Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives (Contemporary Studies in Linguistics) 1350156248, 9781350156241

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Global Entanglements of Language and Social Justice
Part I: Challenging Linguistic Ideologies and Exclusions
Chapter 1: A Language Socialization Approach to Humanizing Ethnographic Methods in Latinx Families’ Homes
Chapter 2: Language Access and Deaf Activism in Mexico and Nepal
Chapter 3: Multilingual Activism as Acts of Linguistic Citizenship in South Africa
Chapter 4: Colonialism and Language Politics in Puerto Rico
Chapter 5: Labels, Codes, and Language Sovereignty in the Pacific
Commentary to Part I
Part II: Confronting Hate and Violence
Chapter 6: The Humpty Dumpty Mistranslation and Misrepresentation Deployed in the British Colonization of Aotearoa/New Zealand
Chapter 7: The Linguistic Defense of White Comfort in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Chapter 8: (Con)sensual Sexual and Reproductive Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls through Beadwork and Burlesque
Chapter 9: Telling Truths, Keeping Silence in the Aftermath of War in Sarajevo
Chapter 10: Arabic and the Discursive Contours of Islamo-Linguistic-Phobia in Spain and France
Commentary to Part II
Part III: Decoding Globalized Interactions
Chapter 11: Seafarers’ Talk about the “Good Ship”
Chapter 12: Barcelona Street Vendors’ Voice and the Crossing of Narrative (B)Orders
Chapter 13: Interdiscursive Dimensions of Mobility and Precarity for Guatemalan Indigenous Youth
Chapter 14: Regimes of Organization in Danish Legal Interpreting
Chapter 15: Keywords Decolonized? The Social Lives of Wenhua/Culture and the Specter of Symbolic Violence in Chinese–English Dialogues
Commentary to Part III
Part IV: Negotiating Resources in the Anthropocene
Chapter 16: Global Languages and Communicative Inequality in the “Last Place” on Earth
Chapter 17: Pursuit of Health/Communicative Justice through an Intercultural Health Model in Gulumapu (Chile)
Chapter 18: Inscribing Social Justice through Indigenous Place-Names
Chapter 19: Discursive Resistance, Communicative Refusal, and Food Provisioning in Santiago de Cuba
Chapter 20: Discursive Constructions of Non-human Beings and the Contingency of Moral Consideration for Local Wildlife
Commentary to Part IV
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Contemporary Studies in Linguistics Series Editor: Li Wei, Chair of Applied Linguistics, University College London, UK The Contemporary Studies in Linguistics series presents state-of-the-art accounts of current research in all areas of linguistics. Written by internationally renowned linguists, the volumes provide a selection of the best scholarship in each area. Each of the chapters appears on the basis of its importance to the field, but also with regards to its wider significance either in terms of methodology, practical application or conclusions. The result is a stimulating contemporary snapshot of the field and a vibrant reader for each of the areas covered in the series.

Titles published in the series: Applied Linguistics and Politics, edited by Christian W. Chun Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts, edited by Zsófia Demjén Diversifying Family Language Policy, edited by Lyn Wright and Christina Higgins Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 1, edited by Vivian Cook and Li Wei Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 2, edited by Li Wei and Vivian Cook Contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning, edited by Michael Thomas, Hayo Reinders and Mark Warschauer Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, edited by Paul Baker Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies, edited by Christopher Hart and Piotr Cap Contemporary Linguistic Parameters, edited by Antonio Fabregas, Jaume Mateu and Michael Putnam Contemporary Media Stylistics, edited by Helen Ringrow and Stephen Pihlaja Contemporary Task-Based Language Teaching in Asia, edited by Michael Thomas and Hayo Reinders Contemporary Stylistics, edited by Marina Lambrou and Peter Stockwell Soundings and the Politics of Sociolinguistic Listening for Transnational Space, by Kinga Kozminska

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Kathleen C. Riley, Bernard C. Perley and Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Copyright © Kathleen C. Riley, Bernard C. Perley, Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez and Contributors, 2024 Kathleen C. Riley, Bernard C. Perley, Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes, the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5624-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5625-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-5626-5 Series: Contemporary Studies in Linguistics Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments x Introduction: Global Entanglements of Language and Social Justice Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez, Kathleen C. Riley and Bernard C. Perley

1

Part I  Challenging Linguistic Ideologies and Exclusions

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1 A Language Socialization Approach to Humanizing Ethnographic Methods in Latinx Families’ Homes Ariana Mangual Figueroa and Sera Hernández

23

2 Language Access and Deaf Activism in Mexico and Nepal Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway and Anne E. Pfister

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3 Multilingual Activism as Acts of Linguistic Citizenship in South Africa Quentin Williams

66

4 Colonialism and Language Politics in Puerto Rico Sherina Feliciano-Santos

84

5 Labels, Codes, and Language Sovereignty in the Pacific Kathleen C. Riley and Christine Jourdan

104

Commentary to Part I  Patricia Baquedano-López 129 Part II  Confronting Hate and Violence

135

6 The Humpty Dumpty Mistranslation and Misrepresentation Deployed in the British Colonization of Aotearoa/New Zealand Margaret Mutu

137

7 The Linguistic Defense of White Comfort in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Jennifer Roth-Gordon 8 (Con)sensual Sexual and Reproductive Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls through Beadwork and Burlesque Brittany Johnson

158

178

vi

CONTENTS

9 Telling Truths, Keeping Silence in the Aftermath of War in Sarajevo Keziah Conrad

194

10 Arabic and the Discursive Contours of Islamo-Linguistic-Phobia in Spain and France Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez and Chantal Tetreault

211

Commentary to Part II  Luisa Martín Rojo

238

Part III  Decoding Globalized Interactions

249

11 Seafarers’ Talk about the “Good Ship” Johanna Markkula and Sonia N. Das

251

12 Barcelona Street Vendors’ Voice and the Crossing of Narrative (B)Orders Laura Menna and Eva Codó

264

13 Interdiscursive Dimensions of Mobility and Precarity for Guatemalan Indigenous Youth Jennifer F. Reynolds 14 Regimes of Organization in Danish Legal Interpreting Martha Sif Karrebæk and Marta Kirilova 15 Keywords Decolonized? The Social Lives of Wenhua/Culture and the Specter of Symbolic Violence in Chinese–English Dialogues Louisa Schein and Fan Yang

286 311

335

Commentary to Part III  Miyako Inoue 359 Part IV  Negotiating Resources in the Anthropocene

367

16 Global Languages and Communicative Inequality in the “Last Place” on Earth James Slotta and Courtney Handman

369

17 Pursuit of Health/Communicative Justice through an Intercultural Health Model in Gulumapu (Chile) Jennifer R. Guzmán 18 Inscribing Social Justice through Indigenous Place-Names Bernard C. Perley 19 Discursive Resistance, Communicative Refusal, and Food Provisioning in Santiago de Cuba Hanna Garth

392 412

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CONTENTS

20 Discursive Constructions of Non-human Beings and the Contingency of Moral Consideration for Local Wildlife Paul B. Garrett and Rebecca Michelin



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451

Commentary to Part IV  Barbra Meek 472 List of Contributors 483 Index 489

FIGURES

0.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 12.1 14.1 14.2 17.1 17.2 17.3 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5

Wolastokwi Ckuwapin, Maliseet Dawn15 Segment of David’s personal history timeline 50 Illustration depicting parents preventing their deaf child from socializing with deaf peers 55 Illustration depicting parents supporting a deaf child in socializing with deaf peers 55 Beaded flower for Kokum 183 Large beaded vulva 186 Workshop beadwork 188 Immigrants First 216 Trojan Horse 218 Temporal distortion timeline 223 Islamophobic meme of Macron as a “useful infidel” 228 Meme falsely depicting minister Vallaud-Belkacem as a shepherd girl 229 TopManta T-shirt designs 279 Screenshot of flow chart 320 Screenshot of “Professional Interpretation Services” video 321 “Milk dispensary” bilingual door sign in Spanish and Mapudungun 398 Monolingual poster in Spanish advocating hand-washing as a preventive measure against disease 399 Bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun sign that lists symptoms for recognizing pneumonia and bronchopneumonia 401 Unpacking colonial baggage 422 Colonial baggage 422 Unpacking extinction 423 Having reservations: unpacking colonial baggage (Maliseet version) 426 Having reservations: belonging 430

TABLES

3.1 3.2 6.1 10.1 10.2

Group Discussion on Afrikaans and Afrikaaps 74 Monox Performing His Lyrics for “Ek is Afrikaaps”78 Glossary of Maori Words 153 Meme Denounced by Salam Plan 220 Comparison of “VOX Málaga” Facebook Post and Meme Denounced by Salam Plan 221 20.1 Patients Admitted to the Clinic in 2019 453 20.2 Animals Brought to the Clinic by the Ninety-Eight Rescuers Who Were Invited to Participate in the Study 456 20.3 Animals Brought to the Clinic by the Rescuers Who Were Interviewed 456

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. However, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased, if notified of any omissions, to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Introduction Global Entanglements of Language and Social Justice INMACULADA M. GARCÍA-SÁNCHEZ, KATHLEEN C. RILEY AND BERNARD C. PERLEY

The global entanglements of language and social (in)justice have become depressingly obvious: the mainstreaming of disinformation, increasing polarization of political discourse, and the global rise of neofascist, nativist, and totalitarian political movements; the continued militarization of borders and criminalization of migrants; the onslaught of police brutality and structural racism; the rollback of reproductive justice and women’s rights; the ongoing colonial violations and erasure of Indigenous peoples; the rapidly worsening anthropogenic climate change crisis; the concatenation of a tragic series of (politically manufactured) refugee crises (Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians, etc.) set in motion by imperial hubris and unbridled nationalism; the culmination of a Brexit movement fueled by imperial nostalgia and “resentment” (in Fassin’s sense, 2013); renewed waves of book bannings and attacks on gender-affirming health care; the proliferation of conspiracy theories and science denialism; and, how to forget, the Covid-19 pandemic that has accelerated some of these processes and deepen inequalities. As we (Inma, Kate, and Bernie) sat down to write this introduction, we were feeling the immensity of the many injustices that have been stalking the globe since we first met to discuss the idea of this volume, as well as the big and small resistance movements to these injustices. As part of these movements, recent years have also seen a burgeoning of inspiring scholarship committed to examining how language mediates social (in)justice, whether as a tool for undermining inclusion and equality or, more ideally, as a means of achieving justice through “praxis,” understood in the Freirean sense of the need to constantly reflect upon conditions and structures of injustice in our efforts to generate knowledge for collective action and social transformation. As such, we owe a great debt in our thinking to a long lineage of ethnographers, not all of whom have focused on language per se, but more generally on the global circulation of materially impactful discourses (understood in the Foucauldian sense of ideological formations), whether to do with sexual oppression (e.g., Zheng 2015), environmental degradation (e.g., Tsing 2015), global health (e.g., Dewachi 2017), and/or Indigenous sovereignty (Tengan 2008). Also, many more in our intellectual genealogies have indeed examined the specific role of language and its adjacent communicative modalities, as exemplified by the collected volume of Avineri et al. (2019) as well as other recent work by applied linguists and discourse analysts from around the world (e.g., Pennycook 2017; Piller 2016; Skutnabb-Kangas 2009). The present volume has deep and specific roots in the research of linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists who have been probing the inner workings

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of indexical signs and language ideologies, and how these may both reproduce and challenge unequal social relations, institutions, and practices at a global scale (e.g., Bauman and Briggs 2003; Errington 2008; Gal and Irvine 2019; Heller and McElhinny 2017; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998). Some of these scholars have been deconstructing (literally and figuratively) sociolinguistic hierarchies and institutions of ethnolinguistic repression in the Americas (e.g., Bucholtz 2011; Das 2016; Dick 2018; Heller 2011; Hill 2008; Lippi-Green 1997; McCarty and Lee 2014; Meek 2010; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Morgan 2002; Muehlmann 2013; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2013; Paugh 2012; Paugh and Riley 2019; Paris and Alim 2017; Perley 2011; Reyes 2006; Roth-Gordon 2016; Shulist 2018; Urciuoli 1996; Zentella 1997). Others have been studying the metapragmatics of power elsewhere in the world (e.g. Blommaert 2013, Boellstorff 2005; Bourdieu 1991; Cavanaugh 2009; Codó, 2008; Duchêne, Moyer and Roberts 2013; García-Sánchez 2014; Gaudio 2009; Hoffman 2008; Inoue 2006; LaDousa 2014; Livia and Hall 1997; Makihara and Schieffelin 2007; Schulthies 2020; Tetreault 2015; Woolard 2016). The critical orientations of these researchers have provided fertile ground for the more recent emergence of more explicit praxis-oriented linguistic-anthropological research that mobilizes knowledge to advance communities’ interests and to contribute to social transformation for the common good (e.g., Avineri et al. 2021; Back and Zavala, 2019; Baker-Bell 2020; Baquedano-López 2021; Black 2019; Briggs and Martini-Briggs 2016; Charity Hudley and Mallison 2018; Chávez and Pérez 2022; Davis 2018; DeGraff 2020; Leonard 2021; García-Sánchez and Avineri forthcoming; Marin et al. 2020; Martín Rojo and Del Percio 2020; Rosa 2019; Williams, Deumert and Milani 2022). Given then how the scope of language and social justice research is already wide and deep, the present volume builds on this wealth of research to emphasize the ethnographically diverse ways in which languages and other multimodal forms of communication have specific effects due to longue durée global processes, such as colonialism and neoliberal globalization.1 Toward that end, the volume offers a sampling of case studies from a range of global settings and disciplinary perspectives, while simultaneously interrogating the keywords, fields, epistemologies, and subjectivities with and through which we work. First and foremost, all contributors to this volume are cognizant of the need to critically examine our assumptions about the concept of “social justice” as an ideological goal (by contrast, for instance, with other idealized notions such as the conservative “human rights”2 or the increasingly contentious “freedom of expression” frameworks). We also all share an explicitly holistic conceptualization of “language” as a semiotic mediator of social justice activism—that is, as a multimodal tool for engaged action in pursuit of goals that fall under the umbrella of this term. In other words, this volume brings together a group of ethnographically grounded scholars who have addressed the communicative aspects of social problems and structural inequalities in an array of specific localities, and who are committed to exploring the idea that language may be mobilized to both silence and empower people, deny or instil meaning in their lives, facilitate or ameliorate discrimination. While some of these ethnographic cases point to the inevitable ambiguities involved in these situations, others celebrate instances in which multimodal channels of communication contribute fighting tools of resistance. We hope this diverse sampling of studies contributes to the expanding interest in researching language and social justice globally, exploring the tensions and potential pitfalls of this emerging field of inquiry while also conceptualizing and imagining the possibilities for social engagement that can result from it.

INTRODUCTION



3

DECONSTRUCTING THE TITLE (BECAUSE WORDS MATTER) We turn now to presenting the editors’ syncretic perspectives on language and social justice at a global scale, both as fields of inquiry and as approaches to sociopolitical transformation. These perspectives have evolved over the last few years from the continuous dialogue among ourselves and the contributors to the volume, as we tried to clarify for them and for ourselves the goals of this project during an unprecedented period of global crisis (at least in our lifetimes) that in and of itself put in sharper relief many of the injustices and structural inequalities we were trying to grasp. While we cannot fully describe how much we have enriched one another’s thinking in this short introduction, we offer, as an orienting framework, a brief investigation of the concepts invoked in the volume’s title (and variously explored by our contributors) in this order—“language,” “social justice,” and “global perspectives”—focusing on both their potent relationships and their potential limitations.

Language We begin with what seems the most obvious. But as with most anthropological concepts, what we often unproblematically call “language” has been enriched by centuries of sometimes thoughtful, sometimes disastrous interactions between interlocutors from West and East, North and South, Indigenous and imperial. So, by “language” we (and most of the contributors to this volume) mean a host of things. Not simply words, though words do (frequently) matter—from denotation to connotation, from the descriptive to the indexical—but also everything in and around the words that carries significance— from the bodies of speakers to the multiple and contested language ideologies of communities—because significance takes shape through every kind of interaction in every kind of situation. Thus, we attend to the now century-old linguistic anthropological sense of language as a vehicle of local knowledge from Sapir (2014 [1921]) to Basso (1996) and McCarty et al. (2018). We also concern ourselves with regimes of linguistic variation as traditionally studied by sociolinguists, from Labov (1972) to Charity Hudley, Mallison and Bucholtz (2020). Rooted as well in the philosophical study of pragmatics and semiotics, we dig into the meanings of specific speech acts in specific contexts governed by specific metapragmatic ideologies from Austin (1975 [1962]) to Silverstein (1993) and Rosa (2019). However, given our focus here on language’s intersection with social justice, we are particularly interested in how embodied signs are entangled with social action— that is, who communicates how, when, where, and with whom and with what intentions, interpretations, and impacts, both in oppressive and liberatory ways. First of all, we all know well that it can sometimes be difficult to get the words just right. For instance, the labeling of people (whether based on categories of age, race/ ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious background, national origin, immigration status, (dis)ability status, or socioeconomic status), as well as their places and their modes of communication, is itself a very productive area of language and social justice research and activism. Thus, ethnonyms, toponyms, and linguonyms are a specific locus of investigation for some of the chapters in the volume (e.g., Perley, ch. 18; Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5; Williams, ch. 3; and Roth-Gordon, ch. 7). Additionally, we wish to acknowledge that all terminology has limitations, especially in how they may illuminate some dimension of experience or identity while often also obscuring others. Words can be

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problematic in one way or another, including how they are incommensurably translated into other languages. Again, several of the chapters in the volume (Karrebæk and Kirilova, ch. 14; Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1; Mutu, ch. 6; and Schein and Yang, ch. 15) are specifically concerned with the processes and effects of (mis)translation and (mis)representation of languages in various contexts. Finally, the sociopolitical value and relative power of various languages, whether signed, spoken, or written, is a perduring focus of language and social justice inquiry and activism, as is explored in a number of chapters in this volume (e.g., Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4; Guzmán, ch. 17; Hoffman-Dilloway and Pfister, ch. 2; and Slotta and Handman, ch. 16). However, many chapters attend not only to ethnonyms, linguonyms, toponyms, and translations, but also to how terms and codes are transliterated and typographically represented given the propensity of colonizers to erase prior bodies, places, and languages from the landscape. Moreover, we consider establishing ethical relationships with our research participants and the communities we work with and for to be in and of itself a language and social justice issue. Conducting intimate research, whether as insiders, outsiders, or something in between, inevitably involves linguistically interacting in social contexts that are shaped by multiple and contested power dynamics, some of them beyond the researcher’s control. Thus, both as researchers and activists, we spend time reflexively reflecting on those dynamics and discussing with our research participants and collaborators how to represent names and other details related to the people with whom and the places where we work, pushing against the boundaries of traditional research designs to offer our participants opportunities to represent themselves in their own terms. Part of honoring the access we have been offered involves listening carefully to how people interact using specific styles, registers, and genres—from joking to teaching, from rap songs to political organizing—and how in the process they leverage spaces to empower themselves and give voice to what they envision as something that begins to look like justice. Additionally, we listen not only to the natural and/or elicited exchanges of our interlocutors but also examine the ways in which these everyday discourses reproduce and/or transform the dominant, and increasingly globalized, discourses at large in the world. We do not settle for words alone but examine other modalities of expression as well, from silence (Conrad, ch. 9) and narratives (Reynolds, ch. 13) to sign languages (Hoffman-Dilloway and Pfister, ch. 2) and body language (Roth-Gordon, ch. 7), food (Garth, ch. 19) and memes (García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10), beaded art (Johnson, ch. 8) and t-shirts (Menna and Codó, ch. 12), as well as one that touches on modes of communication that involve our non-human relatives (Garrett and Michelin, ch. 20). And given our conscious attention to the power of expression in its many modalities, it should be no surprise that we, as editors, have attempted to avoid imposing a set of preferred theoretical terms or typographic conventions on contributors, as this would not only fly in the face of sound ethnographic practice but also be difficult to reconcile with our (inter)activist stance—that is, an approach that forefronts the necessity of grounding effective activism in the give and take of social interaction (Riley and Paugh 2019).

Social Justice This, a concept with many competing and contested definitions (see Tuck and Yang 2018), has become in its own right a communicative trope with both general appeal and divisive impact in academia and popular discourses. For many scholars, activists, and activist

INTRODUCTION



5

scholars, “social justice” is understood to be both an ideological goal and a pragmatic framework for upending cultural, political, and economic inequities, abuses, and exclusions. Visions for social justice are often grounded in an understanding of intersectionality and the specificities that this entails while also recognizing and making provisions for equity,3 sovereignty,4 and communal well-being for those who occupy categories that are socially and politically constructed as marginal. However, not all scholars and activists agree on the sources or even definitions of these social injustices, and given the complexities, many question the easy, and sometimes virtue signaling, deployment of such a catchall phrase. We will not attempt an excavation into the archaeology of the term’s apparent successes and downfalls in this short introduction (but see the work of others who have begun to—e.g., Fraser (2012); Piller (2016); Avinieri et al. (2019)). Instead, we note here its continued significance within a diverse and fraught world and consider how the term seems widely used (especially in the North American context) to highlight the intersection of race-based sociopolitical-economic inequities, for which colonialism and neoliberal capitalism are held responsible. Indeed, as is teased out by Heller and McElhenny (2017) in their book on language, colonialism, and capitalism, a range of nuanced complications and contradictions are found in both the historical centers and peripheries of the globe as a result of these two deeply intertwined historical processes (colonialism and capitalism), which have by now clearly transformed human society everywhere on the planet (as well as the planet itself, as made clear by the increasingly visible impact of climate change and environmental degradation). Most of the chapters in this book examine those effects to some degree in specific places around the globe. Nonetheless, these systemic “forces” and “processes” cannot be so simply framed as causing all forms of social injustice presently experienced in the world. Some peoples would welcome a little more “neoliberal choice” in their lives (e.g., in Cuba, ch. 19 or Papua New Guinea, ch. 16), while others may feel misunderstood, and at times oppressed, by Euro-American geopolitical might cloaked in hegemonic liberal ideals to do with democracy, human rights, and free markets (e.g., in China, ch. 15 and Bosnia-Herzegovina, ch. 9 or on international cargo boats, ch. 11). Indeed, the clashing of such forces leads to locally lived friction over the meanings of fairness and how to achieve it, as well as regional and national debates over values and authority that do not neatly fit the definition of social justice as normatively recognized in Western intellectual thought. Thus, we have purposely attempted to include examples of other local forms of social injustice (even in the heart of neoliberal Denmark) in ways that are meant to represent a somewhat more “global perspective” on language and social justice than is sometimes undertaken, especially in anglophone corners of language scholarship. Yet we are also reflexively sensitive and aware that, despite our best efforts, our framing of activist research into language and social justice in this volume represents just one such framing in the global marketplace of ideas; and one that is, of course, informed by our disciplinary roots in linguistic anthropology and our geographical academic positions in North American (the United States and Canada) universities. Indeed, we are aware that our claim to a “global perspective” (as explained more fully in the next section) may feel unwarranted to some readers, given that all three of the editors as well as many of the authors in this volume are employed by North American universities. Moreover, although most of us read widely beyond our training, attending conferences for example in related disciplines, such as applied linguistics and pragmatics, in Europe and beyond, it is also true that our own epistemological and theoretical perspective is deeply embedded in the originally North American discipline of linguistic anthropology or closely related fields

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such as sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. However, because we do not want to contribute, even if inadvertently, to the sort of discursive hegemony via keywords and/or linguistic varieties (especially English) explicitly critiqued in some chapters in this volume (e.g., Schein and Fang, ch. 15, and Slotta and Handman, ch. 16), we want to clarify that our use of “global perspectives” in the title does not represent an illocutionary claim to the entirety of global discourses about language and social justice, nor is it an attempt to exclude the many other productive approaches to exploring these issues on the planet (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2009; Pennycook 2017; and several articles in the “Social and divisions” section of Flowerdew and Richardson 2018), but rather a way to signal our efforts to offer something akin to global coverage even as we point out the limitations.

Global Perspectives Thus, we use this phrase advisedly to signal a triple stance: topical, epistemic, and theoretical. Topically, we have attempted to present examples from different locales around the globe that take on a wide range of social (in)justices. Epistemically, we have invited scholars who represent a range of diverse positionalities (including, e.g., identities, career stages, geographic locations) and employ an eclectic mix of ethnographic and discursive methodologies. Theoretically, we are committed to an anthropologically holistic orientation toward understanding language as social action, an approach that recognizes the global entanglements of language and social justice, even if locally they often translate into situationally different structures of inequality and movements of resistance. At the topical level, we invite our readers to take note of the many case studies and diverse research questions in a wide range of very different places on the planet. Additionally, several studies are multisited (Felicianos-Santos, ch. 4; Reynolds, ch. 13; Markkula and Das, ch. 11) and/or comparative (García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10; Hoffman-Dilloway and Pfister, ch. 2; Perley, ch. 18; Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5), which then exemplify the ongoing entanglement of peoples around the globe. We are painfully aware of the remaining lacunae and how we wish we could have included chapters on Palestine or Australia, Siberia or Northern Ireland, India or Cameroon, and so on. Much careful, conscious research of “local” examples of “global” forces has been conducted in many of these communities. Indeed, we attempted to enlist examples from several of these communities. It is simply that we would need an entire encyclopedia and then some to do justice to a literal interpretation of the phrase “global perspectives.” Nonetheless, we highlight the number of contributions we have assembled from Indigenous Oceania (Mutu, ch. 6; Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5; Slottman and Handman, ch. 16), Indigenous North America (Johnson, ch. 8; Perley, ch. 18), Central and South America and the Caribbean (Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4; Garth, ch. 19; Guzmán, ch. 17; Reynolds, ch. 13; Roth-Gordon, ch. 7), South Africa (Williams), China (Schein and Fan, ch. 15), as well as from Europe (Conrad, ch. 9; García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10; Karrebæk and Kirilova, ch. 14; Menna and Codó, ch. 12), because even as the latter was the origin point of the imperial genocide, colonialism, and exploitation, whose consequences we research elsewhere in the world, the increasingly diverse contemporary European context continues to spawn its own linguistically mediated social injustices. Similarly, while the book broaches a diverse set of topics, some typical and some not so typical of activist research about language and social justice, we also recognize the painful reality that we could not cover all forms of systemic oppression and structural

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inequity that people encounter daily around the world and in which communicative issues are implicated. Significantly absent, for instance, are chapters covering police brutality, transphobia, and environmental (in)justice. Our aim, however, is not to address all possible dimensions of language and social justice. To be fully comprehensive and representative, we would once again have needed several volumes. Rather, we offer a selection of the many ways and contexts in which humans employ communicative strategies to engender and/or address social ills, ranging from linguistic imperialism as tied to white supremacy (Perley, ch. 18; Williams, ch. 3) and educational disparities (Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4; Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1) to speciesism (Garrett and Michelin, ch. 20) and oralist language ideologies (Hoffman-Dilloway and Pfister, ch. 2), sexual violence against Indigenous women (Johnson, ch. 8) and gender discrimination (Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5), racism (Roth-Gordon, ch. 7 ; Markkula and Das, ch. 11) religious intolerance and nativist political dicourse (García-Sanchéz and Tetreault, ch. 10), and linguistically mediated forms of justice in the aftermath of mass violence (Conrad ch. 9), marginalization and criminalization of migrant and Indigenous populations (Reynolds, ch. 13; Guzmán, ch. 17; Menna and Codó, ch. 12), and market constraints on food access (Garth, ch. 19), linguistic labor (Karrebæk and Kirilova, ch. 14), and intellectual ideas (Schein and Fan, ch. 15). Epistemically, as we mentioned above, we were intentional in inviting scholars who represent a range of diverse positionalities (including, for instance, their backgrounds, career stages, geographic locations, and theoretical and methodological orientations). One dimension of positionality we attended to was the inclusion of many contributors who would in some way be considered “native” scholars by their interlocutors (e.g., Perley, ch. 18; Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4; Mutu, ch. 6; Yang, ch. 15; Johnson, ch. 8; Kirilova, ch. 14; Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1; Michelin, ch. 20; Williams, ch. 3). Although aware of the ambiguities and tensions of that term—encompassing both its constraints and affordances (see, for instance, Brayboy and Deyhle 2000; Jacobs-Huey 2002)—this inclusion felt particularly important in light of the decolonizing efforts of our parent discipline of anthropology as well as the reflexive methodologies and dialogic epistemologies to which we adhere. In addition to being sensitive to diverse positionalities, as editors, we sought out scholars who share our own long-time commitment to both engaging our research participants/partners/collaborators in, and analyzing our own self-conscious impact as researchers on the process of, producing and circulating knowledge. The research axioms and practices that emerged out of the reflexive and dialogic turn in anthropology decades ago are now widespread in other fields and have been taken up by scholars interested in exploring the global contexts, causes, and consequences of language ideologies and practices, and their entanglement with social justice issues.5 This volume has been largely composed by those who have engaged in many years of reflexive research, using both creative and critical approaches to analyze how discursive interactions and communicative encounters—both daily and dominant— can have the power to change the world (see Roth-Gordon (2020) for a recent survey of these methods in anthropological perspective; and Handford and Gee (2023) for articles surveying the many ways in which “discourse” can be analyzed in all its multimodality). Finally, our use of the phrase “global perspectives” represents a specific theoretical approach. It is a tenet of this volume that language and social justice research and activism must necessarily emphasize the historically deep and geographically encompassing scope of the processes generally referred to as neocolonialism and neoliberal globalization. That is, inspired by decolonial scholarship from the Global South (e.g., Lugones 2008; Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Quijano 2000) and activist anthropologists such as Wolf (1982), we

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hold that many of the issues of language and social injustice to be found in the world today are the political, economic, and interactional consequences of global processes of colonialism that began at least 500 years ago. And yet we attempt to allow for global variation in how these processes have evolved. Thus, while some of the chapters specifically focus on disparities stemming from and communicatively instantiated via neoliberal globalization (see, for instance, chapters by Menna and Codó, ch. 12 and by Das and Markkula, ch. 11), others explore the consequences of global “exchanges” going back at least 1,000 years, for example, to the orientalist roots of Islamophobia in Europe (García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10), and still others the continued impact of Eurocentric models of schooling and health on Indigenous and immigrant well-being (Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4; Guzmán, ch. 17; Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1; Reynolds, ch. 13; Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5). Moreover, several chapters explore some of the globally networked ways in which actors are seeking justice through modalities of transformation that are emerging out of the global exchanges and flow of ideologies, practices, and institutions (Williams, ch. 3; Johnson, ch. 8; Perley, ch. 6; Mutu, ch. 18). Thus, what this volume may add to the language and social justice literature is its gathering in one place of so many sensitively and ethnographically researched case studies, all of which offer theoretically informed perspectives on global phenomena situated in diverse and specific places on the planet.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME As hopefully it is by now clear, we enlisted contributions to this volume with one large question in mind: How are language and other forms of discourse implicated in the manufacture, maintenance, or mitigation of social (in)justice globally? Breaking that down into several questions: How does language use both contribute to and ameliorate social justice problems at a local scale but as a result of global forces? How do language’s ideological instantiations become part of the problem or part of the solution? How do linguistic interactions erase some and give voice to others in ways that are sometimes globally instigated and sometimes have global repercussions? As long-time members of the American Anthropological Association’s Language and Social Justice network, we editors had easy access to a number of scholars already involved in this conversation about both the actual and potential interactions between language and social justice, as well as the global causes and consequences of their entanglements. However, we let them know that we were hoping to interpellate a readership for this volume that would include both fellow researchers (from undergraduate to postgraduate) and fellow activists (from the specific communities and from comparable ones elsewhere), as well as curious allies to this field who may simply wish to know more as they feel themselves to be a part of this world. In other words, we asked our colleagues to contribute a chapter that would be legible to readers who had no necessary background information about the ethnographic settings, the linguistic situations, or even the methods and theoretical approaches of the scholars. Although we were always aware of what a huge (t)ask this was, writing our own chapters made the difficulty of writing for this imagined readership more experientially real. Yet, happily, all of the contributors rose to the challenge in ways we hope will make the chapters a fascinating read for audiences from around the world and from a wide spectrum of disciplines, and even to a host of possible “eavesdroppers,” so to speak. We are extremely grateful to all of our contributors

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for sticking with us throughout the long editorial process as we worked through these and other issues. But then there was the matter of organizing the chapters that were coming in. On what basis were we to group these so purposefully diverse contributions into a sensible table of contents? To classify them geographically would have been akin to reproducing the colonial legacy of area studies, and incoherent with our theoretical approach to global perspectives, even if it had been possible to assign a chapter on transnational migration or another on global seafaring to a specific areal section. Also, given our commitments (and those of our contributors) to intersectionality and our constructivist epistemology rooted in linguistic anthropology, the chapters could not have been sorted using any a priori social categories such as sex, class, race, ethnicity—that is, clustering all the gender/sexuality chapters in one part, all of the race and religion chapters in another, and so on. To the contrary, one of our goals has been to show how various systems of oppression and their corresponding and most salient identity categories are imbricated in mutually elaborating and compounding macro processes of violence, precarity, and powerlessness. We might also have organized the chapters around a set of analytic categories that are already somewhat familiar with respect to language and social justice research: linguistic colonialism, language education for minoritized youth, linguistic inequalities in access to institutions, hate speech and other forms of symbolic violence, and so on. Indeed, one reviewer suggested we open the volume with a section devoted to some more familiar contexts and established lines of research (e.g., linguistic hierarchies and institutional control) rather than with the still relatively new and emergent approaches (e.g., environmental sovereignty issues). To some degree, we heeded this advice, but not entirely. As readers will see, what resulted did not exactly line up with what we were imagining either. Instead, much of what we have on offer escaped their containers, but hopefully in some comprehensible ways, which we now address. In Part I, “Challenging Linguistic Ideologies and Exclusions,” we gathered some (not all) of the chapters that, on the one hand, address the sorts of language ideologies that set oppressive standards and sociolinguistic hierarchies and, on the other, legislate the socioeconomically and politically acceptable media for challenging social inequality and achieving social justice. Examples include the processes by which syncretic codes are devalued and silenced, even as they keep emerging, from South Africa (Williams, ch. 3) to the Caribbean (Feliciano-Santos, ch. 4) to the South Pacific (Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5). Other chapters illustrate the ways in which language ideologies and policies, rooted in long-standing linguistic hierarchies, regiment how one ought to speak and whether one will be heard: for instance, how deaf children’s access to sign-mediated schools and peer socialization is limited in Mexico and Nepal (Hoffman-Dilloway and Pfister, ch. 2), or how communicative access to social goods is constrained for undocumented Latinx parents in the United States (Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1). However, these chapters also address how community members strain against these constraints and develop alternative strategies for accessing a voice: producing defiant Hip Hop in the Cape (Williams, ch. 3), reconstituting colonial languages for female empowerment in the Marquesas (Riley, ch. 5) and Solomon Islands (Jourdan, ch. 5) or for Indigenous sovereignty in Puerto Rico (Sherina-Felicianos, ch. 4), or simply engaging the sensitive eyes and ears of researchers in Mexico (Pfister, ch. 2), Nepal (Hoffman-Dilloway, ch. 2), and Pennsylvania and California in the United States (Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1). We asked Patricia Baquedano-López to comment on these chapters and the ways

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in which they speak to each other, and she has offered some wonderful insights about the role reflexive research can play in the linguistic achievement of social justice. Part II, “Confronting Hate and Violence,” is composed of chapters that explore some of the situations in the world where people have used semiotic resources to address not only symbolic violence but also its manifestation as material violence, from colonial genocide to phobic harassment graphically online or in the streets. On the one hand, there are considerations of how Indigenous activists are addressing the ongoing “slow violence” of European colonizers (see Perley, ch. 18), whether through the revision of mistranslated treaties and claims for territorial reparations by Maori lineages (Mutu, ch. 6) or through the performative arts and representational crafts of First Nation women restoring their selves and their bodies after generations of sexual intrusion (Johnson, ch. 8). The other three chapters address deadly forms of exclusion and discrimination perpetrated and/or resurrected by European (-identified) elites against social groups long identified as “outsiders.” In Portuguese-colonized Brazil, Roth-Gordon (ch. 7) examines how middle-class families justify white supremacy through everyday racist interactions that entrench presumptions about the criminality of the favela-dwelling underclass. Similarly, García-Sánchez and Tetreault (ch. 10) probe how Muslims, long ethno-religiously “othered” in both Spain and France, continue to be violently excluded via pervasive media representations that now intertwine linguistic intolerance with Islamophobia. By contrast, at the crossroads margins of Europe, Conrad (ch. 9) explores the uneasy simmering of long-term interethnic tensions and complex negotiation of relationships below the surface of everyday familial interactions and silences in Sarajevo following the mass violence and targeting of civilians during the Balkan War in the 1990s. For this part of the volume, we asked Luisa Martín Rojo to comment. She provided extremely enlightening remarks about the repressive power of dominant discourses and interstitial resistance. For Part III, “Decoding Globalized Interactions,” we assembled chapters that consider how value (symbolic and material) is distributed across and regimented by a globalized semiotic marketplace. Authors in this section look at how the linguistic labor of translators is subject to neoliberal capitalism in Denmark (Karrebæk and Kirilova, ch. 14), and how the significance of theoretical concepts and intellectual property are negotiated in the face of Western hegemony in China (Schein and Fan, ch. 15). Sailors on international cargo ships negotiate the value of their work onboard, using a range of languages, genres, and other semiotic channels (Markkula and Das, ch. 11), while Senegalese street vendors, who migrated to Barcelona due to postcolonial conflict and restructuring, find their multimodal voices in the midst of conservative and progressive jockeying to suppress and/ or speak for them (Menna and Codó, ch. 12). Finally, Reynolds (ch. 13) discusses how semiotic acts and narratives are socialized and disseminated through migrant networks from Guatemala to the U.S. Midwest in response to globalized labor opportunities and political constraints. We imagined Miyako Inoue as an ideal discussant for these chapters, and indeed her comments illuminate a number of intriguing connections focusing on how humans navigate the regimentation of global communicative systems. And for Part IV, “Negotiating Resources in the Anthropocene,” we assembled studies that consider what happens when basic resources are not shared equitably across community actors. For instance, how is the moral personhood of suburban wildlife represented and interpreted by humans in the United States (Garrett and Michelin, ch. 20)? How do Cubans communicatively manage their limited access to the foods that would feel both emotionally and materially nourishing to them (Garth, ch. 19)? How are

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healthcare opportunities linguistically legible and culturally recognizable as caring health for the Gulumapu peoples of Chile (Guzmán, ch. 17)? How can linguistic and cultural knowledge be reinscribed by First Nations peoples from whom both the places and their names were ripped away (Perley, ch. 18)? Finally, how do people in the Yopno and Waria Valleys of Papua New Guinea articulate their distress over being the “last place” on earth to receive the “good news” of Christianity and the symbolic capital of global English (Slotta and Handman, ch. 16)? In this case, we invited Barbra Meek to explore some of the interesting links and contrasts between the conflicted strategies enjoined in these constrained settings.

LESSONS LEARNED AT THE INTERSECTION OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND ACTIVISM Finally, we wish to thank all of our contributors for their hard work on their chapters and comments as well as gratitude for their patience as this volume took shape so slowly. But here at the end of our voyage, we also need to circle back once more and discuss a few of our own takeaways from the experience, while also probing once more who we are, how we got here, and where we hope to go from here. We start this section by remembering the many conversations we have had over the last few years about how processes of social (in)justice are not only contemporaneous but also globally interconnected, such as racial justice activists in Brazil marching under the banner of Vidas Negras Importam (“Blacks Lives Matter”), or Hungarian president Viktor Orbán addressing the 2022 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Texas to sell his “White Christian Illiberal Democracy,” or Spanish antiabortion groups taking to the streets in Madrid after the US Supreme Court rolled back Roe versus Wade, or the agreement at COP27 for wealthier polluting nations to pay for the damage wrought by climate change on the least polluting and most vulnerable nations. Because of the many connected ways in which the world has been imploding recently, we recall the old adage that “it takes a village” and confirm that it will take broad coalitions and cohorts of seriously playful equals to (re)occupy public spaces and restructure paradigmatic knowledge in ways that truly make sense as we find ways to (in MLK’s words) “bend the arc of history towards justice.”

