in Gaelic at the pre-school and elementary level. They wanted their kids to be fluent and confident Gaelic speakers but worried that within an English-only system, their Gaelic acquisition and abilities would be significantly undermined. Subsequently, GME classes were augmented by children of parents who couldn’t speak Gaelic themselves, but who wished for their kids to become bilingual. But it was only due to the hard work of grassroots Gaelic organizations that policymakers were persuaded to establish the system in the first place. Similarly, I suspect that internationally, it is only bottom-up support from parents and community that will encourage and enable minority-medium immersion pupils to maintain their linguistic abilities in minoritized varieties after schooling is completed.

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: Mixed methodological approaches are increasingly being used in the field. Your book uses semi-structured interviews (qualitative data) and online surveys (quantitative data). What were the challenges that you experienced while analyzing the data? How can your methods guide other research on language revitalization?

Stuart Dunmore: I think the principle of data triangulation – that is, testing the reliability of conclusions made using one method against one or more other methods – lends a great deal to the validity and generalizability of social research generally, and this is certainly true of linguistic ethnography in my view. That can mean testing a researcher’s own ethnographic, participant-observations against more detailed interview accounts, focus group or survey data, or in my own case, employing statistical techniques alongside qualitative sociolinguistic methods such as ethnography of communication. As you say, it often is genuinely challenging for researchers to feel confident employing multiple methodological techniques simultaneously, but I would recommend this approach as one that we can adopt and learn to improve the reliability of our findings in the field of language revitalization.

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: In your book, you mention Fishman’s claim that language revitalization efforts in schools will fail unless the minority language can be more broadly used outside school. Similarly, scholarship has demonstrated the importance of intergenerational transmission to language maintenance. How do your findings contribute to this debate?

Stuart Dunmore: Fishman’s point that communities and parents passing on endangered languages to children in the domains of home, neighborhood and community – intergenerational transmission – is the key to securing language revitalization (in the sense of re-vernacularisation, or normalizing the use of the minority language in the community once again); however, it is very difficult to take issue with on an empirical basis. My book demonstrates that for the majority of students who acquire a minority language in an immersion classroom, the language will remain a thing used for school purposes only if parents, community and grassroots organizations are unavailable or unable to encourage minority language use in the home. Gaelic language socialization – which I measured as having been raised with at least one Gaelic-speaking parent at home, correlated consistently with higher rates of Gaelic retention and use among former-immersion students in my quantitative statistical analyses, and in interviewees’ own accounts. Without this normalizing influence for minority language use outside the classroom, it’s hard to avoid Fishman’s conclusion that school-based interventions will not be successful in the long term.

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: Your book shows that the majority of participants’ social use of Gaelic is reported to be limited among peers such as friends, siblings and partners. However, there are other language practices of Gaelic that seem to be relevant to speakers (‘secret code’ and ‘informal’ use of Gaelic characterized by a code-mixing with English). What does this tell us about the relationship between Gaelic and practices related to language identity and ideologies?

Stuart Dunmore: Quite simply, I think my data show that the relationship between linguistic practices, ideologies and identities is absolutely key to understanding language decline and revitalization processes. Limited use of Gaelic by my informants across the domains you mention above appeared to be underpinned by their language ideologies concerning the appropriate use of Gaelic and relative lack of social identity in Gaelic. Those individuals who tended to use the highest levels of Gaelic in the present day had frequently grown up with Gaelic at home, and subsequently have a stronger cultural identification with the language.

The school system alone didn’t appear to encourage pupils without this background to develop a clear sense of social identity in the language, and as a result, they didn’t use it a great deal or wish to pass it on to their own children in future. My sense is that these processes are universal in contexts of language shift and revival, and that language ideologies and social identities are crucial considerations for policymakers to bear in mind. Revitalization initiatives, whether focused within the education system or not, should clearly address issues of ideology and identity, which often have a strong and negative influence on linguistic practice.

Christian Puma-Ninacuri: Finally, taking into consideration the results of your investigation, how does your book establish a conversation with policymakers, educators and community members to improve processes of language revitalization of Gaelic, especially to improve the GME system?

