Suggested AAA panel

[Valentina Pagliai]

Dear friends,

together with two other linguistic anthropologists, I am trying to organize
a new panel for 2002 AAA meeting. I thought of sending you the draft of our
idea and see if if somebody out there may be interested in joining us. This
draft is still very raw.

The main idea is to have a panel on language (and other kinds of)
ideologies that focuses on the side of the persons as agents, and the way
in which they "deal" with the multiple ideologies in their lives. Here is
the draft:


This panel examines the ways in which language ideologies function as sites
to assert and contest dominant representations of ..... art, gender,
ethnicity, childhood (and so on).  We are concerned with the ways that some
ideas and practices about these representations are recognized and accepted
by social groups as well as how the authority of such representations are
challenged and contested by individuals.  An important focus that should
emerge from the papers is a particular attention to individual speakers and
their agency.  We attempt to advance the inquiry into language ideologies
by illustrating the ways in which individuals are not just shaped by
institutional ideologies, but also the ways in which individuals creatively
appropriate use and embody them.  Presenters analyze a variety of data
including naturally occurring quotidian discourse, interviews, and
sociolinguistic data in order to elucidate struggles between hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic representations.

There is a general problem among ethnographers and social scientists: their
inability to recognize ideological constructions for what they are:
ideological constructions. The consequence of this is the inability of the
ethnographer to appreciate the informants' manipulation, appropriation and
hybridization/mixing of the ideological system(s) themselves.  Thus
ethnographers have become blind to people's displays of personal agency.
And they are blind to people's displays of complex, layered and
knowledgeable understanding of the social phenomena around them, and in
which their own lives are embedded.
Our panel wants to look at the ways in which people plays with the
articulation of ideological domains and systems: either in conversation
with the ethnographers, in everyday encounters, or in other contexts.

E-mail me if you are thinking in our same direction.


Bye,


Valentina Pagliai
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