[Linganth] in two weeks - Magnus Pharao Hansen - November 29th

Ilana Gershon imgershon at gmail.com
Fri Nov 15 14:04:00 UTC 2024


Dear Colleagues,
Magnus Pharao Hansen will be talking about his new book, Nahuatl Nations
in two weeks -- November 29th

He has asked us to read the introduction, and offers the conclusion for
anyone who wants to read about some of the ways all the chapters
intertwine.   Please read as much as you can, but do feel free to join us
even if you haven't managed to read everything.

The reading can be found here:

*Introduction*
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17xFwEup_FSymyyH8ZLCQdHAT8o-0Suf_/view?usp=sharing

*Conclusion*
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z4kvuWuREbAJGKW1C00lPw4feAf38P5l/view?usp=sharing


The meeting will be 12-1 pm  east coast time and can be
reached by clicking on this Zoom link:

  https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698 <https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698>

Looking forward to seeing you all virtually,

Ilana

Press blurb: *Nahuatl Nations* is a linguistic ethnography that explores
the political relations between those Indigenous communities of Mexico that
speak the Nahuatl language and the Mexican Nation that claims it as an
important national symbol. Author Magnus Pharao Hansen studies how this
relation has been shaped by history and how it plays out today in
Indigenous Nahua towns, regions, and educational institutions, and in the
Mexican diaspora.

Based on long-term fieldwork in several Nahuatl speaking communities in
Central Mexico, Hansen uses a combination of methods from ethnohistory,
sociolinguistics, anthropology and ethnography to study the political
importance of Nahuatl in different periods and places, and for different
persons. He suggests that the complicated political relations between
State, Nation and Nahua communities can be understood through the concept
of 'semiotic sovereignty', which refers to a community's ability to manage
its own semiotic resources, including its own language, and the cultural
practices that constitute it as a political community. He argues that
Indigenous languages are likely to remain vital as long as they used as
languages of political community, and they also protect the community's
sovereignty by functioning as a barrier that restricts access to the
participation for outsiders. Semiotic sovereignty therefore becomes a key
concept for understanding how Indigenous communities can maintain both
their political and linguistic vitality. While the Mexican Nation seeks to
expropriate Indigenous semiotic resources in order to improve its brand on
an international marketplace, Indigenous communities may employ them in
resistance to state domination.
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