Stuart Dunmore: I hope the dialogue my research provokes will lead policymakers and community members to consider critically the effectiveness of top-down interventions, and how this can be improved through being joined and supported by bottom-up efforts from within the language community. A book on its own can’t do this job for educators and policymakers, but hopefully some of the knowledge exchange activities I have undertaken since completing the research can help to inspire discussion between communities and policymakers. As the book demonstrates, it’s absolutely crucial that bottom-up efforts from within communities complement policymakers’ interventions to support them if minority languages are to be successfully maintained into future decades.
Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo discusses Revivals, Nationalism, and Linguistic Discrimination

June 8th, 2020

Interview by Claudia Matachana

https://www.routledge.com/Revivals-Nationalism-and-Linguistic-Discrimination-Threatening-Languages/Fleming-Ansaldo/p/book/9781138193314

Claudia Matachana: Through the book, you made a distinction between revivalist and revitalization language movements and point that, in most of the literature, the difference between these two terms is not always made. What were the reasons to make this clear division? Or, to put it another way, what was the main motivation to write this book?

Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo: We find it necessary to make a division between the two in order to make it clear that while the process of supporting truly endangered languages is basically positive (revitalization), the process of advancing a major language to the discredit of others is fundamentally negative (revival). We are aware that where these have been used interchangeably, our distinction may cause problems. In North America for example, revival is often used for revitalization. Overall the main motivation for writing the book was to clarify that while we understand and are sympathetic to revitalization movements which attempt to prevent languages from disappearing, we do want to critically examine why and how the concept of revival can be used to support movements or policies whose goals ultimately create rather than challenge inequality.

Claudia Matachana: Your book shows how the discourse of language revivals and nationalism is many times disguised as the discourse of linguistic rights for minorities. You point at the difference between the language revitalization that attempts to help a language to not disappear, and the social movements that seek to use a language for gaining power. What do you think are the implications of your study for language revitalization? Is there a message that you want to convey from your book for the people working on language revitalization?

Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo: Yes indeed – that while supporting endangered languages, researchers should be careful not to create the underlying conditions for language discrimination. As we say in the book, we are not arguing against language revitalization per se. Rather we want to caution that involvement in and discourses about revitalization/revival should be careful about the exclusionary, purist ideologies that often accompany such movements, and that claims that a particular policy, practice, or ideology supports revival should not be taken as a carte blanche to implement policies with exclusionary or hierarchical effects.

Claudia Matachana: In the chapter dedicated to the language situation in Kazakhstan, one of the interviewed participants (K9) said that he bears a responsibility to his history and language and he cannot just become part of other nation or ethnic group because that would be a betrayal. That idea of linguistic loyalty and betrayal may appear to be related with nationalism. Where do you think that this relationship between language, ethnicity and nation –which, as you show, is not only present in this case– began?

Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo: Well, as other scholars have pointed out, the classic formulation of nationalism as “one people, one territory, one language” has its roots in European romanticism, but in each of the contexts we consider, ideas about nation, language, and ethnicity have their own local resonances and histories. In the specific context of Kazakhstan, for instance, conceptualizations of ethnicity/nation have roots in the Soviet “nationalities” system according to which every citizen had to belong to (only one) designated, officially recognized “nationality,” which has somewhat conflated the concepts of nationality/ethnicity in many post-Soviet contexts.

Claudia Matachana: One of the things I found more interesting about your book is that it presents a wide variety of examples that covers different political and geographical situations – Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Catalonia – with a diversity of research methods –interviews, discourse analysis or documented political history. What was the reason for you to choose these diverse geographical locations for your study? How do the different research methods relate to each other and how did you link these specific methods to draw a general conclusion?

Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo: We thought it would be most helpful to cover a range of case studies that illustrated our arguments in different ways, and with different dynamics. Some of the languages we examine are the languages of independent states; others, of regions or semi-autonomous regions within other states. Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan are both nations which had to form new policies and interethnic relations post-independence; in one case leading to civil war (Sri Lanka) and in Kazakhstan, to a complex set of hierarchies and interacting social structures. Mongolian is not exactly “reviving,” yet we can still see certain similarities in the kinds of discourses and nationalist ideologies that have been used to underpin the Mongolian context and the other cases. Hong Kong and Catalonia are both semi-autonomous regions where many people want to maintain or increase that autonomy, possibly by achieving statehood.

