36.1875, Reviews: Living Together Across Borders: Gomwalk (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1875. Tue Jun 17 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1875, Reviews: Living Together Across Borders: Gomwalk (2025)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Joel Jenkins <joel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 16-Jun-2025
From: Philemon Victor Gomwalk [philgomwalk at gmail.com]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Sociolinguistics; Living Together Across Borders: Gomwalk (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-140

Title: Living Together Across Borders
Subtitle: Communicative Care in Transnational Salvadoran Families
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/living-together-across-borders-9780197755730?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Lynnette Arnold

Reviewer: Philemon Victor Gomwalk

Summary
Lynette Arnold’s book is organized into eight (8) principal chapters.
It provides a multipronged, fairly in-depth investigation into how
traditional familial ties continue to be endorsed and further
solidified across territorial borders through transnational
communication gestures and mechanisms in El Salvadorean diaspora
communities in different parts of the contemporary world.
The Prologue section of the book - (p. xix) is mostly devoted
introducing, defining and justifying the use of a number of
Spanish-derived concepts such as ‘Convivencia’ (Living-Together),
‘debilidad’ (weakness, lack of vigour or strength), ‘prestamistas’
(moneylenders), ‘mandar saludos’ (send greetings), among several
others. These Spanish-based terminologies are well explained in
succeeding chapters of the book, with the aid of suitable English
glosses wherever necessary. The Introduction section of the book
(titled Communication and Care-at-a-Distance- pp. 1- 29), on the other
hand, provides useful definitions and clarification of other major
theoretical concepts and anthropological terminologies associated with
the specific study of transnational communication mechanisms within
the contemporary El Salvadorean sociocultural milieu. Two of the key
theoretical concepts, among several others, include ‘transnational
family life’ and ‘state-endorsed migration discourse’.  Many more
concepts and terms are introduced and further discussed in succeeding
chapters of the book.
Chapter 1 (titled State-Endorsed Migration Discourse in El Salvador,
pp. 30-56) highlights and explains how the concepts of ‘transnational
family life’, as well as ‘state-endorsed migration discourse’,
constitute   significant foundation stones for properly understanding
the nature and underlying dynamics of national progress in El
Salvador. The vision of cross-border care discussed in this chapter of
the book largely operates on the basis of transnational imaginaries
and figures of personhood rooted in heteropatriarchal models of family
life.
Through these discourses, the Salvadoran state is shown to incorporate
migrants and their remittances into nation-building projects aligned
with structural adjustment policies. This chapter also establishes
that dutiful family care powerfully shapes the ways through which
families enact transnational care as well as the forms of resistance
such families engage in. Such imaginaries are further outlined and
explained in Chapter 2 and other chapters of the book.
Chapter 2 (titled Transnational Care in Multigenerational Households,
pp. 57-85) provides an ethnographic account of the complex unfolding
of intra-national care within El Salvador, as well as close-family
care (or living–together consciousness) across territorial borders in
diaspora communities. In this chapter, Arnold outlines the
cultural-anthropological framework in El Salvadorean society within
which cross-border family care routinely operates.
The chapter further highlights the role of communication in
transnational care, suggesting that language is a powerful resource
due to its multifunctionality and its omnipresence in all aspects of
transnational family care. In the chapter, Arnold also provides a
lucid ethnographic explanation of the complex operation of
transnational care across territorial borders, focusing on some of the
moral and cultural imageries that undergird and are reproduced by
cross-border family care within the El Salvadorean cultural milieu.
While stressing the traditional significance of a relatively
simplistic model of cross-border care which was highlighted in Chapter
1, Chapter 2 is able to emphasize that transnational families can be
understood as operating family care patterns within which all
relatives potentially participate. Finally, the chapter is able to
highlight the important role of communication in transnational care;
indicating that language is a powerful resource due to its
multifunctionality and its omnipresence in all aspects of
transnational family care.
In Chapter 3 (titled Sending Greetings, Envisioning Family, and
Grappling with Inequality, pp. 86-111), Arnold highlights and
demonstrates the power of communication by focusing on the cultural
significance and symbiotic value attached to cross-border video
greetings sent between those living within El Salvadore proper and
their close relatives living in diaspora communities elsewhere in the
world. This chapter also able to highlight the inherent power of
social communication mechanisms by investigating cross-border video
greetings sent between relatives.
In the chapter, family care is shown to be critical   not only from a
monetary perspective, but also from an interpersonal communicative
angle. The type of family care and symmetrical family linkages
highlighted and discussed in Chapter 3 also serves to show that many
transnational families envisage their cross-border communication
habits as possibly continuing to occur across generations through the
repeated migration of some of those raised in El Salvador and
socialized to transnational family life during their childhood.
Chapter 4 (titled The Conversational Temporalities of
Intergenerational Care, pp.112-137) builds on the unique
anthropological insights provided in Chapter 3 to investigate and
report on the nature and dynamics underlying the operation of a
well-known form of transnational care: remittances.  This chapter is
also able to reveal the regular communicative practices that families
develop as they engage in routine remittance negotiations over the
years. Finally, the was able to highlight and explain the intricate
gendered norms that govern the uneven distribution of such remittance
negotiations in real-time.
Chapter 5 (titled Defying Institutional Forgetting through Remembering
as Care, pp. 138-160) explores how transnational families remember
together across borders. It situates this communicative practice
