[Linganth] AAA CFP - Language and Life History

[Edwin K. Everhart]

Dear colleagues,

Pleaser consider this call for papers and forward to anyone you think might
be interested. Thank you.
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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