We also were keen to include both contexts that had been well-studied as well as less commonly discussed cases. For those contexts which have received little sociolinguistic attention – particularly Kazakhstan and Mongolia – we felt it was especially important to gather new data in the form of interviews, because there is very little published research relating to language ideology, use, and policy in those places. For Catalonia, for instance, there is such a significant body of work that we felt that a limited selection of interviews would have less to contribute to the existing literature. We don’t consider this book the final word on any of these contexts, necessarily – it is a limited account of one aspect of local dynamics in each place. Yet when taken together we believe these cases provide a robust illustration of how revival may play out and what kinds of tools / discourses may be used to advance revivalist (and covertly nationalist) projects, despite the different histories and realities in each place.

Claudia Matachana: Finally, your book shows how language is related to and used for political purposes, specifically its use in nationalist movements and as a tool of discrimination. What do you think is the political importance of these findings? How do you see your book speaking to the current political situation that is lived worldwide?

Kara Fleming and Umberto Ansaldo: We hope to be able to unmask what a powerful tool language is and how easy it is to manipulate. We believe that because of its ubiquity, necessity, and close ties to identity construction and expression, language is particularly vulnerable to being misused as a tool for political and social manipulation. In many contexts, language is heavily politicized as a key symbol of national and personal identity, yet many aspects of the sociolinguistic status quo are simultaneously naturalized – it is often considered simply self-evident and unquestionable that these languages must be revived / protected by any means necessary. What we hope to accomplish is disrupt this taking for granted by introducing questions about who benefits and who is disadvantaged by such processes, and how they might potentially be deconstructed and re-imagined to create more inclusive and equitable societies.
Don Kulick on his book, A Death in the Rainforest

January 20th, 2020

https://www.workman.com/products/a-death-in-the-rainforest

Excerpted from original New Books Network podcast

https://newbooksnetwork.com/don-kulick-a-death-in-the-rainforest-how-a-language-and-a-way-of-life-came-to-an-end-in-papua-new-guinea-algonquin-books-2019/

Transcribed by Shulan Sun; Lightly edited by Ilana Gershon for clarity

Alex Golub: Now, many people who don’t study Papua New Guinea but who are involved in anthropology will know Papua New Guinea through the work of Marilyn Strathern, [or] in a slightly different way, maybe Roy Wagner. And Marilyn describes Papua New Guineans as having dividual selves or, they have this very exotic theory that their selves condense many relationships. You provide a very individualist portrait of Gapuners. They tend to really value their autonomy and are encouraged to be self-reliant. What should people who read Strathern think – how would you recommend reconciling that with your portrayal, which seems a little bit different?

Don Kulick: I don’t really know what to do with that because I think Marilyn Strathern’s understanding of Papua New Guinea is very heavily – and I am sure that she would be the first to agree – it’s very highly based on her experience with highlanders. Now again, Papua New Guinea is a very big country, there’s lots of different cultures. It is not all the same. I also thought Marilyn was writing in a very sort of abstract way – I don’t think she will actually say that people see themselves as dividuals. That is an anthropologist’s understanding of Papua New Guineans’ sociality.

And what I see in Gapun is, certainly, people are connected to one another. I mean, sorcery is a great connector. Because, if I do something, then I don’t have to die, but maybe my nephew will die, or my sister will die. So again, we are all connected in that way and my actions will influence other people, often in ways, or sometimes in ways that go against their own self-interest. And I have an example from the book. If somebody steals a battery that somebody managed to buy somewhere: I steal a battery and got caught. I can say that I did it, but it wasn’t me, somebody made me do it. And that is a perfectly acceptable excuse in Gapun. Which again, ties to the notion of dividuality – that we are the conduits of action, but we are not the agents of action. So, in that sense, I think that’s very similar. But again, what I saw in Gapun, from the very start, was not only how people are incredibly, incredibly individualist, it’s really all about themselves. But they are socialized to be that way. Babies are continually being socialized like “it’s not yours, it’s mine!” “Whose is it?” And, you know, I think people who even work in highlands, I am thinking of Bambi Schieffelin’s work, for example, she writes about that constant question: “who does this belong to?” That is a crucial fact for anything – in order to do anything, use, or steal, or eat, or throw it away, you have to know that. So, there’s an ownership thing that really socializes people into standing up for the rest. You know, the kroses you were mentioning earlier, the swearing, it’s all about women saying: “This was mine, you destroyed it, you screwed with it, I am pissed off at you, and I am now abusing you for it.”

