AAA 2002 panel proposal

[Janina Fenigsen]

I would like to circulate a call for papers (or at least for a
preliminary expression of interest) for a panel on "Misrecognition and
the semiotic limits of linguistic awareness in ideologizing
sociolinguistic boundaries" (working title). If interested, respond to:

fenigsen at gwm.sc.edu

This panel calls for further empirical and critical-theoretic attention
to the semiotic and sociocultural processes involved in ideologizing of
a sociolinguistic field; in particular, to local and "expert linguistic"
interpretive strategies and understandings that serve the (re)drawing of
sociolinguistic identities and linguistic boundaries. The papers may
explore these phenomena within a broad range of ethnographic sites and
settings. The sociopolitical contexts that intensify such processes and
put them in sharp relief may range from language revitalization,
officialization, and  standardization movements (whether in western,
postcolonial, or other settings) to, say, the allocation of socially
marked voices to literary or other fictive characters. The papers
should, however, explicitly attend to discursive or other semiotic
practices (for example, linguistic cartography,"family trees") that
constitute sociolinguistic fields through, for example,erasing some
kinds of linguistic differences and practices and highlighting others.
	Theoretical agenda: (a) to juxtapose Bourdieu's "misrecognition"
with the semiotic conceptualization of the limits of linguistic
awareness by Silverstein; (b) to explore the relative weight of
political and formal-semiotic factors in influencing the salience
/eraseability of various aspects of linguistic differences, and (c) to
articulate Bourdieu's somewhat diffuse attention to power/hegemony axes
that delimit awareness and reflexivity with Silverstein's analytically
subtle but politically neutral concept.