[Linganth] ICASS IX Language Session - Linguistic Economies of Place

[Jenanne K Ferguson]

Hello all,

The Languages Section of the Ninth International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS IX) in Umeå, Sweden, 8-12 June 2017, is still looking for submissions for papers! The deadline is 16 January 2017.

In particular, we'd like to draw your attention to section 11.3:

Linguistic Economies of Place:


Throughout history, languages have been made into a powerful tool for making and unmaking boundaries between people. With the idea of people as having a single language and a single geographical space/territory, language (and ways of speaking) became ideologically, politically and emotionally linked to both ethnicity and territoriality. Language thus has evolved into (and been maintained as) one of the main principles of social, ethnic and territorial definition and differentiation, i.e. of defining who we (vs. they) are and where we belong. Language thus has a capacity to index place or implicitly link people to particular place-based or territorial identities. However, as part of changing political environment and the ongoing negotiation for control over lands and resources in recent years, we can observe shifts from language and ethnicity to territoriality, where “land is often taken as more iconic of identity than language” (Schreyer 2016; see also Krupnik and Vakhtin 2002: 19, 34).


Here, we define 'linguistic economy of place' as how language, territoriality and conceptions of belonging/identity coincide (see Schwalbe 2015). Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1992) notion of linguistic capital, where language is seen as a social relation within system of exchange, and on linguistic ecologies (Mülhäusler 1996), we are interested in how language may be a symbolic material commodity that circulates in a situated manner, gaining value from its connection to the places in which it is spoken and/or written. Our panel seeks to investigate how both language and territory (linked to these ideas of belonging) can become resources for (re)creating identity - be it regional or ethnic.


We wish to explore how these ideas of belonging to a particular place, expressed and signified in a language, form an inseparable part of local language economies, i.e. systems of valuation and display applied in a group’s dynamics. We are also interested in exploring how these ideas of language and land together are linked to claims of ownership or responsibility, and how they figure into the “rhetoric of othering” (Riggins 1997), solidifying the boundaries between groups. Finally, we seek to better understand how these ideas of belonging might be contested within the global economic market (e.g. trends in global discourse, like sustainability discourse and/or ‘save the Arctic’ discourse?) and the on-going shift from ethnicity to territoriality (or trans-territoriality).


For full call for papers and abstracts and submission information, please see:
http://www.trippus.se/web/Presentation/web.aspx?evid=l+k2p0UcaP8eXy9TNfnXsQ==&ecid=loNJV+HVzL0o7zbDGv/zsQ==&ln=eng&view=category&template=desktoph

Please feel free to write to Jenanne Ferguson (jenannef at unr.edu) or Daria Morgounova Schwalbe (daria.schwalbe at gmail.com) with any questions.

Thank you, and we hope to see you there,
Jenanne and Daria



Jenanne Ferguson, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
1664 North Virginia Street
University of Nevada-Reno
Reno, Nevada
89557-0096

Office: Ansari 506, (775) 682-7629


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