So again, in this network of connectedness, individuals are continually being made. But I think that the way to reconcile this is to understand that individuals are, they are not American individuals, they are not Swedish individuals. They are individuals that emerge against a background of networks that I think Marilyn Strathern does a fantastic job describing.

Alex Golub: Yea, they are individuals, but they are very permeable.

Don Kulick: That’s a good way of putting it, exactly. They’re permeable. They’re continually being impressed by other people’s wills, by their desires, by everything. So, yes, I have had very confusing conversations with people who steal things from me in the village. I asked a young man: “Why did you take my soap?” “Because I asked you for it and you didn’t give it to me. Therefore, you made me steal it.” “But it’s the only soap I have!” [laugh] So, again, I find this very curious. I see humor in it, but I also see that this is how people die. I mean, you always die because somebody did something to you. And it doesn’t have to be you who did it, somebody else did it. And you’re dying for that person’s wrongs.

Alex Golub: Yeah.

Don Kulick: But again, you’re the one who dies. Nobody else dies. That’s how the individual emerges. It is, again, I think this is also Marilyn Strathern’s point, it’s the individual emerges out of relationship. I see this very clearly in Gapun. I think the tonality, or the tenor of individualism is perhaps different in Gapun when compared to the highlands. But I do think that we’re all connected in the sense that we all influence one another, in ways we can’t control and don’t understand. It’s very Papua New Guinean.

Alex Golub: I think the upside of it, for some people, is that it prevents accumulation, and it prevents centralization of power. But then, the downside of it is that it prevents organization or anything getting done.

Don Kulick: Absolutely. I mean, Gapun could be a case study for that.

Alex Golub: One of the sorts of melancholy dimensions of – this melancholy situation is the “language death” that you also include in the title. Can you tell me a little bit more what it’s like to watch this language die? And it seems like of those contrarian themes in this book in addition to some of those contrarian ones you might talk about, is that you don’t have the standard take on language death – that there are these precious languages that have to be preserved that when they die, the world loses a precious bit of diversity. That’s not exactly what you’re saying, is that right?

Don Kulick: It’s not what am I saying. And I have deep respect for linguists who work with endangered languages. I really do. But, I think there are many linguists who work with endangered languages these days who go for the biodiversity trope claiming that language are endangered species, So language are like pandas and whatever other species that is now on its way out. And they claim that languages are like that. I have always found that a very difficult metaphor, not because I don’t appreciate its potential rhetorical power, because it does have some power. But I think it’s because it ignores the people who speak the languages. And I think that kind of metaphor is wrongheaded – to presume that we should look to the natural world as ways of understanding language is an error. The natural world is exactly the place we should not look to when we want to understand a phenomenon like language death. We should be looking at, for example, the fate of the political parties, or the fate of religious movements. We should look to the social world to understand language death. Languages die because people stop speaking the language. So, the question is, how do they die? What are the dynamics that produce a population of people that stops speaking their language for various reasons? So yeah, I argue in the book against that very worthy metaphor. I don’t think it helps us. And I think it also risks wrongheaded blame. The last people I want to blame for losing the language, or for abandoning their language – for not speaking and not transmitting their language — are the speakers of the language, because that makes it seems as though they had a choice. It suggest they had a choice and that they decided not to. Sometimes that does happen – sometimes people do decide not to teach the language to their kids. In Gapun, no one had ever made that decision. That’s one of the things that drew me to the village in the first place – that I realized that nobody said, “we’re not gonna teach our language – we don’t like our language, [or] our language is not useful.” Nobody said that. They all said: we like our language. Their reason is, but babies don’t want to speak it. Now that, for me, is really cool, what’s going on there?

So again, these ideas that language death are all very lamentable, it is very sad. But I think the risk in focusing on the language as oppose to focusing on the speaker of the language, is that we can be very patronizing and condescending to the speaker of the language.

Alex Golub: You have the sentence at the end of the book where you say the speaker didn’t abandoned Tayap, Tayap abandoned them. That was such a powerful sentence and also so unexpected. What did you mean when you wrote that?

