36.167, Nahuatl Nations: Hansen (2024)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-167. Tue Jan 14 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.167, Nahuatl Nations: Hansen (2024)

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Date: 14-Jan-2025
From: Rachel Havard [Rachel.HAVARD at oup.com]
Subject: Nahuatl Nations: Hansen (2024)


Title: Nahuatl Nations
Subtitle: Language Revitalization and Semiotic Sovereignty in
Indigenous Mexico
Series Title: Oxford Studies in the Anthropology of Language
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/nahuatl-nations-9780197746158?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Magnus P Hansen

Hardback: ISBN: 9780197746158 Pages: 328 Price: U.S. $ 99.00

Abstract:

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.

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Sociolinguistics




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