AAA CFP: Strategies and Performances of Temporal Heteroglossia

[Richard J Senghas]

[Forwarding, as requested.  Please send all replies to Jacqueline Messing or Andrea Smith directly.  -RJS]

From: Jacqueline Messing <jmessing at usf.edu>
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 8:30 AM
Subject: AAA CFP: Strategies and Performances of Temporal Heteroglossia

SECOND CALL FOR AAA 2013 - We have a couple of slots left.
See revised abstract below.   If you are interested, email us right away and send the abstract by April 12.


CFP AAA 13:  Strategies and Performances of Temporal Heteroglossia

As languages forever evolve and change, elements from former ways of speaking emerge into contemporary language in a myriad of ways for a host of reasons.  In this panel, we want to focus on the varying degrees of strategy and performance involved in what might be termed “temporal heteroglossia,” the mixing of voices from the past into the present.  This panel builds on the Bakhtinian heteroglossic legacy (Hill 1995, 1986), anthropological interest in temporality (Inoue 2004), and the rich literature exploring the ways the past enters into contemporary life via performance.  This literature has, for instance, highlighted traditional storytelling genres (Bauman 1986), the ways bygone days are narrated and framed (Briggs 1988), skilled orality (Tonkin 1995), and the construction of authority in traditional tales (Kroskrity 1993; 2008). In much of this work, the use of specific linguistic features, verbal genres and/or performance styles that assist in constructing “pastness” is considered the result of agentive speakers who endeavor to achieve specific goals. We could then argue that the past is a resource deployed by speakers as they set out to affect change in the present, and consequently in their efforts to alter the course of the future.

Can we make the same assumptions when we focus on everyday talk about the past?  Many have found that speakers will deploy linguistic resources to evoke “pastness” strategically in everyday talk, as when linguistic forms are used to index qualities associated with a former era; a subgroup of Briggs’ “traditional tales” (1988) were told in conversational settings. However, voices from the past may emerge, or be performed, in different ways for quite different purposes. When people are talking or writing about past times, terms from prior eras, former ways of speaking, statements from the past in the form of reported speech, idiomatic expressions and other elements of “pastness” can appear.  This panel considers the ethnographic emergence of a wide array of forms of “temporal heteroglossia,” into present discourse in an international context.

Sources Cited
Bauman, Richard  1986. Story, Performance, and Event. Cambridge U Press.
Becker, A.L. 1984, Toward a post-structuralist view of language learning, Language Learning 33:217-220.
Briggs, Charles. 1988. Competence in Performance. The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art. U of Pennsylvania Press.
Hill, Jane H. (1995).  The Voices of Don Gabriel:  Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative.  In D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim (eds.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press.
Inoue, M. (2004), Introduction: Temporality and Historicity in and through Linguistic Ideology. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14: 1–5.
Kroskrity, Paul. 2009. Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(1):40-56
Tonkin, Elizabeth. 1995. Narrating Our Pasts. Cambridge U Press.

Andrea Smith, Lafayette College, smithal at lafayette.edu
Jacqueline Messing, University of Maryland/Georgetown, jacquelinemessing at gmail.com




*  *  *
Jacqueline Messing, Ph.D.

Adjunct Professor of Anthropology & Latin American Studies, University of Maryland-College Park
Undergraduate Advisor, Latin American Studies Center

Visiting Scholar & Adjunct Professor, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University

Associate Professor (Retired), Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida
http://usf.academia.edu/JacquelineMessing