Forwarded announcement

[Richard J Senghas]

[Please don't reply to this message; just forwarding it along.... -RJS]

People may want to check out this session on Sun morning (10am-2pm):

ADVENTURES IN HETEROGLOSSIA: NAVIGATING TERRAINS OF LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCE
IN LOCAL AND COLONIAL REGIMES OF KNOWLEDGE.
European colonial accounts of the linguistic landscape in culturally
heterogenous regions of the world typically betrayed perplexity bordering
on contempt for the unruly array of language varieties found in local
repertoires.  In many such locales colonial administrators in league with
philologists and ethnologists took it as their duty to "rationalize" what
seemed to be a Babel-like confusion of tongues.  This rationalization often
took the form of identifying centers of "pure" language use and protecting
the loci of purity from corruption and contamination across freshly carved
ethnolinguistic boundaries.  The overarching colonial goal was to confront
heteroglossia by superimposing the ideology of a unitary standard.  At the
same time, the new relationships to language which have emerged within such
encounters have caused fresh demarcations, reformations, and definitions of
languages to occur in conjunction with new nationalist, anti-colonial, and
independence movements worldwide.


Marco Jacquemet
Anthropology
Barnard College
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
tel. 212-854-4314
fax. 212-854-8266

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Richard J Senghas, Assoc Professor       | Sonoma State University
Department of Anthropology/Linguistics   | 1801 East Cotati Avenue
Coordinator, Linguistics & TESL Programs | Rohnert Park, CA 94928-3609
Richard.Senghas at sonoma.edu               | 707-664-3920 (fax)