https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MakiharaLanguage

Tony Webster: I want to say how much I enjoyed reading your book Language and Political Subjectivity: Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela. It’s really a wonderful and thoughtful book. I appreciated, especially, the chapter on Mata-U’iroa Atan’s poetry, and given I’d just read Janet McIntosh’s Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics, which also includes a chapter on poetry, it seems, to borrow a title from John Berger, which I think rather appropriate, that “the hour of poetry” has come round at last. But, I’m not going to ask about poetry, not directly anyway.

Juan, I know how much Jonathan Hill meant to you as a scholar and a mentor, and I see his influence in this book, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about Jonathan and his influence on you and your work. Miki, not to exclude you, I’d open it up more broadly to you, to ask about intellectual ancestors and their influence on your work as well.

Juan Luis Rodríguez: Jonathan’s influence is all over this book,  most obviously in our theorization of truth. His work on myth in Amazonia has been hugely influential in South American ethnography, and it has shown me personally the way to tackle the relation between discourse and social reality. Myth for Jonathan was history in the words of Amazonian speakers, not just a surface manifestation of their mental structure. For him, attending to myth was attending to the political and power relationship between Amazonian communities and the colonial forces of nation-states settling around them. There is then a direct relationship between that work on myth in Amazonia and my preoccupations with truth and the settling of national truth both in Venezuela and the contexts in which Venezuelans have been forced to move as diasporic subjects. These are things I learned from Jonathan while hearing him hammer away on the importance of discourse, power and history while walking two steps behind him as we walked around campus not knowing if he was still talking directly to me or to himself.

Miki Makihara: For me, that attention to truth is essential because it is what connects an individual speaker’s self and beliefs to history. How do people use linguistic forms to move history forward or capture collective attention? This question is central to Joe Errington’s work on Indonesia. Combining that focus on history and common attention is the basis for our emphasis on stancemaking in the book. Micaela di Leonardo sparked my interest in political economy which helped me to ground our semiotic and linguistic theorization of power.

Both: We should also add that ultimately, what brought us together on this specific project was a deep appreciation for concrete, everyday discourse. This came from our shared engagement with scholars like Joel Sherzer, Bambi Schieffelin, and Elinor Ochs. For Miki, it was also directly shaped by her early study with and work as a research assistant for Niko Besnier on Nukulaelae, Tuvalu. For Juan, it grew out of the countless times Juan interrupted you, Tony, in your office in Carbondale, Illinois. These experiences taught us to ground our biggest theoretical questions in the fine-grained details of how people actually talk.

Tony Webster: I think one of the more striking and distinctive things about the book is its collaborative nature, so I’d like to ask you to say a bit about that collaborative process. It seems, not just a shared writing project, but a shared research project.

Juan Luis Rodríguez: That collaborative spirit is something we both learned from our mentors. For me, as a relatively early career linguistic anthropologist, one of the most fortunate things was landing in a department where I found true mentorship. As I’ve learned over time, that isn’t always common. But in my case I found a colleague that took me under her guidance and from whom I truly learned this style of collaborative work.

Miki Makihara: While I learned fieldwork and solo writing from Niko, it was Bambi Schieffelin who introduced me to the modalities and rewards of deep collaborative writing soon after I arrived in New York. Working with her on the book Consequences of Contact was a marvelous experience. We applied that exact model to this book, literally weaving together every single sentence of the book over the course of many long working sessions. And this collaboration was not just about writing but about truly doing research together and creating a synergetic interaction.

Tony Webster: There seems currently in linguistic anthropology an attempt to delimit or contain the sweep of language ideologies; you cite Gal and Irvine on this point, and one could add Paul Kroskrity’s recent work on language ideological assemblages, that language ideologies can’t mean everything, and there needs to be some rethinking of the concept. Your intervention here, is to argue for lived beliefs and corporeal consciousness, which aren’t meant to replace language ideologies, but rather to refocus some of the conversation. Have I got this right, or am I misreading your argument?

Both: That’s an excellent reading of our argument. Language ideologies have been an influential idea in linguistic anthropology in one form or another for almost half a century. We are not trying to replace or delimit the concept of language ideologies, but to zoom in on how they are actually lived and felt, clarifying its relationship to subjectivity, experience, and practice. For us, an ideology isn’t a fixed set of ideas that people download into their minds and take up as awareness. It’s something that has to be built, felt, and transformed through lived experience. We focus on corporeal consciousness because these beliefs aren’t just abstract thoughts; they are felt in the body, often in ways that aren’t fully articulated. That is the lesson we draw from Raymond Williams. It is not that people are aware of experience or not but whether and how experience becomes available to thoughtful and feelingful actors. For example, when the Navajo poet Blackhorse Mitchell told you during fieldwork that he wanted to “give the listener an imagination,” he wasn’t just trying  to convey ideas; he was trying to share an experience. This is a point that Rapa Nui poets also emphasize.

