[Linganth] Juan Luis Rodriguez's book

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today CaMP anthropology blog features the winner of the 2021 SLA New Voices
Prize,
Juan Luis Rodriguez answers Rusty Barrett's questions on his book, Language
and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta.

You can find the interview here: https://campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Exploring the ways in which the development of linguistic
practices helped expand national politics in remote, rural areas of
Venezuela, *Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta* situates
language as a mediating force in the creation of the 'magical state'.
Focusing on the Waraos speakers of the Orinoco Delta, this book explores
center–periphery dynamics in Venezuela through an innovative linguistic
anthropological lens.

Using a semiotic framework informed by concepts of 'transduction' and
'translation', this book combines ethnographic and historical evidence to
analyze the ideological mediation and linguistic practices involved in
managing a multi-ethnic citizenry in Venezuela. Juan Luis Rodriguez shows
how indigenous populations participate in the formation and contestation of
state power through daily practices and the use of different speech genres,
emphasising the performative and semiotic work required to produce
revolutionary subjects.

Establishing the centrality of language and semiosis in the constitution of
authority and political power, this book moves away from seeing revolution
in solely economic or ideological terms. Through the collision between
Warao and Spanish, it highlights how language ideologies can exclude or
integrate indigenous populations in the public sphere and how they were
transformed by Hugo Chavez' revolutionary government to promote loyalty to
the regime.
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