within the context of memory work in post-war El Salvadore, where
long-standing institutional silencing makes remembering a deeply
political act. This chapter is able to show how members of
transnational families recall ‘short-term experiences’ as well as
remember ‘long-term memories’ of each other across territorial
borders. These forms of communicative practice are often situated
within the broader cultural context of social experiences in post-war
El Salvadore, where long-standing institutional silencing pressures
make instances of short-term recall as well as long-term memories and
remembrances very deeply political acts.
Finally, the chapter is able to demonstrate that recalling experiences
and remembering past experiences across geographical borders help
members of transnational families to build personal and collective
family resistance against dominant, culture-derived discourses. In
doing so, such families are also very consciously refusing to accept
the imaginaries imposed upon them by external culture-induced forces
and instead insisting on their own continued family-togetherness
despite long-term periods of separation, especially when such
separation is brought about through either voluntary or involuntary
immigration pressures.
The Conclusion segment of Arnold’s book (titled Social Change through
Communicative Care, pp. 161-173) synthesizes diverse insights into
transnational care in the El Salvadorean cultural milieu, as gleaned
from a communicative care perspective. The chapter reviews how
language underpins care in many contexts beyond transnational family
life, arguing that the insights developed in this book have broad
relevance to studies of how traditional family care mechanisms within
the internal borders of El Salvadorean society find projections in how
family care ties are similarly expressed across transnational borders
in foreign communities that play host to El Salvadoreans elsewhere in
the world.
This concluding portion of the book highlights the multifunctionality
and temporality of language communicative mechanisms; indicating how
such mechanisms serve as potent tools for a proper understanding of
how transnational family care operates within and across various
diaspora communities in different parts of the contemporary world. It
also prospective readers to consider how they might take action to
support the struggles of transnational families for a world in which
convivencia (or ‘living-together consciousness’) is a matter of
self-determination rather than exploitation.
Evaluation
Lynette Arnold, the author of Living Together Across Borders, is able
to demonstrate considerable knowledge and deep understanding of
various dimensions of transnational social communication and
interactions between communities within and across the borders of El
Salvador.  A cursory consideration of the anthropological research
output of the author shows that Arnold does possess sufficient
theoretical expertise and empirical research experience to be able to
write intelligibly and lucidly on the subject matter of transnational
social communication and interactions within diaspora communities
(see, for example, Arnold, 2019a; 2020; 2021; 2022;2023 as well as
Arnold and Black, 2020 in the Reference section of the reviewed book).
All eight chapters in Arnold’s book are thoughtfully-organized and
well-written, citing (where necessary) appropriate case–study data,
tables and graphs, to aid potential readers in gaining better
understanding of many key concepts and issues related to transnational
social communication within and across El Salvadorean diaspora
communities. These are appropriately highlighted, discussed and
illustrated from a wide range of research sources.  I also note with
satisfaction that coherence of discourse in key sections of the book
is facilitated through apt cross-referencing to relevant past studies
in transnational social communication within and across selected
diaspora communities in the world.
I view the publication of Arnold’s new book as ‘significant’ and
‘ground-breaking’ for the progressive development of contemporary
social anthropology research in general.  I find Arnold’s discussion
of new theoretical and methodological insights in transnational social
communication research very interesting and stimulating. The author
has rightly indicated that, over time, new insights can be derived
from more in-depth collaborative studies, which can be carried out
between researchers from social anthropology, sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics, among several other disciplines. The interesting
possibilities which can emerge from such interdisciplinary research
collaborations are not only raised but also highlighted and discussed
in different chapters and sections of Arnold’s book.
On basis of my overall assessment of its academic worth and potential
publication value, I would warmly recommend Arnold’s book to all
readers with average exposure to contemporary social anthropology
terminologies.
References
Arnold, Lynnette. 2019a. “Language Socialization across Borders:
Producing Scalar Subjectivities through Material-Affective Semiosis.”
Pragmatics 29, no. 3: 332–56.
Arnold, Lynnette. 2020. “Cross-Border Communication and the
Enregisterment of Collective Frameworks for Care.” Medical
Anthropology 39, no. 7: 624–37.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2020.1717490.
Arnold, Lynnette. 2021. “Communication as Care across Borders: Forging
and Co-Opting Relationships of Obligation in Transnational Salvadoran
Families.” American Anthropologist 123, no. 1: 137–49.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/aman.13517.
Arnold, Lynnette. 2022. “Data Management Practices in an Ethnographic
Study of Language and Migration.” In Open Handbook of Linguistic Data
Management, edited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, and
Lauren B. Collister, 249–56. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Arnold, Lynnette. 2023. “National Heroes or Dangerous Failures:
Mobilizing Gender in Salvadoran Migration Discourse to Create
Relational Neoliberal Personhood.” Gender and Language 17, no. 4:
412–32. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.22687.
Arnold, Lynnette, and Steven P. Black. 2020. “How Communicative
Approaches Enrich the Study of Care.” Medical Anthropology 39, no. 7:
573–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2020.1814285.
About the Reviewer
Philemon Gomwalk is a teacher and researcher, affiliated to the
University of Jos in Nigeria, with research interests in both
synchronic and diachronic studies and analyses of languages belonging
to the Chadic sub-phylum of Afro-Asiatic within the Nigerian
sociolinguistic environment.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1875
----------------------------------------------------------