That is also what our concept of stancemaking gets at. It’s the messy, ongoing process where we use language to become and reshape ourselves and the world. Ideologies are not clear sets of ideas that are already existing but something that has to be made and transformed through experience and action. Ideologies are such semiotic objects embodied in behaviors. Languages are such embodied ideologies. They do not just guide and narrow our perception of the world, nor do they just allow speakers to intentfully do things with words, but more importantly we use them to become and reshape ourselves in society. They are in a constant state of becoming in relation to our positions in the world. This, we believe, is in line with Gal and Irvine’s idea of the partiality of language ideologies, and also Kroskrity’s idea of language ideological assemblages. Ideas such as a Chilean democratic nation-state, a pure Rapa Nui language, or that “we Venezuelans come from the future” are powerful, but they are always partial and always in the making. Our project is to understand how these partial ideas are incorporated,  believed, and made real in the world

We want to emphasize experience as a process for the making of the individual and subjective world. This experience is felt and becomes intimate to the individual body. It is not just learned to become an object of thinking. Think of the Rapa Nui poet Mata-U’iroa Atan. He does not just list political grievances. He grounds his truth in personal, bodily experience to create an exemplary self for future generations of Rapa Nui speakers. He wants to convey what it feels like to have ancestors.         

Tony Webster: The book is–while certainly ethnographic–densely theoretical and an attempt to map out a set of theoretical terms to account for diasporic communities and Indigenous communities in their struggles for sense-making. Many of the concepts, stancemaking most obviously, are meant to be portable and usable beyond the particulars of this book. But for me, I think your rethinking of truth is particularly insightful (Chapter 4 especially). But, I’ll leave the question more open-ended, what do you see as the most portable of the concepts you introduce, and why?

Both: That’s a great question. We put a lot of care into developing concepts that could travel, and three stand out for us. First, as you mentioned, is truth. This is no coincidence as we pointed out in the answer to your first question. We’re concerned with the future of diasporic communities, both indigenous and not indigenous, who are facing larger nation-state formations that threaten their very existence. In places like Chile, the idea of truth has been central to democracy since the end of the dictatorship. The idea that it is possible to agree on truth is also driving political efforts all over the world and is challenged with almost equal intensity everywhere. We try to show how settling on a constructed national truth is a political project. Whose testimony counts? In Chile, the voices of victims of the dictatorship were collected as testimonies and platformed as powerful national symbols. But these testimonies make the individual voice controllable in the name of peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, the voices of Indigenous peoples in their own truth commission were largely substituted with so-called expert knowledge. So, for us, truth isn’t about facts alone; it’s about the political process of fixing belief and the struggles over whose voice and experience are counted as real and recognized. We hope this is a useful lens for analyzing truth claims in other places as well.       

Politics and power are also two twin terms we rethink in the book. We are inspired by Bakhtin’s centripetal and centrifugal forces of language in culture, which we think of as two co-existing and opposing forms of agency. Power is a cohesive centripetal force. Things like discipline, control, modeling, conventionalization and exemplarity compel and pull people together. We suggest that power is always anticipatory to ways in which this cohesion can be challenged and disrupted. This disruption comes from transgression. Politics is the centrifugal force – the acts of transgression and disruption that challenge social boundaries and the status quo. There is no guarantee of balance between them; authoritarian rule can emerge (as we have witnessed both in Chile and Venezuela but also now here in the U.S.), but so can radical change. This framework allows ethnographers to analyze the constant tension between forces of cohesion and forces of disruption in broad social contexts.

Finally, the idea of stance-making itself was key. At the beginning, it was puzzling to us. We knew what we wanted to say but were uncertain about what to call it. Stance taking and footing were appealing concepts but the idea of subjects positioning themselves in front of a fixed object was unsatisfactory. Social actors make themselves through these positions but also create others and the objects they pay attention to. We were uncertain what to call a process in which not just the object of attention or the subject emerged, but where relationship and perspective building was also the point. We wanted to emphasize the dialogical and dialectical relationship between self and object (including other selves). This was a meaning making process not just a matter of positioning. There was also no obvious straight named concept neither in Spanish nor Japanese that we could resort to for this, but we knew of breadmaking and as a noun in English, so stancemaking captured the idea for us of a process of worldmaking. Stancemaking produces a subjectivity (understood as a point of view in the world) that has consequences for the world and for others we share it with.    