Needing Ever More Collaborative Knowledge Production and Mobilization as We Keep a Critical Lens Trained on Our Own Research Methods and Positionalities First, we need to emphasize that social justice is not just an abstraction but a deeply embodied, experiential, and intersubjectively lived reality for communities and researchers alike. Whether researchers are insiders or outsiders or something in between in the contexts they study, this volume is full of those who look ever more deeply for ways to collaborate with, not merely “subject” to study, those who willingly participate in our studies, striving to support them in their efforts at meaning-making, as well as to mobilize and elevate communities’ knowledge. For an example of this, consider the work of Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, ch. 1, who made the development of intersubjective exchange between researchers and researched the linchpin of their chapter. Many other contributors are also particularly reflective of the degree to which they have one foot in and one foot out of the phenomena they are analyzing. Schein and Fan (ch. 15), Roth-Gordon (ch. 7), FelicianoSantos (ch. 4), Karrebæk and Kirilova (ch. 14), and Williams (ch. 3) have all contributed unsentimental and astute critiques from an inside out perspective by examining at close

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range the edges of social categories of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality, and forming relationships across these. Similarly, collaboration takes place between scholars and grassroots activists in designing approaches with the potential to address forms of justice that matter in everyday practice. In this volume, Mutu (ch. 6), Johnson (ch. 8), and Perley (ch. 18), as deeply invested insiders, are themselves engaged in the activist reformulation of the unjust structures to which they themselves have been subjected. But many of our other contributors, outsiders to the specific fray within which they have immersed themselves as researchers, take it as a necessary part of their job to bear witness to those with whom they work (see, e.g., Reynolds, ch. 13; Menna and Codó, ch. 12; Slotta and Handman, ch. 16; Conrad, ch. 9; and Guzmán, ch. 17), as well as to bring grassroots activists as partners in the research and writing process, for example, Garrett and Michelin (ch. 20). We also wish to include here collaborating scholars who take on the hard work of probing and comparing similar topics but in contrasting contexts, finding human variations and agency in the face of global constraints and structural commonalities (e.g., García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10; Riley and Jourdan, ch. 5and Markkula and Das, ch. 11). Finally, there are those who have joined this volume from somewhat different disciplinary angles (e.g., Garth, ch. 19; Johnson, ch. 8; Mutu, ch. 6; and Schein and Fan, ch. 15) in hopes that we may all break out of our academic silos to forge common and generative frameworks for thinking about the role of language in addressing social justice issues.

Shifting the Center: Whose Version of Social Justice and Social Justice for Whom? We are also cognizant of the need to keep an eye on the ever-shifting center of social justice. As mentioned above, several chapters in this volume take issue with conventional understandings of the term. Garth (ch. 19) questions traditional Marxist approaches to economic justice as redistributive justice, by inviting us to ask, alongside the communities with which she works, to consider to what extent we can invoke facile generalizations about neoliberal capitalism in socialist Cuba. Schein and Yang (ch. 15) question the hegemonic presumptions of Western definitions of intellectual property. Conrad (ch. 9) asks whether the horrors of a civil war can be overcome through UN sanctioned forms of Truth and Reconciliation efforts. In so doing, she disturbs taken-for-granted understandings of forms of Truth and Reconciliation that give primacy to speech. Feliciano-Santos (ch. 4) travels through the multiply colonized space of Puerto Rico, feeling the various consequences of sociolinguistic hierarchies for multiple actors. Karrebæk and Kirilova (ch. 14) ask how an attempt to create a just system of court translation for migrants in Denmark can create unjust conditions for the translators themselves, who become disposable pawns in the gig economy. Guzmán (ch. 17) explores how a global health model designed for the just and culturally sensitive purveyance of medical care can go terribly wrong when imposed from a distance in Indigenous locales. And Slotta and Handman (ch. 16) investigate what happens when global English is experienced not as a hegemonic evil to be resisted but as a good to be acquired by those who have had the least access to the material fruits of “modernity.” In other words, “social justice” is inevitably a moving and fluid target; so we too must keep our minds open and, through the stance of humility that Mangual Figueroa and Hernández describe in their chapter, accept that communities’ understandings of what social justice means and looks like may sometimes look different from what we envision in our academic discussions.

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Language as a Multimodal/Multisensorial Field for Multi-genre Activism Finally, and while this might feel particularly ironic coming from three linguistic anthropologists, we are also painfully aware that (our) words are never enough. We need to engage not only in conversations about discourse but also in discourse as action, and what changes are necessary to our inherited linguistic-anthropological research practices to center collaborations and reciprocity and to produce knowledge for social actions that advance communities (Avineri et al. 2021; García-Sánchez and Avineri forthcoming). Many of the contributors to this volume not only talk about epistemic justice but also bring about different modes of knowing through practice. We not only explore through thought and words how to make praxis vibrant through multimodal genres of learning but also infuse our activism with multimodal and multisensorial interactions. In short, we are seeking to transform social inequity and achieve justice through reflexive listening and dialogic performance (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2016), creative communication and audience coalescence (Avineri and Perley 2019), and consciously embodied and situated (inter)activism (Riley and Paugh 2019). In this volume, we offer examples of alternative, genre-bending pathways, from working sexual knowledge into beaded vulvas (Johnson, ch. 8) to crafting narratives out of imagery on t-shirts (Menna and Codó, ch. 12), from voicing citizenship through code-switching Hip Hop (Williams, ch. 3) to expressing youth responses to ICE raids through drawing and theatre (Reynolds, ch. 13), and from pointed joking about food scarcity (Garth, ch. 19) to critiquing Islamophobic memes (García-Sánchez and Tetreault, ch. 10). We acknowledge that these examples are just grains of sand to be added to the work activists and scholar activists have been doing for decades. And on that note, we end this introduction with a coda of invitation written by Bernie that examines what happens when we accept that tensions and contradictions will not just go away—we need to keep creatively exploring the possibilities.

INVITATION: PUTTING LANGUAGE TO WORK IN THE SERVICE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE This introduction highlights the strengths of the tools we use to address issues of language as they relate to issues of social justice. The collected chapters provide case studies of particular circumstances in complexly situated perspectives illuminating the variety of experiences and actions in our global sampling. One common goal across chapters is the exploration of multimodal strategies of communication, engagement, and action. The following reflection is a personal provocation for creative world-making in the service of empowering communities to assert social justice praxes. I (Bernie) started grade one with the required box of crayons and a notebook. The school was an English-only school, and I was the only Maliseet student in my class. I did not speak or understand a word of English, and neither the teacher nor the other students spoke Maliseet, my ancestral language. By the end of the first day of class, most students remember with fondness the new friends they made. I remember being the last student on the bus. The bus driver was twisted around looking at me, his mouth moving and sounds coming out of his mouth. I didn’t understand a word he was saying. I was sitting in the front seat with tears streaming down my cheeks. That first day of school was the beginning of a long, slow, traumatic erasure of my language and culture. Everything I knew to be true and right with the world was rendered mute and irrelevant. My experience on that

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first day of school informs my work on language revitalization in Indigenous communities and my engagement with issues of language and social justice. I learned important histories, concepts, and practices in anthropology. I also developed important skill sets in my professionalization as a linguistic anthropologist exploring language revitalization strategies and best practices. While linguistic and anthropological skills are fundamental to the work of language description and documentation, they also created an unintentional bias toward methods and approaches when dealing with community partners. Most obvious among the biases is the focus on “language” per se. The will to save the language placed emphasis on preserving the code. While I worked alongside the language activists in the community, I realized our focus should be placed on supporting the social activities where the language was being used. “Saving” the social relationships that promote Maliseet language use would increase the prospects of producing documents that empower community members to create additional resources for Maliseet language life. Shifting our focus away from the language and toward social relationships also entails broadening our semiotic field of research and advocacy. Significantly, the small gestures required to type on a keyboard are effective in producing texts for printing and dissemination, but they are less effective in creating experiential epistemic space. In my case, the trauma of language loss could not be adequately expressed in keystrokes and words on a page. I needed broad gestures that allowed me to replicate the trauma of language loss by tearing the canvas apart and slapping paint on the torn and crumpled canvas, and I needed to mimic the dissolution of Maliseet worlds by scattering the many pieces into a chaos of forms and colors. Despite the trauma associated with language and cultural loss, I was determined to create possible futures for Maliseet worlds. I took the disarrayed pieces and started to sew them together into a visual ethnographic construction that expressed in more immediate and visceral terms my stance toward emergent vitalities of Maliseet world-making. I continued to create installation pieces that allowed participants to experience Maliseet worlds by imagining and creating Maliseet sacred space in Maliseet time immemorial. I conceptualize the installation pieces as epistemic spaces where non-Maliseet visitors can experience the beauty of Maliseet worlds without needing the crutch of texts. I realized words are not my best gift, so I used my creative skills to convey both the trauma of language loss and also the promise of world-making (see Figure 0.1). However, this reflection acknowledges the necessity of weaving words and artwork together to serve as a catalyst for members of the community to not only see what can be done but also to imagine what might be possible for future Maliseet language use. The constraints of academic publishing and publisher expectations require privileging words (and images) on a page and predominantly printed in colonial languages. Ideally, my chapter in this volume would be printed in Maliseet in anticipation of a Maliseet audience who will read the chapter and find it useful for imaging and actualizing Maliseet language vitality. This volume is the next best ideal. As a collection of essays sharing strategies and advocacies in diverse communities, the volume is designed to empower communities to actualize just futures for the communities we are serving. That said, I recognize there are still areas of research and advocacy that can benefit from an honest and open engagement with different modes of learning and knowing. This volume is tangible evidence that thinking about language and social justice is a first step toward redressing myriad forms of injustice. However, as my story shows, academic forms of activism by themselves will not bring us closer to emancipatory praxes unless we elevate communities’ ways of knowing and communicating as part of our collective commitments and advocacies.

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FIGURE 0.1:  Wolastokwi Ckuwapin, Maliseet Dawn. Reproduced with permission from the author.

NOTES 1. We offer here some loose working definitions of three terms that all contributors employ in this volume although they may not all share the same strict definitions. (1) “Globalization” is used to refer to a wide range of cross-cultural, political, and economic processes that have been enmeshing most human (and non-human) actors more and more tightly since the beginning of human evolution, migration, and social exchange; (2) for some, globalization began 500 years ago with the advent of European mercantilism and “colonialism” and the imposition of European sociocultural and political-economic practices, institutions, and ideologies on the rest of the world; (3) for others, full-blown globalization is the result of

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post-World War II “neoliberalism”—that is, the global expansion of capitalist strictures designed to avoid military and now environmental apocalypse by tying individual actors together with ideologies of democratic choice while also creating new unequal strata and life possibilities. 2. See historian Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (2017), which powerfully challenges the conventional wisdom that human rights efforts have universally reflected a “leftist” post-fascist agenda and rigorously demonstrate the conservative roots of this framework. 3. In the course of discussing the variable use of terms such as “equity,” we editors discovered a graphic that beautifully expresses our intuitions about the distinctions between equality, equity, and justice and wanted to share it with our readers (last accessed Jan. 9, 2023) https://onlinepublichealth​.gwu​.edu​/resources​/equity​-vs​-equality/. 4. First coined, in the sixteenth century France, to establish national (and subsequently imperial) power of a centralized nation state over its feudal (and colonial) dominions, the term “sovereignty” has gone through several semantic and political shifts in significance, beginning with its near reversal during the French Revolution to voice the concept of “popular sovereignty.” Subsequently reworked through struggles over parliamentary versus constitutional sovereignty and federal versus state control in British and US politics, a new anti-state understanding of “pluralist” or “divided” or “pooled” sovereignty emerged in the twentieth century, due in part to post-World War II attempts by the United Nations to oversee the process of decolonization—that is, requiring colonizing states to “develop” their “trust territories” politically and economically with an eye toward full autonomy and self-government (https://www​.britannica​.com​/topic​/ sovereignty last accessed Jan. 9, 2023). This terminological history has informed recent debates over Indigenous sovereignty and citizenship based on race, territory, language, and other floating signifiers in the twenty-first century (e.g., Davis 2018; MoretonRobinson 2015). 5. See Ganassin and Consoli (2023) for a look at how the concept and practice of reflexive research has caught on in our sister discipline of applied linguistics.

REFERENCES Austin, J. L. (1975 [1962]), How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon. Avineri, N., L. R Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (2019), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 1st edn, Milton: Routledge. Avineri, N., E. J. Johnson, B. C. Perley, J. D. Rosa, and A. C. Zentella (2021), “Applied Linguistic Anthropology: Balancing Social Science with Social Change.” In Doris S. Warriner and Elizabeth R. Miller (eds.), Extending Applied Linguistics for Social Impact : CrossDisciplinary Collaborations in Diverse Spaces of Public Inquiry, 1st edn, 171–94, London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi​.org​/10​.5040​/9781350136410. Avineri, N., and B. C. Perley (2019), “Mascots, Name Calling, and Racial Slurs: Seeking Social Justice Through Audience Coalescence.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. D. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 147–56, Milton: Routledge. Back, M., and V. Zavala (2019), Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Perú, New York: Routledge.

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Baker-Bell, A. (2020), Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity and Pedagogy, New York and London: NCTE-Routledge. Baquedano-López, P. (2021), “Learning with Immigrant Indigenous Parents in School and Community.” Theory into Practice, 60 (1): 51–61. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00405841​.2020​ .1829384. Basso, K. H. (1996), Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Bauman, R., and C. L. Briggs (2003), Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, vol. 21, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Black, S. P. (2019), Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health: Zulu Tradition, HIV Stigma, and AIDS Activism in South Africa, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Boellstorff, T. (2005), The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Brayboy, B. M., and D. Deyhle (2000), “Insider-Outsider: Researchers in American Indian Communities.” Theory Into Practice, 39 (3): 163–9. Briggs, C. L., and C. Mantini-Briggs (2016), Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, Durham: Duke University Press. Bucholtz, M. (2011), White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavanaugh, J. R. (2009), Living Memory: The Social Aesthetics of Language in a Northern Italian Town, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Charity Hudley, A. H., and C. Mallison (2018), “Introduction: Language and Social Justice in Higher Education.” Journal of English Linguistics, 46 (3): 175–85. Charity Hudley, A. H., C. Mallison, and M. Bucholtz (2020), “Toward Racial Justice in Linguistics: Interdisciplinary Insights into Theorizing Race in the Discipline and Diversifying the Profession.” Language, 96 (4), e200–35. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/lan​.2020​.0074. Chávez, A. E., and G. M. Pérez (2022), Ethnographic Refusals, Unruly Latinidades, Santa Fe: The School for Advanced Research. Codó, E. (2008), Immigration and Bureaucratic Control: Language Practices in Public Administration, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Das, S. N. (2016), Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts, New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, J. L. (2018), Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. DeGraff, M. (2020), “Toward Racial Justice in Linguistics: The Case of Creole Studies Language.” Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, 96 (4): e292–306. Dewachi, O. (2017), Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, 1st edn, Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Dick, H. (2018), Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants, Austin: University of Texas Press. Duchêne, Alexandre, Melissa Moyer, and Celia Roberts, eds. 2013. Language, Migration and Social Inequalities: A Critical Sociolinguistic Perspective on Institutions and Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Duranti, M. (2017), The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Errington, J. J. (2008), Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power, Malden: Blackwell Pub. Fassin, D. (2013), “On Resentment and Ressentiment: The Politics and Ethics of Moral Emotions.” Current Anthropology, 54 (3): 249–67. Flowerdew, J., and J. E. Richardson, eds. (2018), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, Milton Park: Routledge. Fraser, N. (2012), “On Justice: Lessons from Plato, Rawls and Ishiguro.” New Left Review, 74: 41–51. Gal, S., and J. T. Irvine (2019), Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ganassin, S., and S. Consoli (2023), Reflexivity in Applied Linguistics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Suggestions, eds. S. Ganassin and S. Consoli, New York: Routledge. García-Sánchez, I. M. (2014), Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. García-Sánchez, I. M., and N. Avineri (Forthcoming), “Language Socialization Methods and Social Justice.” In M. T. Winn and L. T. Winn (eds.), Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education, Bloomsbury Publishers. Gaudio, R. P. (2009), Allah Made Us: Islamic Outlaws in an Islamic African City, Malden: Blackwell-Wiley. Handford, M., and J. Paul Gee (2023), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, Milton: Taylor & Francis Group. Heller, M. (2011), Paths to Post-Nationalism: A Critical Ethnography of Language and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller, M., and B. McElhinny (2017), Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hill, J. H. (2008), The Everyday Language of White Racism, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hoffman, K. E. (2008), We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco, 1st edn, Hoboken: Wiley. Inoue, M. (2006), Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacobs-Huey, L. (2002), “The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among ‘Native’ Anthropologists.” American Anthropologist, 104 (3): 791–804. https://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/3567257. Kroskrity, P. V., ed. (2000), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Labov, W. (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. LaDousa, C. (2014), Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky: Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India, New York: Berghahn Books. Leonard, W. (2021), “Centering Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Collaborative Language Work.” In Sustaining Indigenous Languages: Connecting Communities, Teachers, and Scholars, 21– 34, Northern Arizona University Press. Available online: https://jan​.ucc​.nau​.edu/​~jar​/SILL/. Lippi-Green, R. (1997), English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, London: Routledge. Livia, A., and K. Hall (1997), Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, New York: Oxford University Press. Lugones, M. (2008), “Colonialidad y Género.” Tabula Rasa, 9: 73–102. Marin, A., T. Stewart-Ambo, N. McDaid-Morgan, R. W. Eyes, and M. Bang (2020), “Enacting Relationships of Kinship and Care in Educational and Research Settings.” In T. McCarty and A. Ali (eds.), Critical Youth Research in Education, 243–64, New York: Routledge.

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Martín Rojo, L., and A. del Percio (2020), Language and Neoliberal Governmentality, New York: Routledge. Makihara, M., and B. B. Schieffelin (2007), Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, New York: Oxford University Press. McCarty, T. L., and T. S. Lee (2014), “Critical Culturally Sustaining/Revitalizing Pedagogy and Indigenous Education Sovereignty.” Harvard Educational Review, 84 (1): 101–24. McCarty, T. L., S. Nicholas, K. Chew, N. Diaz, W. Leonard, and L. White (2018), “Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices: Storywork as Theory and Praxis in Indigenous-Language Reclamation.” Daedalus, 147: 160–72. https://doi​.org​/10​.1162​/DAED​_a​_00499. Meek, B. A. (2010), We Are Our Language, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008), Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs, Malden: Blackwell. Mignolo, W., and A. Escobar (2010), Globalization and the Decolonial Option, New York: Routledge. Morgan, M. H. (2002), Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015), The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muelhmann, S. (2013), Where the River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ochs, E., and T. Kremer-Sadlik (2013), Fast-Forward Family: Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-Class America, 1st edn, Berkeley: University of California Press. Paris, Django and H. Samy Alim. 2017. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. New York: Teachers College Press. Paugh, A. L. (2012), Playing with Languages Children and Change in a Caribbean Village, New York: Berghahn Books. Paugh, A. L., and K. C. Riley (2019), “Poverty and Children’s Language in Anthropolitical Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 48: 297–315. Pennycook, A. (2017), Posthumanist Applied Linguistics, London: Taylor and Francis. Perley, B. C. (2011), Defying Maliseet Language Death Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, 1st edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quijano, A. (2000), “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views From the South, 1 (3): 533–79. Reyes, A. (2006), Language, Identity, and Stereotype Among Southeast Asian American Youth: The Other Asian, New York: Routledge. Riley, K. C., and A. L. Paugh (2019), Food and Language: Discourses and Foodways Across Cultures, New York: Routledge. Rosa, J. (2019), Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, New York: Oxford University Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2016), Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley: University of California Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2020), “Situating Discourse Analysis in Ethnographic and Sociopolitical Context.” In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, 32–51, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, E. ([2014] 1921), Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Schulthies, B. L. (2020), Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality, New York: Fordham University Press. Schieffelin, B. B., K. A. Woolard, and P. V. Kroskrity (1998), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shulist, S. (2018), Transforming Indigeneity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Silverstein, M. (1993), “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Function.” In J. Lucy (ed.), Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, 33–58, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2009), Social Justice through Multilingual Education, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Tetreault, C. (2015), Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Tengan, T. P. K. (2008), Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i, Durham and London: Duke University Press Tsing, A. L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuck, E., and K. W. Yang (2018), Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, Milton: Taylor and Francis. Urciuoli, B. (1996), Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class, Boulder: Westview Press. Williams, Q., A. Deumert, and T. M. Milani (2022), Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Woolard, K. A. (2016), Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, E. R. (1982), Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zentella, A. C. (1997), Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York, Cambridge: Blackwell. Zheng, T. (2015), Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART I

Challenging Linguistic Ideologies and Exclusions

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Chapter 1

A Language Socialization Approach to Humanizing Ethnographic Methods in Latinx Families’ Homes ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA AND SERA HERNÁNDEZ

INTRODUCTION This chapter represents many years of conversation between the two authors––Ariana Mangual Figueroa and Sera Hernández––who first met as doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley (Hernández and Mangual Figueroa 2022). We met as students of Patricia Baquedano-López who, in her training and mentorship, centered the themes of expert and novice role-taking, central and peripheral participation, and the political stakes involved in conducting educational research (Baquedano-López 2004; Baquedano-López, Alexander and Hernández 2013). We were trained as language socialization researchers and share the field’s concern with centering the voices and actions of children and novice social actors (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984; Ochs and Schieffelin 2008). While the founders of Language Socialization (LS) did not label this work part of a movement for social justice, we believe that the paradigm shifts produced over the last three decades have lifted up the voices of agentic yet marginalized members of communities the world over. Language socialization researchers who study the interrelated phenomena of social inclusion and exclusion and the construction of morality in schools have made important critical interventions in the field. García-Sánchez’s (2014) ethnographic study of the everyday experiences of Moroccan children living in Spain is set against a critical appraisal of historical processes of racialization and nation-state formation in that country. By tracking the ways in which these histories adhere in contemporary interactions within and beyond schools, she offers an empirical basis for the study of social reproduction and socialization to habitus that language socialization researchers seek to trace (Kulick and Schieffelin 2004). A number of LS studies in Sweden and Finland––see Cekaite (2012) and Mökkönnen (2013) respectively––track the ways in which immigrant students and those fluent in languages other than the school-sanctioned codes are constructed as worse

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students and less competent speakers in the course of everyday school life. Through their careful work detailing the ways in which beliefs about belonging and worthiness shape everyday interactions and educational practices, these scholars have opened up new approaches to the study of social power and schooling practices. Relatedly, language socialization researchers have traced the ways in which social science research has positioned nonwhite communities as deficient and in need of intervention, especially as it relates to mainstream perceptions of language and literacy practices in racialized groups (Avineri and Johnson 2015; Baquedano-López et al. 2013; Paugh and Riley 2019). Taken together, this growing body of research calls on scholars to move away from framing individuals from racialized communities as a problem and toward studies that unmask the problematic institutional practices in educational research and educational policy that render particular nonwhite speech communities as such. We build on this research, which calls for an anthropolitical linguistics (Zentella 1995) and an anthropolitical language socialization (Paugh and Riley 2019) approach because we agree that it has the “potential to expose how language is used to reflect and reproduce structural inequality but may also be used to contravene the damage and articulate new ways forward” (Paugh and Riley 2019, 309). Here we hope to build on this growing body of critical language socialization research to show how attending to power dynamics can help us rethink the roles we take up as ethnographers in the field. We argue that cultivating a researcher stance of deference, (i.e., the humbling and respectful positioning of oneself as a learner) offered us a way to refuse othering and exclusionary practices in educational research and instead work toward methodologies that are humanizing and justice-oriented. We will reflect on the ways that we, as researchers, deferred to our participants to lead conversation and interaction when we assumed the roles of novice learners during data collection. We believe that novice role-taking through deferential stances required us to intentionally shift out of the expert researcher role that we had accumulated throughout a career of teaching and as advanced doctoral students. As Ochs (1996) explains, stance includes both epistemological and affective dimensions that help to constitute the social activity and the identities of the social actors participating. While it is expected for individuals to shift between expert and novice roles throughout the course of interaction, she explains that there is something particular at stake for the researcher’s role-taking in the field: “the socialization of a human world depends upon a continual human willingness to assume the status of novice as parents, as teachers, and as culture-travelers” (432). In other words, if we are to produce knowledge that humanizes both the researcher and researched we, as ethnographers, must be willing and able to take up novice roles in relation to those who welcome us into their everyday lives. The remainder of this chapter explores how we assumed a researcher stance of deference during data collection for our dissertation research.

FIELDWORKER POSITIONALITY We build upon the view that researcher positionality is consequential throughout the ethnographic process. We focus on one dimension of positionality: the researchers’ development of “communicative competence” as it relates to establishing a set of social relations in the field. Briggs (1984) and Moore (2009) model ways of reflecting on researchers’ own communicative competence and how it may reproduce what Briggs calls “communicative hegemony” (1984, 22). Briggs’s focus on the ethnographic interview shows how researchers may disrupt conventions for local communication by posing questions

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that are not locally appropriate or comprehensible, ultimately revealing the ethnographers’ inability to adapt to and respect local norms. In this formulation, the onus is on the researcher to develop interview methods that don’t impose the researcher’s social and linguistic practices, but instead acknowledges difference between researcher and researched while acquiring local practices that can promote rather than prevent open exchange. Moore (2009) also calls on ethnographers of language to work toward developing linguistic and cultural fluency that is respectful of and responsive to the local norms of the speech communities they study. She notes that “most of us report little on our own skills or how we developed them, despite the fact that our field competence has strong bearing on the research questions we ask and how we answer them” (p. 2). By calling on researchers to write about how they acquired “field language communicative competence,” Moore insists that we must reconsider our methods and modes of language use in ways that acknowledge the role of power inherent in the researcher-researched relationship (2009, 3). These important insights draw on participants’ practices––in Briggs’s case transcripts showing how participants’ speech styles depart from the question-answer format typical of interviews and in Moore’s case notes on her language learning and use in the field. We are interested in a related but different point here: those social relations that are produced when the researcher communicates her incompetence as a speaker. We track the ways in which––during our own fieldwork––we demonstrate our lack of linguistic knowledge and create conditions that shift power dynamics in generative ways between ourselves and the Latinx families we work alongside.

OUR FIELDWORK, OUR POSITIONALITY 1 Ariana conducted her dissertation fieldwork in the New Latino Diaspora, a phrase coined by Murillo and Villenas (1995) to denote emerging sociopolitical spaces of Spanishspeaking immigrant settlement from Latin America to geographical areas in the midwestern and southeastern parts of the United States that had not been traditional entry points for new arrivals. In this context, Ariana began her ethnographic engagement in mixed-status homes with family members who hold a range of legal immigration statuses. Raised in a Puerto Rican family in New York City and having taught in the city’s schools, Ariana shared some of the linguistic and cultural knowledge that her focal families had living in diaspora in the United States. As a child in a Puerto Rican family that had been granted US citizenship due to the island’s colonial status, she did not share firsthand experience living in a mixed-status family. For twenty-three months, Ariana conducted her ethnographic dissertation study in the homes of four mixed-status families and in the emerging Latino community in the city of Millvalley, Pennsylvania (a pseudonym). Ariana’s dissertation sought to answer the following research questions:

1. How are parent’s and children’s perceptions of citizenship status, and the challenges and opportunities afforded by their varying migratory statuses, expressed during everyday interactions in mixed-status Mexican families?



2. How do parents and their children socialize one another to identify with distinct national frames of reference, Mexican and American, through language use?



3. How do children and youth in mixed-status families assert their identities as USborn citizens or undocumented migrants during routine activities at home?

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The focal families in this study exemplified a national trend in which mixed-status families included older children who were undocumented migrants like their parents as well as younger US-born children (Passel and Cohn 2009). The data in this chapter draws from a video-recorded interaction that took place in one home with the Utuado-Alvarez family members in the spring of 2010. At the time, both Marta and Carlos––the Utuado-Alvarez parents––were undocumented, along with their eldest son José, while their youngest son Igor was a US-born citizen. Sera’s twenty-four-month ethnography was conducted in four Mexican immigrant families’ homes, two in the San Francisco bay area and two in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, during an educational era influenced by federal policies that simultaneously rendered the families both (hyper) visible and invisible dependent on their immigration status, race, class, and language. Sera’s desire to conduct ethnographic research that would allow for an emic perspective from families stemmed from her own family’s experience with subtractive schooling (Valenzuela 1999) that resulted in the heritage language loss of both Spanish and French. As a mixed-race Latina growing up in an English-only home, Sera shared connections to Mexico like the families in her study, though she is far removed from the immigration process her great-grandparents on both sides of the family experienced. Sera understood that the ways in which families come to understand the educational system in the United States was mediated through language, that is, everyday discursive interactions across domains mediated the ways in which family members understood and negotiated their knowledge of the school system and structures, parental roles in schools, educational opportunities and inequities, and their educational ideologies in general. As such, the study’s research questions were purposefully designed to be exploratory and included the following:

1. How do Mexican immigrant families come to understand US schools or classroom practices?



2. How are parent involvement roles mediated across the two CA school districts?



3. In what ways do institutional conditions affect parent participation and student experience in schools?

The data shared in this chapter was recorded in the Romero home, led by single mother Sofia. She and her middle school daughter Aracely lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an urban city right outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. At the time of the study, Sofia had been living in the United States for fourteen years, after leaving a town in Jalisco, Mexico. Sofia was an undocumented immigrant and made a living cleaning the homes of families that lived in the city’s hills. Aracely was born in the United States and had US citizenship. We both conducted sustained participant observation in the families’ homes. Using a language socialization approach to ethnographic research (Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002), we conducted participant observation during the families’ everyday lives and collected audio and video recordings over a two-year period. See Mangual Figueroa (2010) and Hernández (2013) for a detailed description of the methods employed in their dissertation studies. We analyzed the large corpus of linguistic data to gain insight into family members’ socialization into particular school roles and the ways in which they negotiated binaries such as marginalized and empowered identities (for Sera) or US-born and undocumented identities (for Ariana). Each author translated their data from Spanish to English, and it is important to note that––for the purposes

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of this chapter––we have used a Conversation Analysis (CA)-inspired approach to transcription. Drawing on CA tenets of the study of interaction, we focus our attention on the turn as the central unit of analysis and we highlight in bold those linguistic and paralinguistic resources that we employed to achieve a stance of deference in the field (Schegloff 2007).2

MEALTIME TALK ACROSS TWO FIELDSITES We begin our analysis with the assumption that––due to long-standing social and cultural beliefs––we entered each of the family’s homes already situated within a social hierarchy. The family members perceived us to have valued forms of social capital (our experiences as teachers and ability to navigate their children’s public schools, our connections to university systems, our abilities to speak English more proficiently than the families, and our US citizenship) (Mangual Figueroa 2014). And while we were clear about these forms of status or privilege––and often purposely leveraged them to help the families when asked (e.g., by translating for parents in institutional settings where our linguistic repertoire granted us access to information or authority)––we also worked to shift these expert research-novice researched roles so as not to reify the belief that our knowledge base was the preferred one. Mealtime is an essential site for constructing moral categories of right and wrong, good and bad, valued and not valued. In retrospect, we see our behavior in mealtime moments as an opportunity to reframe traditional expert (researcher) and novice (immigrant parent) roles and to create possibilities for the parents to impart expert knowledge. Mealtime socialization has been an important locus of language socialization research focusing on the ways in which novice members of a social group are apprenticed into culturally specific competent behaviors (Ochs and Capps 2001). Accounting for the mealtime studies conducted across the globe, this research represents a diverse array of sites and participants (for comprehensive reviews, see Karrebæk et al. 2018; Ochs and Shohet 2006). This diversity is not represented in mealtime research within the United States, where it has largely been conducted in white middle-class homes, and the focus has been on the socialization of children into the norms for talk and interaction (Ochs and Shohet 2006). In our analysis, we focus on the ways in which the researchers (us) were being apprenticed to particular forms of cultural knowledge, and how we created opportunities to subvert traditional researcher-researched relationships. While our ethnographic research did not set out to study mealtime as a site per sé, we consider these important socializing activities because we were being apprenticed into norms of talk in the Mexican families who welcomed us into their homes. Just like Riley (2016) states in her own reflexive methodological accounts of conducting fieldwork in the Marquesas islands—living and learning in Polynesian and French languages––“access to talk was the primary objective of my study, but without food (and the understanding of how to negotiate access to it), I would have been incapable of carrying out my research”–– we have also found that being invited into family mealtimes and participating in the learning that ensued in those exchanges became a primary mode of data collection over time. This chapter builds upon another insight that issued from Riley’s experiences breaking bread with her subjects—this time during a family meal in Paris, France––which prompted her to reflect on the ways in which “we as researchers have the opportunity to let our formation at the hands of our subjects and our colleagues have a constructive impact

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on the way we represent our subjects through data” (2009, 263). In our experiences as ethnographers, by intentionally assuming the role of a novice in relation to the family members who welcomed us into their homes during mealtime, we are able to blur the binaries between expert/novice and researcher/researched in generative ways. The lessons we learned by positioning Latinx family members as experts in the field have enabled us to fulfill an ethical responsibility to represent Latinx parents as creators and transmitters of knowledge on their own terms. In so doing, the interactions that we present in the subsequent pages are representative of our data in the following ways: first, nearly every visit to a family’s home involved sharing food; second, we often took up active roles during the mealtime routine by setting and clearing the table; third, we often set up our camcorders and audio recorders in that room, meaning that much of the data in our corpus reflects the centrality of that part of the home as a locus of activity.

Example One: Dinnertime, Millvalley, Pennsylvania Ariana’s exchange in the Utuado-Alvarez family began in a typical way on this day in June 2010: being offered and served a meal that Marta (the mother) had prepared. Marta’s husband, Carlos, was home in between work shifts and their two sons––seven-year-old José and four-year-old Igor––had just arrived home from school. The first ten minutes of Ariana’s visit involved several overlapping activities: Ariana setting up the camera for recording, the three adults talking, and Igor playing with his toys.

Section 1 Just before turn 1 represented below, Carlos had been asking Ariana about how the public university that she and her husband worked for obtained its funding: “¿A tu esposo le paga el gobierno o una empresa privada? ¿La universidad es una empresa privada o de gobierno?” (“Is your husband paid by the government or a private company? Is the university a private company or does it belong to the government?”). Carlos’s questions were typical: he was asking Ariana about the public institutions prominent in the city so as to understand the local economy and to make sense of how each of us fit into the labor market and sociopolitical landscape. In these exchanges, Marta and Carlos positioned Ariana as an expert—fluent in the terminology and conversant in how the city’s civic institutions worked because of her advanced degrees and career experience. However, when Ariana complemented Marta on the food she’d served, the conversation shifted for approximately seven minutes. →1 Ariana: 2 Marta: →3 Ariana: 4 Igor: 5 Marta: →6 Ariana: 7 Marta: →8 Ariana:

‘Ehhta rico (It’s delicious) ((chuckles)) Gracias tiene buen gusto el caldo (Thank you the broth has a nice flavor) Blast off phoooo Chile guajillo (Guajillo chile) Guajillo? ((gulps)) Mm hmm es un chile seco(Mm hmm it’s a dried chile) Mmm

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9 Marta: 10 Carlos: →11 Ariana: 12 Marta:



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-semirojo para darle el sabor y el color a la comida (Somewhat red to give the food flavor and color) Rico rico rico rico (Delicious delicious delicious delicious) Es lo que Ana estaba licuando? (Is this what Ana was blending?) Mmm primero se asa y luego se licúa (Mmm first you roast it then you blend it)

This sequence began as Ariana commented on the delicious broth that Martha had prepared. Marta chuckled—perhaps at Ariana’s distinctly Puerto Rican accent and aspirated vowels or perhaps bashfully upon receiving the compliment––and then shared the name of the key ingredient in the soup. Unlike the previous stretch of talk where Ariana was positioned as an expert, here she took up a novice role in relation to Marta and Carlos. She responded with a one-word repetition of the ingredient in turn 6, and an affirmative discourse marker in turn 8 (to signal understanding), both of which were met with expanded responses by the parents (such as Marta’s explanation in turn 9). This pattern continued as Ariana signaled other ingredients in the bowl with her spoon––¿y esa?––and Marta named them “panza” (stomach) and described their preparation. Carlos participated in the exchange by highlighting key terms for Ariana to repeat after him, “panza” (stomach), “garbanzos” (chickpeas), which she did indeed repeat. This pattern of stating a word and expecting a novice interlocutor to learn it through repetition closely resembles “prompting” routines found in many sociocultural contexts around the world (Moore, 2012).

Section 2 Several turns later, Carlos began to describe the cultural context in which this stew would be enjoyed in the region of Southern Mexico where he and Marta had immigrated from. 20 Carlos: Allá en Chiapas en mi pueblo (Over there in my town in Chiapas) →21 Ariana: Mm hmm 22 Carlos: esta comida lo sirv[en (they serve this food) 23 Marta: [con una pata (with a leg) 24 Carlos: -en los restaurantes (in the restaurants) 25 Marta: Mm hmm típico (traditional) 26 Carlos: Pero más en los restauranes bares (But more so in the bar restaurants) 27 Marta: Fondas (Local restaurants) →28 Ariana: Mm? Hmm hmm 29 Carlos: Allí llega la gente y se toma sus cervezas y dicen un caldo de pata. Y te sirven

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 un platón así como esto? ((muestra con ambas manos)) Lleno pero esto es pancita pero hay otra cosa mas finita que es más rica (People get there and they have a beer and say a leg stew. And they serve you a plateful like this? ((gestures with both hands)) full but this is stomach but there’s another finer thing that’s even more delicious) Carlos and Marta co-constructed their description of the sociocultural context in Mexico where they would be eating the stew we were presently enjoying together in Pennsylvania. Like co-teachers, they built upon each other’s words to model an amplified culturally specific lexicon for food and eateries—shifting from “restaurantes” to “restauranes bares” to “fondas” across lines 24, 26, and 27. As they elaborated on the food itself and where it could be found, Ariana continued offering audible discourse markers signaling affirmation (turn 21) and curiosity (turn 28). Carlos once again turned to describing the food itself (turn 29)––referring to an ingredient he didn’t recall the name of––and the exchange continued as Marta offered up additional key terms needed to enhance Ariana’s lexicon of ingredients in Mexican cooking. For several minutes not transcribed here, Marta and Carlos explained the fine distinctions between the parts of the cow included in this dish and other related recipes: piel (skin), tendón (tendon), and tuétano (bone marrow). As they introduced and debated the distinctions between parts of the animal from which these ingredients derived, Ariana repeated the words and sometimes offered others in order to demonstrate an interest in the subject and a listening stance. Ariana interjected: “¿cutis o piel?” (both words for skin but with different uses); “¿qué es tuétano?” (What is marrow?) and wondered whether the tuétano was “¿cómo el tendón?” (Is it like tendon?). This kind of exchange, which could be considered a kind of direct instruction, transpired for approximately four minutes or so and became patterned. Within the four minutes, the same structure repeated six times: Marta or Carlos introduced a new term, they repeated it, Ariana then repeated it or asked for clarification, and they either described it, argued over the correct term, or noted its taste.

Section 3 Finally––in the last section of this exchange––the conversation turned to more than a description of food and eating. Instead, Carlos and Marta turned toward a comparison between life in the United States and Mexico, and they raised questions of whether the family would ever return to Mexico. Marta picked up on Carlos’s previous description of eating in restaurants in southern Mexico and introduced a provocative statement about her desire never to return. Ariana’s participation shifted here, from her role as a novice cook back to her role as an ethnographer seeking to directly elicit this mixed-status family’s perspective. 30 Marta: Carlos no se le olvida las comidas de allá (Carlos never forgets the foods from there) 31 Carlos: No es el tuétano. El que cae en medio del hueso (No it’s not bone marrow. The one that’s inside the bone) 32 Marta: Pero a mi que me den cinco millones de dólares no me regreso a México (But if they gave me five million dollars I wouldn’t return to Mexico) →33 Ariana: A no? (Oh no?)

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34 Marta: No no →35 Ariana: Y usted Carlos regresa? (And you, Carlos, would you return?) 36 Carlos: Con uno nada más que me den (If they only gave me one I would) →37 Marta and Ariana: ((risas)) ((laughter)) 38 Marta: Pues dije que niño y niño que se vayan con su mamá y papá y él y yo nos quedamos acá (Well I say the boy and the boy should go with his mother and father and he and I will stay here) →Ariana:  Mmmhmmm 39 Carlos: No consigno no consigno (I don’t consent I don’t consent) . . . →44 Ariana:  Aquí es mejor? Crees?  (It’s better here? You think?) 45 Marta: Sí. Valió la pena (Yes. It was worth it) 46 Carlos: No puede ser mejor cuando estamos amenazados (It can’t be better when we are threatened-) 47 Igor: Ariana! Ariana! Ariana! 48 Carlos: -que si la policía nos va agarrar (-of whether the police will grab you) →49 Ariana:  Eso es lo que a mi todavía [me impresiona que sí que todavía mucha  gente dice que sí  (That’s what still is so amazing to me that so many people still say yes-) 50 Carlos:  [me preocupo 51 Igor: pom pom pom →52 Ariana:  -con todo eso que todavía es mejor acá  (-that it’s better here) 53 Carlos: Y usted que tienes trabajo, que tienes papeles (And for you who have a job, have papers) →54 Ariana:  Ya, no (Yes, no-) 55 Carlos: Lo que deberíamos hacer es forzarnos más, gastar menos, trabajar más para ahorrar por si un día bueno (What we should do it make more of an effort, spend less, work more to make more in case one day well) →56 Ariana: Hmm 57 Carlos: Vamos a decir. Estamos bien. Aquí nos está yendo mejor que allá. La vida aquí es mucho más bonita. Con su diferencia que aquí vivimos bajo el temor que la policia nos agarre y deporte en el momento que menos suerte tengamos. Entonces para eso tendría que estar preparado ahorrar para llevar algún dinero. Eso el lo único!