Don Kulick: Well, again, I mean that it is beyond their control, basically. I mean, I think, one of the things that linguist likes to tell us is that we can revitalize, or we can help to revitalize, and we can. Anyone who wants to get their language revitalized should have all the help that they asked for. If the villagers suddenly decide that they want to use my grammar to help them to revitalize, I would be all for it. I would give them whatever they wanted to do. But the fact is that they don’t want that. And I think that to focus on the language ignores the processes that had resulted the death of the language. And when I say that Tayap had abandoned them, I mean that the historical processes of colonialism, Christianity, capitalism, have actually resulted in a situation that their language is just out of their control. As language always is – language is always out of individual control. But this is a situation where I think the language itself – it’s gone. It’s going. And I mean that in the agentive, in the sense that the language is going. And I draw parallel there with the spirits in a rainforest. You know that my old teacher Raya said that “you know, we use to see those things in the rainforest, we use to see these – eels, crocodiles spirits, now they are not there anymore. They must have all gone.” That’s why we draw parallels to a language. Maybe you can say the same things about them.

Alex Golub: Wow, it’s heavy, I know.

Don Kulick: Yeah. But again, I hope that people, you know, when they read the book – I mean, you’ve mentioned the humor, it’s called the death in a rainforest – and death are never happy events. But I hope that it’s not a total downer [laugh].

Alex Golub: I think everyone should read Don’s book, it’s hilarious.
Sarah Shulist on her new book, Transforming Indigeneity

December 3rd, 2018

Interview by Shannon Ward

https://utorontopress.com/ca/transforming-indigeneity-2

Shannon Ward: Your book demonstrates how children in São Gabriel actively respond to discourse that frames Indigeneity as performance, by acting out Indigeneity as a set of symbols distinct from the realm of everyday life. You also explain that youth, facing the realities of urban poverty, substance abuse, and violence, often look to non-Indigenous symbols of material wealth for aspiration. Do you see any hope for mobilizing the resources necessary to give children and youth space for building their own meaningful cultural practices, as part of a shared identity as urban Indigenous youth?

Sarah Shulist: I absolutely see hope for youth to find creative ways to build “meaningful cultural practices”, and I think they definitely are doing so already. I should note that the story about “performing” Indigeneity really highlights more about what the little girl’s parents thought than what she herself was doing (because she herself was very young), which illustrates that even the adults have a complicated relationship to the balance between the symbolic form of Indigeneity and a more “lived in” one. I found that older teens and young people in their 20s were very committed to their vision of themselves as urban Indigenous people, however, and really resisted the discourses of rigid cultural “purity” that some powerful people advocated. They were creating theatre groups, developing radio programs, and starting hip-hop dance/song workshops, and in all of these they really wanted to use Indigenous stories and themes in ways that resonated with their “modern” views of themselves. This was also situated as a way of ensuring that kids would have sources of social strength that would help prevent them from becoming involved in drug trafficking and other risks. One of the most passionate young women I knew when I was there is now in her early 30s, and has become the head of a newly created municipal youth council, so her energy is being transferred forward in that context.

Shannon Ward: Your book shows the challenges of cultural and linguistic transmission in a city, when concerns about Indigeneity are often framed through discussions of land rights and when Indigenous language practices are deeply tied to the realities of everyday agricultural life. How could the generally effective political mobilization of Indigenous peoples for rural land rights (pg. 41, for example) be replicated in urban spaces?

Sarah Shulist: I think that one way to mobilize around language in urban areas would involve mobilizing more directly around language in and of itself, rather than as an extension of other rights – specifically, in this case, the right to ‘differentiated education.’ A lot of activism that has taken place around language has strategically looked for the openings provided within the legal structure of the Brazilian constitution, which makes perfect sense, but which has left the urban areas out. Now, with the recent election of a government that has promised to erase Indigenous land reserves, the risks associated with having all rights tied to these land recognitions become even more starkly clear. Language efforts can become ways of solidifying and strengthening community networks in urban areas, or across urban/rural movements, and so on. Language exists (or can exist) wherever speakers and potential speakers exist, so I have often seen the crux of urban language revitalization as based in the notion that “the community” needs to be created, rather than presumed to already be in a given place. At the same time, an aspect of Indigenous mobilization that’s happening here in Canada, and that I think is also important elsewhere, is a reminder that these cities are also built on colonized land, and that the Indigenous people living in them have a claim to ways of moving through those spaces that are often erased by separating out what “counts” as Indigenous lands as only referring to what we call “reserves” here, and “demarcated territories” there. It’s striking to look at a map of the municipality of São Gabriel and remember that the ‘seat’ of governance is the only part of it that is not considered to be Indigenous territory – this tiny island of non-Indigenous space from which everything is supposed to emanate – when of course the reasoning behind that is a purely colonial logic.