Tony Webster: There are number of striking and moving bits of ethnography in this book, and for me, one of the more moving parts of the book, is the discussion about the distinction between intimacy and cherishing of Rapa Nui; first I think many of us who have worked in such situations can appreciate this distinction, but secondly, and this is a testament to Miki’s work, one also sees this distinction unfolding in time. I wonder if you could say something, first about this distinction, and then, secondly, something about the value of long-term ethnographic research.

Miki Makihara: That distinction is really at the emotional and intellectual core of the book, and it was something I only came to grasp through long-term ethnographic research. It was challenging to express and make sense of the complex nature of what we call language cherishing and its relationship to what scholars such as Sapir, and you, have theorized about feelingful attachment to language. When I first arrived in Rapa Nui, the dominant academic narrative was one of survival and imminent language death. The historical trauma was undeniable – the devastating slave raids, epidemics, European missionization, and Chilean colonization in the 19th century had left deep scars. But the language I encountered didn’t feel like it was disappearing. It felt intensely alive, repeatedly reconstructing itself. On the streets and in homes, I heard this fluid, dynamic, multilingual talk. Rapa Nui sociality was vibrant, open, and creative, spilling over any neat linguistic boundaries the school textbooks and dictionaries suggested. There was profound dissonance between the tragic story of vanishing voices and the resilient, lively community I was living with.

What I witnessed over thirty years was not a simple loss, but a profound transformation, especially in the community’s relationship with their language. On the one hand, I did see a clear sign of language shift and decline in what we call intimacy — that effortless, everyday, fluency that comes from being immersed in a language from birth. Children were growing up speaking Spanish, and a generational gap was growing. But at the same time, I witnessed the powerful rise of what we call cherishing. This is a more conscious, deliberate, and deeply political act of valuing the language as a sacred symbol of genealogical continuity. I saw this cherishing in so many forms: in the painstaking work of elders such as Nico Haoa, who formed a language restructuration committee and meticulously documented and purified the ancestral language. I saw it in the fierce, tireless advocacy of young teachers such as Viki Haoa and Hiralia Tuki, who battled the ministry of education to allow them to teach the Rapa Nui language in the school. I saw it in children who had spoken mostly Spanish at home growing into young adults, coming back from higher education on the Continent, to become fierce public advocates for Rapa Nui, demanding Rapa Nui be taught at schools. And I saw it with young parents, themselves not so fluent speakers, struggling to reclaim their language (re)learning it anew right alongside their own children.

These forms of cherishing became somewhat at odds with the liveliness and diversity of multilingual speech as they seem to lead the development of consciousness about language boundaries and policing. This leads to a painful paradox that we saw activists grapple with constantly: people love their language so fiercely that they feel unworthy of speaking it imperfectly. This explains why they demand government support for the language in schools, yet remain puzzled as to why families don’t enforce it at home. Most children learn to respect and love the Rapa Nui language, but they find it incredibly difficult to reclaim that effortless intimacy with it. Understanding this complex emotional landscape—this mix of commitment, joy, and frustration—was only possible by accompanying the community for decades, watching children grow into activists and witnessing their tireless work of cultural reconstruction firsthand.

Both: Cherishing and intimacy occupy overlapping but distinct places in our theorization of stancemaking. Miki’s experience of Rapa Nui sociality and Juan’s experience of Warao relationship with the Venezuelan state have taught us that a sense of attachment with linguistic form can be something complicated. Intimacy is better understood as a sense of closeness with the linguistic forms that speakers feel as their own and around which a sense of identity and closeness to other speakers can be generated. This sense of closeness and attachment is a product of a process of socialization that can make speakers feel at home in their own language by closing the gap between speakers and the linguistic forms they use. But what happens if respecting and loving one’s language actually produces insecurity and a gap between the speaker and the correct, pure and beloved linguistic form? These are situations in which speakers get to appreciate and name linguistic forms with which they are affectively invested but also have a sense of distance from them. Cherishing then is a form of attachment defined by a certain distance. We feel that the work of closing the dissonance between intimacy and cherishing is central to the challenges we find in the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages everywhere.