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(Let’s say. We’re fine. Here things are going better than there. Life here is much nicer. With the difference that here we live with the terror that the police will grab us and deport us in our unluckiest moment. So we have to be prepared saving money so that we can take some back with us. That’s the only thing!) In the last portion of this exchange, several significant shifts took place in the conversation between Ariana, Marta, and Carlos. First, the topic shifted from cooking and cultural practices of food consumption to the subject of staying in the United States versus returning to Mexico. Second, a change in the interaction accompanied this shift in topic, with Ariana asking more probing questions and Marta and Carlos directly responding with their experiences and views. The questions that Ariana posed in this segment were not like the factual questions she had asked about ingredients earlier (“Is it called tendon or bone marrow?”). They were now much more value-laden and probing (“Was this always the plan?”; “Do you think you’re better off?”; “Was it worth it?,” in turns 35, 44, and 49 respectively). In effect, the parents moved from a conversation of transnational cultural practices to a discussion of the sociopolitical context of everyday life. In turn 57, Carlos elaborated on what was at stake in living and working under police surveillance in a time of restrictive immigration policy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the parents themselves returned to topics relevant to Ariana’s research study on their own terms and in ways that Ariana would not have thought to probe for at the time. They also raised ethical questions that have remained formative to Ariana’s writing and research ever since. Carlos took a strong position on the damaging impact of living under police surveillance and the threat of deportation (turn 46–48), and Ariana added that despite these conditions, she knew many families who continued to live in the United States (turn 49–52). Meant as an elicitation device to probe Carlos’s sense of his experience within the broader migration experience in the United States, Carlos instead shifted the gaze to Ariana the researcher and noted the significant forms of privilege that she enjoyed: a job and having papers (turn 53). Ariana stumbled a bit––first saying yes, then no––and trying to regain her footing in order to simultaneously acknowledge her privileged status and move toward a statement of action and responsibility. But Carlos returned to a we that she did not belong to: those undocumented migrants like himself who believed they needed to continue working hard in order to save money in the event that they could one day change their status and future prospects (turn 55). Carlos didn’t specify how this change might come about––through leaving, through immigration reform?––and this stretch of talk ended as Igor continued to playfully clamor for Ariana’s attention.

Example Two: Dinnertime in Bay Area, California On a fall day in 2011, Sera arrived at the Romero family’s home at 5.00 pm and was greeted by Sofia. After they hugged and checked in on each other’s well-being, Sera followed Sofia into the kitchen where she was preparing food for dinner. Sera offered to help and Sofia asked her to set the table with Aracely. Afterward, Sera set up the video camera in the corner of the kitchen and began the video recording.

Section 1 The previous school year Sofia participated in weekly Latinx family literacy workshops that Sera facilitated as an educational consultant at Aracely’s elementary school, right

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before she transitioned to middle school. Though Sera and Sofia’s relationship started off as one of teacher-student, the following three-minute interaction transcribed below demonstrates how Sera embraced her long-term Spanish learner and novice cook identities and positioned Sofia as the expert in both areas. This deferential stance was taken up by Sera throughout her visits to all four of the families’ homes across the two years of the study. The transcript starts from the beginning of the recording immediately after Sofia, Aracely, and Sera serve themselves their own plates. While this interaction was the first in the Romero home to be video recorded, Sera had shared a meal with the family in their home on several occasions previously. This made it easy for Sofia to feel comfortable as they transitioned from the preparation of the meal to the eating of the meal when the video camera was turned on. Sera initiated the start of the conversation with a nonverbal enthusiastic approval of Sofia’s cooking. →1 Sera: ((making a face of delight with a thumb up and a full mouth chewing)) 2 Sofia: Ay Sera ((se ríe y aplaude una vez)) Sera siempre le gusta mi comida Sera ay  ay Sera, como te quiero ((agarra y enrolla una tortilla)) (Oh Sera ((chuckles and claps hand together once)) Sera always likes my food Sera oh Sera, how I love you) ((grabs and rolls a tortilla)) →3 Sera:  El sabor tiene algo del sabor de enchiladas (The taste has something of the flavor of enchiladas) 4 Sofia: ((Se ríe y mira a su hija)) ((Laughs and looks at her daughter)) 5 Aracely: ((looks at mom smiling)) That’s what she put →6 Sera:  Mmmm, el verde (Mmmm, the green one) 7 Sofia: Uh, huh ((laughing)) →8 Sera:  Me encanta . . . (I love . . .) 9 Sofia: Mm, huh →10 Sera:  ↓ Me encanta esa salsa (↓I love that sauce) 11 All: ((taking bites of food)) 12 Sofia: Es que lo iba a hacer Sera, para mi queda muy reseca y dí—Qué lo pongo?  Qué lo pongo? Ahh (The thing is I was going to do it Sera, to me it was very dry and I said, “What do I put? What do I put? Ahh”) →13 Sera:  Es muy creativa, verdad? (It’s very creative, right?) 14 Sofia: ((laughs)) 15 Aracely: ((nods head yes)) →16 Sera:  Otro día para usarlo (Another day to use it) 17 Sofia: hmm →18 Sera:  Porque compro en las um tazas ((señala con los dedos el tamaño y la forma de un bote)) [o cómo  (Because I buy in the um cups   or how) 19 Sofia:  [hmm, botes (signals with her fingers the size and shape of a can) h  mm, cans

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In turn 2, Sofia expressed approval over Sera’s delight with her cooking, stating that Sera always liked her food. Like in the exchange detailed above with Ariana and the UtuadoAlvarez family, the video-recorded exchange in the Romero home started with a series of teachable moments starting when Sera made a statement about how the food had an enchilada flavor (turn 3). Here, Aracely chimed in, affirming that her mom had used enchilada sauce. This led to Sofia’s explanation for why she decided to use the sauce (turn 12). Because a trusting relationship between the interlocutors at the table had been previously established, Sera felt comfortable requesting for help in remembering a word when connecting with Sofia about the shared use of enchilada sauce in food items that were not enchiladas. In turn 18, Sera asked Sofia, how to say “cans” after saying the word “cups.” Sera intentionally deferred to Sofia with questions and for guidance as the expert Spanish speaker and cook.

Section 2 They continued talking about food for about another minute illustrated in the transcription that follows. It began with Sera’s uptake of Sofia’s offering of the correct word “botes” (cans), followed immediately by another request from Sera for Spanish vocabulary support. →20 Sera:  Botes, solamente uso para las enchiladas o también a veces, cómo se dice  huevos y tortilla? (Cans, I only use for enchiladas or also sometimes, how do you say, eggs and tortilla?) 21 Sofia:  Omelette? →22 Sera:  Es desayuno  (It’s breakfast) 23 Sofia: Omelette? →24 Sera:  Es con tortilla frita ((imita cocinar sobre la estufa con una tortilla en la mano)) (It’s with fried tortilla) ((mimics holding a tortilla and cooking over the stove)) 25 Sofia:  Mmm, chilaquile ((le señala a Sera))  ((points to Sera) →26 Sera:  Chilaquiles ((le señala a Sofia))  ((points to Sofia)) In turn 20, Sera continued demonstrating her novice position by asking for support again in remembering the name of a traditional Mexican breakfast dish. She described the dish in line 20 and gave Sofia additional information in turn 22 when she couldn’t figure out the dish Sera was trying to describe (saying “omelette” in turn 21 and 23). With a little more description (turn 24), Sofia continued to support Sera’s learning by sharing with her the dish name (i.e., chilaquiles). This exchange illustrates a natural occurrence in conversation when meaning is negotiated, and it also highlights Sofia’s role as the expert/ teacher in this interaction.

Section 3 The next several turns in the transcription demonstrate how Sofia casually shifted the talk from food, a seemingly irrelevant topic, to an education-specific topic, the focus of the study.

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27 Sofia:  ((sirviéndose ensalada, vuelve hacia su hija)) No quieres ensalada hija?  ((serving herself some salad, turns to daughter)) (You don’t want salad daughter?) 28 Sofia:  ↓A ver como está este ((refiriendose a la botella del aderezo para ensaladas))  (↓Let’s see how this is ((referring to the salad dressing))) 29 All:  ((all eating in silence)) 30 Sofia:  Me llamaron Sera, el otro día de, de, un quería una ((con la tortilla cerca de la boca)) una ((suspirando)) una charla sobre la educación de Aracely  (They called me, Sera, the other day from wants a ((with the rolled tortilla close  to her mouth)) a ((sighing)) a talk about Aracely’s education) →31 Sera:  Oh, quién? (Oh, who?) 32 Sofia:  Unas personas  (Some people) After some lengthy pausing in between bites, Sofia offered salad to her daughter and commented to herself about trying the salad dressing. In turn 30 she took control of the narrative to move the focus from the meal to an educational matter, a shift we believe is significant as it was initiated by Sofia on her own terms. The few minutes of talk about food that preceded the narrative shift served as an opportunity to “warm up” for the testimonial that would follow. Sera’s only verbal response during this shift was to ask a clarifying question (i.e., “quién” (who) in turn 31) as Sofia simply stated: me llamaron” (they called me).

Section 4 Sofia then continued to report on her experience with the caller for several minutes without pausing except to take some bites of food and to ask Sera if she wanted a napkin at one point. Sera chimed in only to acknowledge she was intently listening with eye contact and “uh, uhs” throughout. Les dije: ––pero cómo me contactaron? Y me dijeron: ––que Ud. está en un formulario en la escuela de su hija. Y le dije: ––a lo mejor sí. Porque me dijeron que ya había sido hace como un año y imaginas que me voy acordar de aquí un año si llené un formulario, ¿no? Estaba insiste e insiste, verdad. Pero nunca pensé que fueron otras personas. De verdad les creí que era algo en la educación. Yo recuerdo el hombre que iba dar la charla me prometaba. Me pidió el reporte de Aracely de la escuela en todo. Me estaba diciendo todo lo que tiene que hacer con ella como por ejemplo que no ha debo de tener en programas después de la escuela porque no hace nada. ¿De repente al ultimo [minuto] Sera? Era para que venderme unos programas que (cambia la voz para imitar al individuo en el teléfono) ––en la escuela no los tiene, que son los programas súper avanzados, y cuando quería invertir en la educación de Aracely. Primero me dieron todo, ¿no? Y yo de verdad creyendo les queda de la escuela. Porque dije así todo y todo lo me he leían y yo decía no pues sí es cierto, sí es cierto. Y al ultimo para venderme unos programas. Y dije: ––que gauchos, cómo me engañaron de bien. (I told them, “but how did you contact me?” And they told me “you are on a form at your daughter’s school.” And I said, “yes maybe.” Because they told me that it had

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been about a year ago and imagine that I will remember here a year ago if I filled out a form, right? He insisted and insisted, right? But I never thought it was other people. I really believed them that it was something in education. Suddenly, I remember the man who was going to give the talk promising me. He asked me for Aracely’s school report of everything. He was telling me everything I have to do for her, like for example, I shouldn’t have her in after school programs because they do nothing. Suddenly at the last [minute] Sera? It was to sell me some programs that (switches voice to mimic speaker on the phone) “they do not have at the school, that are the super advanced programs. And when do you want to invest in Aracely’s education.” They gave me everything first, didn’t they? And I really believed they were from the school. Because I said everything and everything they read to me and I said yes it is true, yes it is true. And finally to sell me some programs. And I said “what bastards, how they tricked me good.”) As she verbally recreated the phone call experience for Sera, Sofia assumed both her role and that of the caller. At times she narrated what the man on the phone told her, what she told him, and what she was thinking in the process. While Sera could have chimed in to share what she knew about these predatory educational business practices, she withheld her expertise to provide space and time for Sofia to unpack what she understood and how she felt about the exchange over the phone. Sofia was able to add details to her narrative that might’ve been withheld if Sera dominated the questioning and conversation or even played a more significant role in it. This particular narrative was significant because it provided Sera with a lens to better understand the predatory nature of highstakes educational accountability––at the same time that this was happening within the home, the school was sending a very explicit message that test scores were of the utmost importance to illustrate both student and the school’s success. The power of discussing food as a segue into larger conversations about education and life in general led Sera to her dissertation study’s key finding—that US institutionalized policy discourses and capitalist framings of parent engagement were pervasive across educational domains, including family homes during dinnertime conversations in Spanish.

CONCLUSION This chapter presents interactional sequences from each of the author’s dissertation studies––a decade after they were completed––in order to analyze those parts of our data that give us insights into the research process itself. Upon listening more closely to mealtime interactions––ones that we did not originally code as “findings”––we realized that our ability to take up the role of novice resulted in more trusting relationships with our participants. We have found that research role reversals––while seemingly leading to off-topic or tangential conversations––allowed us to bear witness as the participants shared meaningful connections to our research topics while they recounted aspects of their everyday lives, an important aspect of humanizing research (Paris and Winn, 2014). The stance of deference that we propose is a methodological disposition that has implications for inverting power relations in the field and for producing knowledge grounded in lived experience rather than researcher’s preconceptions. Aligned with Ochs’s humanistic approach (1996) this stance involve[s] the building of relationships of care and dignity and dialogic consciousness raising for both researchers and participants (Paris and Winn, 2014, xvi). This disposition is consistent with research within LS given the field’s focus on learning across the lifespan; the ways in which interlocutors take

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up shifting expert and novice roles; the centrality of stance as a theoretical and analytic construct; and the importance of everyday activities such as meals as sites for socialization to a community’s cultural norms for communicative competence. Taking on a researcher stance of deference requires doctoral students to relinquish some of the socialization-to-expert that is part and parcel of achieving advanced candidacy and obtaining institutional authorization to conduct dissertation research. We believe that–– given existing social hierarchies in our field sites (where English is privileged at school, for example) and a history of social science as exerting power over historically marginalized communities (often involving assertions of communities’ (dys)function, worthiness, and intelligence)––researchers must be intentional in creating the conditions that allow for shifts in expert-novice role-taking. Our own displays of noviceness during mealtime conversations created opportunities for Latinx parents to tell their own stories. In order to demonstrate our willingness to learn, we suspended an interview style of questioning characteristic of social science research in which the researcher seeks particular information she deems “relevant” to answer her research questions. In the exchanges that we have analyzed here, engaging in talk about food was socially relevant and communicatively competent in familial spaces and led to deep insights regarding the families’ educational and immigration experiences in the United States. Strikingly, across both studies, Mexican-origin parents living in the disparate states of Pennsylvania and California shared unsettling experiences of surveillance. At the time of these studies, neither Ariana nor Sera would have specifically asked the families questions about surveillance; however, both researchers learned about the families’ experiences based on these and other mealtime retellings. By adopting a stance of deference, Ariana and Sera were able to create pathways for remembering, opportunities for parents to have narrative control, and a deeper level of sharing. At the heart of the studies shared here were the emic perspectives of the families who had much at stake in schools and the larger society. The two families referred to in this paper were distinct in their legal and work status, geographical locations, and experiences with the US public school and civic systems, but similar in their willingness to articulate the complexities of living as an immigrant family during an era of educational reform, economic recession, and increased immigrant surveillance. As a mixed-status family, Carlos and Marta were able to express their vulnerabilities—the fear of being separated from their children—resulting from their undocumented immigration status. As a single mother of a middle-school daughter, Sofia narrated that she was willing to consider ways to “invest in her daughter’s education” until she realized she was being targeted by a predatory educational corporation that feigned interest in improving her daughter’s academic performance. Sharing these realities involved sharing vulnerability, especially while being recorded. At a time in which enduring xenophobic views of immigrants have been sanctioned in the national public discourse in new and frightening ways, and when immigrant families are experiencing new levels of uncertainty and fear, we redouble our commitments to working toward a humanizing research methodology that centers Latinx families’ experiences on their own terms and in their own words. We hope that this chapter models possibilities for inverting long-standing power dynamics in the social sciences that can, in turn, lead to new modes of listening and learning in our field sites and in our country.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Mangual Figueroa appreciates the Millvalley family who so generously welcomed her into their homes and made her study possible. Hernández would like to thank the families who

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graciously opened their homes, as well as the UC All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity (ACCORD) that provided funding to support her work. Both authors acknowledge how much they learned from the members of the Laboratory for the Study of Interaction and Discourse in Educational Research at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Dr. Patricia Baquedano-López, who has and continues to serve as an adviser and mentor.

NOTES 1. As we consider our own positionality as researchers, we also want to be explicit about the ways in which we managed ethical dimensions of conducting research with undocumented members of mixed-status families. Mangual Figueroa (2014) has explored these issues at length; here we provide a brief summary of how we managed informed consent, confidentiality, and privacy. Both authors closely followed their Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines on informed consent and confidentiality: we presented participating families with Spanish-language consent forms, met with them to explain the terms in lay language, and have always published using pseudonyms for places and people. We also want to acknowledge that ethical dilemmas of confidentiality and privacy surfaced not only at the outset of our studies, but more so during the everyday interactions we had with families in their homes and in the public space as part of our fieldwork. During our ethnographic engagement with the families in our respective studies, we often served as linguistic and institutional brokers—it was then that the risk of breaking confidentiality as it related to immigration status surfaced the most. In these instances, the authors followed the families’ lead in terms of what they intended to disclose and always erred on the side of ending exchanges that could put families at risk. In one instance when Mangual Figueroa went with the undocumented parents in a mixed-status family to a car dealership to inquire about purchasing a vehicle, the salesperson asked the parents to see their driver’s license. At that time undocumented immigrants could not obtain a driver’s license, and being asked this was akin to being asked to disclose their immigration status. As the families’ translator, Ariana was able to communicate the salesperson’s request to the family while also perceiving their subtle cues to end the exchange at that moment. Mangual Figueroa explained to the salesperson that the family was still considering their options and would return to the dealership at another time without revealing whether they indeed had driver’s licenses and other forms of documentation. Hernández was called upon by families to complete paperwork as they renewed work visas, to locate notary publics that could assist them with paperwork to save their mortgage loan, as well as brokering encounters with the school. Both authors were committed to upholding confidentiality through the use of pseudonyms in publication and to protecting families’ privacy during routine exchanges that involved risking disclosure. 2. Throughout this chapter, we have adhered to standard Conversation Analysis (CA) transcription conventions (see Atkinson and Heritage 1984) as follows: Italics = actual speech →BOLD = turns of talk analyzed . = falling tone (not necessarily the end of a sentence) ? = rising intonation (not necessarily a question) ! = animated tone [ ] = overlapped speech ( ) = English translation

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- = cut off or pick up in flow of talk ↓ = fall in tone (( )) = transcriber’s description of events Additionally, we have combined these CA transcription conventions with accepted orthographic conventions for representing Spanish-language text in the following ways. First, we use CA conventions in the transcript itself while adhering to Spanish grammatical conventions in our analysis. For example, we use one question mark following a word to indicate a rise in intonation in the transcript; however, in our analysis, when we refer back to Spanish turns of talk we use inverted and upright question marks to represent questions posed during the interactions. In the final data excerpt (section 4.b.-Section 4)—which is one speaker’s extended turn of talk––we represent her speech using traditional Spanish orthography instead of CA conventions. Second, readers will notice that in Section 4.b. we use English-language quotation marks when representing reported speech within a turn of talk while also employing the dash typically used in Spanish-language texts to represent dialogue or quoted speech. Third, we present our description of the speech events–– included in the double parentheses––in both Spanish and English.

REFERENCES Atkinson, J. M., and J. Heritage (1984), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversational Analysis, New York: Cambridge University Press. Avineri, N., and E. J. Johnson (2015), “Introduction to Invited Forum: Bridging the ‘Language Gap’.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 25 (1): 66–86. Baquedano-López, P. (2004), “Traversing the Center: The Politics of Language Use in a Catholic Religious Education Program for Immigrant Mexican Children.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 35 (2): 212–32. Baquedano-López, P., R. A. Alexander, and S. J. Hernandez (2013), “Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools: What Teacher Educators Need to Know.” Review of Research in Education, 37 (1): 149–82. Briggs, C. L. (1984), “Learning How to Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers.” Language in Society, 13 (1): 1–28. Cekaite, A. (2012), “Affective Stances in Teacher-Novice Student Interactions: Language, Embodiment, and Willingness to Learn in a Swedish Primary Classroom.” Language in Society, 41 (5): 641–70. García-Sánchez, I. M. (2014), Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Garrett, P. B., and P. Baquedano-López (2002), “Language Socialization: Reproduction and Continuity, Transformation and Change.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (1): 339–61. Hernández, S. J. (2013), “When Institutionalized Discourses Become Familial: Mexican Immigrant Families Interpreting and Enacting High Stakes Educational Reform.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Hernández, S. J., and A. Mangual Figueroa (2022), “Latina Ethnographers Consider Ways of Knowing and Being in the Field: A Decolonial and Humanizing Approach to Educational Research with and for Immigrant Latinx Families.” In Y. Medina and M. MachadoCasas (eds.), Critical Understandings of Latinx and Global Education, 265–84, Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishing Company.

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Karrebæk, M. S., K. C. Riley, and J. R. Cavanaugh (2018), “Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 47 (1): 17–32. Kulick, D., and B. B. Schieffelin (2004), “Language Socialization.” In A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 349–68, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mangual Figueroa, A. (2010), “Language Socialization Experiences of Mixed-Status Mexican Families Living in the New Latino Diaspora.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Mangual Figueroa, A. (2014), “La Carta de Responsabilidad: The Problem of Departure.” In D. Paris and M. T. Winn (eds.), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, 129–46, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mökkönen, A. C. (2013), “Newcomers Navigating Language Choice and Seeking Voice: Peer Talk in a Multilingual Primary School Classroom in Finland.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 44 (2): 124–41. Moore, L. C. (2012), “Language Socialization and Repetition.” In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization, 209–26, Malden: Blackwell Publishing Limited. Moore, L. C. (2009), “On Communicative Competence. . .in the Field.” Language and Communication, 29 (3): 244–53. Murillo Jr., E., and S. Villenas (1995), “East of Aztlan: Typologies of Resistance in North Carolina Communities.” Unpublished paper, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ochs, E. (1996), “Linguistic Resources for Socializing Humanity.” In J. J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 407–37, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E., and L. Capps (2001), Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ochs, E., and B. Schieffelin (1984), “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications.” In R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine (eds.), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, 276–320, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E., and B. Schieffelin (2008), “Language Socialization: An Historical Overview.” In P. Duff and N. H. Hornberger (eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd edn, 2580–94, New York: Springer. Ochs, E., and M. Shohet (2006), “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization. Special Issue: Family Mealtime as a Context of Development.” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 111: 35–49. Paris, D., and M. T. Winn, eds. (2014), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, 223–48, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Passel, J. S., and D. Cohn. (2009, April), A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center. Paugh, A. L., and K. C. Riley (2019), “Poverty and Children’s Language in Anthropolitical Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 48 (1): 297–315. Riley, K. C. (2016), “Learning to Exchange Food and Talk in the Marquesas.” In S. Blum (ed.), Making Sense of Language, 3rd edn, 143–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riley, K. C. (2009), “Who Made the Soup? Socializing the Researcher and Cooking Her Data.” Language and Communication, 29 (3): 254–70. Schegloff, E. A. (2007), Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, vol. 1, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Valenzuela, A. (1999), Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, Albany, State University of New York Press. Zentella, A. C. (1995), “The ‘Chiquitafication’ of U.S. Latinos and Their Languages, or Why We Need an Anthropolitical Linguistics.” In SALSA III: Proceedings of a Symposium on Language and Society, Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). Available online: https://files​.eric​.ed​.gov​/fulltext​/ED416671​.pdf.

Chapter 2

Language Access and Deaf Activism in Mexico and Nepal ERIKA HOFFMANN-DILLOWAY AND ANNE E. PFISTER

INTRODUCTION When deaf1 children are born to hearing parents, as is the case for an estimated 96 percent to 98 percent of deaf children (Mitchell and Karchmer 2004), caregivers’ taken-for-granted expectations about communication and socialization are disrupted. In such cases, the habitus (Bourdieu 1977), or deeply rooted dispositions, of their speech community, may “poorly serve the communicative development” of their child (Ochs et al. 2005, 547). Consequently, hearing families of deaf children often seek the advice of medical, therapeutic, educational, and/or ritual experts, bringing both lay and specialist beliefs about the relationship between language, kinship, and sociality into sharp relief (Humphries et al. 2014; McKee and Smiler 2017; Pfister and Vindrola-Padros 2018). Such beliefs can be characterized as language ideologies, or “ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989, 225). Language ideologies are highly consequential, as they mediate access both to linguistic resources and through linguistic resources to other types of resources (Avineri et al. 2019, 6; Schieffelin and Ochs 1984; Kusters et al. 2020). As Hall (2017, 961) notes, such specialists frequently frame deaf children as “defective hearing people” (see also Bailes et al. 2009) and are influenced by oralist2 paradigms, which prioritize speech and disparage sign languages. The dominance of oralism across a wide range of settings persists despite linguistic research dating back to the early 1960s (Stokoe [1993] 1960) acknowledging sign language as “a visual-spatial mode of communication [that] can express the full complexity of human experience and serve as a vehicle to impart knowledge” (Kisch 2008, 238). Oralism also ignores the existence of robust networks of deaf sociality that have amply demonstrated that deafness need not be understood as loss, but rather as a linguistic, cultural, and perspectival gain (Bauman and Murray 2014). Oralist ideologies typically do not recognize the benefits of multilingualism, such as the parallel use of sign with spoken and written language. These ideologies put deaf people at risk of experiencing a “persistent lack of unhindered access to a natural language during the critical period of language acquisition” (Murray

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et al. 2019), an experience often termed “language deprivation.” This label is often applied to both the circumstances in which accessible language input is unavailable to a child and to the potential consequences of such deprivation, which can “measurably impair the child’s acquisition of—and proficiency in—whatever language(s) they are exposed to, with subsequent adverse consequences in other developmental domains that depend on language (e.g., cognition, social-emotional skills, school readiness, and academic outcomes)” (Hall et al. 2019, 368; see also Murray et al. 2019; Lillo-Martin and Henner 2021). The availability of sensorially accessible interactive language use is important throughout individuals’ life spans, but is a particularly acute issue for deaf children and adolescents during the critical period for language acquisition (Lennenberg 1967). As we discuss in more detail below, language acquisition is developmentally time sensitive, such that delaying exposure to sign languages (which are more sensorially accessible to most deaf people) in favor of (only partially sensorially accessible) spoken languages, can have lifelong effects on language fluency (e.g., Hall 2017, 963; Skotara et al. 2012). Language is an extremely important vehicle through which human socialization flows. Limited access to language can therefore impact the development of cognitive and social skills that emerge through interactive language use. Language deprivation affects access to social roles and relationships and impacts physical and emotional well-being (e.g., Humphries et al. 2016; Hall et al. 2017; Murray et al. 2019; Pfister 2020). This chapter thus addresses language deprivation among deaf people as an urgent social justice issue. In so doing, we follow the turn in the language socialization literature which seeks to unmask “the ways in which one or more groups’ ways of speaking or raising children are constructed as inferior to the benefit of the continued domination of a powerful class” and toward challenging “the policies that encourage and enforce subjugation” (Zentella (2015, 77; see also Kulick and Scheiffelin 2004; Garcia-Sanchez 2016). Further, while we stress the importance of exposure to accessible language use, we follow scholars who argue against narrow ideological views of what constitutes language (e.g., Moriarty Harrelson 2017; Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018; de Meulder 2018). We do not uncritically adopt a view of language as consisting only of monolithic, bounded, standardized, or widely recognized systems. Rather, when we stress the importance of accessible language, we refer to sensorially accessible, shared semiotic resources that afford “mutual meaning-making” (Green 2014) through which rich, interactive socialization experiences can occur. Such communicative resources not only include those ideologically framed as linguistic but also include the capacious semiotic processes that exceed narrow conceptualizations of language (see, for example, that image-making as a mode of communicating deaf experience appears in each of the case studies). Therefore, while we wish to critique the ways in which those adhering to oralist language ideologies seek to limit the semiotic resources available to deaf people, we do not dismiss communicative resources (such as gestural systems or the use of images) which “deaf people deploy that may not align to conventional understandings of language” (Moriarty Harrelson 2017, 16). Throughout the world, layers of intersectionality, circumstance, and stigma influence families’ decisions regarding deaf children. Though the language socialization literature makes clear that children actively socialize one another to language (e.g., Paugh 2005; Reynolds 2008; Meek 2010; Gilmore 2016) and that the relationship between age and communicative agency varies within and across contexts (e.g., Berman 2019), there are limits on children’s agency to choose language modality for themselves, so adults—

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typically hearing adults—make decisions about the educational and socialization needs of deaf children. Therefore, research documenting the experiences of deaf children and adults is a social and moral imperative because decisions regarding language for deaf people—from language use and practice in the home to language policies in schools and beyond—should be informed by the direct experience of deaf people, especially those who have experienced language deprivation and social isolation. We are hearing researchers from the United States, who have become signers through long-term ethnographic engagement in our respective field sites. We ground our claims in this chapter in the experiences and perspectives of our deaf interlocutors as shared with us through the relationships ethnographic research affords. Additionally, we have chosen to provide a comparative perspective on this issue, by drawing on case studies from Mexico and Nepal. We do so in part to highlight similarities and differences in how, across these sites, oralist ideologies are intertwined in complex ways with other ambient ideologies regarding the nature of language and sociality (Kroskrity 2018; Kusters and Sahasrabudhe 2018; Kusters et al. 2020). In both cases, we wish to specify the stakes of families’ (and broader communities’) efforts to navigate complex, overlapping, and competing perspectives about deafness and language. Further, we aim to highlight the social justice efforts of members of deaf social networks, who work to sustain linguistic and cultural capacities “in the face of conditions,” that would diminish them (Alim and Paris 2017, 13). In addition, we have taken a comparative view in order to highlight cases from across the life span. Pfister’s contribution focuses on how deaf children, squarely within what is considered the developmentally sensitive period of language acquisition, were impacted by educational policies that affected their access to language. Hoffmann-Dilloway’s section, on the other hand, centers on the experiences of deaf elders who did not have access to conventional language until very late in life. Pfister begins by examining the experiences of deaf children in Mexico whose access to signed communication is not guaranteed at an early age (or at all), despite the fact that Lengua de Señas Mexicana (Mexican Sign Language, or LSM) is recognized by the Mexican constitution. Drawing on ethnographic research at Instituto Pedagógico para Problemas de Lenguaje (Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems, or IPPLIAP), a bilingual school for deaf children, she explores how ideologies such as medicalization and inclusion ideology underscore oralist ideologies to restrict early educational and language socialization opportunities in LSM. Data from a Personal History Timelines project with students from IPPLIAP reveal the differential affective and socializing consequences of national inclusion policies. Ultimately, youth participants provide a counter-narrative to oralist perspectives they encounter. Hoffmann-Dilloway then focuses on the experiences of elderly deaf people in Nepal who were not afforded unhampered access to spoken or signed communication in childhood or adolescence. After detailing the culturally and historically specific circumstances that resulted in the elders’ not having had access to conventionalized language, she examines how members of the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf work to incorporate the elders into a Nepali Sign Language-mediated deaf social life. While this material highlights the urgency of ensuring early exposure to accessible interactive language use, it addresses the “competencies” as well as the “vulnerabilities” (Friedner and Kusters 2020, 38) of the elders and attempts to push back against ideologies of “compulsory fluency” (Duque and Lashewicz 2018) that equate “languagelessness” or dysfluency with lack of personhood (see also Reno 2012; Harrelson 2017; Goodwin 2017; Wolf-Meyer 2020).

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Through discussion of these two cases, we hope to stress the time-sensitive nature of language acquisition, while also making it clear that it is never “too late” for a deaf person to benefit from being engaged in sign language-mediated deaf sociality. Indeed, we follow de Meulder (2018) in arguing that deaf persons have the “right to sign throughout their life span,” and that while deaf children should have access to signing as early as possible, signing at any life stage is valuable. That is, signing provides benefits during the critical period for language acquisition, as Pfister’s case shows, and well after it has closed, as Hoffmann-Dilloway’s material indicates.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD FOR LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND LANGUAGE DEPRIVATION Eric Lenneberg first proposed a “critical period” for language acquisition in 1967. A critical period is a developmental phase during which certain stimuli are needed for an organism to develop a particular skill or capacity. Lenneberg’s claim was that humans must be exposed to sufficient language input in childhood in order for a language acquisition process to be triggered (Lenneberg 1967). Research focusing on children who were born deaf or became deafened before they acquired spoken language indeed showed that the older a person is when first exposed to accessible language use, the less proficient the person will ultimately become (Mayberry and Kluender 2018). Psycholinguistic research suggests that this drop-off may occur as early as four to six years of age (Newport, Bavelier and Neville 2001, 483; Emmorey 1991; Mayberry and Eichen 1991). While such material provides evidence of a critical period, it also nuances the concept by showing that these maturational factors are affected by experience (Newport, Bavelier and Neville 2001, 482). Specifically, scholars have shown that strong stimuli can lead to learning even at an age when the critical period is beginning to close and perhaps even extend its length, whereas weaker stimuli allow for learning only at the peak of the acquisition period (Newport, Bavelier and Neville 2001, 494). That is, while many deaf children have varying, often unreliable, access to the most widely available stimulus (spoken language), and often do not have access to accessible sign languages, it is important to note that they do not exist in a communicative void. Communication is multimodal and interactive, and such persons may be able to draw upon other parts of the communicative ecologies embedded in hearing discourse. Other stimuli that might be sensorially accessible, including gestures, lip movements, facial expressions, and semiotic resources in the surrounding environment, may be used for communication. Additionally, in some contexts, deaf children and their interlocutors co-construct homesign systems, gestural systems that range in complexity and are relatively idiosyncratic, though they may draw on widespread co-speech gestures used in a given community (Morford 1996; Goldin-Meadow 2013). Unfortunately, speech therapists promoting technological and therapeutic programs designed to help deaf children perceive and produce spoken language often instruct parents to prevent children from using these more accessible channels, arguing that visual communicative modalities will deflect deaf children’s attention from the more difficult work of accessing speech (though, in fact, research shows that signing and other forms of accessible visual communication ultimately enhance deaf children’s skill with spoken languages) (e.g., Wrigely 1997; Marschark and Hauser 2011). In other contexts, stigma surrounding deafness may lead hearing interlocutors to discourage deaf children from

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taking advantage of such communicative modalities, in order to avoid drawing attention to their status as non-hearing. As a consequence of being denied access to sign languages, and even, in some cases, to the sensorially accessible communicative channels that are available in speech-dominated contexts, many deaf children experience language deprivation, the effects of which appear to be pervasive and chronic. For example, research suggests that deaf persons exposed to an accessible sign language after, or late in, the critical period are generally unable to achieve native proficiency (though, of course, such assessments are themselves mediated by language ideologies). However, the degree to which such persons are able to learn a recognized language is affected by (1) age at first exposure to fully accessible language use and (2) the richness of the interactive communicative practices in which they engaged beforehand (De Villiers et al. 1993). Neurotypical deaf children exposed to sign language from birth acquire language through the same stages and within the same time frame as do hearing children acquiring spoken language (Anderson and Reilly 2002; Caselli et al., 2020; Lillo-Martin and Henner 2021). This is the case even when their sign language exposure comes from hearing parents who have learned to sign as a result of having a deaf child (Caselli et al. 2021). Deaf children who are first exposed to a fully accessible sign language from school-going age through adolescence are, in the psycholinguistics literature, often termed “late learners.” In fact, we prefer the term “new signers” because it offers a less deficit-oriented frame as an alternative (De Meulder 2018). “New signers” refers to a wide category of persons, including both those who first learn to sign later in life, after having acquired other languages, and those who learn to sign later in life without having previously acquired conventional languages. Here, we specifically discuss new signers who had not previously had an opportunity to acquire conventional language.3 It appears that such learners acquire vocabulary and semantic processing with native-like fluency (Newport 1990, 484), although they may have difficulty controlling certain complex morphological processes and spatial grammatical structures common to many sign languages ( Newport 1990). The longer and more complete the experience of language deprivation, the more potentially severe the effects, not only for the subsequent development of linguistic skills but also in terms of a range of other harms associated with impaired communicative skills, such as potential cognitive issues, psychosocial problems due to “isolation and frustration,” and diminished “educational and career possibilities” (Humphries et al. 2012). The most effective way to ensure that deaf children do not experience language deprivation is to provide access to sensorially accessible sign languages in visual and/or tactile modalities (Napoli et al. 2015; Gárate 2014) and allow children to draw on a wide range of semiotic and sensory strategies in communicating. However, across global contexts, the experts to whom hearing parents of deaf children turn often provide misinformation, including discouraging signing (as mediated by oralist language ideologies); framing parents’ choice as an “either/or” between speech and signing (as mediated by ideologies treating monolingualism as the norm and which misrepresent signing as detrimental to speech); and treating sign language as a “last resort” (as mediated by language ideologies that fail to recognize the time-sensitive nature of language acquisition); along with a range of other complex ideological stances (Humphries et al. 2016; Matthijs et al. 2017; Pfister 2017). We now draw on our extensive field research in Mexico and Nepal to provide examples of how particular deaf people and their hearing family members have navigated such

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clustered ideologies concerning deafness and have experienced and responded to the effects of linguistic deprivation.

EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES OF DEAF CHILDREN IN MEXICO The ideological landscape regarding accessibility to sign language in Mexico, like many places worldwide, is influenced by oralism, medicalization (biomedical paradigms), and more recent inclusionist policies. Oralist language ideologies are familiar to researchers working on deaf issues. However, related ideologies that operate in different institutional contexts also function to reinforce oralist ideology and undermine the importance of access to sign language. School options and placement are influential factors affecting language access for deaf children within developmentally appropriate timeframes. This section focuses on inclusionist ideologies and their implications for deaf children in Mexico City. I draw on ethnographic research with deaf youth and their families at IPPLIAP to underscore the impact of linguistic and social isolation deaf children experience when they are unable to access sign language in school settings. I also outline the work done by IPPLIAP, and associated LSM advocates, to address the language-related social injustices deaf children face in Mexico. In Mexico, like many places worldwide, sign-based educational programs are an extremely rare educational opportunity. Deaf children are expected to use hearing amplification devices (hearing aids or cochlear implantation, for example) and speech read (or lip-read) which they are trained to do during speech therapy. In Mexico, this process is aptly referred to as oralización (oralization). Oralization is different from language learning and language socialization because the social, spontaneous, and interactive components characteristic of these naturalized processes are conspicuously absent in therapeutic settings like doctor’s offices and many speech therapy sessions (see Pfister 2017 for more discussion). Deaf children in contemporary Mexico are expected to use spoken and written Spanish in most aspects of public and private life. Few families of deaf participants were fluent in LSM; there were few sign-based educational opportunities, and doctors regularly discouraged the use of sign language. Furthermore, the denial of sign language as a complex, natural idiom was prevalent through the 1990s in Mexican educational administration (Macías Alonso 2010) and beyond. Although LSM is recognized by the Mexican constitution as part of the linguistic heritage of Mexico, it is not typically presented to Mexican families with deaf children as a viable or desirable option. First, medical professionals routinely advise against exposure to sign language, so parents often understand sign language opportunities as going against doctors’ orders (see also Pfister 2018 and 2019). Second, Mexico’s education secretariat (SEP) communicates inclusion policy—integración (integration or inclusion)—as the ideological preference of this institution (Secretaría de Educación Pública 2002). An ideological shift toward inclusive education systems, influenced by UNESCO’s 1994 Salamanca Statement, came when the appropriateness of inclusion practices for deaf students were being challenged by experts and continues to be critiqued twenty-five years later (e.g., Goico 2019; Snodden and Murray 2019). For example, the title of Cohen’s (1994a) article “‘Inclusion’ Should Not Include Deaf Students” reveals the sentiment against blanket applications of inclusionist ideology. Cohen and colleagues have argued since the 1990s that the rhetoric around inclusion ideology prioritizes the “least restrictive

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environment” (language from the US Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 2004) over the appropriateness of education (Cohen 1994b, 5). The authors of this chapter agree with Ainscow et al. (2019) that the move toward inclusive schools can be justified educationally, socially, and economically, and we do not wish to downplay the relevance of inclusive schools for many students and groups. We support efforts toward reducing discrimination and increasing equity, acknowledging that inclusive practices ameliorate the marginalization of many groups and individuals. However, inclusion in hearing classrooms is not always a good fit for deaf children because language accessibility issues are not always (or adequately) addressed in mainstream settings.4 The most common option for Mexican deaf children is to attend schools created for all students with special educational needs, or Centros de Atención Múltiple (Centers for Multiple Services, or CAMs). These institutions, the majority of which are in Mexico City and other big cities (Shepard et al. 2002), serve students with a diverse range of educational and health needs. Students in CAMs are “arranged by age cohorts, not service-based groups” (Secretaría de Educación Pública 2002). Thus, CAMs are not a viable educational opportunity for deaf students for the very reason scholars have argued against inclusion for deaf students: the language needs of deaf students are not tended to in these environments. The vast majority of CAM teachers are not trained to use LSM, and most do not have specialized training for teaching deaf pupils but instead have broad educational training in “disabilities” more generally. When deaf children are in environments where sign language is not available, many deaf children are linguistically isolated and risk missing the critical window for acquiring language (discussed earlier). Inclusion policies hinder language socialization opportunities, especially the naturalized process language socialization theories explain. Inclusion disperses deaf children when they are enrolled in their local public schools or CAMs; it is difficult (if not impossible) to interact with deaf peers, sign language models, and sign language-based communities. The social and developmental consequences of inclusion policies for deaf children extend beyond classrooms because these policies impede language-mediated experiences. Proponents of language socialization theory recognize the importance of “language practices,” a form of social organization that is based on language, which also fosters understandings extending well beyond language, including statuses, relationships, and emotions (Ochs 1996). Specialized deaf schools like IPPLIAP (described below) foster environments where “language practices” occur because deaf schools are points of contact among deaf peers (adults and children). Deaf scholars have long heralded deaf schools as important sites for language transmission and standardization and as integral to culturally deaf communities (Erting 1994; Graham and Tobin 2019; LeMaster and Monaghan 2004; Murray et al. 2020; Polich 2005; Ramsey and Quinto-Pozos 2010; Senghas and Monaghan 2002). Nonetheless, global trends suggest that factors including increased mainstreaming and medical interventions impact the influence of specialized deaf schools, potentially detracting from their historic roles in sign language standardization, transmission, and socialization (De Meulder 2018). Bilingual environments, like the pedagogical approach of IPPLIAP, offer an approach that remains extremely scarce in Mexico (and worldwide). IPPLIAP offers a model specialized for deaf children, similar to the Deaf Bilingual Education model. Gárate (2014) describes that it “advocates for the development of the natural Signed Language of the Deaf community and the majority spoken/written language” (pg. 38). IPPLIAP promotes

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the use of LSM to help deaf students visually conceptualize their world. Spanish, written and spoken, is introduced alongside LSM so that deaf students can identify concepts in both languages. The pedagogical stance prioritizes sign language, which is a sharp departure from the oralist, medicalized, and inclusion ideologies hearing families’ first encounter. In fact, multilingual approaches, such as the one used at IPPLIAP, is a component of critical pedagogy that seeks to empower learners and their communities through the incorporation of language (Panda and Mohanty 2009). Data collected among deaf sixth graders and their families (in 2012–2013) contrast the rich linguistic landscape of IPPLIAP, an environment where signing is readily available, with the relative isolation of hearing schools and CAMs most participants previously attended. During extended fieldwork and participant observation that included interviews with thirty-two IPPLIAP parents and family members, I created a project I call “Personal History Timelines” with sixth-grade participants at IPPLIAP (see also Pfister et al. 2014). I worked closely with former school psychologist, Fabiola Ruiz-Bedolla, in focus group workshops called “Circulo Mágico” (Magic Circle) that took place once a week during school hours. Fabiola and I asked participants to think about high and low points in their lives and to chart those sequentially, using graphics such as images, drawings, photographs, and written Spanish and/or emoticon-like expressions. We then interviewed youth participants using the timelines they created to learn more about their experiences prior to IPPLIAP. Memories of hearing schools and CAMs featured prominently in the personal history timelines project. Because sign-based education was so limited in Mexico, most of the participants’ previous school experiences began in CAMs or mainstream classrooms where sign language was not available. Deaf participants’ access to information was severely restricted in these schools, which impacted their academic and social interactions. The personal history timeline data presented here also suggest the limited efficacy of the inclusion model as it relates to deaf children in CAMs because these institutions were limited in the ways they could accommodate deaf children’s language needs. Prior to coming to IPPLIAP, most youth participants were the only deaf children attending hearing schools (or one of very few in some CAMs). Nearly all students recalled early school experiences as low points filled with loneliness and confusion, especially in predominantly (or exclusively) hearing environments where they described only rudimentary communication (including communication forms not typically recognized as language, as mentioned earlier in the chapter). These communicative experiences contrasted sharply with entering school at IPPLIAP which was depicted as a high point or happy memory. More than 90 percent of the youth participants in my study were born to hearing families, a rate that follows widely accepted global estimates. For that majority, IPPLIAP was where they first encountered LSM and, for many of them, entering IPPLIAP was their first chance to meet and socialize with other deaf children. David’s5 timeline depicted his experience in hearing school environments in a way that necessitated very few words (see Figure 2.1). Like others, he used the graphic continuum of his timeline to communicate high and low points in his personal history. Accordingly, “happy” memories are high points (peaks as shown on David’s timeline) and “not-so-happy” moments are low points (valleys as shown on David’s timeline). Starting at the bottom left of Figure 2.1, David depicted himself at “escuela” (school), a hearing school he attended prior to IPPLIAP. The illustration shows that he was confused and upset as he was unable to understand the oral language directed at him. This is represented as multiple lines coming from the interlocutor’s mouth and multiple

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FIGURE 2.1:  A segment of David’s personal history timeline (Some information was redacted by Pfister to anonymize names of schools).

question marks near the image of David, who is on the receiving end but cannot access identifiable information from the speech. The trajectory of his timeline then rises to a high point where David wrote “cambio de CAM” (I changed schools to a CAM). David’s representation of this change suggests optimism for a better school experience. However, the timeline proceeds to plummet again as David recalled his experience at this CAM (on the right-hand side, bottom). David then illustrated lines radiating from the ear of the hearing speaker, to represent hearingness, and the emoticon-like face next to his depicts his unhappiness, presumably because they could not understand each other. Both illustrations show people speaking at—or toward—a miserable-looking David. His depictions present his hearing status as a barrier to information, belongingness, and happiness in these environments. His experiences in CAMs were memorable “low points” and distressing. As time moved on for David, he illustrated another high point: his 2005 move to IPPLIAP when he was six years old and began learning LSM. An interview with David’s mother, Claudia, echoed what David described and provides further insight into the agony families experience when their deaf children are expected to adapt to hearing normative standards. Claudia described David’s experiences in medical and oralist environments this way: When we were in therapy, they kept telling me that we couldn’t use signs, that he had to talk. So, we spent many years like that, in therapy with them telling us that we couldn’t use signs, that he had to talk. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand how [that approach] would amount to anything. He wasn’t learning anything.6

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Claudia’s narrative corroborates David’s Personal History Timeline where he depicts himself in hearing environments and not understanding the speech around him. Like David, Claudia contrasted those experiences (associated with inclusion and oralist approaches) to their experience at IPPLIAP. She said: When we came here, to IPPLIAP, it was a total change. Because there [the CAMs], they aren’t teaching sign language [even if they occasionally used a sign here or there]. When he entered school here, he was so far behind that he had to repeat a year of preschool. Even so, in just months I noticed big changes related to his communication and his behavior. Paired together, Claudia and David’s narratives describe formative experiences in very different language communities and underscore the consequences of inclusion ideology as it is applied to deaf children in educational institutions. They show how youth participants experienced compromised access to participation in hearing classrooms because their language needs were unmet. Consequently, deaf children’s social and academic participation was restricted by their inability to communicate reliably. In other words, the environment was not inclusive, in that David and other deaf students were too easily (and too often) linguistically excluded. Their inability to naturally interact and participate freely was extremely frustrating and lonely, and this was an experience that upset children and parents alike. Yet, it remains the most common scenario for many families with deaf children in Mexico thanks to ideologies affecting school placement and expectations that deaf children behave as hearing children. By contrast, transitions to IPPLIAP—which for many, provided a first chance to learn LSM—was a comparative high point in their lives. When language is more readily accessible, children are more easily included. At IPPLIAP, children were able to engage with other deaf children and adults; they learned LSM relatively quickly and could participate more interactively in the process of language socialization. These narratives illustrate the fundamental and urgent nature of accessibility of sign language, the modality most suited for deaf children. Oralist, medicalized, and inclusion ideologies place the onus on deaf children to conform to hearing society, but participants often suggest that hearing people can learn sign language with relatively more ease than deaf people can learn spoken languages. However, this is not what parents are told in medical environments and in school placement discussions, both of which underscore oralist ideology and push families toward oralización, not inclusive sign language environments. Both stories point to IPPLIAP as an option where David was integrated with his peers and experienced language socialization. David and his mother both described positive changes in learning and well-being, suggesting that sign-based bilingual instruction supported better outcomes for children and families. Claudia and David’s story is offered as an example that represents a common trajectory found in my research. Upon learning their child is deaf, the first point of contact for most IPPLIAP parents was an institution of Mexican public health. Many are routinely and explicitly advised by medical professionals and speech therapists to avoid sign language instruction for their children, claiming that children will never learn to speak if they learn LSM. In fact, many parents in this study repeatedly claimed their children performed better in speech therapy after learning LSM, underscoring the importance of accessible language as a backdrop for contextual understanding, even when speech is the ultimate goal. This supports considerable research demonstrating that children can, and do, learn

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to speak alongside learning sign language, and refutes the notion that sign language impedes learning to speak (see also Gárate 2011; Pfister 2017; Yoshinaga-Itano 2006). Like David, many research participants described isolation and confusion in exclusively oral environments prior to IPPLIAP and often recounted a friendless existence and tenuous family dynamics because their language needs went unmet. As they entered the bilingual and bicultural environment at IPPLIAP, parents and children described profound personal transformations. They attributed these changes to learning sign language and having the opportunity to socialize in sign language. In other words, we see the effects of access to and through LSM (Schieffelin and Ochs 1984). Through LSM, children had access to an inclusive education and social life and therefore experienced an effective form of inclusion.

LONG-TERM LANGUAGE DEPRIVATION AND DEAF SOCIALITY IN NEPAL Though the percentage of deaf Nepalis born to hearing parents is not known, it is most likely at least as high as the 96 percent–98 percent cited above for the United States (Mitchell and Karchmer 2004). This is because in Nepal deafness is more frequently caused due to infections, iodine deficiency, or accidents rather than genetics (Little et al. 1993; Maharjan et al. 2006; Snoddon 2019). As Pfister mentioned earlier regarding Mexican parents, hearing parents of deaf children in Nepal often turn to specialists to help them cope with the disruption to taken-for-granted patterns of linguistic and cultural reproduction these sensory differences in the family can pose. However, during the earlier period (1997–2006) of my ongoing long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the country, medical professionals offering a biomedical framework for interpreting the nature and consequences of deafness were not the only, or necessarily primary, source of such expertise. While a biomedical perspective was salient to some, a very common understanding was that an inability to hear was the result of bad karma or misdeeds in a previous life. Such karma, in turn, was understood to indicate ritual impurity, such that others could be polluted by various sorts of contact with the person so affected (see Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016 for more details). As a result, deaf Nepalis and their families often encountered stigma surrounding deafness. Accordingly, many hearing parents of deaf children sought the expertise of ritual specialists as well as biomedical specialists (when available, depending on a family’s geographical location and financial resources). For example, one afternoon in 2004, as I was spending the afternoon at the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD), my friends Bikash and Arjun compared stories about their families’ reactions to their deafness. These names are pseudonyms, which I had been trained to use to help protect the confidentiality of those I engaged in the field, with the exception of instances in which I was referring to the creators of published writing or images. As readers will see below, I use first and surnames when referring to the authors of such materials; these are not pseudonyms. While I find compelling and convincing recent arguments against the default use of pseudonyms, which can function as a form of “anti-citation” (Weiss 2021), and will reconsider this practice in future fieldwork, first-name-only references here are pseudonyms as they reflect the terms negotiated with research participants at the time that I conducted this work drawn on in this chapter. As I had done frequently in the months prior to this instance, I had set up a video recorder to capture the afternoon’s interactions (with permission of those present). When later

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transcribing interactions I had recorded, I often asked those recorded to watch the video with me, to comment on the accuracy of my transcription and to provide meta-commentary about the content, context, and form of their contributions to the recorded interaction. The English translation of their comments below emerged from this method. Bikash, an employee of the KAD, took a break from preparing tea, in order to sit down in the association’s central space for socializing. He then signed, in response to an unfolding conversation about KAD members’ life histories, “Growing up, I was born deaf. My parents took me to many of our religion’s places to take god’s help for me, because they wanted me to hear. With sadness, my father saw that it wasn’t working and quit. At age 7, we came to Kathmandu, and I went together with my parents to a doctor. But my ears stayed shut.” Arjun, a KAD member who had stopped in to socialize with friends, then told a story with a different trajectory: “As a baby I was sick and my hearing went away. Pus kept draining from my ear. I went to many doctors and took medicine but they didn’t clean my ear. This was first. Second, we repeatedly went to give offerings at many temples [actions believed to restore hearing]. But I still didn’t hear.” As these narratives suggest, both biomedical and karmic understandings of deafness in Nepal were often intertwined with oralist ideologies; deafness, no matter the etiology, was framed as a problem to be cured, no matter the manner of intervention. However, as we spoke that day in 2004, and repeatedly over the course of my research, both Bikash and Arjun emphasized their intransigent deafness with pride. They did not see themselves as defective hearing people but rather as members of a distinctive linguistic and cultural group. They were fluent users of Nepali Sign Language (NSL) and participants in a robust and supportive network of deaf Nepalis. In each of their cases, after biomedical and ritual interventions had failed to restore their hearing, they had been enrolled in the Central Secondary School for the Deaf in Naxal, Kathmandu. Established in 1966, the Naxal school was the first in Nepal to offer specialized instruction for deaf children. The school had initially focused on introducing oral methods to Nepal. As Kiran Acharya (1997, 1), one of the school’s first students, wrote in his History of the Deaf in Nepal, “the teachers working at the instruction center did not allow the deaf students to communicate or study using sign language. In order to suppress our natural tendency to communicate (with signs), the teachers would scold us, hold our hands down, twist our ears, and pull our hair.” However, by gathering together a critical mass of deaf children, the school created conditions for the establishment of signing practices and deaf sociality. Acharya (1997, 4) continues, During class hours, signs were not used. However, when 1:00 came, the time for tiffin (lunch), students could surreptitiously communicate through visual and gestural modalities. After 4:00 in the afternoon we were free to talk to each other using signs after leaving school. There was no particular reason to return home early if we did not have to, since we were not able to communicate effectively with our families. So we would gather in a specific place after school to socialize until 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening. NSL consolidated from the communicative interactions of the first several cohorts of students in the schools for deaf students (Acharya 1997; Sharma 2003; Khanal 2013). Naxal school graduates went on to form clubs or associations, where they could privately communicate as they pleased and from which they could advocate for deaf rights (including the right to use sign language in a range of contexts). By 1995, there

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were eight regional and one national association run by and for deaf Nepalis. In addition to their function as places for socialization and advocacy, the associations collected and disseminated signs by publishing NSL dictionaries and began offering NSL classes to deaf people who had been unable to attend a school for deaf persons. They also began pressuring the Naxal school (and other subsequently founded schools for deaf students) to abandon their stringent oralist policies. The Naxal school shifted to sign language-medium instruction in 19887 and continues to be an important site for the linguistic reproduction of NSL, along with other schools for deaf students subsequently established around the country (currently estimated at around twenty-two, offering various levels of education (Snodden 2019, 9). Robust, NSL-mediated networks of sociality emerged from such institutional sites of reproduction. These networks afforded participating deaf Nepalis access not only to language but also through language to other resources often denied them. For example, NSL-medium schools provided access to educational opportunities not typically afforded deaf students (including both the content of the instruction and the credentials provided by schools). Deaf people had often been viewed as incapable of acquiring gainful employment, and associations of deaf Nepalis therefore focused on providing job training (e.g., in tailoring, electrical work, and craftsmanship of various sorts) and on partnering with hearing employers in reducing the stigma surrounding deaf employees (see Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016 for further details on such employment opportunities in Nepal). Additionally, while deaf Nepalis were sometimes considered unappealing marriage candidates in hearing networks, the relationships formed in the schools and associations often led to marriages and deaf-centered kin-building. Bikash and Arjun noted that they had been lucky that their parents had learned about the Naxal school, and that they had thus been able to access the benefits of deaf sociality, while they were relatively young. They were also aware that many deaf children in Nepal had not had this opportunity. For example, the 1980 Report of the Sample Survey of Disabled Persons in Nepal showed that out of an estimated 393,574 to 694,542 deaf people in Nepal, only 609 had been enrolled in any type of school (Prasad 2003, 39). Though the number of deaf students has certainly increased since the 1980s, Nirmal Kumar Devkota, a deaf Nepali leader, estimated in 2003 that only 1 percent of deaf children had received any schooling (Devkota 2003; see also Snoddon 2019 for a recent report on the status of education for deaf students in Nepal). Those few who managed to attend schools primarily attended schools meant for hearing children, where provisions were rarely made to give deaf students access to the spoken and written academic discourse, let alone access to effective peer socialization. Thus, Bikash and Arjun, along with many of their peers who were also fluent signers, frequently volunteered to canvas urban neighborhoods and rural villages in search of deaf children who would benefit from sign language-medium education. However, as Figure 2.2, an illustration by Pratigya Shakya, a deaf Nepali artist, suggests, persuading hearing parents to allow their deaf children to sign could be difficult. Due to the stigma associated with deafness, many hearing Nepalis avoided physical and social engagements with deaf persons in order to protect their relative ritual purity. As a result, hearing families often did not want their deaf children to advertise their status as such through conspicuous signing. While deaf activists in Nepal have made great strides in combating the stigma surrounding deafness and encouraging hearing families to support signing (as portrayed in Figure 2.3, another image by Shakya), this work is ongoing (see Green 2014; Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016; Graif 2018 for details about these efforts). Shakya created these paired images as a part of a series of drawings intended to contrast deaf experiences

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FIGURE 2.2:  An illustration by Pratigya Shakya, depicting parents preventing their deaf child from socializing with deaf peers [republished with permission from Hoffmann-Dilloway, Erika (2016). Signing and Belonging in Nepal. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.].

FIGURE 2.3:  An illustration by Pratigya Shakya, depicting parents supporting a deaf child in socializing with deaf peers [republished with permission from Hoffmann-Dilloway, Erika (2016). Signing and Belonging in Nepal. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.].

of oralist versus sign language-friendly social contexts. He sold me a set of copies of these and other drawings in 2005; they appear here with his permission. Because the first school for deaf students was not established in Nepal until 1966, the vast majority of those born profoundly deaf beforehand had no opportunity to learn an

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accessible, conventionalized language during childhood or adolescence. Thus, it was not just young people currently in the critical window for language acquisition with whom the KAD members were concerned, but also older people who may have missed that window and consequently continued to suffer the effects of language deprivation. To that end, in 2008, the KAD (originally with the support of the British organization Deafway) began hosting a program called the “Older and Vulnerable Deaf Persons Project” (ODP). The term “vulnerable” refers not only to the fact that the elders had been vulnerable to the effects of restricted access to conventionalized language, but also to the ways in which lack of access to language had restricted their access to a wide range of social, educational, and economic resources and roles, creating other forms of vulnerability. Under the auspices of this program, elderly deaf Nepalis gathered together several times a week at the associations in Kathmandu and the neighboring city of Kirtipur, where members served them snacks and tea and provided them with organized language instruction and other activities. I conducted research at ODP sessions in 2015 and 2017, participating in and video recording ODP sessions and discussing the program with instructors and members. As I’ve described in previous publications (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011, 2016), during the earlier phases of my research, older deaf people were conspicuously absent from the robust signing communities I encountered in Nepal. In fact, in 1997, when I inquired about the relative youth of the membership of the deaf associations, my friend ShriHari replied, “Here in Nepal there are no old deaf people.” While of course there were many older people in Nepal who could not hear, what ShriHari meant was that older deaf people did not use NSL, and NSL was treated as the basis for belonging and inclusion in the networks of sociality and support deaf signers had been forming. However, over the course of the 2000s, as the visibility and resources of deaf social institutions grew, older deaf Nepalis were gradually, increasingly incorporated into signing networks. For example, I’ve previously written about Madhu (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011, 2016, 2021a), who I first met in 2004, when he was in his seventies. Deafened at an early age, he had not acquired a spoken language and had not been exposed to NSL until he had encountered a young fluent signer on the street in Kathmandu. She had encouraged him to visit the KAD and soon he became a regular participant in the social life of the association. Madhu communicated with what would typically be referred to in the literature as a homesign system: using gestures that ranged from pantomimic to more lexicalized, and were relatively idiosyncratic, though which in part overlapped with widespread co-speech gestures (both used by hearing Nepalis and grammaticalized in NSL). Locally, this way of communicating is generally referred to as “natural sign” (Green 2017; Graif 2018). Because such systems develop in a smaller social and temporal milieu than established sign languages, some readers may assume that they afford only limited meaning-making. On the contrary, like many such signers, Madhu was a highly skilled communicator, having spent his life working to connect with people with whom he did not share a conventionalized language system. For example, he frequently told detailed, evocative, and humorous stories. Consequently, KAD members enjoyed conversing with him and encouraged him with both material and social support. For example, in phases of my research that took place before the 2008 founding of the ODP, Madhu frequently stopped in at the KAD and was always offered tea and snacks. Association members and I would take a break from other activities to sit down and enjoy his stories. Perhaps because of his age and charm, Madhu

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was not scolded or discouraged for his nonstandard communicative style (which was not always the case; some natural signers encountered disparagement from fluent signers8). Association members had made efforts to teach Madhu to use NSL. However, despite their efforts over the course of years, association members noted, and my observations supported, that Madhu appeared to be more or less “frozen” in the use of his particular communicative repertoire. Further, while his narratives were engaging and virtuosic, he tended to repeat a relatively small number of such narratives, seeming relatively less skilled at marshaling his communicative resources effectively for spontaneous interactions (see also Green 2017). Association members interpreted these restrictions as an effect of his very long-term language deprivation. Indeed, I have video recorded many iterations of Madhu telling the same small set of stories across a range of contexts (e.g., casual socializing, classroom interaction, formal speeches) over a period of about fifteen years (see Green 2017 and Hoffmann-Dilloway 2021a for detailed analyses of his tellings). Within this repertoire was a story about being struck in the back of the head by falling debris in the massive earthquake that struck Nepal in 1934. Another of Madhu’s narratives detailed how his siblings had cheated him out of his land inheritance, leaving him homeless and destitute. Indeed, Madhu’s situation starkly illustrates the intertwined importance of access to and through language (Schieffelin and Ochs 1984), as he explicitly noted that his circumscribed linguistic repertoire prevented him from effectively preventing and contesting the loss of his property. He was not alone in this respect. When the ODP was formed in 2008, it represented a response by younger signers to not only the linguistic but also associated social and economic difficulties faced by older deaf people who had experienced long-term language deprivation. In addition to NSL lessons, ODP sessions provided meals because, as the director, Hari, explained to me, many of the participants did not have reliable access to sufficient nutrition due to lack of access to work and neglect from hearing family networks. Further, while the ODP centered NSL instruction, the program aimed to inclusively provide older deaf people opportunities for rich socialization that many do not have access to elsewhere. Thus, for example, ODP meetings also devoted a significant portion of the time to engagement with a range of images; for example, working puzzles or copying sketches of landscapes and objects from a template provided by the instructor. These practices in some ways resembled the art therapy incorporated into support programs that figure “art as potentially therapeutic or helpful to both people with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers” (Selberg 2015, 475). In such programs, it is thought that modes of expression that don’t depend on language per se may ease potential frustrations between interlocutors coping with dementia. In other work (Hoffmann-Dilloway 2020, 2021a), however, I’ve argued that the centering of images in the ODP is framed less as an alternative to “language” and more as a recognition that engagement with, interpretation of, and reproduction of pictorial images can both be a useful communicative resource for the participants (also see Harrelson 2017) and can support broader semiotic, pragmatic, and social skills that underpin language use. KAD leaders’ accounts and my observations suggest that ODP participants’ progress in learning what is locally recognizable as NSL through these methods varied, according to their particular linguistic life histories (e.g., participants who were deafened later in childhood, after having had years of access to interactive language use, or participants who had had more opportunity to construct robust homesign or natural sign systems with willing partners, were seen to more readily learn new linguistic forms). Regardless of their degree of progress, however, no one was excluded from the ongoing ODP classes,

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even participants, such as Madhu, who appeared unlikely to make significant progress in becoming independent conventional NSL signers. Rather, the classes provided an opportunity for all the older deaf people to regularly perform NSL signs with assistance and scaffolding from younger signers, and in that way, participate in the use of NSL, the language around which deaf sociality in Nepal was grounded. Further, the communicative competencies of elders like Madhu were not stigmatized, but in many cases celebrated in ODP meetings. Indeed, these classes appeared to serve several functions of language socialization, even in the absence of NSL fluency. Madhu and others were able to participate in the unfolding of linguistically mediated interaction, albeit in often predictable ways, and learned the norms and expectations of deaf culture at the ODP and KAD more broadly. While they were incorporated into the signing community in ways particular to their life histories and linguistic repertoires (relative to those of younger fluent signers), such practices both reflected and maintained the fact that there were older deaf signers in Nepal.

CONCLUSION Oralist, medicalized, and inclusion ideologies downplay the importance of specialized deaf education and deaf sociality and negate the vital role of sign language in deaf people’s lives throughout the life course. We chose to juxtapose these two ethnographic cases because they stress the time-sensitive urgency of responding to the social justice issue of language deprivation in childhood. Pfister’s work in Mexico highlights, from the perspective of deaf children, the vastly different experiences of struggling to communicate through sensorially inaccessible channels compared to a social environment in which participation and interactivity were possible because communication was sensorially accessible. Hoffmann-Dilloway’s work with older deaf people in Nepal provides a grounded illustration of “vulnerabilities and competencies” (Friedner and Kusters 2020, 38) resulting from the long-term effects of language deprivation in one context. While both of these cases are drawn from the Global South, such concerns are as acute (and in some cases more pervasive) in wealthier nations that strongly promote mainstreamed education and cochlear implantation. Specialists sometimes suggest that sign languages can safely be reserved as a “last resort” once oralist approaches to language acquisition have been exhausted (Humphries et al. 2012). However, we caution against this framing and we hope this chapter has made clear the serious potential harms of such delays. However, we reiterate that it is never “too late” for a deaf person to benefit from being engaged in sign language-mediated deaf sociality. While language acquisition is time sensitive, language socialization is a lifelong process (Ochs 1996). Thus, both researchers underscore the importance of the role of two fundamental components of language socialization processes: (1) access to local sign languages and (2) social contexts that afford spontaneous participation in interactive communicative practices. Furthermore, a focus on language socialization reiterates how access to sign language is imperative because language use socializes people to social roles, through which important resources become accessible, and this happens most naturally for deaf people through sign language. Language ideologies and structural conditions that limit deaf persons’ access to such modalities and contexts present an urgent social justice concern that must be addressed. An important path toward redressing this injustice is to encourage hearing parents of deaf children to recognize the specialized knowledge and

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authority of deaf people who have experienced language deprivation and who advocate for sign language use.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Pfister’s research was supported by Fulbright-García Robles and Fulbright-Comexus. Special thanks to Mercedes Obregón Rodríguez and Fabiola Ruiz-Bedolla and to the students, teachers, and parents at IPPLIAP. She also thanks Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway for an invitation to participate in the creation of this chapter and collection and for her collegiality and insight. Hoffmann-Dilloway’s research was funded by the Fulbright Institution of International Education/Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States and Nepal, the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program, and an Oberlin College Powers Grant. Quinn Donover and Elana Pontecorvo served as research assistants in 2015, themselves respectively supported by an Oberlin Shansi In Asia grant and The Richard ’63 and Karen Cowan ’63 Ford Endowed Anthropology Fund. She thanks everyone at the Kathmandu Association of the Deaf and the Older and Vulnerable Deaf Persons Project. She also thanks Anne Pfister for collaborating with her on this chapter. The authors thank Maartje De Meulder, Lina Hou, Michele Koven, Annelise Kusters, Elana Jacobs-Pontecorvo, Jennifer Reynolds, David James Savarese, Chantal Tetreault, and this volume’s editors for their helpful comments on this work. All errors are our own.

NOTES 1. While some work in Deaf Studies capitalizes the word “Deaf ” to indicate reference to persons who identify as members of signing communities and reserves lower-case “deaf ” to refer specifically to hearing status, more recent work has suggested that an overapplication of this distinction may flatten scholars’ attention to variation in how deaf persons across social, cultural, and historical contexts understand themselves. Consequently, we do not adopt the d/Deaf typographical distinction in this chapter. 2. In this article we primarily discuss oralist ideologies (those that privilege spoken language, but treat speech as something that can be accessed through multiple modalities). We note, however, that in some contexts auralist ideologies (which not only privilege speech but also insist that speech should be accessed only through hearing) predominate (e.g., Friedner 2022). 3. It is important to clarify that there is a distinction between the contexts of language deprivation we discuss in this chapter, which are specific to deaf people, and contexts in which children are acquiring language(s) used in their households and communities, but the linguistic resources they acquire are not recognized or valued by dominant groups (e.g., studies and policies that inaccurately posit that minoritized children in the US experience language deprivation if their languaging practices are not seen to conform to middle-class, English-centric standards [see Avineri et al. 2015 for critiques of such positions]). In the latter contexts, children do not experience sensory barriers to accessing their family’s and community’s language practices. However, there are similarities in that in each type of situation, experts recommend interventions aimed at increasing the amount of “rich linguistic input” children are exposed to, with a narrow view of what codes and modalities constitute “appropriate” input that devalues the role that multilingualism and multimodal

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communicative modalities play in providing rich linguistic environments. A critical awareness of the shortcomings of such deficit-focused models is crucial to understanding both types of contexts (see Paugh and Reilly 2019). 4. If hearing teachers and peers routinely learned to sign, mainstreaming would not be as isolating for deaf students. Even under such conditions, however, deaf children would benefit greatly from social relationships with deaf peers and adults who understand their sensory orientations (e.g., see Graham and Tobin 2019). 5. Participants, including children and their parents, were asked during informed consent if they wanted to anonymize their names. Participants who asked for an alias were assigned one or created their own. Child participants are identified by their first names only, even if they (and their parents) chose not to anonymize. 6. Interviews with participants were conducted at IPPLIAP in Spanish or LSM (with an interpreter). Transcripts were translated from Spanish to English by the author. 7. See Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016, 2021b for details about the school’s pedagogical practices, including its adoption of a Total Communication Policy, and complexities around what different constituencies in Nepal understand “sign language medium” to entail. 8. See Hoffmann-Dilloway 2016 for some thoughts on why different homesigners received different levels of support for their different linguistic practices.

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Chapter 3

Multilingual Activism as Acts of Linguistic Citizenship in South Africa QUENTIN WILLIAMS

INTRODUCTION South Africa remains an unequal yet multilingual society. In spite of advances in democracy and a widely celebrated constitution, historically marginalized communities continue to experience the effects of colonial and apartheid linguistic discrimination. But as a beacon of hope, the country has seen a resurgence of what I have termed multilingual activism that has come to redefine the tenets of agency, voice, language, and new forms of relationality visible across a number of media platforms and types of performances (Brown and Deumert 2017; Williams 2018). This chapter provides insight into how the Afrikaaps1 language movement is defining multilingual activism as acts of Linguistic Citizenship (LC). In this chapter, I argue that although language remains one of the tools that define (racial and gender) discriminatory practices against multilingual speakers in the country, it is important for us to also focus on the processes of language reinvention and acts of Linguistic Citizenship (LC) that derive from the practice and performance of multilingual activism. To illustrate this argument, I suggest that if we approach multilingual activism in this way, we are able to understand how multilingual speakers establish new forms of relationalities and at the same time reinvent language. LC is here defined as an approach to the study of linguistic justice that highlights the manifold ways multilingual speakers mediate and represent their agency2 and voice3 in situations defined by explicit and implicit discriminatory practices. Multilingual activism is the artistic representation of linguistic justice for historically racialized and marginalized speakers of former colonial and apartheid languages. And language invention is the discursive and linguistic struggle to disrupt language and linguistic labels invented in colonialism and apartheid by focusing on how historically marginalized speakers are rethinking and redefining what a language is and could be. In the next section of the chapter, I provide a brief framing of the historical background on language activism in South Africa. I link the emergence of multilingual activism to the current democratic context to argue that if we understand such activism as acts of

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LC we in turn also understand the way in which marginalized speakers approach the reinvention of language. In section three, I discuss a case study of the emergence and impact of the Afrikaaps language movement. I demonstrate how this movement insists on advancing the reinvention of Afrikaans into Afrikaaps as a language that disrupts language discriminatory practices. Specifically, I open the section with a discussion on the history of the Afrikaaps language movement. I provide space to analyze the early catalysts of the movement and its critique of the hegemonic power of Afrikaans and the impact of racist language labels such as “Gamtaal.” This is followed by an analysis of the significance of Afrikaaps for the speakers and also how the movement has been mediatized, poeticized, and commodified. I close the chapter with a few concluding thoughts on Afrikaaps, multilingual activism and LC.

TOWARD LINGUISTIC JUSTICE: MULTILINGUAL ACTIVISM AS ACTS OF LINGUISTIC CITIZENSHIP It is perhaps by now a familiar story. Linguistic justice for the social life of historically marginalized languages in South Africa remains elusive. Though many language activists have fought long and gained little legislatively, the future of linguistic justice from the bottom up remains a hard sell for historically marginalized communities That is, language activists have for decades campaigned for a fairer and more just approach when it concerns the granting of equal access to language resources and the distribution of such resources (Alexander 2010). However, at the same time, those same decades have also been defined by the deepening inequality and redistribution of the materials and discourses of power in language based on a colonial and apartheid racial economic system that came at the expense of racialized language communities and the oppression of their languages (Stroud and Heugh 2003). Since before colonialism, South Africa was already understood to be a multilingual country but leading up to the imperial invasion of the British, the country became redefined by English, and its spread, its power and appeal as a language firmly entrenched across the linguistic landscape of the country (Mellet 2020). From the time the British agreed in 1806 to undertake control of Cape Town to the spread of English across the country, and between two South African wars, the unassailable position of English was cemented into South African life as part of the policy of indirect rule (McCormick 2008). For example, colonial South Africa legislated hegemonic languaging and socially entrenched a hierarchy of languages, society, class, and culture through English (though not exclusively) (Alexander 2012; Harries 2007). Between two South African wars, the colonial administration sought through numerous inexhaustible attempts to capture the imagination of the native subject by reinforcing English and did so successfully (de Klerk 1997; Kamwangamalu 2004), growing and spreading alongside the development of Afrikaans (McCormick 2002). But it would be English that becomes the language of the colonizer, the language of the commercial industry, in the scientific field, technology, and of global society, and a language of wider communication. An intentional invention of a language hierarchy emerged, with English on top, followed by Afrikaans, neglecting a rich array of varieties of languages, including African languages, left on an unequal footing. It took the racist apartheid state, a racialized economy and draconian apartheid laws to force Afrikaans into the top of the language hierarchy and to keep it there from the early 1940s to the late 1980s (Kriel 2013, 2018). Afrikaans and English became the two official languages and for much of apartheid dominated every institution and segregated nook

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and cranny where most white Afrikaans and English speakers could benefit from and enjoy the spoils of an apartheid society (Kriel 2010). At the top of the hierarchy, Afrikaans and English gained hegemonic notoriety. But this could not be sustained. In the early 1990s, just before the turn toward democracy, language activists (in particular language policy theorists) debated the innocuous position of English, the precarious state of functional Afrikaans, and the intellectualization potential of indigenous and African languages have taken on many forms (Alexander 2012). At the turn of democracy, conservatists and alarmists alike argued that the spread of English in South Africa would head to a consolidation of the elite class, the continued domination of the marginalized, a deepening of linguistic injustice, and a steady rush toward language loss for African speakers (McCormick 2008). The debate at the time hardly dispelled fear of the hegemony of English because it is a language (with many forms) used in not only the practice and performance of multilingualism but also characterizes access and power for those on the margins of South African society, while Afrikaans, on the other hand, seemingly remains the language that refuses access, emancipation and success for black and colored4 speakers of the language (as we have recently come to learn) (see Stroud and Williams 2017; Constitutional Court Judgement 2019, Gelyke Kanse vs University of Stellenbosch5). This backdrop set the stage for the politicization of the language landscape against which linguistic and social justice activists worked to undo language hegemony at the dawn of South Africa’s democratic era. For example, Applied Linguists and language planners invested in building a multilingual rainbow nation, reflecting then in the Taal and Stryd (Language and Struggle) conference in 1989, published in the Language Projects Review journal. Language activists Jan Esterhusye (1989), Kathleen Heugh (1989), and Neville Alexander (1989) provided early thoughts on the conception of language, multilingualism, the over-privileging of a particular named language (then, at the inception of the conference, Afrikaans), the narrow visions of language policy makers in accepting the unassailable position of English (compare Alexander 2012), and the important relationship between language and culture in what was initially a conference on Afrikaans (its position, status and future as a language). Although the conference sought practical solutions to language planning that would later feed into the language provisions of the 1994 constitution of South Africa, such as the officialization of eleven languages (nine previously marginalized), it also provided importantly a summary on the thoughts of some language activists—conservative, moderate, and liberal—who argued for and against Afrikaans hegemony and the continued social and linguistic inequalities out of which white Afrikaner speakers (and other white speakers) benefited. It is thus this history of struggle with the making and unmaking of language that defines how language activists (see Williams 2018) represent the traces and effects of colonialism and apartheid upon language communities today (cf. Hale 2006). For many multilingual activists, the continued marginalization of speakers of marginalized languages or varieties forms part of a complex matrix of power, politics, and distribution of material resources sustained by deepening economic inequalities. In this regard, multilingual activists have actively sought to present an alternative vision and interpretation of language and multilingual communication that bring marginalized forms of languages, their varieties, speech forms, and registers from the periphery to the centre (cf. Bucholtz, Cassilas and Lee 2016). This is accomplished with an egalitarian vision and approach to linguistic justice (compare Lowe and Merry 2010: S210–11).

