[Linganth] SLA Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize Panel

Mon Nov 17 01:19:49 UTC 2025

This is amazing... Can you please take me off this list and unsubscribe me. Thank you all and wish you all best of luck 

Greetings linguistic anthropologists, 

I look forward to seeing many of you in NOLA later this week! Please mark your calendar for this annual highlight of the conference, featuring all four finalists for this year's Gumperz Prize and two thoughtful discussants,
 4:15-5:45 Friday . Come hear some exciting new work in our field! 

Best wishes, 

Kate 

 SLA Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize Panel 

Start Date: 11/21/2025 4:15 PM through 11/21/2025 5:45 PM 

Venue:  Marriott Room: Galerie 2 

This panel showcases the four finalists for the 2025 John Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize, 

awarded annually by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. The award honors John Joseph 

Gumperz (1922–2013), whose pioneering work in the ethnography of communication and language use in social context has inspired generations of linguistic anthropologists. This year's winning papers concern varied topics and geographic contexts, but what they
 have in common is careful examination of how people work out aspects of their lived experience through linguistic and semiotic practices. What do people accomplish in "talk about talk," or talk about sound, or talk about landscapes and places? Presenters demonstrate
 how (post)colonial hierarchies are 

constituted by mutually reinforcing online and offline practices, how people cross semiotic 

modalities by means other than lexical semantics, how Indigenous sociolinguistic diversity has 

been understood before and beyond named languages, and how landscape registers and 

embodied practices of viewing the land become enactments of knowing. They draw on diverse 

ethnographic contexts, from violin repair shops in New York City and Boston to pueblos in southern Mesoamerica, and from ridges on the Tibetan plateau to TikTok depictions of Cairo. 

Section: Society for Linguistic Anthropology 

Organizer: Kathryn Graber, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology 

Chair: Kathryn Graber, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology 

Presenter(s): Perry Wong, Juliet Glazer, Marisa Breathwaite, Xiao Schutte Ke 

Discussant:  Steven Black , Georgia State University, Department of Anthropology,
 Marybeth 

 Eleanor Nevins , Middlebury College, Department of Anthropology 

 Linguistic diversity and talking about “language(s)” in Cunén before and/or beyond “Mayan:” Listening in to the earliest recording, today 

Central to this essay is a consideration of explicit talk about "language(s)" in and around Cunén, a 

sociolinguistically diverse municipality in sociolinguistically diverse southern Mesoamerica, before and/or beyond contemporary projects of properly named "Mayan languages." By listening to an interview conducted in K'iche' with a sexagenarian local man in
 the mid-1960s, and comparing his explicit talk about "language(s)" to what I have learned in Cunén today, triangulated with a range of sources from the region, I sketch out an ideological horizon when encompassing Indigenous sociolinguistic diversity is imagined
 in terms of orientation to named pueblos but where distinct local "(Mayan) language(s)" is/are generally not properly named. Throughout, I explore certain facets of linguistic structure/ideology dialectics as they bear on this case of metalinguistic practice
 as intersects with histories of symbolic diversification. 

Presenter(s):  Perry Wong 

 Talking about Sound: Conversation as a Tool for Timbre 

Anthropologists and music scholars who research communication about tone or timbre tend to 

focus on lexical semantics. Timbre lexicons often include cross-modal metaphors such as "warm," 

"metallic," and "clean" (Harkness 2017; 2013). Scholars note that these lexicons pose problems of 

vagueness (Barthes 1978; Dudley 2014). For example, "metallic" may refer to a range of timbres, 

and one person's notion of a "metallic" sound may not match another's. I demonstrate an 

alternative approach to analyzing timbre by listening beyond lexical semantics (Carruthers 2023). 

Instead, I observe how people communicate about timbre in practice through extended 

conversations and non-linguistic interactions. I examine strategies used by New York City and 

Boston-based violin repairers (also called luthiers) when they collaborate with violinists to alter 

instrumental acoustics during "sound adjustment sessions." Such sessions are opportunities for 

luthiers to physically adjust violins to improve their timbres. Luthiers begin by eliciting musicians' 

descriptions of desired timbres, then work to make them sensorially real through an iterative and 

improvisational practice of testing, listening, talking, and adjusting. I build on Porcello's typology of metapragmatic strategies for talking about sound (2004; 1994) to show that luthiers co-create violin sound with musicians through strategies for communicating
 about timbre that unfold not only through lexical semantics, but also through metapragmatics. 