Shannon Ward: In chapter 4, your discussion of Indigenous language pedagogy, specifically, Nheengatú classes that valorize literacy over other linguistic skills, seems relevant to discussions not only of language revitalization, but of language and literacy learning more broadly. What do you think the case of Nheengatú classes in São Gabriel can tell us more generally about the acquisition of literacy, and the challenges of implementing immersion-based learning in communities that may not value linguistic diversity as an element of everyday practice?

Sarah Shulist: This is a great question, and it covers a lot of ground. I think the example of the Nheengatú classes fits within a much larger pattern of classroom-based views of ‘language’ that really emphasize not only literacy, but very particular forms of literacy. The diversity of literacy practices beyond schooled literacy have, of course, become an important topic within linguistic anthropology, and this research is part of what helped me to recognize the strength of that pull towards writing-centric ideologies in the Nheengatú classrooms. I think what I learned from the challenges facing Nheengatú language teachers was to be careful about dismissing the meaning and power behind teaching literacy. As someone trained in linguistics, I’ve definitely been influenced by the emphasis on orality, and I do think there is an important need, in language revitalization efforts, to orient toward supporting language in practice, rather than as an abstract grammatical system. But at the same time, I think there is a lot of meaning behind the literacy practices that we can sometimes dismiss too easily. While feelings about the inferiority of Indigenous languages are obviously rooted in internalizations of colonial logics, that doesn’t make them any less real or worth challenging, and having or learning writing in the language seems to have a lot of power to challenge those beliefs. The biggest challenge of implementing immersion schools in São Gabriel, I think, is less about a devaluation of multilingualism per se and more about a strong attachment to a specific view of what formal education is for, which is to learn how to move and succeed within a non-Indigenous world. Given that, I think the potential for immersion-based learning that is happening outside of schools is important to cultivate, and there are plenty of great examples of these types of strategies from around the world that could be applied in the Amazonian context.

Shannon Ward: In chapter 7, you explain that cross-border migration is changing the linguistic ecology of São Gabriel How might cross-border alliances of Indigenous peoples in this region develop? How could such alliances mobilize Indigenous people to hold greater agency in urban places of habitation?

Sarah Shulist: The question of cross-border migration within São Gabriel remains an ever-changing concern, and I think even in the year or so since I did the final read through of the book proofs, the dynamics of changed. Colombia has become more stable, while Venezuela’s economic and political crisis has deepened, and the results of the Brazilian election will also reshape the implications of being Indigenous in each of these three countries. I think the degree of unrest and the shifting dynamics make cross-border alliances and transnational advocacy groups into vital elements in this discussion, but in ways that I don’t think are predictable at this point.

Shannon Ward: Brazil has recently faced several tragedies covered by international media, including the destruction of archives of Indigenous endangered languages at Brazil’s National Museum. How might this tragedy factor into future decisions surrounding the methods of language documentation and linguistic revitalization in São Gabriel?

Sarah: I think working on language revitalization requires a degree of hopefulness – an imagination about a future social world in which Indigenous peoples have the space, both metaphorical and literal, to use their languages and live in ways that are holistically their own. I have, personally, found it difficult to maintain that hopeful vision given the recent tragic losses of the museum fire, as well as the election of Bolsonaro, who has said some truly frightening things about his desire to do away with even the most basic of Indigenous land protections. I think these events call us, as academic allies, to really rethink what our goals are with respect to language revitalization. Documentation and “preservation”, as in the museum, have long been recognized as incomplete, and also, in many ways, as products of an extractive colonial ideology that puts the language down on paper and takes it away from the community in which it is used (I wrote a post about this on my own blog in the immediate aftermath of the fire: https://anthropologyas.wordpress.com/2018/09/12/on-what-was-really-lost-in-the-fire/ ).