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An egalitarian approach in multilingual activism recognizes that it is not enough to affirm the differences and diversity in and among multilingual speakers denied linguistic justice (compare Bucholtz, Cassilas and Lee 2019 on sociolinguistic justice). Rather, the point is to open up dialogue around what constitutes common ground for debating not only the premise of linguistic justice for all but understanding the ramifications for the lack and distortion of dialogue on what truly should be the form of such justice for historically marginalized speakers. An egalitarian approach in multilingual activism works toward a notion of common relationality, showing up the linkages to relationalities, that is, the highlighting of speakers who work toward a relationship based on communication characterized by “ineradicable lines of influence, usually carried in part through the communicative flows of meaning and confusion that constantly remake the persons involved” (Condit 2006, 10). At the same time, such an approach persuades researchers to adopt a transformative approach to language and multilingualism, one that focuses on nonstandard varieties as linked to empowerment, and with an emphasis on diversity, fairness in linguistic diversity, and a focus on equal codes of communication. In this vein, multilingual activism can be defined as a discourse and practice that (1) explicitly critiques the erasure of racialized citizens’ sociocultural-linguistic and embodied voices and their languages; (2) recognizes racialized citizens who speak a variety of languages other than the hegemonic variety; (3) advances the idea that the politics of multilingualism as tied to voice is changing rapidly in our global world and that it is multilingual speakers who are redefining the terms and conditions under which we think a language is created; and (4) problematizes the issues that the link linguistic forms and functions to new types of voices that are not clearly defined because linguistic borders (urban versus rural). These four discourses and practices (and there may be many more) are what often inspire the need for reinventing language. Language reinvention, to be sure, concerns the discursive and linguistic disruptive rethinking and redefining of language for the purposes of reimagining the future of historically marginalized speakers. Reinvention pushes us not to dismiss inventions of language or linguistic fixities but persuades us to internalize new ways of knowing through and in language for a better multilingual future. The need for the reinvention of language is caused by how language was formed and what it will look and sound like by multilingual speakers in a multilingual society. We often enter debates of language description not only for redress but to reevaluate and revise the history of its formation by considering the emergence of new language genres, speech, codes, forms, and functions. These discourses and practices hold important implications for how we perceive and analyze multilingual activism as acts of LC. Approaching multilingual activism from the vantage point of LC entails rethinking the relationships of power underlying particular practices and understandings of language(s). In other words, issues of who may decide what a language is and which speakers are legitimate are crucial to understanding the manifold contexts in which multilingual activism does political work. In this sense, multilingual activism in the vein of LC concerns reframing “semiotic practices of citizenship away from a totalizing sense of language” (Stroud 2009, 213). In a postnational country such as South Africa, we have found that it is not enough to recognize or affirm the difference and diversity of multilingual speakers (Stroud and Williams 2018). According to Stroud (2018, 18), LC in this regard helps us to rethink what we understand by language via citizenship and participatory democracy. Linguistic

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citizenship builds on the idea that “language falls firmly within citizenship discourses, and that it is the very medium whereby citizenship is enacted and performed” (Stroud 2009, 217). It is a notion that encourages critical thinking around what we mean by linguistic justice and its mediation across various discourses and modalities. In other words, LC is a notion that brings to the fore what “citizens” do with linguistic and nonlinguistic resources as they chart a transformative understanding of their citizenship, and shift “the location of agency and voice.” It is also a notion that aligns well with the goals of language activists seeking linguistic justice and agitating for language fairness in the public sphere (online or offline). An application of the notion persuades us to argue that linguistic justice is not just about fairness, or which lingua franca to agree on, or who needs to learn which language on behalf of whom, but it is very much about what types of relationality are useful in order to erode the old affirmative politics of recognition in favor for a transformational politics that repairs and rejuvenates relationships to emancipatory selves and others in order to be anew with language today. In this sense, multilingual activism involves acts of LC. In other words, following Isin (2009), acts of LC is the recognition that citizens, multilingual speakers, act out their citizenship in contexts of diversity and marginalization “. . . across a range of institutional and informal political arenas” (Williams and Stroud, 2015, 407). Stroud and Williams have argued in this regard that if we closely analyze acts of LC then we come to understand that the way people engage with diversity is about “getting on with the neighbours, handling diversity or difference, and finding a good fit for themselves in what is happening around them—a subtle exercise of the politics of the ordinary, in other words” (Williams and Stroud, 2015, 407) (emphasis our own). Isin (2009) argues that the way we have defined citizenship has changed throughout the twentieth century and because of that we require a new way of talking and writing, a new vocabulary for describing citizenship. He notes how where citizenship is performed or enacted, and negotiated, as well as the variability of its framing by nation-states, it is fluid, dynamic, and formed through contest and struggle. Furthermore, Isin proposes that studying “acts of citizenship” is productive because we come to understand the “deeds by which actors constitute themselves (and others) as subjects of rights” (2009, 371), or alternatively, as those with “the right to claim rights.” For Isin and those actors who claim the right to citizenship or the act of claiming rights in new sites today pushes us to rethink and retheorize what we mean by citizenship in our current global social and political climate. Analyzing multilingual activism as acts of LC concerns how nonmainstream speakers wrestle control from political institutions of the state by using their language over many modalities and giving new meaning in communication to reflect the social and political issues that affect them. Thus, describing and analyzing multilingual activism as acts of LC offers an inroad to a “process of engagement that opens doors for respectful and deconstructive negotiations around language forms and practices, (to) lay the groundwork for a mutuality and susceptibility to alternative forms of being-together-in-difference” (Stroud 2018, 37). In the next section of the chapter, I illustrate and analyze how multilingual activism as acts of LC is performed and practiced through a case description of Afrikaaps “language” activism. I focus explicitly on how the transformational rhetoric of LC emerges from the reinvention of Afrikaans as Afrikaaps.

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INVENTING AFRIKAAPS, REINVENTING AFRIKAANS: A CASE STUDY FOR LINGUISTIC JUSTICE A decade or so ago, fresh into the new democratic South Africa, Catherine Henegan approached a few Hip Hop artists and poets active in the Cape Flats communities of Cape Town to put on a theatre play (also known as a HipHopera) at the Baxter Theatre (in Cape Town).6 The play, entitled Afrikaaps and directed by Henegan, comprised a multiracial cast and revisited the formation of Afrikaans through rap songs, dance, and indigenous sounds. At the time, Dylan Valley, a young Honours student in Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, recorded the production and staging of the play in various venues and subsequently produced a documentary by the same name. The final cut of the documentary mediatized the creation and performance of the play mixed with scenes of his own language socialization and biography into Afrikaans, Afrikaans history, and supplemented by interviews with Neville Alexander (noted language activist) and notable Arabic-Afrikaans expert Tariq Mellet. The documentary presents an honest, comprehensive history, and inclusive idea of Afrikaans as a language. Emboldened by the reception of the documentary, by both the public and academia, Afrikaaps language activism subsequently emerged. Advanced by Hip Hop artists Emile YX?, Jitsvinger and poet Janine Blaqpearl, and with advocacy from academics such as this author, Adam Haupt and H Samy Alim, the Afrikaaps movement sought to highlight the competing dynamics in the construal of Afrikaans. The movement promotes the creole origins of Afrikaans; it not only aims to restitch an inclusive narrative of language development but at the same challenge a history of white Afrikaans language practices and policies. Additionally, it is a movement that attempts to revisit and reinvent present representations of Afrikaans by performing a new, inclusive idea of Afrikaans. In the next four subsections of this chapter, I discuss the historical impetus for the emergence of the Afrikaaps language movement. I trace back the initial challenge to the hegemonic power of Afrikaans by pioneering Hip Hop artists Prophets of da City (POC) and point out how their rear-guard multilingual activism led to the (de)occupation (a la Alim, 2019) of racist language labels such as Gamtaal imposed on marginalized speakers of Afrikaans. I argue below that this form of activism and the use of Gamtaal to turn the linguistic tables on the hegemony of Afrikaans could be defined as an early emancipatory act of LC, anticipating the emergence of Afrikaaps. This history, I also suggest, not only critically addressed what it means to do and be in Afrikaans, but came to demonstrate how efforts at reinvention would look like and how it would feed into an alternative politics of language, especially as defined by the rhetorics of resistance. I then follow on with a discussion on the significance of the documentary Afrikaaps as a representation of the theatre play and I focus the analysis on a group discussion scene in the documentary on what it means to be perceived as inarticulate while speaking Afrikaaps. I close the analysis with a discussion of the mediatization, poetics and commodification of Afrikaaps. In all these instances, I demonstrate how this type of activism in various ways act out LC.

It’s Bigger than Hip Hop Activism: A Brief History of Reinventing Gamtaal Advocating for the reinvention of Afrikaans has always been part of the activism of Hip Hop culture in South Africa. Since the culture’s inception, as Haupt (1995) reports, there has always been (racist) stereotypes used by the apartheid government and South African society at large that denigrate the speech practices of historically racialized

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speakers of Afrikaans, in particular colored and black speakers (Erasmus 2001; Adhikari 2005; Moses 2019). In support of the liberation movements (ANC, UDF), Hip Hop artists reframed the injurious politics of language to stage struggles against white Afrikaans language hegemony over other marginalized varieties of Afrikaans and African languages and to a lesser degree English through apartheid, transforming countless words, metaphors and similes into meaningful rap music7 to counteract the prevailing ideologies and symbolic violence that white Afrikaans discursive struggles (though not all) have wrought. In the early 1980s, Hip Hop artists advanced a rear-guard activism and since have always been the progressive, critical thinkers of popular culture, speaking on the problem of language, culture, race, gender, sexuality and space/place (Warner 2007, 2011). Rap groups such as POC (Prophets of da City), Godessa, and Black Noise, for example, emerged with a progressive approach to language that would seek to advocate, with support from academics and other advocacy groups (intentionally or by accident), for the emancipation and empowerment of historically racialized colored and black speakers who spoke what the apartheid government and apartheid society at large designated and termed then as Gamtaal (see Ariefdien and Burgess 2011; Small 1972, 1987; Hendricks 2012; Blignaut 2014; Hendricks and Dyers 2016; Williams 2016). POC in particular tested the limits of Afrikaans hegemony, domination, and discrimination enforced by the apartheid government by overturning the negative signs associated with Gamtaal (Haupt 2008).8 By the late 1980s, Hip Hop artists began to understand that renaming and reinventing language—in this case Afrikaans—and complicating what we mean by language should be part of Hip Hop activism generally. Consider for example the following answer by Shaheen Ariefdien, co-founder of POC, to Adam Haupt on the question of language, the sometimes explicit reference to Gamtaal and how POC represented that stereotyped speech variety throughout their rap music: When we do interviews and shit like that and we speak gamtaal, or whatever, that shit’s on purpose so the kid at home can say, “Fuck, they’re speaking my language,” you know? They’re representing, you know, what comes out of the township and shit. So if some middle class motherfucker comes, “Oe God, skollietaal” [Oh God, gangster language]. The shit’s not for them, you know what I mean? I don’t care if some whiteass dude at home thinks, “Oh shit, look at this . . . uncultured, you know? I want some kid from the ghetto to think, ‘Naa, we can relate to that.” (Haupt 1995) Shaheen Ariefdien is here critical of apartheid’s Afrikaans ideology in terms of language categorization, separation, and differentiation. He deliberately calls the way he speaks, his speech style, Gamtaal, and by doing so, he brings us closer to the racism and linguistic injustice imposed during apartheid. He does so further by referring to how race, class, and place function as intersecting factors in determining what a language is and should be. Specifically, he provides insight into the linguistic strategy of resistance then employed: that it is (1) “on purpose” to draw in the young speakers of Gamtaal so that the speaker could be recognized and represented, (2) locatable—it “comes out of the township,” and (3) that it is not for middle-class individuals with prejudicial thoughts about the language use of Gamtaal speakers but for “some kid from the ghetto”. More than a decade later, in conversation with emcee Marlon Burgess, Ariefdien reflected even more specifically on how Cape Town Hip Hop culture reinvented language away from the negative stereotypes of Gamtaal, and how it came out in their rap music

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not as a linguistically transformed system but as an ideologically and metapragmatically reworked style, generally, in the practice of Hip Hop. [Cape Town] Hip Hop took the language of the “less thans” and embraced it, paraded it, and made it sexy to the point that there is an open pride about what constituted “our” style . . . to express local reworkings of Hip Hop (Ariefdien and Burgess 2011, 235) In the turbulent context of late apartheid, for example, the goal was to reclaim, take back, the negative signs that relate to the practice and performance of Afrikaans on the margins of society, often by racialized working-class speakers. At the same time, the goal of reinvention then was to call on young, racialized speakers of Afrikaans on the Cape Flats (and beyond) to join the rear-guard activism of Hip Hop against the hegemony of apartheid. Hip Hop artists acknowledged early on that Afrikaans was an instrument of repression, and even though language boundaries and language differences also existed within Hip Hop culture, an activism approach to language reinvention seemed to be (in part) the likely course because most spoke a variety of Afrikaans, received their education through standard Afrikaans, and were heavily invested in an inclusive future of Afrikaans. As a result, they remixed their lyrics with three languages and speech styles to reach out to a multilingual, nonracial audience; a poetic move toward reinvention that anticipates an emancipatory relabeling of Gamtaal as Afrikaaps. These initial acts of language activism by the early pioneers of Hip Hop were steeped in a general approach that advanced a critical language awareness campaign through rap performance and other genres of Hip Hop (see Haupt et al. 2019). Here, multilingual activism as acts of LC emerges by way of a critical stance against language racism and the language hegemony of Afrikaans and the apartheid state. Already then we see Hip Hop culture tap into an emancipatory, liberatory notion of LC where the language of the “less thans” was given pride and was made relatable, working against the racist nation-state ideology of apartheid that sought “to silence, invisibilize, and sort speakers and languages hierarchically” (Stroud and Williams 2017, 168). The early pioneers of Hip Hop culture in South Africa, such as POC, sowed the seeds of how to perform activism that brought into view the “exercise of youth agency and voice” (Williams and Stroud 2010, 57), and it is this approach to activism that would be carried over into a democratic South Africa.

Inarticulate while Speaking Afrikaaps Afrikaaps as a play provides a rich alternative celebration of Afrikaans. It provides a storied history of the invention of Afrikaans as a language but also the many reinventions of Afrikaans into Afrikaaps. In South Africa, the play has inspired the Afrikaaps language movement, including how historically marginalized speakers of Afrikaans are redefining their speech as Afrikaaps (see Haupt et al. 2019). Afrikaaps activists and the movement have thus far campaigned for the reclamation of ownership of Afrikaans and the future of Afrikaans as a language of empowerment through Afrikaaps. The movement provides awareness of the critical interpretations of Afrikaans, its history, linguistics, and language contact dynamics via her creole roots that is comprehensive and inclusive of multiple narratives. In the documentary, for example, there are scenes of traditional Malay humor, personal narratives of language pain and resistance, expert and lay definitions of Afrikaans, and the history of Afrikaans told

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from colonial times into a democratic South Africa. Instead of a language sculpted out of processes of racial subjugation, exclusion, and erasure, the documentary reveals how the play—as a genre of language activism—re-represents Afrikaans as a language built on the inclusiveness of the voices of those historically subjugated, and the affirmation and visibility of entangled interracial histories.

TABLE 3.1  Group Discussion on Afrikaans and Afrikaaps Original (in English and Afrikaaps)

Translation (by author)

1. Monox: I’m scared to speak like I really do, because, even when I got to college and stuff, you know. And I spoke like I did. I got like looks and stuff. Like. My Afrikaans isn’t as nice as Jits’, you know. 2. Group: [laughs] 3. Jitsvinger: Wat mien djy?

What do you mean?

4. Monox: Nou moen djy wiet nou gat ek in ’n klaskamer waa Engels die hooftaal is. Nou my Engels is nie soe glad ie, vestaan djy. En my, my, my tone en die way ek praat is op ’n relax buzz man. Nou sê die juffrou vi my, “You must try . . . didn’t you go for like speech therapy?”

Now you need to know I go into a classroom and English is the main language. Now my English is not as smooth, you understand. And my tone, my tone and the way I speak is on a relax buzz man. Then the teacher tells me, “You must try . . . didn’t you go for like speech therapy?”

5. Group: [laughs] 6. Monox: Nai ek praat ie ’n lien. Ek praat nie. Ek lieg nie, nuh.

No, I’m not lying. I’m not lying. I don’t lie, okay.

7. Catherine: Watter moedertaal was sy?

What was her mother tongue?

8. Monox: Sy’s ’n Indian. Sy vir my sê.

She’s an Indian. And she wanted to tell me.

9. Group: [laughs] 10. Emile: We inhibit ourselves from speaking because we were taught that how we speak is not good enough to be spoken. And it’s our parents and everyone else. 11. Janine: So now, because I don’t speak proper Afrikaans enough, I also don’t speak proper English enough. It’s like you really mixed up man. And I really mix Afrikaans and Ingels (English) as ek (if I) Ingels (laugh!) 12. Kyle: I also would like to say, in terms of the music, that’s the only thing I can really talk about. But if we can all really keep a, a, a basis of and of African consciousness in the sound that we bring. It’s really African consciousness in many ways. It’s legalizing African sound.

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The pure and polished pedigree of Afrikaans’ lineage from Dutch is replaced with the turbulent emergence of a “hybrid” language, and the imprint of many voices is captured in the multivocality of the Afrikaaps performance. This re-imagination of Afrikaans as Afrikaaps simultaneously captures a different sense of language, one that structures relationships between speech practices and speakers in nonhierarchical terms, and that acknowledges linguistic encounters as sites of struggle and vulnerability. There is an outpouring of ecstasy of liberation, dignity, autonomy, agency, and inclusivity in Afrikaans, as one voice after the other tells its story of Afrikaans in the documentary, morphing Afrikaans into a vision of Afrikaaps. Moreover, the documentary celebrates a linguistic reconnect of self and language through Afrikaaps, as selves are refigured and a new, vocal, political voice emerges that is reclaiming ways of speaking deeply entwined with alternative thinking of what it means to be a speaker of Afrikaans today. For example, in one scene of the documentary (Table 3.19) a group discussion about the hegemony of Afrikaans and the potential Afrikaaps by the actors, musicians, and Hip Hop artists demonstrate the fraught relationship historically racialized speakers have with Afrikaans, and the stereotypes attached to speaking with an Afrikaans accent and being perceived as intelligible through Afrikaans. In this discussion, it is clear members of the Afrikaaps play grapple with speaking Afrikaans differently by comparing the way they speak to how others speak. In particular, Monox reflects on how he has always felt trepidation when he had to speak Afrikaans, especially at college. His anxiety is amplified as a pathology when he enters the classroom, especially where English is the main language of communication. His reflection of the teacher’s assessment of his Afrikaans, such as the pronouns djy (jy in Standard Afrikaans and you in English), contractions such as liegie (lieg nie in Standard Afrikaans and not lying in English), phonologically transformed such as soe (so in Standard Afrikaans and like in English), and non-rhoticized words such as vi (vir in Standard Afrikaans and for in English)—asking whether he went for speech therapy, however good her intentions—is a painful reminder of the firm hold racist language ideologies has on historically racialized bodies such as his, especially those speaking a marginalized language variety. Although his reflection elicits laughter, in his own way, Monox tries to save face by arguing that his teacher could not judge his Afrikaans as authentically as his peers because she is Indian and potentially struggles with the same pathology as his: speaking Afrikaans with an accent. Emile, however, points out that in spite of issues of accent and the pathology of speaking a marginalized variety of Afrikaans, in the end, it is how we are socialized into language by our parents and the greater community. The emphases on an alternative politics of language, advancing a campaign (for instance, through theatre) for the reinvention of language, revisiting the creole histories of language, and providing an inclusive narrative of language origins and development, comprise a form of multilingual activism that goes to the heart of what it means to act out LC. Afrikaaps as a play and a documentary mediate agency and voice for multilingual speakers as it should be in a transformative South Africa. What is clear from the group interaction scene analyzed above is the need to develop respect in language (Stroud 2018, 37), on the one hand. This is often the key to going beyond common ground and toward the formation of new socialities and new registers (styles) of hope, relationality and interculturality (see Stroud and Williams 2017), but also a strategy against linguistic discrimination. On the other hand, the group interaction also reveals that the meta-reflection on the difficulty with Afrikaans or being in Afrikaans has to do with actively engaging discourses of mutuality, relationality, and diversity. In other words,

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throughout the play, the documentary and the interaction, activists such as Monox and Emile critically rethink what is meant by language use and language socialization, key tenets in not only charting a transformative understanding of citizenship but ways and means to shift “the location of agency and voice” (Stroud 2018, 23). Both are racialized speakers socialized into a racialized history that compels them to redefine what a language is, not in what it denotes in the here and now, but what it indexes for the future emancipation and empowerment of Afrikaaps speakers. At the same, Janine reflects how she endures an ontological struggle and refashioning where it concerns a remixed sense of self in the mixing of English and Afrikaans, while Kyle (the pianist) reflects on the legalizing of the African consciousness through Afrikaaps music and soundscape, an equally weighty interpretation and critique of Afrikaans and “in thinking about new, future orderings of speakers and languages . . . by building an inclusiveness of voice in ways that repair and rejuvenate relationships to self and others” (Stroud 2018, 35); all acts of LC.

Afrikaaps in Media, Poetics, and Commodification Since the staging of the Afrikaaps play and the subsequent circulation of the documentary across various media, one central message comes across: Afrikaaps is the “language” of restoration, reconciliation, and reinvention for Afrikaans. Afrikaaps activism is now well known in some quarters of the South African academy, the public mainstream, and social media. On the one hand, it has inspired new poetics of an inclusive voice, but on the other hand. it has also been minimized through cultural appropriation and turned to profit by commodification. An investigation of newspaper headlines on Afrikaaps over the last few years reveals that there has been a steady uptake and representation of Afrikaaps in mainstream media. In one way, most newspaper headlines represent it as a dialect of Afrikaans, as an act of reclaiming Afrikaans, as an effort to decolonize Afrikaans, and as the advancing of a local perspective on what a language should be. Thus, the media has correctly mediatized what the Afrikaaps language movement is about, but the companies and individuals that have commodified the label and speech practices associated with Afrikaaps continue to turn a profit, at the expense of the movement. A first case in point concerns the company Vannie Kaap (From the Cape), for example. Vannie Kaap is a company selling products that commodify the language, lived experience and cultural sayings of Cape Coloured people. Recently, the company published a video of a poem entitled “R.I.P. Kaaps” on YouTube,10 shared many times over on social media sites such as Facebook, celebrating the death of Kaaps11 and the birth of Afrikaaps. The YouTube video, recorded as a performance of a Public Service Announcement (PSA), seeks to bring us closer to consider the implications of the reinvention of Afrikaans, and of course Kaaps, but at the same time how to accept that a new generation of historically racialized Afrikaans speakers (young speakers) have already accepted that Afrikaaps will be the “language” that best represents them in a non-racial, democratic South Africa. The poem/PSA is about the erosion of injurious ideologies that remains with Afrikaans. But it also celebrates Afrikaaps as the renewed form of Kaaps at the level of the Afrikaans language community (at large), and at the individual level where it may be a reality that finally there will be a loss and decline of the negative connotations and myths associated with speaking certain racialized and marginalized forms of Afrikaans. In the video, we hear the performer call out to so-called colored speakers of Afrikaaps to bear witness with him and declare that Afrikaaps is not a kombuis ((kitchen)) language,

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but a language that so-called colored men and women built the whole house of Afrikaans with: Djytie hele blerrie huis gebou (You built the entire bloody house). The performer rails against the stereotype that although there are eleven other official languages, Afrikaaps is seen as foolish, but that in spite of this, the so-called colored men and women should raise their voices and push aside the laughter of others. Instead, so-called colored speakers of Afrikaaps should reaffirm the unique expressions in Afrikaaps such as djy (you), rerag (really), wietie (don’t know), and mirrag (good day, to greet), and to continue to use it, and say it with meaning. Although the poem is well mediatized and executed, the intended goal of the company Vannie Kaap is to revalue the pride speakers of Afrikaaps have in Afrikaaps and turn it into a profit. It is a business that has gained a reputation for selling pride in language and turning a profit on the sociocultural-linguistic practices of so-called colored speakers in Cape Town, without the burden of transforming the lives of those speakers. The company has also used in this instance an animator to wax lyrically about the death of Kaaps and the rise of Afrikaaps, and through clever tonality and backtrack with pride-inspiring keyboard modulations to deceive speakers of Afrikaaps, to bring across the message that Vannie Kaap is a company that supports the future of Afrikaaps; yet it is only in it for the money. The second example is a song from the Afrikaans pop album Ons Klank (Our Sound) entitled, “Afrikaaps.” Composed by Nadia Louw, a well-known pop star in the Afrikaans music community, and published in 2018 and further shared on social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube,12 the song presents a modernist, multicultural interpretation of Afrikaaps, but not written and performed in Afrikaaps. An exercise in linguistic and cultural appropriation with lyrics set to a nursery rhyme-like instrumental, the song is the direct opposite of the original Afrikaaps song, “Ek is Afrikaaps”13 (“I am Afrikaaps”), performed by the original Afrikaaps cast for the staging of the play. Instead, “Afrikaaps” by Louw celebrates Die Kaap (The Cape) as a place where everybody speaks Afrikaaps—a modern melting pot of diverse voices of different colors and sounds. For example, in the refrain of the song, the artist celebrates a form of Afrikaaps diversity without Afrikaaps diversity at the linguistic level, that is, the lyrics are all in a near-standard form of Afrikaans. The lyrics reference the origins of Afrikaaps—So uie aan die Kaap (It belongs ot the Cape), that it is different because when you hear it Die kommer role en die oe rek (Concerns may be and eyes may stretch), and that you can hear it especially in homes and on the street, and that it is also known as Kaaps Afrikaans (reinforcing the idea that Afrikaaps remains a variety of Afrikaans). In comparison, the song Ek is Afrikaaps (see Table 3.2) performed in the play celebrates the origins story of Afrikaans, its turbulent history of making, the formation of Afrikaaps, and what it means for present-day speakers to use it in democratic South Africa. Here is Monox performing the opening stanzas: Here, Monox sings of the origins of Afrikaans in migration and creole entanglements, a language with roots stretching from Zanzibar and Dar Es Salaam, with important milestones celebrated in the ghoema song. The ghoema harks back to the musical culture of the seventeenth-century Malay Slaves and was a celebration of their being granted freedom in 1834; to celebrate their freedom, they would march in groups in central Cape Town every year. Monox draws attention to how one effect of cycles of disruption, reformation, and juxtaposition is that no single group of speakers can lay claim to ownership or authenticity of the language, as successive and layered encounters and entanglements of speakers have historically contributed to the rhizomatic character

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of Afrikaans today. In addition, throughout his performance, he uses typical features of Afrikaaps, words that have been lexico-phonologically transformed by Afrikaaps speakers from English, standard Afrikaans, and Khoi-Afrikaans: words such as numbe (number), Innie (in the), oek (also), dai (that), nogge (another); final consonant deletion of the rhotic /r/ in words such as hie (here), daa (there), lee (learn), wee (again), kee (try); and the use of first and third personal pronouns such djy (you) and brasse (friends).

TABLE 3.2  Monox Performing His Lyrics for “Ek is Afrikaaps” Original (Afrikaaps)

Translation (by author)

  1. Ek is!   2. ’n numbe met ’n storie ou pel   3. Van hoe my mense hulle feelings en geheime vertel   4. Ek was gebore daa in Europe met ’n ander taal   5. Innie Kaap was hie gekap met ’n creole style   6. Ek is oek baie gesange met ’n ghoema sang   7. Vat jou van Zanzibar en Dar Es Salaam   8. Dutch Sailor Boy   9. Wat sing djy daa? 10. Sal jy mind as ek vir jou ’n klein vragie vra 11. Nou sing dai song gou wee, en dan ’n nogge kee 12. Nou kan ek mos al my brasse dai number lee 13. En oor ’n uur of twee sal ons dai number ken 14. En met n smiiile sing ons dit now and then

  1. I am!   2. I’m a number with a story old pal   3. About how people talk about their feelings and secrets   4. I was born in Europe with a different language   5. But in Cape Town I was produced with a creole style   6. I’ve been sung a lot with a ghoema song   7. I take your hand from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam   8. Dutch Sailor Boy   9. What are you singing? 10. Do you mind if I ask you a question 11. Now sing that song again, and then again 12. Now I can teach all my brothers that song 13. Over an hour or two well know that song 14. We’ll sing that song

In an attempt to appropriate the emancipatory discourse of the movement, the song by Louw infantilizes speakers of Afrikaaps and the gains made by Afrikaaps activists. Although it celebrates the speakers of this new variety, it fails to comprehensively represent the authentic Afrikaaps linguistic experience (poetically). The fact that no black or colored speakers or performers of Afrikaaps feature or are sampled in the song demonstrates the freedom with which the artist had appropriated and commodified what is held near and dear in Afrikaaps: pride in language (compare Duchene and Heller 2012). In less than a few minutes, the activists are priced out of participation in an Afrikaans music and linguistic market (a la Bourdieu 1993) without consent, and as a consequence their symbolic pride in Afrikaaps is wholly disregarded. The refrain of the song provides a distorted image of the linguistic landscape, interactions, performances, and practices of Afrikaaps speakers. The artist, rather than tap into the rich style of Afrikaaps—by featuring actual Afrikaaps artists or speakers or samples—generalizes the particular spatial, linguistic, and cultural experiences of Afrikaaps speakers to all speakers living in the greater Cape (disregarding the rural routes and roots of Afrikaaps, and other areas where it is heard and spoken in South Africa).

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Unlike the appropriation and commodification practices of Vannie Kaap described above, where we find the actual recognition and use of Afrikaaps, the artist Louw has minimized the agency and voice of not only the original cast of Afrikaaps but its speakers too. The two examples above represent what happens when “conditions of diversity” advanced by language activists for the cause of social and linguistic justice are appropriated and commodified for profit, rather than the promotion of pride in Afrikaaps. The Afrikaaps movement provides the tenets for how to agitate for restorative linguistic justice and reconciliation, but in both cases of appropriation when the symbolic earnings for restorative justice are traded away by Vannie Kaap and artist Nadio Louw, it eventually minimizes the impact of the movement. Vannie Kaap and artist Nadia Louw may argue that in a neoliberal, free-market context they have the right to appropriation, and that they have their rights to market commodified versions of “linguistic liberation,” with the former company earning on the sale of products branded with Afrikaaps sayings and the latter with a song for sale on audio purchasing sites, but we should be clear that neither ultimately has a serious investment in the corrective social and linguistic justice for speakers of Afrikaaps. Instead, their capitalist manoeuvres, however well-intentioned, seek to compromise Afrikaaps acts of LC at a sensitive time in the social transformation of a becoming nonracial South Africa where access to rights, success, and equality could make a material difference to historically marginalized speakers of Afrikaans.

CONCLUSIONS The Afrikaaps activism points to reclaiming ownership and authority over Afrikaans, about doing and thinking language “otherwise,” and what it means to be an Afrikaans speaker in the new South Africa. This example of multilingual activism resonates with other instances of linguistic and social justice cases in many peripheral contexts around the world, where there is a groundswell of resistance to centrist and neoliberal/colonial replications of languages and selves (compare for example Avineri et al. 2019). In all the examples of Afrikaaps analyzed above, an alternative politics of voice is emphasized (1) that explicitly points to the mainstreaming of racialized citizens’ voices and their languages; (2) that supports the recognition of racialized citizens who speak a variety of Afrikaans other than the hegemonic variety, and that such citizens be active contributors to defining multilingualism from the bottom up; (3) realizes the politics of multilingualism as tied to voice is changing rapidly in the new South Africa and that it is young multilingual speakers who are redefining the terms and conditions under which we think a language is created; and (4) that understands that the link to forms and functions to create new types of voices are not clearly defined because linguistic borders (urban versus rural) as is clear from the case of Afrikaaps. In conclusion, we see LC manifest as events/moments in the way Afrikaaps is represented by the speakers across performance, genre, and media. These events/moments are linked strongly to acts of agency, voice, and participation and the reconceptualization of racialized selves by Afrikaaps speakers caught up in the matrices of Afrikaans power and hegemony that refuses linguistic justice. What acts of LC teach us is that re-appropriations of language by communities of speakers on the periphery often involve (and evolve) understandings of language, authenticity and ownership that diverge significantly from more institutionalized discourses on language.

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NOTES 1. In this chapter, I provide a more detailed discussion Afrikaaps as a reinvented label of Kaaps, one of the oldest languages in South Africa that creolized at the Cape through contact with Khoi speakers who spoke a localized variety of Dutch, out of which Afrikaans too developed. Afrikaaps is also a label that attempts to do away with the racial label, Gamtaal, that came to define so-called colored speakers of Afrikaans. 2. By agency, I mean the ability to bring about institutional change. 3. Voice is defined here as the ability to make oneself heard. 4. Colored is a racial epithet created in colonial times, and used further in apartheid to describe such citizens as not quite white nor strictly black or African. 5. Gelyke Kanse and Others v Chairperson of the Senate of the University of Stellenbosch and Others. Download full Court Judgement here: http://www​.saflii​.org​/za​/cases​/ZACC​ /2019​/38​.html​?fbclid​=IwAR160Ja​-sTA​2DVG​1fAB​cqTw​dSZyIHhGM​_dPyc4uBGz5Is​ _7UE0QdGMVuDRQ (Accessed 30 January 2020) 6. The cast of the theatre play Afrikaaps included notable Hip Hop pioneer Emile YX?, poet Blaq Pearl, rapper Jitsvinger, musician Monix, b-boy Bliksemstraal, Jethro, and Kyle. 7. Listen for example to Never Again by Prophets of da City, available at: https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=vhN​_GzCbH0I 8. POC become the first rap group from Cape Town to secure a recording deal with a major label, producing albums such as Our World (1990) and significantly Age of Truth (1993) and Universal Souljaz (1995). 9. The original transcript is given on the left and the translation (by the author) is given no the right. All Afrikaaps words and phrases in the original are italicized. English words remain unitalicized. And in the case where the original transcript is in Afrikaans, I have underlined all such words and phrases. 10. RIP Kaaps PSA/Poem available at: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=J5R7IySRXHo (accessed 30th January 2020). The first portion of the video is in English, and it is recorded and published as such to reach a wider audience. The second portion of the video is in Afrikaaps. 11. Kaaps is typically understood to be a variety of Afrikaans. Afrikaaps is similar to Kaaps in syntax, phonology, but spoken (mainly) by different generations of so-called colored speakers and other speakers in South Africa and beyond. 12. Afrikaaps song by Louw available at: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=2bJ9BzgYtsc (accessed 30th January 2020) 13. Ek is Afrikaaps song available at: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=y19JkDTggLk (accessed January 3, 2020)

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Heugh, K. (1989), “Threads deur taal en stryd, en stryd in die algemeen in Suid Afrika.” Language Projects Review, 4 (2): 14–15. Isin, E. F. (2009), “Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen.” Subjectivity, 29: 267–388. Kamwangamalu, N. M. (2004), “The Language Policy/Language Economices Interface and Mother-Tongue in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Language Problem & Language Planning, 28 (2): 131–46. Kriel, M. (2010), “Towards an Alternative Take on Language Activism: A South African Case Study.” Language Matters, 41 (2): 278–93. Kriel, M. (2013), Loose Continuity: The Post-Apartheid Afrikaans Language Movement in Historical Perspective, Unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science. Kriel, M. (2018), “Chronicle of a Creole: The Ironic History of Afrikaans.” In J. Knorr and W. T. Filho (eds.), Creolization and Pidginization in Contexts of Postcolonial Diversity: Language, Culture, Identity, 132–57, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lowe, S. M., and S. E. Merry (2010), “Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2.” Currently Anthropology, 51 (S2): S203–26. McCormick, K. (2002), Language in Cape Town’s District Six, New York: Oxford University Press. McCormick, K. (2008), “Cape Flats English: Morphology and Syntax.” In R. Mesthrie (ed.), Varieties of English: Africa, South and Southeast Asia, 521–534, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Mellet, T. (2020), The Lie of 1652: A Decolonised History of Land, Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers Ltd. Moses, W. (2019), In the Mix: Expressions of Coloured Identity in Cape Town-Based Hip Hop, PhD Dissertation, Harvard University. Small, A. (1972), “Adam Small in Gesprek met Ronnie Belcher.” In Gesprekke met Skrywers, vol. 2, 93–105, Kaapstad, Johannesburg: Tafelberg-Uitgewers. Small, A. (1987), Kitaar my kruis, Derde, Hersiene Uitgawe, Pretoria: HUAM-Literer. Stroud, C. (2009), “A Postliberal Critique of Language Rights: Toward a Politics of Language for a Linguistics of Contact.” In John E. Petrovic (ed.), International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice and Controversy, 191–218, Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Stroud, C. (2010), “Towards a Postliberal Theory of Citizenship.” In J. E. Petrovic (ed.), International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice and Controversy, 191–218, New York: Information Age Publishing. Stroud, C. (2018), “Linguistic Citizenship.” In L. Lim, C. Stroud, and L. Wee (eds.), The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change, 17–39, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stroud, C., and K. Heugh (2003), “Linguistic Human Rights and Linguistic Citizenship.” In D. Patrick and J. Freeland (eds.), Language Rights and Language Survival: A Sociolinguistic Exploration, 191–218, Manchester: St Jerome. Stroud, C., and Q. Williams (2017), “Multilingualism as Utopia: Fashioning Non-Racial Selves.” AILA Review, 30: 165–86. Warner, R. (2007), Battles Over Borders: Hip Hop and the Politics and Poetics of Race and Place in the New South Africa, Unpublished PhD dissertation, York University, Toronto.

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Warner, R. (2011), “Colouring the Cape Problem Space: A Hip Hop Identity of Passions.” In P. K. Saucier (ed.), Native Tongue: An African Hip Hop Reader, 105–46, Cape Town: African World Press. Williams, Q. (2016), Afrikaaps Is an Act of Reclamation, Johannesburg: Mail&Guardian. Williams, Q. (2018), “Multilingual Activism in South African Hip Hop.” Journal of World Popular Music, 5 (1): 31–49. Williams, Q., and C. Stroud (2015), “Linguistic Citizenship: Language and Politics in Postnational Modernities.” In T. Milani (ed.), Language and Citizenship: Broadening the Agenda, 89–112, Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins Publishing Company.

Chapter 4

Colonialism and Language Politics in Puerto Rico SHERINA FELICIANO-SANTOS

Issues of language and social justice often hinge on determining rights around speech, be it the language medium, the spaces, or the authority attributed to different varieties of speech and speakers. Processes of colonization often involve some form of linguistic regimentation and imposition to demarcate the forms of access, authority, and legitimacy available to the newly colonized subjects under the guise of belonging and potential citizenship. I discuss two cases to illustrate how Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has become an index and icon of Puerto Rican authenticity and belonging both (1) within widespread discourses and national language policy, as well as (2) understood as a form of Indigenous heritage for some Taíno/Boricua activists in the island. First, I consider public educational policy in Puerto Rico and how it has anchored language ideologies regarding Spanish and English varieties. Second, I consider how these ideologies are reflected in Puerto Rican Taino/Boricua activists’ language and heritage efforts. Taken together, these different cases illustrate the ways that ideologies that position a colonial language such as Spanish as the linguistic heritage of Puerto Rico reverberate in marking inclusion, exclusion, and solidarity among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Puerto Ricans. While Spanish is a colonial language, many Puerto Ricans’ allegiance to Spanish as a heritage language can be understood in the context of the US military occupation and annexation of Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century and language policies in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century. The positioning of Spanish as the language of Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century allows us to understand how activists on behalf of Taíno/Boricua Indigeneity within Puerto Rico and local Puerto Rican policymakers both position Puerto Rican varieties of Spanish as a form of linguistic heritage that confers inclusion, legitimacy, and authority upon its speakers. From this ideological position and following Irvine and Gal’s discussion of recursivity (Gal and Irvine 2019), I trace how embedded within the ideology of speaking Spanish as conferring greater Puerto Rican legitimacy than speaking English, specific varieties of PRS and Puerto Rican English (PRE), are similarly coded as more local and thus more authoritative and legitimate varieties associated with Puerto Ricanness. This ideology permeates different layers of ethnoracial identity in Puerto Rico, such that we can see its effects both in Taíno/ Boricua activism and in island-wide educational language policies. To unpack the interests, contexts, and conditions that have positioned PRS as a form of linguistic heritage to be protected from foreign intrusions, the two cases I consider show how debates about Spanish and English situate different actors as more or less

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authentically and authoritatively Puerto Rican or Taíno/Boricua and as anchoring Puerto Rican policies and programs. These cases suggest that political struggles over language autonomy in Puerto Rico have collapsed ideas about the imposition of the English language and English as a foreign language onto PRE speakers. To contextualize language ideologies in Puerto Rico, I briefly summarize the complex histories of language policies and politics on the island and then look at how these politics reverberate in the context of class, geographical, and racialized distinctions within the island in the contemporary era.

LANGUAGE AND COLONIALISM IN PUERTO RICO In Puerto Rico, the circulating language ideologies and discourses around language reflect the consecutive Spanish and US colonization of the Island. Forms of linguistic activism in Puerto Rico around Spanish are best understood within the context of US colonization. The legacy of Puerto Rico’s successive colonialisms and English language imposition in the first half of the twentieth century is a strong ethnolinguistic nationalism that has affected many island-based Puerto Ricans’, Indigenous and not, reactions to language and diasporic non-Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans. Recent research on Puerto Rican language attitudes has highlighted how language in Puerto Rico has been a site of political struggle since, at least, Spanish colonization started in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and Spanish was positioned as the de facto language of the Island since the sixteenth century (Gonzalez Rivera and Ortiz Lopez 2018). Under the US rule, an essentialized PRS became the banner of Puerto Rican nationalist identity by contrast with the image of an external and imperial American English. School language medium policies became sites of struggle over English and Spanish. Starting in the early 1900s schools became positioned as sites of cultural and linguistic resistance (López Yustos 1997; Negrón de Montilla 1975; Solís 1994). In a 1927 Teacher’s Association meeting, schools were proposed as agents of “Puerto Ricanization” in response to efforts made by US appointed governors to make English the medium of instruction on the island. It was not until 1949 under the governance of the first popularly elected Puerto Rican governor, Luis Muñoz Marin, that PRS was again officially made the medium of instruction at all grade levels and English was permanently relegated to being taught as a foreign language in all grades (Parker and Parker 1978, 15). Since the desire to Americanize Puerto Ricans via English language imposition had overshadowed all other instructional aims during the past fifty years, Muñoz Marin reorganized the educational system and instituted an educational framework based in an ideology of cultural nationalism (Duany 2002) celebrating Spanish as a site of resistance to US Americanization. Mid-century language policies solidified Spanish as a site of cultural nationalism that effectively bolstered Puerto Rico’s colonial political and economic relationship with the United States by assuaging concerns about sociocultural assimilation (Kerkhof 2001). Speaking and teaching English in public schools was instead positioned as a threat to Puerto Ricanness (Carroll 2016). While Spanish is a colonial language, it has also been the recorded language of literature, archives, and institutions within Puerto Rico for centuries. Puerto Rican philologist Manuel Álvarez Nazario has extensively documented the origins of PRS with a focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He argues that the Spanish crown had an early interest in religiously converting the Indigenous Antillean population to Christianity and Spanish culture and language (18). The effect of such efforts, he argues, is a linguistic and cultural genocide of the Indigenous Taíno by the end of the sixteenth century (19). The development of PRS varieties, he argues, was not only impacted by the varieties

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of Spanish spoken by early settlers but also by the inclusion of many Taíno nouns for place-names and objects. He describes how the early forced migration and enslavement of largely West African speakers of Niger-Congo languages and the seventeenth century arrival and settlement of maroon communities from other French, English, Danish, and Dutch Caribbean islands also added to the PRS vocabulary (22-3). Within the context of current Puerto Rico, different PRS language varieties are recognized, often associated with different regional, generational, and class markers. Rural Puerto Rican Spanish (RPRS) varieties, sometimes called Jíbaro Spanish, are salient and recognizable on the Island due to the particularity of the vocabulary, prosody, pronunciation of specific sounds, and grammatical structures as compared to other PRS varieties (Álvarez Nazario 1982; Díaz Montero 2000; Holmquist 2005; Navarro Tomás 1966). The rural varieties of Spanish are often associated with the figure of the Jíbaro, who is an archetype of Puerto Ricanness, both celebrated in its model form and used as motive for insult in its grounded, realized shape. As a model of Puerto Ricanness, the Jíbaro often represents the normative values of a moral, proud, agricultural, Spanish-speaking, practical, and authentic Puerto Rican. In practice, it could also be used to insult a person as poor, backward, unfashionable, and uneducated. The tension in this duality is reflected in evaluations of Jíbaro Spanish—at once authentic and backward, legitimate and institutionally deauthorized, a reliable index of the past, understood as less touched by contemporary educational pressures toward more “correct” varieties of Spanish.