Presenter(s):  Juliet Glazer 

 “Egypt” vs. “Masr” (مصر): The Semiotic Making of Two "Egypts" on TikTok 

In this paper, I analyze, via the popular "Egypt vs. Masr" TikTok format, what I take as the semiotic process and ideological work (Gal and Irvine, 2019) of rendering "two Egypts"– a "colonial recursion" (Reyes, 2017) where "Egypt" and "Masr" are differentiated
 by contrasting sets of linguistic and non-linguistic signs whose complex sign relations are in constant, relational making and remaking of one another. I approach how semiotic processes as ideological work forge the co-constitution of "two Egypts" as "things
 in the world" that are engaged by both a virtual public in TikTok comments and an offline public. In the Cairo of today, rapid commercial and administrative upscaling, increased securitization and surveillance, and the attendant displacement of the city's
 urban poor takes place concomitantly with the relocation of the city's elites en masse into the upscale suburbs of the city's eastern and western edges, constituting the economic, political and spatial (re)organization that dialectically (re)produce these
 "two Egypts." Through the semiotic analysis of a popular format of TikTok, I take a rigorous theoretical approach to the ideological work that undergirds an enduring colonial hierarchy and ongoing urban spatial transformations in the Egyptian postcolony. 

Presenter(s):  Marisa Breathwaite 

 “View the Land and View the Area!”: Landscape Registers and Terrain Viewing Acts in Amdo Tibet 

In this paper, I explore a few complementary ways of viewing, segmenting, and talking about the 

Tibetan plateau landscape for plateau residents. I look at how Amdo Tibetan (agro)pastoralists 

describe and characterize their terrain, trekking the terrain through specific social pathways. By 

2025 Annual Meeting: Ghosts 1239 Report Corrections invoking "viewing" the terrain, I draw on Tibetan metapragamatic description for this activity (ལྟ ་བ། lta ba), as well as the verb's connotations of contemplation, visual discernment or even analysis. I demonstrate
 my textual, fieldwork-based, and collaborative trajectory of learning to view the terrain from Indigenous Tibetan friends and consultants. I emphasize acts of viewing, through which — and only through which — Tibetan landscape registers become descriptively
 true to their speakers. I argue that these registers and acts of viewing are further sedimented in certain bodily habits of viewing the plateau landscape, channeling subjects' mobilities as well as pathways across the plateau. Through the metapragmatics of
 many (agro-)pastoralists, this total lifestyle and its familiar pathways constitute (agro-)pastoral competence as well as an evaluative matrix for different degrees of Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivity under colonial conditions. 

Presenter(s):  Xiao Schutte Ke 

Discussion 

Greetings linguistic anthropologists, 

I look forward to seeing many of you in NOLA later this week! Please mark your calendar for this annual highlight of the conference, featuring all four finalists for this year's Gumperz Prize and two thoughtful discussants,
 4:15-5:45 Friday . Come hear some exciting new work in our field! 

Best wishes, 

Kate 

 SLA Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize Panel 

Start Date: 11/21/2025 4:15 PM through 11/21/2025 5:45 PM 

Venue:  Marriott Room: Galerie 2 

This panel showcases the four finalists for the 2025 John Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize, 

awarded annually by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. The award honors John Joseph 

Gumperz (1922–2013), whose pioneering work in the ethnography of communication and language use in social context has inspired generations of linguistic anthropologists. This year's winning papers concern varied topics and geographic contexts, but what they
 have in common is careful examination of how people work out aspects of their lived experience through linguistic and semiotic practices. What do people accomplish in "talk about talk," or talk about sound, or talk about landscapes and places? Presenters demonstrate
 how (post)colonial hierarchies are 

constituted by mutually reinforcing online and offline practices, how people cross semiotic 

modalities by means other than lexical semantics, how Indigenous sociolinguistic diversity has 

been understood before and beyond named languages, and how landscape registers and 

embodied practices of viewing the land become enactments of knowing. They draw on diverse 

ethnographic contexts, from violin repair shops in New York City and Boston to pueblos in southern Mesoamerica, and from ridges on the Tibetan plateau to TikTok depictions of Cairo. 

Section: Society for Linguistic Anthropology 

Organizer: Kathryn Graber, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology 

Chair: Kathryn Graber, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Anthropology 

Presenter(s): Perry Wong, Juliet Glazer, Marisa Breathwaite, Xiao Schutte Ke 

Discussant:  Steven Black , Georgia State University, Department of Anthropology,
 Marybeth 

 Eleanor Nevins , Middlebury College, Department of Anthropology 

 Linguistic diversity and talking about “language(s)” in Cunén before and/or beyond “Mayan:” Listening in to the earliest recording, today 

Central to this essay is a consideration of explicit talk about "language(s)" in and around Cunén, a 

sociolinguistically diverse municipality in sociolinguistically diverse southern Mesoamerica, before and/or beyond contemporary projects of properly named "Mayan languages." By listening to an interview conducted in K'iche' with a sexagenarian local man in
 the mid-1960s, and comparing his explicit talk about "language(s)" to what I have learned in Cunén today, triangulated with a range of sources from the region, I sketch out an ideological horizon when encompassing Indigenous sociolinguistic diversity is imagined
 in terms of orientation to named pueblos but where distinct local "(Mayan) language(s)" is/are generally not properly named. Throughout, I explore certain facets of linguistic structure/ideology dialectics as they bear on this case of metalinguistic practice
 as intersects with histories of symbolic diversification. 

