Call-for-Papers for a volunteered AAA panel

[Tzu-kai Liu]

Dear ling anthropologists,


My colleague and I are seeking more abstracts for a volunteered AAA panel.
The panel submission deadline is April 15, 2014. The AAA conference will be
held in Washington, DC, December 3-7, 2014. Below is a brief description of
our panel.



*"Representing Materiality and Publicness in, and through, Languages"*



Amidst the growing development of commodification and marketization in
globalizing world, linguistic anthropological studies have paid close
attention to the complex dynamics between language use and material
representation (Heller 2010). Linguistic meanings and ideologies of the
material are often illustrated in and signified by way of representing
material style, taste, aesthetics and sociality and that of negotiating
hierarchical order and uneven accessibility in the production and
circulation of particular objects through various uses of linguistic
devices, including genre, performance, utterance and speech. The
intersection of words and things produces and potentially reshapes the
meanings and semiotic ideologies of materiality (Shankar and Cavanaugh
2012; Keane 2005) which are associated with commodification, ethnicity,
nationalism, authority, interpersonal network, and sociality. This panel,
in particular, focuses on the public circulation and representation of
materials in/through language use. It will ask: what forms of linguistic
practices play a role in the production and circulation of materials in the
public sphere?; how the "linguistic construction of publics" (Gal and
Woolard 2001) is integral to claims of material authenticity, sociality and
ownership in response to influences of audience in the public spheres
(e.g., tourist market, public display, festival and others)?; what patterns
of style, aesthetics, taste, and sociality can entail the semiotic
ideologies and values of the material?; and how users' and speakers' agency
and identities are constructed both in the differential management of their
linguistic practices and in their various (in)accessibility to specific
things or commodities?




Organizer: Tzu-kai Liu (Chi-Nan University)

If you are interested, please send an abstract (no more than 250 words) to
Dr. Tzu-kai Liu (tkliu2005 at gmail.com) by April 1st, 2014.


Thanks!