Schools, likewise, are very expensive projects whose maintenance and value depend on constant reinvestment and buy-in from the colonial state, and the political whims of the moment really demonstrate how precarious it is to lay our hopes on this kind of a foundation. That’s my somewhat long-way-around introduction to saying that I think a lot of language documentation and revitalization, in São Gabriel in particular but also elsewhere, needs to really listen to Indigenous voices who are emphasizing radical re-imagining of what ‘language’ is and what it means to support its continued presence in their lives. I’m thinking of Indigenous scholars like Wesley Leonard and Jenny Davis, among others, here). A lot of academics are recognizing that any authentic desire to support Indigenous languages requires us to support Indigenous people, and not shy away from the messy human realities that entails. The museum fire was somewhat less devastating to languages in the Northwest Amazon region than it was to other areas, because most of them are still spoken by at least a small number of people, and good, recent documentation exists of many of them that was not housed in the Museu Nacional. I still hope that it will be taken as a powerful reminder that we need to refocus on language as inherently embedded in its social context, and on protecting the lifeways of the people who use it.
James Costa on his new book, Revitalising Language in Provence

November 13th, 2017

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-111924353X.hbtml

Interview by Sandhya Narayanan

You mention from the beginning that this book is not an ethnography of language but a critical reflection on language revitalization research. Was this your plan from the very beginning? What was your approach to writing this book, starting from your original research to envisioning what the final product of this monograph would be?

Well, the book does result from ethnographic fieldwork, but in the end this is not how the book was framed, for a number of reasons. The main reason, then, was that I was looking for ways to interpret what I was observing, and I could find no satisfactory approach. I guess at the time I needed a framework to understand what language revitalization was, what it was about, and back when I started my PhD 2006 the two main currents were either works on endangered languages and, soon afterwards Heller and Duchêne published Discourses of Endangerment. I found neither approach entirely satisfactory, so I felt that, to paraphrase Bourdieu, I needed to constitute and problematize my own object, rather than be constituted by it. Hence the largely historical parts that seek to retrace the emergence of a reflection on language revitalization in linguistics and anthropology on the one hand, and the parts that try to retrace the birth of a language movement in Southern France roughly from the 16^th century onward. It was only then, I felt, that I could say something worthwhile about what people were doing with language in Occitania, from a perspective that was my own and not that of language endangerment or critical sociolinguistics in the sense of Discourses of Endangerment. (more…)
Erin Debenport on her new book, Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibilty in Indigenous New Mexico

January 25th, 2017

https://sarweb.org/?sar_press_fixing_the_books

Interview by Shannon Ward

You identified commonalities in the processes of creating the San Ramon dictionary and pedagogical texts, as well as in the speech genres and cultural practices they encode. For example, both texts are continually refined, or “perfected,” through editing meant to closely control the circulation of knowledge about certain linguistic and cultural practices. Also, both texts contain chronotopes that link authoritative knowledge about the past to present community issues and the potential future implications of cultural and linguistic loss or revival. How do these features of the texts intersect with other socialization strategies practiced informally within families or among community members? That is, how does the use of these texts fit into broader language and cultural socialization within San Ramon?

The most visible socialization strategies that connect to ideas about perfectibility at San Ramon were approaches to childrearing and the associated transmission of knowledge. Although outside the focus of the book, I noticed that caregivers—both men and women, parents, non-parents, adults, and teenagers—felt comfortable “correcting” children, telling them to be respectful, to listen, or simply stop what they were doing if they were misbehaving. This connects to the idea that the responsibility for the transmission of knowledge is shared among all community members. Related to this, adults would often correct or comment on behavior even when the child was performing a task correctly or behaving themselves. Once I heard a Head Start teacher say, “That’s the way, Amber. You don’t go messing up the play area when you spend time there,” almost keeping the master/apprentice “channel” open between teacher and child. A new way that texts are figuring into broader patterns of language and cultural socialization at San Ramon and the other Pueblos is through the use of Facebook. When posting about community events or commenting on tribal policies, I have noticed that the past is often invoked in this new context, as in “Make your ancestors proud and help clean up the arroyo this Saturday.” Processes of perfectibility are apparent here, too, as users craft elaborate comments, replies, and visual materials while composing Facebook posts.