Presenter(s):  Perry Wong 

 Talking about Sound: Conversation as a Tool for Timbre 

Anthropologists and music scholars who research communication about tone or timbre tend to 

focus on lexical semantics. Timbre lexicons often include cross-modal metaphors such as "warm," 

"metallic," and "clean" (Harkness 2017; 2013). Scholars note that these lexicons pose problems of 

vagueness (Barthes 1978; Dudley 2014). For example, "metallic" may refer to a range of timbres, 

and one person's notion of a "metallic" sound may not match another's. I demonstrate an 

alternative approach to analyzing timbre by listening beyond lexical semantics (Carruthers 2023). 

Instead, I observe how people communicate about timbre in practice through extended 

conversations and non-linguistic interactions. I examine strategies used by New York City and 

Boston-based violin repairers (also called luthiers) when they collaborate with violinists to alter 

instrumental acoustics during "sound adjustment sessions." Such sessions are opportunities for 

luthiers to physically adjust violins to improve their timbres. Luthiers begin by eliciting musicians' 

descriptions of desired timbres, then work to make them sensorially real through an iterative and 

improvisational practice of testing, listening, talking, and adjusting. I build on Porcello's typology of metapragmatic strategies for talking about sound (2004; 1994) to show that luthiers co-create violin sound with musicians through strategies for communicating
 about timbre that unfold not only through lexical semantics, but also through metapragmatics. 

Presenter(s):  Juliet Glazer 

 “Egypt” vs. “Masr” (مصر): The Semiotic Making of Two "Egypts" on TikTok 

In this paper, I analyze, via the popular "Egypt vs. Masr" TikTok format, what I take as the semiotic process and ideological work (Gal and Irvine, 2019) of rendering "two Egypts"– a "colonial recursion" (Reyes, 2017) where "Egypt" and "Masr" are differentiated
 by contrasting sets of linguistic and non-linguistic signs whose complex sign relations are in constant, relational making and remaking of one another. I approach how semiotic processes as ideological work forge the co-constitution of "two Egypts" as "things
 in the world" that are engaged by both a virtual public in TikTok comments and an offline public. In the Cairo of today, rapid commercial and administrative upscaling, increased securitization and surveillance, and the attendant displacement of the city's
 urban poor takes place concomitantly with the relocation of the city's elites en masse into the upscale suburbs of the city's eastern and western edges, constituting the economic, political and spatial (re)organization that dialectically (re)produce these
 "two Egypts." Through the semiotic analysis of a popular format of TikTok, I take a rigorous theoretical approach to the ideological work that undergirds an enduring colonial hierarchy and ongoing urban spatial transformations in the Egyptian postcolony. 

Presenter(s):  Marisa Breathwaite 

 “View the Land and View the Area!”: Landscape Registers and Terrain Viewing Acts in Amdo Tibet 

In this paper, I explore a few complementary ways of viewing, segmenting, and talking about the 

Tibetan plateau landscape for plateau residents. I look at how Amdo Tibetan (agro)pastoralists 

describe and characterize their terrain, trekking the terrain through specific social pathways. By 

2025 Annual Meeting: Ghosts 1239 Report Corrections invoking "viewing" the terrain, I draw on Tibetan metapragamatic description for this activity (ལྟ ་བ། lta ba), as well as the verb's connotations of contemplation, visual discernment or even analysis. I demonstrate
 my textual, fieldwork-based, and collaborative trajectory of learning to view the terrain from Indigenous Tibetan friends and consultants. I emphasize acts of viewing, through which — and only through which — Tibetan landscape registers become descriptively
 true to their speakers. I argue that these registers and acts of viewing are further sedimented in certain bodily habits of viewing the plateau landscape, channeling subjects' mobilities as well as pathways across the plateau. Through the metapragmatics of
 many (agro-)pastoralists, this total lifestyle and its familiar pathways constitute (agro-)pastoral competence as well as an evaluative matrix for different degrees of Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjectivity under colonial conditions. 

Presenter(s):  Xiao Schutte Ke 

Discussion
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20251117/696421ab/attachment-0001.htm>