MIGRATION BETWEEN PUERTO RICO AND THE UNITED STATES Puerto Ricans’ status as US citizens has also enabled movement between the two countries (Duany 2002; J. Flores 2000; Guerra 1998; Morris 1995; Jiménez Roman and Flores 2009). Waves of Puerto Rican migration to the US were accelerated with the launch of state-sponsored contract labor programs promoted by the US Department of Labor after World War II (Whalen 2001). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholars began to note the influx of migrants returning to the island from the United States among those “returning” were students who may have been arriving to the island for the first time and did not speak Spanish fluently or at all. For a long time, the approach to these students in schools was to have them repeat a grade, with no other linguistic accommodations as they transitioned into Spanish-medium schooling. Part of the reason for this non-accommodation for the population of non-Spanish speaking students was in large part due to the politicization of the language issue in Puerto Rico. For example, in 1993, the former Puerto Rican Secretary of Education Celeste Benítez of the Popular Democratic Party (pro-commonwealth) responded to the efforts of then governor Pedro Roselló of the New Progressive Party (pro-statehood) to increase the usage of English in the public school by declaring in Spanish, “Spanish is an integral part of our national identity”1 in the island’s most widely read newspaper El Nuevo Día (Benítez 1993). Another political figure of the Puerto Rican Independence Party replied to these efforts, also in Spanish, in a similar vein: “English, is for Puerto Ricans a foreign language and, one, I repeat, difficult to assimilate” (Santori 1997). In fact, when this educational policy measure was presented, the Teachers Association announced that they “would refuse to teach in English” (Navarro 1997). These statements exemplify what have historically been the most widespread political discourses on Puerto Rican national identity as related to language: that the commonality of Puerto Rican national identity hinges on Spanish

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and its use demarcates an alignment between Puerto Ricans and their national identity as being anchored in speaking Spanish (Kerkhof 2001). Return migrants have historically presented a challenge to the nationalist discourse on the island (263–265). Most debates regarding English and Spanish in Puerto Rico have assumed that everyone in Puerto Rico (not just should but do) speaks Spanish and by implication that English is a foreign or secondary language needed for pragmatic purposes such as employment or for political reasons such as US annexation. This discursive political polarization of Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Ricans has erased non-Spanish speaking, self-identifying Puerto Ricans living, studying, and working on or off the Island (also diminishing class, race, and cultural differences and orientations). This has meant that at a public policy level, any efforts made regarding language curricula in schools until at least the early 2000s were aimed at how much English should be taught to the supposedly monolingual Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican student. For example, in the proceedings of a 1996 symposium “Rethinking English in Puerto Rico,” various articles addressing the issue of language in the classroom seemed to assume that the classroom learner was a monolingual Spanish speaker (Fiet, Pousada, and Haiman 1996). While a few essays addressed “Nuyorican” students in the US context, work like Ana Celia Zentella’s (1990) findings from her 1983 study of forty-five high-school return migrants from the United States attending public schools in the Puerto Rican metropolitan area and Erna Kerkhof’s (2001) 1993–1994 study of a lower-class Mayagüez neighborhood stand out in their attention to how return-migrant students have been ostracized and othered within their schools largely based on their migration experience and language abilities. More recently, an attitudinal study published in 2019 showed how Puerto Rican youth responded to different varieties of English and Spanish, as well as to varieties that draw on both English and Spanish according to their gendered, classed, and regional backgrounds (Guzzardo Tamargo et al. 2019). The researchers found that listeners focused on accent to determine the assumed Puerto Ricanness of speakers. Among metropolitan area speakers, there was a bias toward assuming that rural speakers were less likely to speak English. Additionally, code-switching varieties were more likely to be associated with persons of higher-class statuses and from metropolitan areas. Among the speakers in the study, ideologies seem to have shifted from interpreting English as indexical of foreignness to interpreting it as indexical of cosmopolitanism and urbanness in the context of bilingual Puerto Ricans. However, within this ideology, rural varieties of Spanish continued to index authentic and genuine Puerto Ricanness, indicated by the assumption that these speakers were less likely to speak English. While these attitudinal studies track shifts in assumptions about English as foreign, the island’s widespread language ideologies seemed to continue to posit Spanish as an emblem of genuine Puerto Ricanness. The recursively transforming ideologies indicated by these attitudinal studies still excluded non-Spanish dominant Puerto Ricans because they were positioned as not speaking sufficient Spanish to anchor them as being from the island, whereas cosmopolitan and more highly socioeconomically positioned English speakers were still understood as being from the island because their Spanish code-switching varieties still allowed them to index their Puerto Ricanness. Work on the reception and talk of return-migrant students has usually looked at this phenomenon through the lens of clashing identities and explicit/conscious in and out-grouping schemes between the islander and return population (Clachar 1997; Lorenzo-Hernandez 1999; Walsh 1998, 1990), while others have focused on code-switching behavior as it relates to the negotiation of the power structures that

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migrants live in (Urciuoli 1996). Still others have concentrated on how structural constraints in the educational system affect the possibility of attending to the problem of return-migrant inclusion (Beléndez Soltero 1994). Long-standing educational policy regarding language (of) instruction in schools, has historically reflected a widespread ideology that positions Spanish as the language through which to be Puerto Rican and express Puerto Ricanness (Zentella 1990) whereas English has been described as the language of the United States (Aranda 2006). Negative perceptions of English in Puerto Rico have traditionally limited the opportunities public school students have for learning English and marginalized primarily English-speaking Puerto Ricans (Nieto 1998; 2000). Like recent work that considers the particularities of language, education, and belonging (Davis 2015; García-Sánchez 2014; Reynolds and Chun 2013), the research discussed in this chapter reflects on the ways in which ideologies of linguistic belonging map onto ideas of locality, nationality, and interactional accommodation. My own interests in this topic are propelled by my experiences as a return migrant moving from Chicago to a small town in Puerto Rico in the late eighties. After having lived in a diasporic context where I was constantly reminded of my Puerto Ricanness by my family and by the institutions I encountered as a child, I experienced quite a shock when I started school in Puerto Rico and was called la americanita (the little American girl). At a young age, the complex entanglements of language and belonging in Puerto Rico were made explicit to me. While I spoke Spanish, I made many mistakes (idiomatic and otherwise) that indexed my non-localness to my classmates. This led to an interest in the ideologies of language that framed orientations to inclusion and exclusion vis-à-vis Spanish, English, and other languages in Puerto Rico. I draw on several sources to consider the complicated linguistic entanglements resulting from Puerto Rico’s colonial situation. I consider language attitudes in the context of my long-term research on Taino/Boricua mobilization in Puerto Rico alongside earlier work in the context of return migrants in Puerto Rican public schools. The research I draw on in this chapter among Taíno / Boricua largely took place in 2006–2008 and in 2018 and with largely the same people. The research focused on return migrants took place for shorter periods in 2001 and 2017, largely based on interviews and school observations of participating students, their teachers and administrators, and where possible their families. By looking at these two cases in tandem, my aim is to show the manifold impacts of Puerto Rican forms of ethnolinguistic nationalism that position PRS as a privileged index of local belonging, legitimacy, and authority on the island, as well as the recursive ideologies that develop as shifts in populations and political-economic contexts generate new pressures and linguistic investments for different actors.

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES AND RETURNMIGRANT STUDENTS In 2001, I conducted research on return-migrant youth in Puerto Rico in a public high school in the Western Central region (Feliciano-Santos 2002). The students I observed were recent migrants (1–5 years since they arrived to Puerto Rico from the United States). Some arrived with their families for quality of living reasons (“it’s safer in Puerto Rico” than NYC); for economic reasons such as job prospects; others moved with family members such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents for reasons including parents’ ability to care for them. The school was a medium sized high school in la “Isla”—the non-metropolitan area of the island, in the midwestern, non-coastal region, closer to

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the mountainous coffee zone than to the beach. In interviews, return-migrant students were asked questions about their experiences in Puerto Rico and were observed in the classroom setting. Teachers were also interviewed and asked about their experiences teaching return-migrant students. I was struck by the consistency with which teachers’ impressions revealed assumptions about the identity and belonging of return-migrant students. The following excerpts reflect the answers teachers offered to questions about their experience with Puerto Rican students who came from the United States. El problema es que como nosotros estamos acostumbrados a trabajar con grupos y ellos tienden a mantenerse aisladitos, hay que hablarles, velarles, es difícil. Especialmente en las clases de español e historia . . . No sabían cómo seguir las instrucciones. (The problem is that since we are used to working with groups and they tend to keep themselves isolated, we must talk to them, watch them, it is difficult. Especially in Spanish and history classes . . . They did not know how to follow instructions.) —Sandra, Physics teacher2 Estudiantes de Puerto Rico respetan más a la autoridad. (Students from Puerto Rico respect authority more.) —Pablo, Social Studies teacher Traen tradiciones y costumbres que chocan con las nuestras, tardan en adaptarse, traen estas creencias y chocan, y por eso tardan en adaptarse. Bueno, muchos de ellos, vienen con un language callejero, y ellos tienden a hablar como en las calles de Nueva York, [les falta] la cortesía con los adultos, la forma de vestir, hay diferencias. (They bring traditions and customs that collide with ours, they take time to adapt, they bring these beliefs and collide and that is why they take time to adapt. Well, a lot of them, they bring a street language, and they tend to talk like they do in the New York streets, [they lack] courteousness with adults, the way they dress, there are differences.) —Alberto, Math teacher There are several assumptions made about differences between the return-migrant students and, by implication, islander students. Teachers addressed forms of dress, talk, and behaviors. The teachers made implicit, deictically grounded assumptions about a nosotros (us) and ellos (them). The return migrant was portrayed as an assimilated maleducado (ill-mannered) American student, whereas the Puerto Rican student was depicted as educado (well-mannered), precisely within the moral binaries constructed in the Puerto Rican national discourse. This essentialized and somewhat cemented axis of politico-national identity is reified in this sort of talk and in how teachers interpret the behaviors of return-migrant students as deficient and problematic. In using the nosotros, teachers are presupposing that there is an “us” and a “them,” that they are different, that the “us” is a uniform entity, and that “they” keep themselves apart from the rest of the class. In my observations, however, students’ apparent inability to follow instructions was not a lack of respeto (respect), but often a product of not following the etiquette conventions of Spanish in Puerto Rico, such as knowing the difference between tú and usted (informal and formal you), being unable to understand teacher’s lessons in the classroom, or not knowing what was being said. Drawing on the concept of raciolinguistic ideologies, Flores

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and Rosa (2015) discuss how in the context of the United States, racialized students may be interpreted as deficient regardless of how much they attempt to meet the educational standards of “appropriateness.” Similarly, in the Puerto Rican context, students marked as returnees were often interpreted as misbehaving and deficient regardless of their motivations. Interviews with students revealed how they experienced struggles in adjusting to the classroom and disrupted teachers’ narratives regarding returning students “separating themselves” and being “misbehaved.” They expressed that understanding teachers in Spanish was difficult. Even when they spoke Spanish, they often only knew some phrases that they used with their families. One student that moved to Puerto Rico three years prior to the interview explained some of the challenges she had: Yeah. I spoke it, but I didn’t understand what I was saying. The most thing was “bendición” (asking for a blessing), “abuelita” (grandma), “te vas a caer” (you are going to fall). Like the stuff your parents would sometimes say, like “don’t sit there you’re gonna fall.” Or, “turn on the lights,” “turn it off,” or “go get this” or “go get that,” that’s about it. (Elizabeth, 16) There were also interactional and educational norms that were new and not understood by some students, which they expressed hindered them from obtaining clarification. Another student explained, also in English, some of the difficulties and misunderstandings he confronted when attempting to make a clarification in a class: Well like my social studies teacher, my social studies teacher at, uh, the other school . . . she . . . I’ll be raising my hand and asking her, and she has to tell me to ask the students and some of them don’t even know, don’t even know what they doing she be like, well you should’ve been paying attention. Well, I be paying attention my best, uh, I don’t understand when they talk so fast and then in Spanish, in Spanish. (Abelardo, 15) The students experience challenges both in their comprehension of the language of instruction and due to teacher attitudes toward them and their speech (not necessarily shared by all teachers and often a reflection of students speaking stigmatized varieties of both English and Spanish, when they spoke it). These interactional challenges are compounded by the effect of the institutional and ideological constraints already in place for these students and thus exaggerate the extent to which these students were allowed to be marginalized in the classroom. Return-migrant students were aware of such binarized differences, which deictically grounded their use of terms like “here” and “over/out there.” It’s nice here, but when I came here first, people didn’t accept me because of my clothes and the way I talk. —Raquel, 15 I guess I’m more interested over there, than what I am here. Because, here it’s more harder in Spanish than over there. —Elizabeth, 16 It’s been different, well, it’s different for me because, I have more opportunities here than I had in the U.S., over here, they [parents] gave a little bit more chance to do stuff. —Alberto, 17

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I can learn things, not just as much as over there. —Miguel, 17 Here, I don’t know. Some teachers, I don’t know. It’s okay. Because there are some teachers that actually help you, but there are some it’s like, I don’t know, probably, it’s like they don’t even care, they just explain it and that’s it. And that just, that just don’t do it. Out there, I had more help, I raised my hand, and a teacher would help me. —Raul, 18 Teachers here are very difficult. They are very different from teachers in the states. In a way, how can I put it? In the states, they do care, and here they pretty much don’t care. For me that is what it is. They won’t explain things, sometimes they won’t help, sometimes they do. Over there, in the U.S., they keep drilling you ‘til they get you to understand it. —Wilfredo, 15 These examples dichotomize each site, the speaker’s stance toward each, and their opinions regarding the differences contained within. What this “here” and “there” obfuscates is the variation inherent within these supposed umbrella identities that are being latched onto the “here” and “there.” The major discourses of belonging or not belonging as attached to Spanish and English have inundated the political decision-making process, the making of school policy, people’s language use, and how actions and talk are interpreted. And while teachers’ interpretations did not uniformly map onto the motivations contained within school policies and the nationalistic anti-assimilationist language ideologies of resistance that historically informed them, their uptake of student behavior still articulated with these ideologies in ways that allowed their institutional reproduction. The institutionalization of language difference was maintained through the erasure of the return-migrant student in policy-making processes that assumed students spoke Spanish and for whom English would be taught as a second language, which furthered the possibility that these students would not even be allowed to access the “competencies” in Spanish that would make them interpretable as “Puerto Rican” enough by local standards.3 While students were aware of the ethnolinguistic binary that effectively excluded them, they claimed their Puerto Ricanness while continuing to speak English, often expressing that they couldn’t wait to return to the United States.

LANGUAGE ATTITUDES AND BELONGING IN THE WAKE OF THE PUERTO RICAN DEBT CRISIS Puerto Rico’s recent debt and environmental crises have contributed to one of the largest recent out-migration waves from Puerto Rico to the United States. (Delerme 2014; Otterstrom and Tillman 2013; Velez 2017). As argued by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón in Aftershocks of Disaster (2019), the environmental disasters and debt crises in Puerto Rico have been the product of its colonial relationships and federal policies that limit the Puerto Rican government’s ability to manage its debt, leading to an increased cost of living on the island, a decrease in job growth opportunities, and frozen wages, making many people’s ability to find employment with a living wage on the island increasingly difficult. This migration has coincided with the recent restructuring, extreme budget cuts, and closures of Puerto Rican public schools. Recent studies (Domínguez-

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Rosado 2015) have argued that attitudes toward English are becoming more positive in Puerto Rico. Changes in the imagined futures of students, including the looming possibility of migration to the United States, have impacted youth attitudes toward English and institutional opportunities for learning English on the Island, shifting the younger generation’s ideologies of Puerto Ricanness to be more inclusive of speaking English. This shift stands in tension with prior ideologies of language as made apparent in my interviews with parents and teachers who express concern about the Spanish being spoken by Puerto Rican youth. These dynamic language attitudes and the imagined futures of youth in a changing educational and economic environment point to the potential for linguistic and national ideological changes. In 2012, then governor, a member of the pro-Statehood party, Luis Fortuño justified the need for more bilingual schools by arguing that a fully bilingual population would ease the island’s transition toward annexation as a state of the United States. This concern was reflective of the results of the 2010 census, where 71 percent of Puerto Ricans on the island stated that they did not feel they were fluent in English. However, following the tensions present in language policies in schools established since the early 1900s, the then vice president of the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico, María Meléndez, expressed that in Puerto Rico, English was not seen as a linguistic priority. Instead, she argued, people felt that the Spanish language is the one that needed to be prioritized and protected (Saiz 2012). A recent language medium policy in Puerto Rico was legislated through the Education Reform Law of Puerto Rico (Law 85-2018, as amended February 4, 2019), where the Department of Education stated public policy was to make sure that students were fluent in both English and Spanish “to have truly bilingual students” (3 L.P.R.A. § 9801a). The law established that each student has the right to communicate fluently in at least the two co-official languages of Puerto Rico, inclusive of students who were Spanish language learners who should expect reasonable accommodations in one of the official languages according to their level of communication in these (3 L.P.R.A. § 9809). In the spring of 2017, I visited and interviewed students from a high school in the same town from my previous fieldwork to gauge their language attitudes. For example, in an interview with incoming high school freshman Trixie (14) and her mom Isabel (34) in a library near the center of the town, I remarked on the increase of English-speaking youth I had been observing in schools and local malls the last few years. Trixie responded by discussing her dream to become a chef, but she had seen many restaurants close; so she is planning to train and obtain work in the United States first, returning to Puerto Rico when she has further established herself in the United States.4 Her mother added that she thought that things were different for her daughter than for “our” generation (Isabel graduated high school in 2001, I graduated high school in 1998). Her daughter and her friends felt pressure to plan for what seemed like an uncertain future and practising the English they learn in school with her peers was a practical exercise as much as it was also fun. She followed this insight, however, with a concern about her daughter’s writing skills. She explained how her daughter “doesn’t know how to add accents and her verb conjugations are bad.” Listening to her daughter speak to me in fluent Spanish during the interview, I asked if this was reflected in her speech at all. She nodded, “No, her speech is okay. It’s her writing. I am afraid that when she moves to the U.S., she will lose it.” This attitude of concern toward the role of Spanish for youth was echoed in an interview with another student’s mother, Miriam (36). Her concern was that the current generation of youth could speak Spanish but did not seem to be able to write

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it “appropriately.” Notably, the generation of parents I interviewed was in high school or college during the 2001 study, reflecting the language attitudes prevalent during their own schooling. While the attitude toward English seemed to be changing, I was curious as to the extent the change in attitude toward English was reflected in attitudes toward return migrants. I asked Trixie about her school and her thoughts about return migrants’ English. She explained that the English spoken by returnees was “diferente” (different), and that their Spanish was also “diferente.” Interested in the distinction she was making, I asked her to further clarify the difference to me: Lo que pasa es que ellos son como diferentes, más a lo suyo y no hablan español mucho. Yo hablo inglés con mis amistades, pero el español es como mi primer idioma. Ellos son como más diferentes siendo criados mayormente afuera. (What is happening is that they are like different, more toward their own things and they don’t speak Spanish much. I speak English with my friends, but Spanish is like my first language. They are like more different having been raised out there.) Speaking Spanish not only grounded her sense of growing up in Puerto Rico as opposed to the United States but also indicated for her a distinction between herself and returnees. At another high school in the metropolitan area, I noticed that while English was more widespread in the everyday life and communication of students in the school, the recently returned students were still, like they did during my observations in 2001, spending time among themselves. Flor (29), a teacher at the school, expressed the difference as follows: Es que, mira, ellos (returned migrants) son buenos, pero la verdad es que a veces como que no se acoplan y se van rápido porque no hay mucho que hacer en comparación a los sitios de donde vienen. Y lo del idioma es en serio, porque los de aca puede ser que hablen inglés, pero hablan español tambien, y pues ellos (the returnees) no hablan mucho español, y no es lo mismo. Pero, es que muchos de ellos no se quieren quedar tampoco, se terminan yendo. (It’s that, they, are good, but the truth is that sometimes like they don’t fit in, and they quickly leave because there is not a lot to do compared to the places they come from. And the language stuff is serious, because people from here may speak English, but they speak Spanish too, and well they don’t speak much Spanish, and it’s not the same. But it’s that many of them don’t want to stay either, and end up leaving.) Flor focuses on how return-migrant students do not learn Spanish because they know they will migrate again, and thus self-segregate. The institutional lack of accommodations for such students were not addressed in her analysis. An administrator who asked that I not record her but agreed to have me include her perspective explained that, in her opinion, while the schools are adjusting to the economic and political reality of migration through their English class offerings, the assumptions regarding local students being primarily Spanish speakers had not changed. Return students were accommodated at a few bilingual schools with Spanish and English courses, but in most schools, English was taught as a second language for students who may plan for futures that require them to migrate. Several students expressed that while they thought English was “cool,” and part of their knowledge base for interacting on social media and consuming popular culture, they and their friends assume that they might have to also know English to eventually get work.

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Aware of the economic crisis, they did not take for granted a future in which they may not have to migrate. Additionally, even if students decided to stay, many colleges in Puerto Rico had an expectation that students speak English and Spanish. Mazak and Carroll’s (2017) study of the relationship between university polices and classroom dynamics in Puerto Rico show examples of translanguaging in the classroom as students and their professors drew on both English and Spanish to communicate. The researchers found that while both languages were getting used in the classroom and considered of high prestige, ideologies attaching English to science and academia and Spanish to housekeeping tasks and community building were indexed in the teacher’s and students’ translanguaging practice. Again, while English was spoken within the classroom, the usage patterns reveal recursively nested ideologies of English as cosmopolitan and of Spanish as more local and authentic to community building. Overall, in the context of the economic crisis, island-born and raised Puerto Rican youth expressed that they were speaking English more, while their parents worried about their literacy in Spanish. While nonmigrant Puerto Rican youth’s attitudes toward English seemed to be more positive than what I had encountered in 2001, their attitudes toward returned migrants were still ambivalent. Students’ language attitudes revealed that ideologies that anchored Puerto Rican nationals belonging to speaking PRS remained.

SPANISH, LINGUISTIC BELONGING, AND TAINO/BORICUA LANGUAGE ACTIVISMS These forms of linguistic belonging anchored in PRS resonated in some of the forms of language reclamation and authorization that circulated among several Indigenous Taíno/ Boricua activists based in Puerto Rico as well. Given that several Taíno/Boricua activists are living and have grown up in the US diaspora, there might be a reason to think that Spanish, as a colonial language, would not be privileged as the language of interaction for Taíno/Boricua. However, the language ideologies and pressures toward migration to the United States that have developed in the context of Puerto Rican colonialism also have impacted Taíno/Boricua activists. Given that widespread and mainstream histories often have assumed the Taíno/Boricua population’s extinction and that Taino/Boricua languages are no longer intergenerationally transmitted, RPRS has been positioned by some Taíno/ Boricua as an Indigenous language variety. In this sense, debates about Taíno Spanish reflect broader debates about Puerto Rico’s political realities. While contemporary Taíno/ Boricua differ in their relationships to Spanish, English, and Taíno—some Taíno/Boricua understand RPRS as an Indigenous language variety. Endeavors to document and protect this variety have become positioned as a channel for protecting and defining a continuous Indigenous heritage and knowledge. Research on Indigenous communities and their relationships to language highlights the rich and complex forms of connection that may be felt to different language varieties. In the book Intimate Grammars (2015), Anthony Webster describes the felt attachments that Diné persons had to Navajo and English, reflecting their life histories and linguistic biographies (see also Samuels 2004 regarding San Carlos Apache). Barbra Meek (2020) considers how non-Indigenous audiences project their (often racist) mass-mediated stereotypes of Indigeneity and language to evaluate their senses of what authentic and genuine American Indians look and sound like. Wesley Leonard (2017) puts forward the concept of language reclamation to highlight the community epistemologies that

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undergird Indigenous definitions and meanings of language which rarely overlap with any mass-mediated stereotypes. In a similar vein, Jenny Davis (2017) highlights the importance of emphasizing the personal experiences and communicative practices that anchor language reclamation movements. She draws on Jeanie O’Brien’s (2010) concept of “lasting” to explore how non-Indigenous people may discursively define Indigenous groups through single characteristics to then lament the loss of those with that defining feature, and relatedly, the loss of the groups altogether. Taken together, these phenomena reflect the various forms of linguistic imperialism (Perley 2020) and colonialism (Shulist and Murali 2020) endured by Indigenous populations, wherein different assemblages of language attachments, resistances, and practices may develop according to the specific historical contingencies and pressures endured because of dominant language policies and politics. Thus, as M. Eleanor Nevins (2004) has highlighted, it is important to listen to the stories speakers tell about their languages and their ways of transmitting them to apprehend how people understand their speech communities being anchored and realized. This attention allows scholars to perceive how language revitalization and reclamation might take place across different communities (Perley 2020). Additionally, this body of work has highlighted the role of contingency and different agentive bodies in the emergence of language ideological frameworks (Perley 2009) as well as the variety of resistive strategies undertaken within the power relations produced within colonial relations and in the context of “nation-state ideologies of dominance and coercion” (Perley 2006, 187). Consecutive forms of language colonialism in Puerto Rico have impacted how language ideologies of authenticity in Puerto Rico have emerged and the role of RPRS, or Jíbaro Spanish, as an emblem of Puerto Rican Indigeneity for many Taíno/Boricua on the Island. As described before, Jíbaro is a name commonly used to describe rural Puerto Ricans, who are widely and popularly iconized as the most genuine bearers of typical Puerto Rican culture. In Puerto Rico, recent Taíno/Boricua mobilization and activism has been met with skepticism by the broader non-Indigenous population based on the belief that the Taíno/Boricua did not survive the conquest and colonization of the Americas. One of the challenges the Taíno/Boricua encounter is the argument that pre-Columbian varieties of their language have not been maintained as spoken code and that there is limited documentation from which to reconstruct it as a language of interaction. As discussed elsewhere (Feliciano-Santos 2017), several groups have taken up reconstructing Taíno/ Boricua drawing on sixteenth-century Spanish travel chronicles of the Caribbean and comparative reconstruction of related languages (though groups debate whether Taíno/ Boricua is a Mayan or Arawakan language). However, during my research among Taíno/ Boricua groups since 2006 in Puerto Rico it became evident to me that RPRS was also understood as a form of Indigenous linguistic heritage for some groups regardless of whether they believed that the Island’s Indigenous language was Mayan or Arawakan. As discussed previously, the centrality of Spanish in discourses of Puerto Rican nationality is closely linked to its colonial history with both Spain and the United States. As Irvine and Gal (2000) argue with regards to the processes of iconization and erasure in language ideologies, some historical and contingent aspects of Puerto Rican nationalism have been made into an essence while other historical and contingent details of language variants have been obscured. While many Taíno/Boricua dispute the historical claim of their extinction as a distinct cultural group, they do largely agree that pre-Columbian varieties of the Taíno/Boricua language were not broadly maintained or documented as a spoken language during the Spanish colonial period, which has made the reconstruction

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and revitalization of Taíno/Boricua a contentious and difficult project. Instead, some argue that Spanish, especially rural varieties of Spanish, maintained traces of Taíno/Boricua language and worldview in its vocabulary, pronunciation, and related interactional schemes.

TAÍNO/BORICUA CONTESTED ORIENTATIONS TO SPANISH Jíbaro-Boricua activist Tato Guajataca outlined for me the people he wanted me to meet during my research time with him during an interview in 2008. He was very focused on providing me with an understanding of why he wanted me to meet the people he had selected. He assured me that I should meet the most authentic and genuine Indigenous population. A proponent of the thesis that the Indigenous language of the island was the Mayan language, he also strongly encouraged me to consider how Jíbaro Spanish was an Indigenous variety of Puerto Rican Spanish. Throughout the months I spent with him driving around his region of the island and interviewing the rural people he wanted me to meet, he would point out salient aspects of people’s vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, grammar, and pronunciation as evidence of the Indigeneity of the variety, providing me with an etymology of its origin grounded in his understanding that it was the Mayan language. While rural varieties were not generally prestigious among the broader Puerto Rican public, they served to legitimate its speakers when it came to their authority on traditional practices and among Taíno/Boricua they served as indices and symbols of contemporary Taíno/Boricuaness—particularly as the bearers of preservable heritage from which to evaluate the authenticity of Taíno/Boricua. In my observations, some Taíno/Boricua leaders would draw on some of the more salient tokens of Jíbaro Spanish in their speech to underscore the authenticity and legitimacy of their position as Taíno/Boricua. Some would seek RPRS speakers to include in their organizations and recover information about traditional practices with which to potentially recover Indigenous practices, words, and worldviews. In these cases, the image of jibaridad promoted by the cultural arms of the Puerto Rican government as the most authentic realization of Puerto Ricanness became reframed as not a multi-rooted Puerto Rican, but as the repository and current realization of Taíno/Boricua heritage. During an interaction from a Taíno symposium that took place at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in September of 2018, an elder who has been a key figure in my research, Abuela Shashira, gave her presentation in her variety of RPRS, right before me. In order to ensure that she understood me, since I was reflecting on what I had learned from her, I spoke in Spanish as well. During the panels that followed, however, given the space and the presumed audience, most of the panelists in the two panels that followed chose to speak English or some variety of Spanglish. While the Abuela had, during my fieldwork in 2006–2008, told me that Taíno ways of communication were more than just about the code being spoken, but also about Taíno knowledge, worldviews, and interactional patterns, I could sense that she was becoming increasingly upset at not understanding all the English being spoken. She finally stood up during the question-and-answer session of the last panel and admonished the speakers for excluding people like her, Taíno elders from the island who did not speak English, from the conversation. Her reprimand made clear that she expected Taíno persons to speak Spanish as their nearest ancestral language—the closest form of Taíno linguistic heritage

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given the absence of a continuous and agreed upon community of Taíno (pre-Columbian Arawakan or Mayan) language speakers. This moment revealed how the attitudes toward communication the Abuela had previously shared, where she highlighted the roles of interpersonal and intergenerational respect, symbolism, and non-human interlocutors in Taíno interactions regardless of code being spoken were still undergirded by an expectation of speaking some variety of Spanish in the presence of Spanish-speaking Indigenous elders who might otherwise be excluded from the conversation. The ways that Abuela interpreted the use of non-Spanish language varieties as excluding her reflects the Spanish-English tensions broadly expressed in Puerto Rico (as the returned migrant data suggests) throughout the last century of US colonization. It also insinuated that acts of speaking in these contexts should ensure the accommodation of all elders and ancestors to maintain communication. Her speech indexically connected RPRS varieties as forms of Indigenous ancestral heritage. In an ideological context that understands Spanish as being closer to or as having been spoken by Taíno ancestors, the colonial language of Spanish, especially its rural variety, was privileged by some Puerto Rico-based Indigenous activists vis-à-vis the subsequent colonial language of English as a language of interaction. Here, as discussed by anthropologist Bernard Perley in the context of Maliseet language, rural Spanish became a site of Taíno vitality in the context of Taíno language disembodiment (Perley 2011, 174). For Puerto Rico-based groups such as the Liga Guakía Taína Ké (LGTK) the language varieties favored as contemporary Taíno heritage were the Jíbaro Spanish varieties often spoken by the grandparents and elders who often were also understood to have maintained traditional Indigenous practices in their daily lives—even when they may not have claimed to be Taíno themselves. Among many Taíno/Boricua, it was precisely the overlap between rural Puerto Rican varieties of Spanish and the maintenance of Indigenous traditions that allowed them to interpret Jíbaro Spanish as the most authentically Taíno variety of Spanish.5 For many Puerto Rico-based organizations activism around language involved the protection of Taíno communicative/cultural practices drawing on rural Jíbaro practices. LGTK projects of preservation for Taíno heritage did not only rely on Jíbaro Spanish—they often relied on lexical tokens of Taíno, Jíbaro interactional routines, and innovations based on interactions with other Arawakan Indigenous groups in the Caribbean (as opposed to Mayan, for example). The hope expressed by many of the Taíno/ Boricua in Puerto Rico with whom I interacted during my research was that these become the pathways through which current and future Taíno/Boricua enact their heritage. On the other hand, much like the English-dominant return-migrant children in Puerto Rican public schools, Puerto Rican Taíno based in NYC who I spoke to had a different relationship to Spanish. While it was a recognizable vehicle for elders to assert their authority and legitimacy as Taíno, it was not explicitly imagined as a vehicle for the preservation of Taíno/Boricua heritage nor necessarily assumed to be a medium of linguistic inclusion. This was evidenced in the NYC-based Taíno Nation’s projects of linguistic reconstruction of Tainey, the name they have given to the language of the Taíno, through comparative reconstruction with other Arawakan languages. Interviews revealed that many younger members focused on learning Tainey rather than Spanish as their heritage language. Since there were limited domains in which to speak Tainey, this often led to the heavy use of Tainey vocabulary and short phrases in the context of otherwise English speech. During the time of my research, they were actively teaching members Tainey, though they had several challenges teaching a language in the process of being reconstructed (Feliciano-Santos 2021).6 As an elder in this group shared in English:

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“It is more like a creole sort of, you know, you use Spanish words, but you put in the Taíno words also, in place, what you know in Taíno you put in place of the Spanish or the English.” While English was not envisioned as Taíno linguistic heritage, Spanish was not privileged either. In contrast to many PR-based Taíno activists, the orientations of these US-based Taíno activists seemed to be to ancestral (pre-Columbian) Taíno itself, and insofar as they were able to recover it and use it to frame themselves as speaking (as) Taíney, Spanish or English otherwise served their communicative purposes equally well. Broader Puerto Rican-based language ideologies regarding Spanish were mirrored in Taíno/Boricua heritage politics and evaluations. Ideologies of Puerto Ricans as Spanish-speaking have historically served to discursively exclude non-Spanish speaking US-based Puerto Ricans from the island nation: however, US-based Puerto Ricans claim their belonging regardless of their ability to speak Spanish. Similarly, Puerto Rico-based Taíno/Boricua evaluated Taínoness based on speaking Spanish, especially Jíbaro Spanish, while US-based Taíno focused on tokens of Taíno in their speech, couched equally comfortably in English or Spanish. US-based Taíno activists I spoke with, did not seem to position any particular variety of Spanish as linguistic heritage though they may have interactionally relied on it to legitimate and lend authority to their speech. Groups such as the Taíno Nation focused instead on related Arawakan languages such as Eyeri or Lokono to recover their linguistic heritage rather than Jíbaro Spanish in itself. Jíbaro Spanish became relevant as an anchor of genealogical authenticity and as a bearer of recoverable Taíno tokens, but not necessarily as a variety to categorize as heritage. For example, when group elder J.B.L described his experiences as a youth in Puerto Rico at another member’s home, he was careful to acknowledge having been “born a Jíbaro.” When I asked J.B.L. regarding his interest in reconstructing the language, he began speaking English, but switched to Spanish about halfway through his turn: But I have always had a-a closeness to what we have, of the language. I was born a Jíbaro. I lived the Jíbaro for a while, not for long. But I think long enough for me to be attached. I know what it is to sleep in hammocks. I know what it is to make a hammock. I know what it is to make ropes from, uh, maguey. I know what it is to eat in ditas, which in Eyeri they call rritas. See, so they have the same word but they use the “r” and, uh, I know what a jataca is, una dita era forma era una higuera pequeña que la cortaban y la usaban para tomar agua, para coger agua eh muchas cosas que estuve relacionado con eso porque viví con mis abuelos en ambos bandos de la familia y ambos bandos venían de Orocovis, un centro muy, había mucha influencia indígena. (a “dita” was a form was a small gourd that they cut and used to drink water, to take water, eh, many things. I was related to that because I lived with my grandparents in both bands of the family and both bands came from Orocovis, a center very, there was a lot of Indigenous influence) In the above excerpt, J.B.L connected his interest in reconstructing Tainey to his own Jíbaro heritage as a way of authenticating his Taíno experience—he mentioned several practices associated with Puerto Rico’s Indigenous heritage. While the shift to Spanish served to discursively authorize and legitimate him in the context of talking about his family and their Indigenous ancestry, the shifts throughout the conversation to English and the speaking of English by two other Taíno Nation members in that meeting, did not seem to pragmatically position any particular variety of Spanish as a form of linguistic heritage in itself—even when being able to code-switch into Spanish served as a form

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of discursive legitimation and authorization. These examples speak to broader Puerto Rican language ideologies, debates regarding who and what counts as Puerto Rican in the context of migration to the United States, as well as distinct orientations to the genealogical threads that anchor Taíno/Boricua ancestry, and the extent to which Spanish, particularly Jíbaro Spanish can be understood as Taíno/Boricua linguistic heritage or not.

CONCLUSION In conjunction, a consideration of language policy in Puerto Rican schools and of Taíno/Boricua attitudes toward different varieties of Spanish and English reveals how language ideologies in the context of two consecutive colonizations, and migration between colony and empire, impact how peoples and communities “attach” their sense of belonging and inclusion to different language varieties. Widespread discourses of what constitutes Puerto Ricanness circulated within policy and popular media have anchored national belonging in adherence to iconizations of Puerto Rican culture that are considered traditional, authentic, and essential, including its original colonial language, Spanish. The organization of resistance to US colonial assimilation around Spanishspeaking Puerto Ricanness has effectively contained the variation within the island’s linguistic practices and overlooked the inequities contained within hegemonic Puerto Rican language ideologies. While shifts are documented in the linguistic repertoires of and attitudes toward English among many Puerto Ricans, the deep entrenchment and taken-for-grantedness of Spanish-language maintenance as a form of resistance to US colonial assimilation still informs educational policy. It also effectively relegates any other languages spoken by Puerto Ricans as outside the scope of discourse and policy. Given Puerto Rico’s successive colonizations, anti-colonial discussions with respect to the United States, and decolonial discussions more broadly across both empires need to also engage with how anti-assimilationist linguistic resistance to the United States has further entrenched the remnants of Spanish colonial power while also obscuring its role in maintaining US economic and political power. Notions of solidarity and belonging in both the P.R. educational context and P.R.-based Taino/Boricua activism are framed by ideologies that privilege varieties based in a colonial language, Spanish, as an icon of authentic and genuine Puerto Ricanness and Taíno Indigeneity.7 However, this strategy relies on elisions and erasures of English-dominant Puerto Ricans (and Puerto Rican speakers of other languages), thus excluding them and their forms of being and speaking from attaining the same forms of authority, belonging, and solidarity afforded to speakers of varieties of PRS within the island. The cases above invite us to imagine what an anticolonial or even a decolonial approach to language in Puerto Rico might look like. Given how coloniality has influenced the formation of subjectivities, politico-economic orders, and social relations within the island, how might moving beyond the binary of English and Spanish suggest novel strategies to countering different threads of colonial power? Highlighting the histories and economies of value that organize the authority and legitimacy of different language varieties of English, Spanish, or any other languages, that have become Puerto Rican, or Taino/Boricua, offer insights into the social, political, and economic mechanisms that reproduce a complex web of colonial relations with the United States and within the island. This attention offers the possibility of interrupting the evaluative frameworks, moral economies, and social orders that purify, dichotomize, and map the relationship between language and nation as a site of resistance and which often have the effect of further engraining the power of those who adhere to the valued

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categories, the marginalization of those that do not, and the erasure of those whose very experience lies outside of them altogether.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to all the generous feedback on this essay offered by Barbra Meek, Anel Méndez-Velázquez, and the editors of this volume.

