[Linganth] Update / reminder: AAA CFP on Language and Life History

Mon Apr 2 12:04:30 UTC 2018

Dear Edwin and Sonya

Here I send an abstract for your proposed AAA session. I hope it fits.
best,

Magnus

*The existential grounding of language politics: A life history perspective*
*Magnus Pharao Hansen, Postdoc, University of Copenhagen*
*Email: magnuspharao at gmail.com <magnuspharao at gmail.com>*

Across the world increasing numbers of speakers of minority languages are
deciding to participate in linguistic revitalization projects, often
struggling to take up speech (Moore 2012) in languages that the surrounding
society has encouraged them to abandon, and in social contexts from which
those languages have been excluded. In Mexico indigenous language activists
work in different contexts to reclaim Nahuatl as a language of community
and of education. This paper uses life history narratives of Nahua language
educator-activists as a way to understand how people come to make the
choice of reclaiming languages, focusing on how language activists ground
their glottopolitical activities in narrative reconstructions of lived
experience, framing them as individual existential choices. It is suggested
that attention to the existential grounding of the glottopolitical
decisions of individual speakers may be crucial to be able to predict the
outcomes of language revitalizatoin and reclamation projects.

On 1 April 2018 at 21:51, Edwin Everhart <edwin.everhart at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> We are happy to announce that Anthony K. Webster (University of Texas at
> Austin) will serve as discussant for this panel. Please see our panel
> abstract, below, and forward widely. Thank you again for considering this
> call for papers.
>
> Sonya Rao and Edwin K. Everhart, University of California, Los Angeles
>
> *Language and Life History: Linguistic Resistance, Resilience, and
> Adaptation*
> 117th AAA Annual Meeting, November 14 - 18, 2018, San Jose, CA
> *Draft panel abstract - subject to minor updates.*
>
> Through language, how do people experience, enact, and narrate resistance,
> resilience, and adaptation? In this panel, we hope to articulate an
> approach to language and life history focused neither exclusively on social
> structure, nor on language structure. Rather, in line with Sapir’s (1934)
> call to understand culture through both the individual and the structural,
> we take individual biographies, perspectives, and practices as necessary
> for a rigorous understanding of language in society.
>
> We share an interest in language-focused life histories which often draw
> on subjects’ own narratives and (limited) consciousness of social
> structure, and which center on experiences of language such as
> socialization, acquisition, labor, exclusion, and alienation. While
> maintaining a focus on language and the individual, the organizers hope to
> bring together diverse scholars whose work represents a broad range of
> ethnographic contexts and research agendas.
>
> The long tradition of observing the social individual in anthropology,
> including the tradition of person-centered ethnography (LeVine 1982), has
> led to uniquely powerful analyses of narrative (e.g. Ochs and Capps 2001),
> and provided a framework of the life history as a lens into social
> structures (Langness 1965, Langness and Frank 1981, Watson and
> Watson-Franke 1985). More recently, scholars have joined these approaches
> to show that the narratives of “exceptional individuals” can explain
> important sociolinguistic change from valorization (Kroskrity 2009) to
> devaluing a linguistic culture (Kroskrity 2014).
>
> Meanwhile, there is a long-running debate in linguistics (cf. Johnstone
> 2000) between perspectives which address language as primarily individual
> knowledge, and those which address language as primarily a set of shared
> norms. In both cases the object of analysis is language structure; studies
> of individuals are incidental to the study of phenomena like style and
> register (Rampton 1999, Schilling-Estes 1998), genre (Alim 2003), and
> variety (Labov 1979).
>
> Moving forward, what can we learn from individual cases of linguistic
> resistance, resilience, and adaptation? This panel will draw together a
> range of approaches to “lingual life histories” (Kroskrity 1993:109-142)
> and linguistic individuals. Taken together, we show that turning our
> attention to biographical detail of individuals will reveal important
> spheres of experience and agency that are not captured through other
> methods, and explore diverse questions of language ideologies, language
> structure, and discursive practice, and social change.
>
> Though individual perspectives are never definitive, their analysis (e.g.
> analysis of internal structure, or cross-checking against external evidence
> of actual practice) is a productive method for the anthropologist. How
> might life histories in language help us to understand the multiple voices
> in any society (cf. Hymes 2003), and to examine individual agency in
> linguistic practice (cf. Kroskrity 2009)? How does the moral freight of
> life-history narratives, including moments of transformation (Mandelbaum’s
> (1973) ‘turnings’), reveal social realities that escape conventional
> ethnography? As a core part of the methodological toolkit of the
> discipline, linguistic life histories can contribute to numerous
> contemporary concerns of linguistic anthropology, including community,
> media, discrimination, identity, publics, representation, language shift,
> and language policy. Finally, the organizers believe that the diachronic,
> often narrative character of linguistic life histories will lead to a panel
> which powerfully addresses the conference themes.
>
>
> *Abstract submission guidelines*
>
> Please send abstracts (max 250 words), along with your name, title,
> institutional affiliation, and contact information to both Sonya Rao (
> sonyarao at g.ucla.edu) and Edwin K. Everhart (eke at g.ucla.edu) by *Wednesday,
> April 4 at 8:00pm Eastern/5:00pm Pacific.*
> We will notify you about acceptance by Friday, April 6 at 8:00pm
> Eastern/5:00pm Pacific.
>
>
> *Citations*
> • Alim, H.S., 2003. *On some serious next millennium rap ishhh: Pharoahe
> Monch, hip hop poetics, and the internal rhymes of internal affairs*.
> Journal of English Linguistics, 31(1), pp.60-84.
> • Hymes, D., 2003. *Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality:
> Toward an understanding of voice*. Taylor & Francis.
> • Johnstone, B., 2000. *The individual voice in language*. Annual Review
> of Anthropology, 29(1), pp.405-424.
> • Kroskrity, P.V., 1993. *Language, history, and identity:
> Ethnolinguistic studies of the Arizona Tewa*. University of Arizona Press.
> • Kroskrity, P.V., 2009. *Embodying the reversal of language shift:
> Agency, incorporation, and language ideological change in the Western Mono
> community of Central California*. in Native American Language Ideologies.
> Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, pp.190-210.
> • Kroskrity, P.V., 2014. *Borders traversed, boundaries erected: Creating
> discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa*.
> Language & Communication, 38, pp.8-17.
> • Labov, W., 1979.* Locating the frontier between social and
> psychological factors in linguistic variation*. in Individual differences
> in language ability and language behavior (pp. 327-340).
> • Langness, L.L., 1965. *The life history in anthropological science* (No.
> F/301.01 S7/8).
> • Langness, L.L. and Frank, G., 1981. *Lives: an anthropological approach
> to biography*. Novato, CA.: Chandler & Sharp Publishers.
> • LeVine, R.A., 1982. *Culture, behavior, and personality*. Transaction
> Publishers.
> • Mandelbaum, D.G., 1973. *The study of life history: Gandhi*. Current
> Anthropology, 14(3), pp.177-206.
> • Ochs, E. and Capps, L., 2001. *A dimensional approach to narrative*. in
> Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling, pp.1-58.
> • Rampton, B., 1999. (ed.) *Styling the other*. Journal of
> sociolinguistics, 3(4).
> • Sapir, E., 1934. *The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a
> Study of Cultures*. The Journal of Social Psychology, 5(3), pp.408-415.
> • Watson, L.C. and Watson-Franke, M.B., 1985. *Interpreting life
> histories: An anthropological inquiry*. Rutgers Univ Pr.
>
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>

-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen, PhD.
Postdoctoral Researcher,
Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
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