The student authors of the Keiwa soap opera, As the Rez Turns, artfully employed characteristically Pueblo speech genres, extracommunity genres, and non-Native images of indigenous people to create subtle social and political critiques. How does this project differ from young people’s everyday interactions that may (or may not) similarly display multiple intertextual links? What does it suggest about changing possibilities for young people’s community-directed action?

I think the soap opera project differed in that the abstract notion of a “language dialogue” provided enough distance for participants to employ such intertextual links while discussing things like tribal politics, “tradition,” and Native identity. Usually the two “realms” are quite separate: the copious use of pop culture references and the production of intertextual links on one side and the serious work that is being an engaged community member on the other. As far as changing political possibilities, I think this is an example of how new spaces for critique are opening up almost within new forms of language circulation. I would not go so far as to say that Facebook and other platforms are singlehandedly enabling youth participation and political action, but I would say that I continue to see social critique within such spaces, spaces that are considered to be frivolous or unconnected to tribal history and values by older community members.

You argue that language revitalization projects perform culturally and linguistically meaningful work beyond preserving grammar and phonology. For example, language revitalization projects serve as metapragmatic resources for reproducing cultural practices and morality, as well as for enacting social critique (pg. 112). Participants in these programs thus tend to view them as beacons of hope for future linguistic and cultural revival, even in the absence of data proving the successful reverse of language shift (pg. 112-117). What possibilities do you envision for expanding recognition of and support for these other facets of language revitalization, in San Ramon and beyond?

I think that one potential influence of the U.S. educational system and dominant approaches to parenting in this county is that increasingly younger tribal members insist on being given credit “for trying” or for attending language classes regardless of their linguistic abilities. In such moments, youth connect attendance and participation with “being Indian” or being a good community member, invested in the future of the Pueblo. I have started to work with an additional Pueblo community, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (not a pseudonym) in El Paso, Texas, and these kinds of connections are much more overt there than at San Ramon. Due to their distance from the other Pueblos, intense discrimination, state educational policies, and the predominance of Spanish in the region, the Southern Tiwa language was largely lost at the Pueblo. Their language program has been an incredible success, however, with the emergence of several advanced speakers who have learned the language as adults. While meetings with other Pueblos or native speakers of the language can be stressful for these learners, they often say that the fact that they are trying to learn shows that they are true Pueblo people rather than being able to speak Southern Tiwa without making any mistakes.

While Pueblo secrecy radically affected your participation in the community of San Ramon, you also harness secrecy in your ethnographic writing, for example, by focusing on cultural and linguistic knowledge production without revealing the content of this knowledge. What aspects of ethnographic methodology aided you in continually adapting to the changes and complexities of your consultants’ relationships with outsiders? That is, how did your ethnographic training help you reconcile your initial expectations of your anthropological endeavor with the constraints (and associated possibilities) you encountered in your fieldwork, analysis, and writing?Your description—“continually adapting to the changes and complexities”—really captures my experience perfectly! Having to always revise my new and ongoing projects keeps this concern at the forefront of my thinking and research, too. I think that two parts of my ethnographic training continue to inform how I research and write in and about Pueblo communities: being introduced to the ideas of informed consent, harm, and language ideologies; and being introduced to literature on knowledge production and power. I first experienced the former when preparing my IRB, which was a surprisingly nuanced process at my graduate institution (there was a separate IRB for social sciences, so I felt guided by scholars working on comparable projects). My advisor also shared with me instances where he chose not to circulate language examples as part of a language project to which he contributed. Also, critiques of language revitalization discourses by scholars including Jane Hill, Robert Moore, Joseph Errington, and Peter Whiteley alongside work on language ideologies and literacy (especially by Paul Kroskrity and Justin Richland who have worked in Pueblo communities) really paved the way for being able to think about such projects as both objects of analysis and potential sites for conflict or collaboration. However, it was really being in the field and realizing the stakes involved with keeping secrets that led directly to the choices I eventually made in the way I presented data in the book. Lastly, works in anthropology, social theory, and science and technology studies that analyzed the ways that anthropologists produce and circulate knowledge had a tremendous effect; Bourdieu, Foucault, and Fabian were key.