NOTES 1. All translations and glosses for terms (and errors) throughout the chapter are mine. 2. Throughout, I italicize non-English text and include translations and glosses in parentheses. Bolded terms are emphasized for analysis. 3. This argument specifically applies to the general public-school education found in most municipalities. Many tuition-based private schools have long offered English-medium education as well as offerings for other languages. See Kerkhof 2001 for an important discussion of the class-based aspects of language-medium and private education in P.R. 4. This narrative of leaving to return, stands in stark contrast to news reports of US-based English-speaking non-Puerto Ricans purchasing real estate and land in P.R. Further studies might consider how this recent migration affects language policy, if at all, and how contrasts in language mediums available in private and public schools are reflected in who is profiting from these sales and associated shifts in service economies. 5. While this is not necessarily fully aligned with the state-sponsored image of the Jíbaro, it does overlap with it as a site of tradition and authenticity. 6. See also Leonard (2007) on similar issues within Myaamia teaching efforts. 7. In future work, I aim to discuss the ideologies that organize how different language varieties spoken by Puerto Ricans are associated with different classed, racialized, and regional categories as well as the evaluations that result.

REFERENCES Álvarez Nazario, M. (1982), El habla campesina del país: Orígenes y desarrollo del español en Puerto Rico, San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Aranda, E. M. (2006), Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the Struggles of Incorporation, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Beléndez Soltero, P. (1994), “Issues in Educating the Return-migrant in Puerto Rico.” In C. A. Torre, H. R. Vecchini, and W. Burgos (eds.), The Commuter Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Migration, 289–310, Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Benítez, C. (1993), “Una Mano Manca, En Vez de Una Mano Dura.” El Nuevo Día, May 28. Bonilla, Y., and M. LeBrón, eds. (2019), Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico before and after the Storm, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Carroll, K. S. (2016), “Understanding Perceptions of Language Threat: The Case of Puerto Rico.” Caribbean Studies, 44 (1/2): 167–86. Carroll, K. S., and C. M. Mazak. (2017), “Language Policy in Puerto Rico’s Higher Education: Opening the Door for Translanguaging Practices.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 48 (1): 4–22.

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Clachar, A. (1997), “Ethnolinguistic Identity and Spanish Proficiency in a Paradoxical Situation: The Case of Puerto Rican Return-Migrants.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 18 (2): 107–24. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/01434639708666307. Davis, C. P. (2015), “Speaking Conflict: Ideological Barriers to Bilingual Policy Implementation in Civil War Sri Lanka.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 46 (2): 95–112. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1111​/aeq​.12093. Davis, J. L. (2017), “Resisting Rhetorics of Language Endangerment: Reclamation Through Indigenous Language Survivance.” Language Documentation and Description, 14: 37–58. Delerme, S. (2014), “‘Puerto Ricans Live Free’: Race, Language, and Orlando’s Contested Soundscape.” Southern Spaces, March 24. https://doi​.org​/10​.18737​/M7RP6J. Díaz Montero, A. (2000), Del Español Jíbaro, San Juan: Editorial Ramallo. Domínguez-Rosado, B. (2015), The Unlinking of Language and Puerto Rican Identity: New Trends in Sight, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Duany, J. (2002), The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the U.S., Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Feliciano-Santos, S. (2002), Back to the Homeland? A Case Study of the Dilemma of Language and Identity among Puerto Rican Return-Migrant Students, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Harvard University, Cambridge. Feliciano-Santos, S. (2017), “How Do You Speak Taíno? Indigenous Activism and Linguistic Practices in Puerto Rico.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 27(1): 4–21. Feliciano-Santos, S. (2021), Contested Caribbean Indigeneities, Critical Caribbean Studies Series, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fiet, L., A. Pousada, and A. Haiman, eds. (1996), Rethinking English in Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico: University of Puerto Rico Press. Flores, J. (2000), From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, New York: Columbia University Press. Flores, N., and J. Rosa. (2015), “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education.” Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2): 149–71. https://doi​ .org​/10​.17763​/0017​-8055​.85​.2​.149. Gal, S., and J. T. Irvine. (2019), Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Soical Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. García-Sánchez, I. M. (2014), Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging, Hoboken: Wiley. González Rivera, M., and L. A. Ortiz López. (2018), “El español y el inglés en Puerto Rico: Una polémica de más de un siglo.” Centro Journal, 30 (1): 106–31. Guerra, L. (1998), Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., V. Loureiro-Rodríguez, E. F. Acar, and J. Vélez Avilés. (2019), “Attitudes in Progress: Puerto Rican Youth’s Opinions on Monolingual and Code-Switched Language Varieties.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 40 (4): 304–21. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/01434632​.2018​.1515951. Holmquist, J. (2005), “Social Stratification in Women’s Speech in Rural Puerto Rico: A Study of Five Phonological Features.” In L. Sayahi and M. Westmoreland (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 109–19, Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Irvine, J. T., and S. Gal. (2000), “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Politics, and Identities, 35–83, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

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Jiménez Roman, M., and J. Flores. (2009), The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the U.S., Durham: Duke University Press. Kerkhof, E. (2001), “The Myth of the Dumb Puerto Rican: Circular Migration and Language Struggle in Puerto Rico.” NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 75 (3/4): 257–88. Leonard, W. Y. (2007), Miami Language Reclamation in the Home: A Case Study, Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Leonard, W. Y. (2017), “Producing Language Reclamation by Decolonising ‘Language’.” Language Documentation and Description, 14: 37–58. “Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico” [Ley 85-2018, según enmendada] Rev. 04 de febrero de 2019. López Yustos, A. (1997), Historia documental de la educación en Puerto Rico, San Juan: Publicaciones Puertorriqueñas. Lorenzo-Hernandez, J. (1999), “The Nuyorican’s Dilemma: Categorization of Returning Migrants in Puerto Rico.” The International Migration Review, 33 (4): 988–1013. https://doi​ .org​/10​.2307​/2547360. Meek, Barbra A. (2020), “Racing Indian Language, Languaging an Indian Race: Linguistic Racisms and Representations of Indigeneity.” In H. Samy Alim, A. Reyes, and P. V. Kroskrity (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, 369–97, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morris, N. (1995), Puerto Rico: Culture, Politics, and Identity, Westport: Praeger/Greenwood. Navarro, M. (1997), “Puerto Rico Teachers Resist Teaching in English.” The New York Times, May 18, sec. A. Navarro Tomás, T. (1966), El español en Puerto Rico: Contribución a la geografía lingüística hispanoamericana, Rio Piedras: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Negrón de Montilla, A. (1975), Americanization in Puerto Rico and the Public-School System, 1900–1930, 2nd edn, Rio Piedras: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Nevins, E. M. (2004), “Learning to Listen: Confronting Two Meanings of Language Loss in the Contemporary White Mountain Apache Speech Community.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14 (2): 269–288. Nieto, S. (1998), “Symposium: Fact and Fiction: Stories of Puerto Ricans in U.S. Schools.” Harvard Educational Review, 68 (2): 133–64. https://doi​.org​/10​.17763​/haer​.68​.2​ .d5466822h645t087. Nieto, S., ed. (2000), Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools, New York: Routledge. O’Brien, J. (2010), Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press. Otterstrom, S. M., and B. F. Tillman. (2013), “Income Change and Circular Migration: The Curious Case of Mobile Puerto Ricans, 1995–2010.” Journal of Latin American Geography, 12 (3): 33–57. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/lag​.2013​.0039. Parker, F., and B. J. Parker, eds. (1978), Education in Puerto Rico and of Puerto Ricans in the U.S.A.: Abstracts of American Doctoral Dissertations, San Juan: Inter American University Press. https://catalog​.lib​.unc​.edu​/catalog​/UNCb1531743. Perley, B. C. (2006), “Aboriginality at Large: Varieties of Resistance in Maliseet Language Instruction.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 13: 187–208. Perley, B. C. (2009), “Contingencies of Emergence: Planning Maliseet Language Ideologies.” In P. V. Kroskrity and M. C. Field (eds.), Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, 255–70, Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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Perley, B. C. (2011), Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perley, B. C. (2020), “Linguistic Imperialism.” In J. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, Wiley Online Library. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​ /9781118786093​.iela0240. Perley, B. C. (2020), “Language Revitalization.” In J. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, Wiley Online Library. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​ /9781118786093​.iela0220 Reynolds, J. F., and E. W. Chun. (2013), “Figuring Youth Citizenship: Communicative Practices Mediating the Cultural Politics of Citizenship and Age.” Language & Communication, Figuring Citizenship: Communicative Practices Mediating the Cultural Politics of Citizenship Age, 33 (4, Part B): 473–80. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/j​.langcom​.2013​.07​.002. Saiz, E. (2012), “Puerto Rico quiere que todas las escuelas públicas sean bilingües en 2022.” El Pais. Internacional. Available online: https://elpais​.com​/internacional​/2012​/05​/11​/actualidad​ /1336700828​_371846​.html (accessed June 13, 2021). Samuels, D. W. (2004), Putting a Song on Top of it: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Santori, F. (1997), “Pollito-Chicken: En Estados Unidos a Nadie Se Le Ocurriría Sugerir Que En Las Escuelas Elementales Del País Se Enseñara En Otro Idioma Que No Fuera El Ingles, Aún Cuando La Constitución Federal No Especifica Que Ese Es Su Idioma Official.” El Nuevo Día, October 5. Shulist, S., and L. H. Murali. (2020), “Language, Globalization, and Colonialism.” In J. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, Wiley Online Library. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​/9781118786093​.iela0224. Solís, J. (1994), Public School Reform in Puerto Rico: Sustaining Colonial Models of Development, Westport: Greenwood Press. Urciuoli, B. (1996), Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class, Boulder: Westview Press. Velez, W. (2017), “A New Framework for Understanding Puerto Ricans’ Migration Patterns and Incorporation.” Centro Journal, 29 (3): 126–53. Walsh, C. E. (1990), Pedagogy and the Struggle for Voice: Issues of Language, Power, and Schooling for Puerto Ricans, New York: Bergin and Garvey Publishers. Walsh, C. E. (1998), “‘Staging Encounters’: The Educational Decline of U.S. Puerto Ricans in [Post]-Colonial Perspective.” Harvard Educational Review, 68 (2): 218–43. Webster, A. (2015), Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry, Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Whalen, C. T. (2001), From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Zentella, A. (1990), “Returned Migration, Language, and Identity: Puerto Rican Bilinguals in Dos Worlds/Two Mundos.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 84: 81–100. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/ijsl​.1990​.84​.81.

Chapter 5

Labels, Codes, and Language Sovereignty in the Pacific KATHLEEN C. RILEY AND CHRISTINE JOURDAN

Social actors use language, consciously or not, to express and evoke the sorts of social inequalities that exist in most if not all human societies. Privileged individuals linguistically index the ideological categories that constrain the means of “economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation” (Piller 2016, 5) for others. Most obviously privilege based on “age,” “sex,” “race,” and “class” function in this way, as has been critically analyzed by scholars from Bourdieu (1991) and Morgan (2002) to Inoue (2006) and Berman 2019). However, despite the systematic construction of unjust institutions and channels of redress, people of less privilege also find ways to use their linguistic resources to rebut inequalities, accessing resources and voices previously denied them in their marginalized capacities. Thus, as witnessed by other chapters in this volume as well as many other recent volumes (e.g., Avineri et al. 2019, Gal and Irvine 2019, Heller and McElhinny 2017, Rojo and Del Percio 2020), language and related communicative modalities serve not only to symbolize and create social inequalities but also as a medium for challenging and demanding equity and justice. In this chapter, we engage in a comparative exercise, examining how similar, yet different, globalizing forces have led to similar, yet different, linguistically mediated forms of social inequality and similar, yet different, efforts to redress injustice in two regions of the Pacific over the past 150 years. We trace the socioeconomic, political, sociocultural, and ethnolinguistic transformations experienced by these two societies during three important phases of their history: precolonial, colonial, and neocolonial, and we analyze how both individuals and collectivities index social inequality, handling and/or challenging the attendant social injustices using a range of linguistic resources in the face of discriminating ideologies and institutions. This longue durée approach, typical of studies of social and linguistic change (e.g., by anthropologists from Wolf 1982 to Heller and McElhinny 2017), provides us with the vantage from which to examine power at work, even as it is apparently subsumed in the mundane situations of everyday life and social relationships. It allows us to analyze how language ideologies affect the production, reproduction, and transformation of social (in)equalities over time in very specific ways. Our two ethnohistorical examples share some similarities and exhibit differences that reveal the specificities of each while exposing the general workings of linguistically mediated social (in)justice, much of it associated with colonialism. Our first example is Solomon Islands, an independent nation and member of the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly British Commonwealth), composed of about 900 islands and 600,000

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people. The other example is the Marquesas, an archipelago of six inhabited islands with a population of approximately 9,000 on the periphery of French Polynesia, a semiautonomous overseas collectivity of France.1 We start by examining how each place was originally populated by peoples who shared commonalities (economic, political, sociocultural, and ethnolinguistic), but also differed with respect to their social structures and the diversity of their linguistic codes. Next, we analyze how these two societies were colonized by two different, yet similar, sociocultural and political regimes (British in the Solomon Islands and French in the Marquesas), whose institutions and ideologies were similar, yet brought somewhat different linguistic ideologies and forms of governmentality and territorialization to the colonial agenda; this then led to somewhat different linguistic forms, attitudes, and practices. We conclude by exploring how both peoples are now confronting neoliberal globalization from different geopolitical positions: that of an independent country versus that of a marginal region of a Pays d’outre mer (Overseas Country).2 In both cases, ancestral sociolinguistic and cultural contrasts (i.e., those existing prior to European contact as reconstructed by archaeologists and ethnohistorians) have interacted with those based on the colonial regimes to produce a range of ethnolinguistic expressions of—and responses to—social inequality in the contemporary period (but see also Hau’ofa for a discussion of similarity and differences in the “sea of islands”).3

PRECOLONIAL LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL (IN)JUSTICE Much has been written about the sociolinguistic and cultural variations found across the Pacific prior to European colonization, frequently categorized as a MelanesianPolynesian-Micronesian4 distinction (e.g., (Sahlins 1963; Pawley 2007; Thomas et al. 1989). Polynesia, literally “many islands,” the language-culture area to which the Marquesas are assigned, encompasses atolls and high islands dispersed widely across the central and eastern Pacific; their inhabitants share a closely related set of Austronesian languages and sociopolitical systems which tend toward social hierarchy organized by hereditary lineages and chieftainships. By contrast, Solomon Islands are considered part of Melanesia, literally “black islands,” an area of more densely clustered islands in the western Pacific that exhibit the highest degree of linguistic diversity in the world and which tend toward informal Big-Men leadership patterns and relatively egalitarian social structures, excepting the gender inequalities discussed below. We begin this section by analyzing how the classificatory labels for social groups and languages such as “Melanesian” and “Polynesian” were minted by European explorers and scientists from the eighteenth century on and how these have shaped western “knowledge” about them and informed the (neo)colonial practices for dominating them (Thomas 2012). We continue by arguing that, nonetheless, the sociopolitical configurations and related linguistic ecologies found in the Marquesas and the Solomon Islands prior to contact manifested some interesting patterns of social and linguistic (in)equality that were later compounded by European colonization.

Labeling As many linguistic anthropologists have made clear (e.g., Calvet 1979; Errington 2001, 2008; Heller and McElhinny 2017), labeling lands, languages, and ethnic groups is part of the business of empire as comparison and classification may facilitate denigration and domination. As elsewhere in the colonial world, racializing discourses aligned darker

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pigmentation with savagery and pale coloring with civilization (Wolf 1982). Specifically, the darker-skinned Australians and Melanesians were portrayed as “savages,” especially by evangelical missionaries, whereas the “noble savages,”5 sought by the Enlightenment, were discovered in the lighter-skinned Polynesians (Tcherkézoff 2003). This Melanesian/ Polynesian distinction was then discursively disseminated through the iconography of explorers, missionaries, and artists (Smith 1960). Essentializing assessments based on physical features were also aligned with specific cultural and linguistic representations that then had far-reaching influences on colonial institutions and practices. Polynesians spoke closely related languages, had developed stratified societies recognizable to Europeans as polities, and were hailed as great navigators and warriors. By contrast, Melanesians, speaking many unrelated and difficult-to-classify languages and organized via more fluid political systems, were considered savage. This not only reflected and confirmed the teleological thinking of nineteenth-century social Darwinism but also the language taxonomies of comparative and historical linguists into the twentieth century.6 Thus, aside from the analytic pitfalls involved in making these classificatory leaps (for the Pacific, see Pawley 2007; Lin and Scaglion 2019), ethnolinguistic representations can be used in subtle ways to bolster the racism implicit in the original Polynesian/Melanesian contrast. Given this fraught history, we use these labels with parsimony and qualification as we explore how actual differences (geographical, cultural, linguistic, and political) paved the way for oppressive practices. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that some Pacific Islanders have recently reclaimed the term “Melanesian” and coined “Melanesianism” to valorize their ethnolinguistic diversities (Kabutaulaka 2015, 129)—that is, flipping the script in ways familiar from debates over identity labeling that have taken place elsewhere in the world (e.g., “queer” or “Kanak”7). Debates over the naming of places (toponyms), peoples (ethnonyms), and languages (linguonyms) in scholarly and activist circles are well-known and perhaps unending.8 The basic problem is that in many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples did not refer to themselves, their lands, or their languages by the encompassing denominations imposed by European colonizers who drew lines on maps and assigned names for ease of appropriation and administration. For instance, no term existed for the Marquesas or the Solomon Islands prior to colonialism; instead, Solomon Islanders referred to themselves by the name of their place of residence, village, or language; and Marquesans referred to themselves by valley or tribal affiliation or possibly by island, depending on the speech context. And these practices continue today, for example, residents of Hatiheu valley tend to speak of te Taipivai, meaning people from the neighboring valley of Taipivai, whereas all of those located on the island of Nuku Hiva will refer to te Ua Pou, meaning everyone from Ua Pou, the next island over. In this chapter, we have made complicated choices about which terms to use for the peoples, territories, and languages we are discussing. The Solomon Islands is the English translation of the Spanish name first presumptuously fixed on European maps by the Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendaña in 1568 and then codified by British colonizers. Solomon Islanders chose to maintain this constructed term for themselves following their independence from British rule, even though (and/or because) their nation consists of at least seventy-four distinctive ethnolinguistic groups. Also, though the archipelago is familiarly known by most anglophones in the archipelago and beyond as “the Solomon Islands,” the country’s official name, per its Constitution, is “Solomon Islands” without preceding article. We respect that usage here when writing about the

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now independent nation whereas we retain the “the” when referring to the area prior to independence. The Marquesan situation is even more complex. Still a part of France’s overseas collectivities, this archipelago is well-known by the French translation of the toponym inscribed in 1595 by Mendaña (during his second voyage to the Pacific) in honor of his patron, the Marquis of Cañete. Presently, the descendants of the original settlers of these islands, when speaking French, which many do much of the time, usually employ these French terms for themselves, their language, and their land: les Marquisiens, le marquisien, and les Iles Marquises. However, when referring to their politically constructed territory in their own language, Marquesans have adopted toponyms and ethnonyms that retain their dialectal variations, such that in the north “the land of the People” is called te henua ’o te ’Enana while in the south it is called te fenua ’o ’te ’Enata. Riley, who has conducted research primarily in the north, sometimes uses the northern terms in her publications, but for this chapter, which details pan-Marquesan issues, she has decided to privilege neither region’s dialect nor the colonial language, resorting instead to English, “Marquesas” (for place) and “Marquesan” (for people and language). This is not to pretend that English can ever function simply as a politically neutral or transparent channel of referential information, but, in this case, it seems preferable to the other options, and is, of course, also well-known globally and therefore easy to google.

Ethnolinguistic Differentiation and Exchange The reports of early European visitors evidence how Pacific Islanders used a wide range of semiotic material to index their ethnic continuities and discontinuities. Early European explorers (e.g., Cook and Krusenstern) were struck by the recurring motifs they found in the languages, legends, dancing, housing, food, tapa cloth, tikis, tattoos, and taboos of the peoples they labeled “Polynesians.” By contrast, late nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographers (e.g., Malinowski (1922) and Codrington (1891)) were fascinated by how the people they lumped together as Melanesians used languages, myths, art, body ornamentation, and ritual wealth (e.g., pigs and shells) to enhance cultural differentiation and status. In particular, both Polynesians and Melanesians employed linguistic distinction to index their sociocultural identities and facilitate their more or less egalitarian exchanges. First, consider how prior to colonization, the Solomon Islands, an archipelago of 6 large islands and about 900 small ones with a population of approximately 200,000, was home to as many as seventy-four ethnic groups speaking distinctive languages (Moore 2013). In some areas, regional trade languages were developed to facilitate interethnic exchange networks (e.g., Roviana in western Solomon Islands), but usually contact and communication for trade and marriage among close neighbors was carried on via the multilingualism of many individuals who acquired active, or at least passive, competence in the languages of their neighbors, acquiring also some prestige as a consequence. Though Jourdan argues (2007b) that the resulting reciprocal bilingualism expressed an ethos of egalitarianism, the many strict language taboos governing who could use specific words and how not only provoked the quick transformation of a language’s lexicon but also enforced social control on the basis of language performance (Keesing and Fifi’i 1969). By contrast, the six inhabited islands of the Marquesas, with a comparable precolonial population of 100,000-200,000, only developed three distinctive but mutually

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comprehensible dialects of the same language. Indeed, across much of the region identified as Polynesia, linguistic differentiation primarily took the form of consonantal reflexes, signaling differences between neighboring valleys as well as distant islands. For instance, the /n/ in mano (shark) in the southern Marquesan islands manifests as /k/ (i.e., mako) in the north except in one valley (Taipivai) which is known for its use of the consonant /ŋ/ (i.e., mango) while this reflex is also found in Aotearoa 3,500 miles away. Given intermittent contact, these minimal phonemic variations allowed speakers to instantiate social differences while maintaining linguistic comprehension. Thus, rather than developing active multilingualism as in Melanesia, individuals learned to do careful cross-linguistic listening, especially those in subordinate or endangered positions in these more hierarchical societies.9 Finally, egalitarian multilingualism (Mühlhäusler 1996) between groups existed throughout the Pacific. That is, although ethnic groups might consider their own language to be more beautiful or effective than their neighbors’, no group was ever forced to learn their neighbor’s language due to losing a battle or lacking access to regional trade routes. Nonetheless, as intimated above, sociolinguistic differences could provide the means for enforcing sociopolitical domination within groups not only in the more hierarchical Marquesas but also in the relatively egalitarian Solomons, a topic to which we now turn in more detail.

Internal Sociolinguistic Differentiation and Dominance Throughout the Pacific, language was used to signify status and effect political domination along lines of gender or social rank—that is, linguistically enacted forms of social inequality. For instance, in the Solomon Islands, speechmaking and active bilingualism or multilingualism were found mostly among men. Although as Akin (2013) explains, Kwaio women had a public voice, many women tended to remain silent during public events or were excluded from social settings (trades and voyages) during which they could have acquired additional languages. Additionally, women marrying into a neighboring group were often forbidden to learn and speak the language of their husband for fear that they would breach a local language taboo. These restrictions contributed to their social isolation and lower status within their group and in their new places of residence. In the Marquesas, language also played an important role in articulating and organizing society hierarchically. However, here the ranking of both men and women was more often ascribed than achieved. That is, although some individuals accrued power through oratorical performance and others were stigmatized via linguistic mockery, many forms of social power were to some degree reproduced through the inheritance of spiritual registers and tapu-setting phrases and practices taught to youth born into elite lineages and used to disempower non-elite men as well as most women and others (e.g., the third gender mahu). These tapu, which constrained the behavior of non-elite men and all women and mahu, were socialized from birth and regimented by both verbal and physical violence. Nonetheless, the mutual intelligibility of languages in the Marquesas meant that women could not be excluded if they married exogamously; additionally, some elite women achieved a voice, bypassing tapu and fulfilling leadership roles (political and religious) in ways that would not have happened in the Solomon Islands (Thomas 1990).

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COLONIAL REGIMES AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC HIERARCHY European colonialism introduced new forms of linguistically mediated social inequality in the regions of the world they conquered from the fifteenth century onward as well as sometimes reenforcing the forms already existing in those regions. Alongside wholesale genocide and enforced labor, colonizers imposed a range of linguistic ideologies and institutions that devalued local languages and inhibited speakers’ ability to access material resources or engage in political action. But before exploring the instantiation of these sociolinguistic institutions and silencing practices in the Solomon Islands and Marquesas, we pause to examine how language ideologies of legitimacy through literacy in a standard language took root in colonial contexts more generally (see also Errington 2001, 2008).

Language Ideologies and Linguistic Hegemony Writing about French colonial linguistics in Africa, Calvet (1979, 53) explains that denigrating local languages is the linguistic counterpart of political appropriation. The language ideology undergirding the ethical comfort of western colonials goes like this: Europeans are civilized, speak a real language, and live in orderly nations; the colonized are savage, speak mere “dialects” (a lay term used in French and English to denigrate linguistic codes other than the standard), and live in tribes in need of regulation. Additionally, it is assumed that the languages of civilized nations take written forms: literature (French belles-lettres) proves their excellence, religious texts anchor their faith, print media develops patriotic citizenship, and textual documents facilitate state bureaucracy (Anderson 1991; Burke 2004; Foucault 1970, 1991). Colonial regimes used these ideologies and attendant structural practices to justify the brute and symbolic violence of their ways—that is, they rationalized that they were bequeathing their superior ideas to these inferior people via a superior language and literacy in it. While European explorers, missionaries, and administrators in the Pacific were similarly guided by this ideological rationale, they were also frequently interested in capturing, cataloguing, regimenting, and “fixing” the languages they encountered: collecting and comparing word lists, creating orthographies and spelling systems, and using these to translate the Bible and print lexicons and grammars, thus introducing a standard variety (and its social effects) where there had been none. For instance, the codes created in the unjust labor settings of colonial capitalism (ships, plantations, and mines) were stigmatized as jargons, or bastard languages, in the scientifically ordered language family trees. As a result, the terms “pidgin” and “creole,” although intended for neutral usage by contemporary sociolinguists,10 still carry negative connotations when applied as linguonyms to the languages constructed in these unequivocally unjust contexts (De Graff 2001; Ansaldo and Matthews 2007). Disparaging labels not only emerge from gross social inequalities but also help perpetuate social injustices (as elaborated below). Nonetheless, we maintain our usage of these terms in this chapter, not only out of a pragmatic need for shorthand terms, but also because we believe they accurately index the dialectically complex and power-inflected social life of languages. They both reflect how syncretic codes such as these emerge out of unjust sociolinguistic conditions while also creating the means for communities to critique those conditions and refuse their contextual ideologies (Jourdan 2008). For instance, in this chapter, we discuss not only the emergence of a creole in the Solomon Islands, pejoratively named “Pijin,” but also the

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discursive processes by which its speakers are moving beyond denigrating themselves for speaking it.

Linguistic Governmentality and Capitalism As mentioned above, the Marquesas and the Solomon Islands were both entextualized (noted and named) on European maps in the late sixteenth century by a Spanish explorer, Alvaro de Mendaña, who also left hundreds dead in each location. By the nineteenth century, both archipelagos were hooked into the global market by outsiders hunting for gold, sandalwood, and whales, and then claimed as colonies, the Marquesas by the French in 1842 and the Solomon Islands by the British in 1898.11 The two colonial regimes employed contrasting forms of governmentality and territorialization but linguistically mediated these through similar financial and administrative documents (e.g., laws, deeds, and contracts). In the Solomon Islands, the British brought their familiar toolkit for extracting material resources and ruling local populations indirectly (Bennett 1987), rendering administrative structures culturally real via terms that were quickly creolized. For instance, “custom,” relabeled kastom by Solomon Islanders, was introduced by the British to differentiate themselves as bearers of “culture” from those who had mere “custom.”12 Wads (wards) were drawn to challenge the political integrity of previous ethnolinguistic polities, and paramansif (paramount chief), new leaders were appointed alongside the traditional Big Men. DO’s (district officers) wrote reports on local events, kept population statistics, collected new takis (taxes) and implemented regulations from the West Pacific High Commission in Fiji. Gavman (government) came to mean this evanescent force that resided nowhere, offered few direct services, and was totally antithetic to Islanders’ understanding of social and political organization. These new textual practices did more than reflect new realities: they were the media through which existing social structures were undermined and the legitimacy of old ones challenged. British administrators set up Native Courts (1942) to handle cases linked to kastom and to resolve cases that local chiefs could not handle. The police prosecuted cases in Magistrate Courts where the judges were British, the lawyers spoke English, and the plaintiffs and defendants depended on translators, such that justice was now carried out in a foreign language. Although traditional authority was still strong in rural areas, it was progressively diminished by outside influences, notably the possibility of finding redress from State courts (Corrin 2019). In these contexts, written documents created a new relationship to power and experience, resulting in the exclusion and disenfranchisement of those Solomon Islanders who lacked opportunities to acquire literacy in English or the court language. With Pax Britannica13 achieved in 1920, British colonists established local coconut plantations requiring a large labor force. A head tax payable in recently introduced British money was levied on every individual, which had the effect of coercing men to enroll for work. Men, who were freshly returned from laboring in the Australian plantations and speaking the pidgin they had learned in those multilingual settings, set to work on these newly established local plantations (Bennett 1987). And the pidgin spread throughout the archipelago, developing into a creole (now called Pijin) that became the lingua franca of the protectorate; it allowed Solomon Islanders to communicate across all seventy-four languages and thus facilitated means of countering British rule (e.g., union organizing and the Maasina political movement14). It also contributed to Islanders’ economic

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opportunities—for example, as translators, house servants, and deck hands. Existing alongside English, it brought some measure of social equality in that Pijin speakers were now a linguistic force to reckon with. However, in the early part of the twentieth century, women, who were initially prevented from leaving the villages, remained mostly unilingual while men added Pijin (and the economic opportunities it afforded) to their already multilingual repertoire, thus reenforcing prior gender inequalities. A somewhat different colonial history unfolded in the Marquesas (for an overview, see Dening 1980). Enlisted to labor on ships and plantations, Marquesans (men especially) acquired some fluency in Tahitian (from the islands at the center of FrenchPolynesia) and other codes such as the English-based nautical jargon used in the Pacific (Keesing 1988). Some also began to acquire French from the missionaries who largely managed the colony throughout most of the nineteenth century. After decreeing the separation of church and state in 1905,15 the French government took over the administrative duties previously fulfilled by the church (Rollin 1929). Unlike the British, they recognized the authority of persons already in power, maintaining the Marquesan term haka’iki (chief) even after this position was transformed into a mayoral position and elected like maires in every other region of France. Post-World War II “liberal” policies transformed the Marquesan colonial Établissement into a Territoire d’outre-mer (Overseas Territory), and in 1946, French Polynesians were granted French citizenship and the right to vote for the French president as well as territorial and local representatives. In this dual government, Marquesans have two administrators, one representing the French state and the other representing the French Polynesian territory (both referred to as komana from French commandant), plus a two-pronged police force (as in France): national gendarmes and local mutoi (from French municipal). Taxes and social services, though territorial in name, mirror the French equivalents, and French judges guide the penal system, all enacted via French. Additionally, the French state began to subsidize Marquesans’ investment in cash crops from vanilla to dried coconut (copra) and moved its atomic testing program to French Polynesia when in 1962 Algeria won its independence from France. The Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP) led to a burgeoning civil service, extensive infrastructural spending (airports, roads, and electricity), and a fledgling tourist industry, which provided salaried employment for Indigenous men and women throughout the territory. Out of these developments, a restructured variety of French emerged, one marked by Polynesian sounds, loanwords, and grammatical calques, and was denigrated by the French as charabia16 (Riley 2007). However, all administrative systems (e.g., taxation, voting, land rights, and marriages) required documents written using a register of French that only French ex-pats and a métis (mixed heritage) elite were educated to master. In both of these colonial contexts, communities already traumatized by disease, violence, anomie and/or exploitation were reorganized via European institutions and reformulated using European terms and codes. Yet some of the cultural and linguistic means for transforming individuals and some of the forms of sociolinguistic hierarchy and hegemony that resulted from these institutional practices differed.

Religious Re-education and Sociolinguistic Hegemony Both French and British regimes relied on two key institutions: the church and the school, to impose their colonial “order.” Education—first religious, then secular—was

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used to teach standardized European languages and inculcate the language ideology that only these could be used to understand colonial policies and navigate their institutional channels. However, there was a difference in cultural ethos: the pragmatic British were slow to offer educational and cultural institutions until quite late in the process (Bennett 1987) whereas France committed early on to its mission civilisatrice17 and attempted to form “little Frenchmen” out of their “noble savages.” Some of these differences, mixed with precolonial specificities, led to variations in how Solomon Islanders and Marquesans discovered their specific codes and voices in the face of colonial injustice. British administrators in the Solomon Islands left schooling to the Christian missions until the 1960s (Bennett 1987). Methodist, Catholic, and Anglican Missionaries used English and local languages while the South Seas Evangelical Church used English and Pijin to teach some basic literacy and numeracy skills in addition to the Scriptures. Girls were taught European forms of domesticity (cooking in pots, sewing clothes, etc) and other behaviors deemed gender appropriate by Christian missionaries, especially “proper” language and manners. Marriage practices were transformed by some European missionaries who misunderstood bridewealth as a form of buying and selling women: some churches banned or limited the amount of shell money given at marriage in the eastern part of the archipelago. These Christian fears emerged in Pijin: local terms for “bridewealth” and “fetch the girl” became braedpraes (brideprice) and baem/paem gele (buy/pay girl); fri (free) was introduced to refer to a woman who was married without bridewealth. Ironically, by interfering in a practice that celebrates bonds of kinship and the (re)productive value of women, the British introduced the notion of commodifying women (Jourdan and Labbé 2020).18 In the 1960s, the government introduced English-medium primary and secondary schools alongside mission schools. In some primary schools, the ancestral language was used for the first two years before transitioning to English. Thereafter, students caught speaking their own language or Pijin at school would be punished, for instance, forced to work in the vegetable garden under the hot sun. This sent a double message: first, your own language is not good enough for school; second, if you want to succeed in the British Protectorate, you must master English (Jourdan and Angeli 2014). These British policies fostered the social production and reproduction (first through indirect rule and then through education) of a body of civil servants and government agents who occupied paid positions as teachers, missionaries, and members of the constabulary. These individuals acquired status and some measure of wealth (compared to their fellow countrymen) because they were rhetorically gifted and multilingual, two linguistic capacities that were also valued prior to colonialism. During and after the colonial period, their mastery of official English (as well as the pragmatically and covertly valued Pijin) instrumentalized their success on the national scene while their claim to legitimacy vis-a-vis their rural constituency was a function of their knowledge of their ancestral language(s). By distributing diverse roles to their children (some stayed home in the village while others went to town to earn money), these emergent leaders transmitted to the next generation both the necessary linguistic skills and the desire for social and economic advancement of a family lineage. These often were the people who, at independence, were elected to provincial or national parliament (Jourdan 2007a). A similar regime for repressing local languages and instilling shame over linguistic incompetence was socialized by churches and schools in the Marquesas but in ways shaped by France’s long history of republican conflict over the role of religion in education. Although the republican mandate to provide state-run primary schools throughout France

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was extended to its overseas territories, this did not materialize in the Marquesas until after World War II.19 Prior to that, Catholic schools opened and closed intermittently in response to French politics, funding from Rome, and the resettlement of a depleted and ailing population into villages whose social lives were organized by Catholic missionaries around churches ringing the hours for mass, life rituals, and Saints’ Days. The Marquesan language was used for prayers and hymns at church to further the conversion process, but at school, the European forms of cleaning, cooking, sewing, gardening, and childcare were taught in basic French, and the use of Marquesan was punished using the symbole technique, a widespread form of colonial education (Heller and McElhinny 2017: 93-95). In this case, any child caught speaking Marquesan on school grounds was given a shell to hold, which they could pass to any other child heard speaking Marquesan; the child stuck holding the shell at the end of the day stayed after to pull weeds till their hands bled.20 Girls were the primary targets of this religious education: they were taken from home and cloistered in nuns’ schools during pubescence to “protect” them from men’s sexual violence and thus turned into a “civilizing” force at home for enforcing French discourses and etiquette (from bonjour “hello” and merci “thank you” to prayers at meals). The sociolinguistic effect was that women were known as proper (if limited) speakers of French while men were associated with Marquesan and other rude communicative practices, for example, cursing (Riley 1996). Where this gendered divide breaks down is in the small class of men from precolonial elite lineages who retained both land and authority due to their being educated in French and ordained to wield power via French-structured institutions and practices that depended on literacy in a form of standard French. Fluent and rhetorically gifted in both French and Marquesan, they became some of the first Marquesan school teachers, nurses, and territorial representatives. This class-formation process was only obstructed by the fact that colonial funds and authority were funneled through Tahiti so that the next wave of teachers, nurses, and other salaried civil servants to arrive in the Marquesas after the French were Tahitians, who became the target of powerful Marquesan men’s ire (Riley 2007, 2011). Thus, religion and education supported the establishment and reproduction of colonial linguistic regimes in both communities as syncretic home languages were denigrated, and written documents in a foreign language were used to instantiate governmentality and commodification into the twenty-first century. However, one additional contrast, that the French held onto their Pacific territories whereas the British eventually divested themselves of their protectorate, has had a substantial impact on the expression and articulation of language inequalities in these two regions.

LINGUISTIC JUSTICE IN THE GLOBALIZED PRESENT The “post-colonial” era has given rise to a wide range of small polities in the world, from independent nations with developed infrastructures and resilient political processes to territories still held by their European colonizers in a variety of forms (e.g., Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico, Hawai’i and American Samoa). However, even the most “independent” are entangled in webs of neocolonial governmentality run by global institutions (e.g., the IMF) and policies over which they have limited control. And, in even the most powerful nations, political-economic arrangements are linguistically mediated in ways that constrain the decision-making voices of both individuals and their collectivities on the world stage (Duchêne and Heller 2012; Piller 2016; Reyes 2021; Rojo and Del Percio 2020). This is especially true for the polities emerging out of the

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clash between neoliberal globalization and prior formations, for whom newly revitalized and/or syncretic codes are called upon to manage new forms of social inequity (see for example chapters in this volume by Feliciano-Santos and Williams). We look now at how Solomon Islands and the Marquesas are retooling their linguistic resources to index their sovereignty on the world stage as well as handle social injustices at home in the contemporary moment.

Linguistic Voice and Sovereignty We clock the “contemporary moment” as beginning in the late 1970s for many peoples of the Pacific with the eruption of new political-economic arrangements. Solomon Islanders were granted independence in 1978, mostly without a fight,21 but still retain a bond with the British Commonwealth. More recently, their dependence on foreign aid and investments from Australia, New Zealand, China, and other Asian countries, has compelled Solomon Islanders (or at least their leaders) to respond to complex power struggles along the Pacific Rim.22 By contrast, the semiautonomous, overseas pays of French Polynesia remains on the UN list of territories to be decolonized. The French state retains a military, naval, and judicial presence, but still funnels its financial investments through the territorial government in Tahiti. However, conscious of this double colonialism, Marquesans have since the 1970s been seeking a relationship with the French state that bypasses Tahiti and supports their own cultural revitalization movement. These quite distinctive forms of political-economic sovereignty have clearly influenced the approaches taken by Solomon Islanders and Marquesans in the remaking of the sociolinguistic hegemonies inherited from their colonial regimes and in their linguistic reworking of the structural injustices affecting the wealth and status of both individuals and polities in the global arena. Pijin, Legitimacy, and Identity In Solomon Islands, English, Pijin, and the seventy-four ancestral languages now coexist in a linguistic hierarchy that superficially resembles the colonial regime. English sits at the apex (though hardly any Solomon Islander speak it as a native language) while Pijin is still discursively stigmatized (even while functioning as the country’s lingua franca). And, although the ancestral languages (termed langus in Pijin) are now all recognized in the constitution, Pijin is not; however, its pragmatic success is encroaching on their vitality. These sociolinguistic issues of legitimacy have consequences for speakers’ identities and differential access to wealth and power. As the official language of the State, English is used in government, at school and church, in print media and in official newscasts. It is heard on radio and television programs from overseas and serves as a vector for higher education and salaried employment in Honiara, Fiji, New Zealand, and beyond. Thus, though a vestige of colonial power, the present prestige of English now rests on its status as the medium of globalization and its ability to open doors to international employment, universities, and travel. But although universal primary schooling in a standard variety of English provides some hope of socioeconomic advancement for all, actual success is constrained by the lack of spaces in secondary schools, high cost of advanced education, especially abroad (Jourdan and Angeli 2014), and lack of jobs. Thus, the hegemonic relationship between English competence and political-economic power is now maintained by the neocolonial elite who originally benefited from indirect rule and provincial secondary schooling and so are now fluent in global English. Yet this English is no one’s comfort code: Solomon Islanders rarely use

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it with each other except in a joking manner or in the presence of foreigners (Jourdan 2020).23 Instead, Pijin has now become the first and sometimes only language of two generations of urbanites and is heard in villages as well as city streets, on the radio and in pop culture. Though it emerged out of blatantly unjust forms of structural violence24 and was subsequently delegitimized as linguistically inadequate, the code has now developed a full range of linguistic complexity through interaction at home, in the street, and in ever more formal contexts. And thanks to linguists, it has been dignified with a dictionary (Jourdan and Maebiru 2002) and grammar (Beimers 2008). However, it lacks the authority of English as many of its speakers have internalized and normalized colonial prejudices and purist ideologies about it being a broken code without rules. Additionally, in the mind of some speakers, Pijin cannot claim to be a real langus,25 having no anchor to an ancestral place with cultural traditions. Yet, despite its proclaimed linguistic illegitimacy, Pijin has gained covert cultural legitimacy for mediating and imagining Solomon Islanders’ sovereign nationhood (Jourdan 2008). Culturally heavy key terms (Williams 1976) circulate regularly as tropes for violence, financial difficulty, and new forms of urban social mores and bonding. Metapragmatically, they anchor a negotiation about social injustices. Masta Liu, an archetypal urban wanderer, faces social exclusion and unemployment (Jourdan 1995b); mama karae (mom is crying) signifies domestic violence; wantok bisnis (one-talk26 business) refers to graft and nepotism as well as ethnolinguistic solidarity; Honiara bone (born in Honiara) refers to lack of customary behavior and etiquette. While coined to capture facets of urban living in this neocolonial country, many such terms are also borrowed into local languages as similar struggles encroach on village life.27 The saliency of heavy words in Pijin indexes the centrality of this overtly devalorized language. Pijin speaks from the gut, embodying the voice, instrumentally unifying, and symbolically recognizing the emergent identity of “Solomon Islanders” who are actively changing the political and economic landscape of this diverse archipelago. However, Pijin’s pragmatic and national success along with the now global power of English have also had a negative impact on multilingualism and the vitality of the many discursively valued langus in ways familiar to activists concerned with the long-term fate of Indigenous languages and their speakers (e.g., in this volume, Perley and Meek). Language shift is most obvious in towns where linguistic-exogamous marriages are common. Children of these unions are estranged from and acquire only limited competence in their parents’ ancestral languages because they are socialized primarily in Pijin at home, their peer interactions take place in Pijin, and schooling is in English. Even in rural villages, most people know and use Pijin, and so competence in their neighbors’ ancestral languages is no longer actively socialized, especially as traditional exchange practices and social networks are also disappearing. This has taken a toll on Solomon Islanders’ traditional commitment to varied forms of multilingualism beyond Pijin-English bilingualism (Jourdan 2008). Finally, not all langus are demographically equal (i.e., some groups have more speakers than others), which has consequences for the relative clout wielded by ethnolinguistic groups on the national scene. Yet, no ancestral language has more inherent prestige than another, and high regard for the continued existence of all langus is transmitted even in urban settings. Here, the older generation speaks not only Pijin (out of necessity) but also uses their langus to seek out wantoks. Even for younger urbanites who no longer understand or produce their parents’ langus, these provide the basis for claiming

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membership in their parents’ ethnolinguistic group(s). Thus, somewhat ironically, langus remain conceptually and emotionally legitimate because they not only index the authentic anchoring of individuals to specific places and social groups whose cultural practices are still respected but also validate their place in this nation, whose cultural identity rests in part on the valorization of ethnolinguistic multiplicity. The question then is whether these distinctive groupings and means of expressing identity will continue to matter in the nation now being imagined and launched on the world stage. Will that nation be committed to pluralism and to safeguarding the kastom and langus of their many ethnic groups? Or will even village youth quit learning their langus, using Pijin instead to affectively link to emergent spaces and ways of life? That is, will Pijin subsume not only the instrumental value of the ancestral langus but also their symbolic salience for indexing attachment to place and wantok? In that case, a long-denigrated, syncretic code may become not only practically significant but also politically powerful as the langus for imagining this emergent sovereign nation (Jourdan 1995a).28 Marquesan Hierarchy and Heritage In the contemporary Marquesas, the sociolinguistic mix of colonial, Indigenous, and syncretic codes, carries a different indexical weight for the expression of identity, voice, and sovereignty. One key contrast is that Marquesans are responding to the power of several powerful codes beyond French and Marquesan. The other is that their movement to revitalize their linguistic and cultural heritage has become key to their struggle to achieve economic sufficiency and cultural sovereignty in the absence of complete political independence. As in Solomon Islands, the colonial language reigns supreme, but more so, due to the permanence of French institutions and funding. These have contributed to Marquesans acquiring the tools to enact Frenchness (if not become the “little Frenchmen” envisioned by Enlightenment thinkers). As French became the official medium for most salaried employment and any governmental interactions, success in these spheres now depends on fluency in a metropolitan variety of French learned and regimented through French school curricula taught by French teachers or, more recently, Marquesans with French university degrees. The phonologically and morphosyntactically variable versions of French developed during colonial times and reproduced as a first language by many members of the community are still denigrated as charabia. However, unlike Pijin, its linguonym is not capitalized, nor are efforts made to codify it with a dictionary. An ability to insert a few Marquesan words while speaking French asserts one’s belonging to a particular place and people. But Marquesans who cannot switch out of this mixed code into something approaching “correct” French may be misunderstood and/or silenced when speaking up to power (e.g., to French administrators, doctors, and educators). But French is not the only power code in play. Many Marquesans are aware that other world languages, especially English, but also Spanish, Japanese, and others, are assets on the global market, and so seek to learn these at school, on the web, and/or through contact with foreigners (e.g., tourists and anthropologists). Their intrigue with these codes tempers their respect for the French language and for the fast-talking communicative style of the French grosses têtes (bigheads) who still hold the reins to getting things done in the territory. These linguistic ideologies and competencies allow for and inspire everyday code-switching that signals one’s cosmopolitan cool (Riley 2007, 2011). But unlike Pijin, these heteroglossic practices have not yet cohered into a syncretic code with the potential

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to voice an overarching sovereign identity. Instead, that role is assigned to a newly idealized Marquesan language and held in contrastive tension to Tahitian, the closely related language to which we now turn. Marquesans have long recognized the power of Tahitian and so learned to mix it into their Marquesan. Empowered by the French colonial enterprise that put Tahiti (700 miles south of the Marquesas) at the center of the collectivity’s economic infrastructure and administrative bureaucracy, Tahitian became the dominant code in many semiformal settings, from merchant ships to local politics, over a century ago.29 Even now, it permeates the airwaves (TV, radio, and pop music) alongside French and is required for civil employment. Consequently, most inhabitants of the territory develop some competence while Tahitians never learn any other archipelago’s language. This double linguistic hegemony mirrors the sense of double colonialism that has underwritten the Marquesans’ long-standing attempt to strengthen their own ties to France and the financial and political independence from Tahiti that would entail. Thus, rather than support the Tahitian movement to unseat French colonialism, most Marquesans have long looked for recognition on the global stage as their pathway to sovereignty by, for instance, celebrating their language and culture through biannual arts festivals (Donaldson 2019; Riley 2011, 2013), museum exhibits (e.g., Ivory 2016), and an application to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.30 Awareness that their language is endangered by the global, national, and territorial power of English, French, and Tahitian arose slowly but is now widespread thanks to Motu Haka, the cultural revival association spearheaded in the 1970s by a few well-educated and fluently bilingual Marquesan men. Importantly, it was also supported by their charismatic archbishop, Mgr . Le Cleac’h, who felt that Marquesans need not follow the same path of language loss and cultural stigma experienced by his own people, the Bretons, at the hands of the French in the early twentieth century. Further inspired by postcolonial discourses concerning cultural revitalization that were then circling the globe, this well-connected elite (most had salaried posts as teachers, mayors, and representatives to the Territorial Assembly) have garnered financial and political support from France31 as well as international NGOs to maintain the natural and cultural heritage of the archipelago (Donaldson 2019; Riley 2013). But it is the movement’s linguistic effects that best highlight the issue of voice and sovereignty. Prayers and songs in Marquesan are increasingly (re)invented and circulated on social media as well as at church and arts festivals, while strategies keep being invented to support the socialization of Marquesan at home, at schools and camps, much of this now supported by French policies and funding. One effort, the Tuhuka ’eo ’enana (Marquesan Academy), modeled in 2000 on l’Académie française, is committed to orthographically fixing Marquesan. Celebrations of the language through competitions and printed texts, such as books of legends and children’s poetry in Marquesan (Tuhuna ’Eo ’Enata 2005, 2012), are intended to increase linguistic pride through literacy; however, these efforts have also led to infighting over how to standardize the language—for example, which dialect(s) to privilege in publications and how to write them. Additionally, purist ideologies have obstructed the intergenerational transmission of the language. That is, forms of Marquesan that show signs of “decadence” (French loanwords and calques, simplified grammar and a loss of nineteenth-century lexemes) are now, like nonstandard French, mocked as charabia. Children who speak this way are shamed by their elders, and its everyday use is on the wane in even the smallest villages (Riley 2007, 2011).32

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This resembles the indexical recursivity Irvine (Gal and Irvine 2019) identified as operating among Wolof-speakers in Senegal (another previously hierarchical society “civilized” by the French Empire). In the Marquesan case, the recursively adopted French language ideologies are erasing the legitimacy of linguistic variation in general while undermining the productive competence in and demographic vitality of specific Marquesan dialects and any associated syncretic codes. Similarly, ideological pride in heritage is being repurposed in the interests of an elitist form of discourse that strangely mirrors the French enlightenment mission to civilize the “noble savage” and highlights how the mission civilisatrice has borne fruit for some, but not all sectors of society. Tensions such as these are now widespread in language revitalization movements as debates rage over if, how, and for whom they can be saved or if they are only being weaponized by a few in the name of some abstract humanistic cause (Hill 2002; Fleming and Ansaldo 2020). However, not all Marquesans seem eager to live up to these power-inflected ideologies, preferring instead to use their cosmopolitan charabia to keu (play)—that is, engage in creative and frequently comedic interactions. Several generations of youth have now contributed to this tendency to mix global, regional, and local terms, as well as nonverbal signs (e.g., shaka, may have originated in Hawai’i but now sports a range of meanings—such as hi, bye, and cool—across the Pacific33). Now circulated through both in-person and online media, these heteroglossic practices resist both colonial French and Tahitian hegemony. They also challenge some of the contradictions inherent in the elite Marquesan being generated by the Academy to express cultural sovereignty. Sometimes “cosmopolitan charabia” feels like an attempt to disrupt, if playfully, a host of discourses imagined by the European Enlightenment. Thus, though the hold of colonial French and its purist ideologies is powerfully fueled by the retention of a sociocultural and political-economic relationship with France and the rejection of territorial control from Tahiti, it is competing with the symbolic capital of world languages. With respect to syncretic codes, the originally French-based form of charabia is moving closer to metropolitan French, the more Marquesan charabia of the youth is demonized by the revitalization movement, yet a cosmopolitan form of charabia is emerging. These linguistic shifts have not only had an impact on the collectivity’s voice on the global scene but have also fueled the ways in which people occupy, transform, and speak in the name of some of the sociocultural identities available to them.

Voice, Legitimacy, and Gender It is clear, as outlined in the previous section, that colonial forms of sociolinguistic stratification and its discourses were not only reproduced but also transformed by both Marquesans and Solomon Islanders. That is, in both societies standardized colonial languages that took root through education are being maintained, but restructured ways of speaking—Pijin and various forms of charabia—are also emerging within a range of colonial and now neoliberal global institutions. Similarly, Indigenous languages are being endangered not only by global killer languages via pop media and the global marketplace, but also by local ideologies and practices, such as the use of Pijin in Solomon Islands and the imposition of a purified Marquesan. And both Pacific societies have encountered similar contradictions in their search for linguistic legitimacy and sovereign voice in the contemporary moment.

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However, constraints on acquiring, using, and shaping these power codes not only affect how these polities represent themselves in the world but also shape if and how class, age, and especially gender affect individuals’ access to resources, status, and political power. Linguistic hegemony in both cases has facilitated class-formation processes and the rise of a neocolonial elite (usually older, educated men) who benefit more than others from these transformations. Nonetheless, many (though not all, as discussed above) Marquesans and Solomon Islanders have refused to wholly devalorize their home-grown communicative styles. And some, especially women (as well as nonbinary persons in the Marquesas), have benefited from resisting the established linguistic hegemonies and engaging in newly emergent practices as a result. In Solomon Islands, precolonial forms of gender inequality were reinforced during early colonialism due to men’s ability to control women’s access to multilingualism in the two power codes, English and Pijin. However, a linguistically empowered younger generation of women has surged onto the postcolonial scene (Pollard 2000). Beginning in the 1960s, women began to learn both English at school and Pijin on plantations and in the streets. English opened doors to higher education, and many young, educated women are now professionals. But it was Pijin that was the game-changer for most women as it allowed them to forge social networks across ethnic boundaries, develop friendships and business connections throughout the city, participate in church-based and women’s associations, and access paid employment (e.g., as saleswomen) or the informal economy (e.g., marketing cooked foods or crafts). Though still saddled with the roles (both precolonial and Christian) of wife and mother, many now engage in activities that afford financial freedom. Additionally, they are released from the costly ethnolinguistic taboos that once endangered them: if in doubt about a word’s appropriate use, they now employ Pijin instead. Finally, thanks to Pijin and English, women now bypass the help (or hindrance) of an interpreter in court, which has increased their jural autonomy and activated their citizenship. By contrast, in the Marquesas, elite women had some access to authoritative roles in precolonial times, a power that was re-enforced by missionary attempts to educate them in the power code of French and later to reward their “proper” behavior with well-paid positions of influence in French institutions as teachers, nurses, and civil servants (in the postal service, administrative offices, etc.). Additionally, Marquesan women have seemingly benefited from contemporary French efforts to legislate gender parity, punish domestic abuse, support gender transitions, and legalize same-sex marriage.34 Although Indigenous and colonial linguistic regimes still constrain individuals’ access to wealth and power today, newer forms of gender justice are being served by contemporary responses to the forms of class inequality discussed above as both new and old ways of communicating play a strategic role in the articulation of these new rights. First of all, oratorical skills are no longer only respectably acquired by persons of elite lineages. Those with the skills to speak out effectively in public tend to be older men but increasingly include men in their twenties and a growing number of women who have broken the polite colonial mold and acquired authoritative public voices, some through embodying a masculine persona and conversational style. Additionally, female-identifying mahu are now recognized for their mastery of polite registers marked as feminine and an ability (understood as masculine) to manipulate documents as required by French-inspired bureaucracies. Thus, traditional forms of gender fluidity seem to be channeling new forms of power. This section has focused on how language politics in the contemporary period in the Marquesas and Solomon Islands show traces of prior social inequalities while also

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mediating emergent ones. Normally, power codes index power because they are spoken by those who are or were powerful, so fluency in them serves as a gatekeeping mechanism for those who wish to wield new forms of authority. However, transformations of old sociolinguistic regimes may transform social justice in unexpected and linguistically mediated ways. In Solomon Islands, a now globalized variety of colonial English is widely acquired, pragmatically instrumentalized, and still ideologically framed as the correct code for official business, but its value remains primarily transactional. By contrast, local langus still carry symbolic and affective weight for individuals, especially those who acquire them in their villages and use them to facilitate wontok connections in urban spaces. However, it is Pijin, though still devalorized as a broken language, that has now gained the clout of everyday currency (a kind of pragmatic power that some official languages never achieve) and become the mother tongue of two generations of urbanites, who are using it to forge and give voice to an emergent national identity. In other words, British language ideologies and linguistically mediated institutions and practices (e.g., a linguistic pragmatism that tells us to use the code that works!) have not only been retained in various ways but also transformed by the workings of sovereignty. These semiotic distinctions have offered a range of both affordances and difficulties for those working to address social inequalities with respect to age, class, and, especially, gender. By contrast, in the Marquesas, the French and Marquesan forms of charabia that resulted from 200 years of colonial domination seem now to be giving way, despite or perhaps because of continued semicolonial control, to more cosmopolitan code-switching practices as more or less standardized forms of French and Marquesan are mixed with other territorial and world languages. This emergent heteroglossia allows speakers to index the prestige associated with global power codes, interpellate cultural identity through a newly codified variety of Marquesan, and draw on a growing competence in metropolitan French. Younger men as well as nonbinary persons and women of all ages are using these linguistic resources to challenge Indigenous and colonial social hierarchies and access the economic benefits associated with both transformed Indigenous and newly minted cosmopolitan social categories.

CONCLUSIONS This chapter has explored how different sociocultural and political-economic regimes may bring about different forms of linguistically mediated social hierarchies, and how these may become more or less consequential over time as the voices of those linguistically assigned to some social categories are squelched while others are handed the mike. As discussed in the first section, some forms of language-based inequalities found in the Marquesas and Solomon Islands predated European colonization. Although Marquesans discriminated more on the basis of rank and Solomon Islanders on gender, both did so by limiting access to the valorized forms of speech that authorized individual agency and status. In the second section, we surveyed how these forms of structural inequality were either dwarfed or inflamed (or both) by new forms of linguistically mediated colonial violence. Literate modes of French and English, instantiated by colonial institutions, were made ideologically prestigious and pragmatically efficacious, thus displacing the status-bearing roles of local languages and speech genres. Through schooling, religion, marketing, and administration, local languages were disassociated, practically and symbolically, from the world of social advancement, other than as objects of scientific study and/or as commodified relics of Indigenous ways of life. In the final section, we

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looked at how, in the last half-century, social actors have found linguistic media for addressing both ancestral and colonial inequalities. We argue that devalorizing the full spectrum of Indigenous languages (in all their dialectal variation) has long silenced and erased many speakers’ social identities and human rights. However, both Marquesans and Solomon Islanders have explored ways to resist dominant discourses of linguistic hegemony at pragmatic levels and have sought ways to re-voice their emergent identities. That is, new language-infused ways of forging new bonds of solidarity and sovereignty have been developed in both societies in ways that have mitigated the segregating effects of the colonial languages. In other words, we see many similarities in the linguistic outcomes in both places: stratification of speakers based on linguistic hegemony, development of mixed codes, and devaluation of ancestral languages as they are spoken. However, the detailed analysis we offer also alerts us to the fact that similar colonial and neocolonial processes do not necessarily have the same results. Injustice existed prior to colonization in the form of status-bearing speaking abilities in both societies. With colonization, an array of linguistically mediated ways of limiting justice and unequally distributing rights and resources (e.g., governmentality, territorialization, commodification) were instituted. Political, social, and kin relationships were redefined with new names thus changing the sociolinguistic configuration of these societies. Territories were marked by new toponyms and administrative divisions, people accessed power through the mastery of new linguistic codes, and a new elite developed based on language skills and education rather than on hereditary transmission or personal achievements. The benefit for some individuals is that class status is now based on achieved financial acuity rather than inherited, symbolic wealth. However, these and other processes evidence how language has always been a medium for social differentiation and dominance, and new forms of media have only furthered these semiotic effects. Most recently, the new codes, policies, and discourses piped in by globalized forms of social media—for example, the celebration of women’s rights as human rights—have been used to access symbolic resources and political sovereignty in new ways—for example, by promoting the public and materially effective voices of women. Finally, the syncretic processes underway for over two centuries in both regions of the Pacific now signal the emergence of new cultural legitimacies as both Pijin and cosmopolitan charabia are becoming more or less alternative channels of expression for their (semi-)sovereign polities. It manifests speakers’ ability to play in creative ways with the linguistic resources available to them and opens the door to linguistic justice, which may contribute to political agendas for social justice. As long as speakers remain ignored or denigrated because of the language they speak, as long as some languages are denigrated because they do not conform to the hegemonic idea of what a language is, linguistic-based social inequality will remain, and social injustice will endure. For this to be corrected, Pijin and charabia speakers need to see their linguistic capabilities valorized by local communities and (post)colonial states, by educational and employment pipelines, and by international organizations and activism.35

CODA In crafting this chapter about language and social justice in the Pacific, we are made evermore mindful of the consequences of our own interventions as researchers: of how we relate to our research participants and collaborators and how we represent

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them to others. We have already explored in this chapter how specific lexemes index whole histories of injustice and how we use them advisedly to undermine rather than sustain these injustices. But our code choices when presenting our findings are also worth mentioning. Our commitment to making our writing accessible to our research participants and other local people interested in building on what we do means that we must write in languages they can read. Unfortunately, that language is not Marquesan or any of the seventy-four languages of Solomon Islands, nor Pijin nor charabia, for all the reasons discussed in this chapter (though see Jourdan 2007a and 2021); and the lengthy transcripts of French-Marquesan code-switching in Riley (2007, 2011, 2016). Instead, Riley whose first and principal language is English, has written articles in French about Marquesans; Jourdan, whose first language is French, writes mostly in English about Solomon Islanders. The obvious irony that these languages were imposed by colonizers in both places needs to be mentioned here once more.

NOTES 1. This chapter draws on ethnohistorical research by others as well as ethnographic fieldwork by Riley and Jourdan. While no individual participants are named in this chapter, many were involved through informed consent in our collection and analysis of data. Without their support and participation, we would have returned from the field empty-handed. Riley, who has engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in the Marquesas since 1993 (most recently in 2020), wishes here to acknowledge the help of two powerful women who supported her research in too many ways to enumerate: Moi Hokaupoko and Yvonne Katupa. Jourdan has worked primarily in Solomon Islands capital of Honiara since the 1980s, and most recently in 2019, and is also endebted to powerful women: Ellen Maebiru, who coauthored the Pijin dictionary and Lily Wame. 2. Of the many regions of the world claimed by the French during its imperial history, some were later usurped by the British, some became independent, and some have been retained via various forms of jurisdiction signaled by various labels: départements, territoires, and collectivités. Only French Polynesia, while still a collectivity, was further designated (in 2004) a pays (country) in recognition of some nuances in their ongoing administration by France. 3. See Da Silva (2019), Makihara and Schieffelin (2007), and Thomas (2012) for more about the social and linguistic impact of colonialism elsewhere in the Pacific, as well as chapters by Mutu and Slotta and Handman in this volume. 4. Micronesia (small islands) is part of the tripartite division of the Pacific along with Melanesia and Polynesia, but we are not discussing it in this chapter. 5. “Le bon sauvage” is falsely attributed to J.J. Rousseau; although he wrote about the deleterious effects of “civilization” on human nature, the idea first took shape in the Essais of Montaigne (Des Cannibales and Des Coches) and in the reports written by early European explorers. See especially Graeber and Wengrow’s (2021) analysis of how this assumption that happier forms of equality and reciprocity must once have prevailed in non-“civilized” societies would never have arisen in Europe without the input of Indigenous intellectuals and the conversations resulting from European exploration and colonial desecration. 6. As explained by Tuite (1999) and Heller and McElhinny (2017), the Stammbaum method of classifying languages into families is fraught with ideological problems. 7. Kanaka, the Hawaiian term for “person,” spread throughout the Pacific as a pidgin term for many Indigenous people. French colonials employed Canaques to refer specifically and

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derogatorily to the various peoples of New Caledonia, now an autonomous collectivity (like French Polynesia). Kanak has now been reclaimed by all New Caledonian political parties working for independence, one of which recently won a majority in the territorial government for the first time: https://islandsbusiness​.com​/news​-break​/independence​ -movement​-wins​-majority​-in​-new​-caledonia​-government/ . 8. A lively discussion thread was triggered on the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO)’s listserve by this article about naming the Indigenous peoples living in the Pacific Ocean: https://www​.stuff​.co​.nz​/pou​-tiaki​/300363764​/pacific​-islander​-an​ -insulting​-umbrella​-term​-researcher​-tells​-royal​-commission). Indeed, ethnonymic debates in North America still simmer over how to name its first inhabitants: “Indians” and “Native Americans” have begun to give way to “First Nations” or “First Peoples,” but only when organizing as a larger collective, whereas for most discourse, more precise references are preferred (e.g., “Western Apache” or “Abenaki Nation,” see Perley’s chapter in this volume). 9. Marquesans’ capacity to understand Tahitians better than the reverse is an example of how subordinates frequently learn to listen up and interpret the linguistic variations of their superiors whereas the latter claim the utterances of their underlings are incomprehensible. 10. Thus, for instance, we too use these terms when discussing the historical emergence of Solomon Islands creole, once pejoratively named Kanaka Pidgin, now the national lingua franca. Not only do the terms serve as a practical shorthand, they also index the dialectically complex and power-inflected social life of languages: reflecting how syncretic codes emerge out of unjust sociolinguistic conditions while also creating the means for communities to critique those conditions and refuse their contextual ideologies (Jourdan 2008). 11. The status was that of the protectorate and the archipelago became known to the British as the “British Solomon Islands Protectorate” until independence in 1978. 12. The term kastom was revalorized during the Maasina movement (see endnote 14) as Malaitans wrote down their cultural traditions, partly to safeguard them and partly to correct British misrepresentations (Akin 2013). 13. This term, a direct reference to Pax Romana, is used to refer to the turn of the twentiethcentury period when Europe was at peace and the British Empire at its most powerful, but also more specifically to the British government’s forcible pacification of the Solomon Islands. 14. This political movement against colonial rule developed mainly on the island of Malaita after World War II, lasted six years, and ended in 1952 with its leaders arrested, put to trial, and sent to jail (Akin 2013). 15. Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l’État https://www​ .legifrance​.gouv​.fr​/loda​/id​/JOR​FTEX​T000​000508749/ (accessed 5.21.2022) 16. Charabia means “mixed-up, incoherent speech” in French (apparently derived from the nineteenth-century patois spoken by coal workers from Auvergne (https://www​.cnrtl​.fr​/ definition​/charabia), but has taken on a life of its own in the Marquesas. Introduced by French and Tahitian teachers castigating their pupils’ French, it is now widely used by Marquesans to stigmatize their Marquesanized French or Frenchified Marquesan, or a code-switching mix of the two plus others (Riley 2007). 17. Literally “civilizing mission,” the phrase is attributed to Condorcet, an eighteenth-century French Enlightenment mathematician and philosopher, but this foundational tenet of French colonialism preceded him—that is, the idea that Indigenous populations can and should assimilated and “enlightened” through the imposition of the French language, laws, faith, and schooling. 18. In town, some young men now say that paying bridewealth means they own the woman.

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19. Tetahiotupa 2004 reviews French Polynesian language and educational policies. 20. This panopticon means of instilling fear, shame, and blame has been reported well into the 1980s when teaching the language was officially authorized in schools, carried on presumably by teachers who were themselves a product of this traumatizing practice (Donaldson 2019, 171; Tetahiotupa 1999, 209–11). 21. Exceptions include the post-World War II Maasina Rule (see endnote 14) and the Western Province breakaway movement begun in the early 1970s. 22. For example https://www​.yahoo​.com​/news​/chinese​-fm​-visit​-solomon​-islands​-070652579​ .html 23. Of course, the joking use of a colonial language in the presence of outsiders can, as Basso (1979) has made clear, be a serious matter. 24. We use the term “structural violence” to refer to the hard labor and living conditions experienced by indentured workers in the plantations of Queensland, where Kanaka Pidgin (the ancestor of Pijin) stabilized, but wish to be clear that this violence cannot be confused with the brutality endured by generations of people enslaved in the Caribbean and Americas. 25. The Pijin lexeme langus is applied to local languages only, never to English or Pijin, which indicates that these are not considered “real” languages. 26. The term wantok was coined to refer to members of one’s ethnolinguistic group but now also indicates friendship, or the belonging to the same school, church, sports team, and so on. 27. The heavy expression: Mifala no save kaekae long gaden; mifala kaekae long selen (We do not eat from our garden; we eat with money) speaks to the stark contrast between village life and an urban world where everything costs money. 28. Similarly, Tok-Pisin, another English-based pidgin, became the post-independence official language of Papua New Guinea (Smith 2002). 29. Tahitian was granted co-official standing alongside French by the Territorial Assembly in 1980 although the autonomy agreement of 1996 (updated in 2004) reinstated French as the one official code while giving Marquesan and two languages from other archipelagos (previously treated as dialects of Tahitian) recognition alongside Tahitian as “fundamental . . . [to] cultural identity,” protecting the right to use them and requiring their maintenance via primary and secondary schooling (Article 115 of Loi organique n°96-312 du 12 avril 1996 https://www​.legifrance​.gouv​.fr​/affichTexte​.do​?cidTexte​=LEG​ITEX​T000​005620766​ &dateTexte​=20101228, updated as Article 57 of Loi organique n° 2004-192 du 27 février 2004). 30. https://whc​.unesco​.org​/en​/tentativelists​/5564/ 31. For instance, the French educational system is required to offer French Polynesian students the opportunity to learn some degree of competence in both Polynesian languages and English, see http://lexpol​.cloud​.pf​/document​.php​?document​=325995​&deb​=3811​ &fin​=3853​&titre​=TG9​pIGR​1IFB​heXM​gbsK​wIDI​wMTc​tMTU​gZHU​gMTM​vMDc​ vMjAxNw== 32. Nonetheless, Marquesans are thought to have retained their home dialects more than elsewhere in the pays: https://www​.education​.pf​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2019​/08​/diapo​ _accueil​-perso​-enseignant​_2019​-08​-06​.pdf 33. For its assumed Hawaiian origins and contemporary globalized meanings, see http:// archives​.starbulletin​.com​/2002​/03​/31​/news​/kokualine​.html 34. For a critique of the achievements of the French gender parity laws, see: https://www​.cairn​ .info​/revue​-actes​-de​-la​-recherche​-en​-sciences​-sociales​-2014​-4​-page​-118​.htm

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35. For example, the UN’s proclamation of the “Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032” https://www​.un​.org​/development​/desa​/indigenouspeoples​/indigenous​-languages​.html. That is, efforts to preserve Indigenous languages should not erase the resilient creativity of Indigenous peoples who have contributed to emergent languages.

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Keesing, R., and J. Fifi’I (1969), “Kwaio Word Tabooing in its Cultural Context.” Journal of the Polynesian Society, 78 (2): 154–77. Lin, H.-L., and R. Scaglion (2019), “Austronesian Speakers and Hereditary Leadership in the Pacific.” Anthropological Forum, 29 (3): 267–83. Makihara, M., and B. B. Schieffelin, eds. (2007), Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, New York: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, B. ([1922] 1961), Argonauts of the Western Pacific, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Moore, C. (2013), Encyclopedia of Solomon Islands. Available online: http://www​.sol​omon​ency​ clopaedia​.net (accessed February 2, 2020). Morgan, M. H. (2002), Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996), Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region (The Politics of Language), London and New York: Routledge. Pawley, A. (2007), “Why do Polynesian Island Groups have one Language and Melanesian Island Groups Have Many? Patterns of Interaction and Diversification in the Austronesian Colonization of Remote Oceania.” Paper Presented at “Migrations” Conference, Porquerolles, France. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, 1st edn, New York: Oxford University Press. Pollard, A. A. (2000), Givers of Wisdom, Labourers without Gain: Essays on Women in Solomon Islands, Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies. Reyes, A. (2021), “Postcolonial Semiotics.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 50: 291–307. Riley, K. C. (1996), “Engendering Miscommunication in the Marquesas, F. P.” In N. Warner et al., eds. Gender and Belief Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Women and Language Conference, 623–32, Berkeley: Berkeley Women and Language Group. Riley, K. C. (2011), “Language Socialization and Language Ideologies.” In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B. B. Schieffelin, eds. Handbook of Language Socialization, 493–514, Malden: Blackwell. Riley, K. C. (2007), “To Tangle or Not to Tangle: Shifting Language Ideologies and the Socialization of Charabia in the Marquesas, F.P.” In M. Makihara and B. B. Schieffelin, eds. Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, 70–95, New York: Oxford University Press. Riley, K. C. (2013), “Fêtes traditionnelles et festivals glocalisés aux Marquises: Utilisation des systèmes alimentaires syncrétiques pour forger des identités hybrides.” Anthropologie et Sociétés, 37 (2): 91–111. Riley, K. C. (2016), “Learning to Exchange Food and Talk in the Marquesas.” In S. Blum (ed.), Making Sense of Language, 3rd edn, 143–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rojo, L. M., and A. Del Percio, eds. (2020), Language and Neoliberal Governmentality, London and New York: Routledge. Rollin, L. (1929), Les îles Marquises; géographie--ethnographie--histoire, colonisation et mise en valeur, Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales. Sahlins, M. (1963), “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5 (3): 285–303. Smith, B. ([1960] 1985), European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, G. (2002), Growing up with Tok-Pisin, London: Battlebridge Publications. Tcherkézoff, S. (2003), “A Long and Unfortunate Voyage towards the ‘Invention’ of the Melanesia/Polynesia Distinction 1595–1832.” The Journal of Pacific History, 38 (2): 175–96.

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Tetahiotupa, E. (1999), Bilinguisme et scolarisation en Polynésie française, PhD diss, Department of Anthropology, Université de Paris I, Panthéon Sorbonne UFR. Tetahiotupa, E. (2004), “Les langues polynésiennes : Obstacles et atouts.” Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 119: 139–53. Thomas, N. (1990), Marquesan Societies: Inequality and Political Transformation in Eastern Polynesia, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thomas, N. (2012), Islanders: The Pacific in the age of empire, New Haven: Yale University Press. Thomas, N., A. Abramson, I. Brady, R. Green, M. Sahlins, R. Stephenson, and R. White (1989), “The Force of Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia Division [and Comments and Replies].” Current Anthropology, 30 (1): 27–41. 10.2307/2743301 Tuhuna, È. È. (2005), Te Tau Teào Hakatu Tahi : Fatutia e te tau toiki hāmani no te Fenua Ènata, Hong Kong: WKT. Thuhuna, È. È. (2012), Haakakai o te fenua ènata o te paòto « haakakai me te âkakai », China: WKT. Tuite, K. (1999), “Au-delà du Stammbaum: Théories modernes du changement linguistique.” Anthropologie et Sociétés, 23 (3): 15–52. Williams, R. (1976), Heavy Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, E. R. (1982), Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Commentary to Part I PATRICIA BAQUEDANO-LÓPEZ

The case studies featured in this section offer invaluable examples of language and social justice research, methods, and advocacy that challenge the ways ideologies and institutions (re)produce linguistic injustices and inequalities. The authors model ways to advance social transformation through their important attention to histories of linguistic subjugation and discrimination, as well as practices that seek to disrupt processes of settler colonialism and linguistic emplacement of colonial languages and value standards in communities across the Pacific, South Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia, and the United States. Through sustained ethnographic methods and approaches, the authors contribute and expand frameworks that advance socially engaged research on language and social justice. These frameworks have centered deep observation, critique, reflexivity, collaboration, and awareness-raising among other components of the research process in language and social justice work (see Avineri et al. 2021; Avineri and Martinez 2021). The chapter authors all do the important work of contextualizing the particular and global histories that contribute to situations of language and social injustice and the work of individuals and communities to interrupt and wrestle with social and linguistic reproduction. The case studies illuminate ways in which research-as-advocacy humanizes the research process, the research participants, and centrally, how it humanizes the researcher. Together, the projects in this section exemplify what Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson meant with the statement, “If research doesn’t change you as a person, then you have not done it right” (Wilson 2008, 135). Speaking from and for indigenous epistemologies in research, Wilson referenced the transformative power of research when it is carried out relationally, with people and for community. The language and social projects discussed here offer compelling examples of such a type of relational work highlighting the voices and goals of people and communities working against unjust, dominant mechanisms of linguistic control. The first chapter by Ariana Mangual Figueroa and Sera Hernández, “A language socialization approach to humanizing ethnographic methods in Latinx families’ homes,” demonstrates the development and engagement of relational orientations I have just noted by expanding frameworks of language and social justice work through a practice of critical listening (Kinloch and San Pedro 2014, 21–2) that includes “turning our gaze” into the ways that researchers position themselves and are positioned by others. In their comparative case studies in the homes of mixed-status and immigrant students, the research lens turns to the family unit. Family dinners, which included the

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researchers, offered opportunities for communal sense-making of identities and for collaborative generation of knowledge about the educational experiences and prospects of these families’ children in US schools. Family interactions with the researchers during dinnertime not only provided opportunities to socialize the researchers to take up new social roles, but to also include them in the families’ stories of migration and of resilience and linguistic and cultural continuity. It was during one of these dinnertime conversations that Mangual Figueroa was asked by the parents in the Utuado-Alvarez family to take a more active role in the well-being of their children in the event the parents were to be deported (Mangual Figueroa 2016). These exchanges had a profound impact on Mangual Figueroa whose reflexive stance and deep examination of her own privileged location as a bilingual US citizen vis-à-vis the parents in her case study exemplifies an ethic of research for social justice that wrestles with the power dynamics created and maintained by social institutions. In a similar way, during visits to Sofia Romero’s home, Hernández was socialized to embody different subjectivities ranging from novice cook and parent to experienced teacher and researcher, and to family advocate. When her host relayed over a dinner conversation that she had received an unsettling phone call from a for-profit after-school language preparation company posing as school-related, Hernández had to quickly assess possible interventions given that educational institutions can be predatory of immigrant Latinx families’ language strengths and needs. The relational nature of these scholars’ co-participation with parents demonstrates an aspect of language and social justice research where critical listening can provide researchers with crucial ways to both identify and amplify the educational opportunities and well-being of immigrant children and families living within systems of surveillance and control. Mirroring the comparative and complementary case studies just discussed, in “Language access and deaf activism in Mexico and Nepal,” Erika Hoffman-Dilloway and Anne E. Pfister draw our attention to the language injustices that deaf people and deaf communities experience when normative conceptions of literacy centered on orality and medicalization perpetuate marginalization of deaf individuals and communities. Through a nuanced review of histories of social and pedagogical (in)attention to deaf students and their own longitudinal work in Mexico (Pfister) and Nepal (Hoffman-Dilloway), the authors discuss at length and convincingly the benefits of sign language support for deaf people starting from a young age and continuing across the lifespan. As the authors argue, this pedagogical sensitivity can cultivate and strengthen a view on deaf people that uplifts their competencies and abilities rather than a focus on a deficit view of (or worse, the generation of) disabilities. Pfister discusses a case study at a bilingual school for deaf children in Mexico with a critical pedagogy orientation that supported sign language socialization where, despite ideologies that often lead to language deprivation, the language and social issue at hand, young children demonstrated multimodal and interactive forms of communication with varying degrees of fluidity, findings that should compel us to rethink and disrupt the focus on orality and medicalization. However, as Pfister notes, this particular school is (shockingly) the only one in the country with this pedagogical orientation, which reveals the inadequacy of institutions to prevent language injustices at a broader scale. Pfister’s work issues an urgent call to reassess the ways in which deaf communities continue to be deprived of language. Similarly, Hoffman-Dilloway offers an important critique of ideologies of oralism that restrict access to the networks, semiotic modalities, and collaborative experiences among deaf people, that is, that limit deaf sociality. Drawing from extensive research in Nepal, Hoffman-Dilloway identifies a language and social justice issue around age and sign language acquisition in a study

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of the limitations experienced by elderly deaf people who did not have access to sign communication earlier in their lives. Such long-term language deprivation is often tied to normative competence, basically, orality; yet, the case of Madhu, an older non-signer of Nepalese Sign Language introduced in the chapter, is instructive of both resilience and insistence of being within a community. Madhu, we learn, was a frequent visitor at a center designed to teach sign language whose presence and storytelling challenged notions of standardized competence, fluidity, and agency, for Madhu actually made others accommodate to him. These studies raise awareness of multi-scalar circumstances and variables (perceptions of competence, age-related language acquisition, availability of resources, dominant ideologies of language and literacy) as well as audiences (families, teachers, schools, local, and global society) that need to coalesce, as Avineri and Perley (2019) say, to reframe, in this case, the damaging effects of language deprivation for historically marginalized deaf communities. The longitudinal case study presented by Quentin Williams in “Multilingual activism as acts of linguistic citizenship in South Africa” follows the emergence of Afrikaaps language activism in South Africa. From this case study, we learn about the ways in which language reclamation boldly resignifies the experience and resurgence of Africanness across scales of participation from the individual to the collective. The language and social issue at stake in this work is retraced to colonial histories of linguistic inequalities and control that devalued people and their languages. Williams’s commitment to identifying, documenting, and supporting a language social movement to recenter the people’s language and thus worldviews articulates engaged forms of transformative solidarity. His close study of youth and performers who steward a growing language movement offers a window into the collaborative positioning that is necessary to both engage and exercise Linguistic Citizenship in order to intervene and disrupt histories and practices of exclusion and silencing. As Williams defines it, Linguistic Citizenship is “an approach to the study of linguistic justice that highlights the manifold ways multilingual speakers mediate and represent their agency and voice in situations defined by explicit and implicit discriminatory practices.” Through a nuanced analysis of music and artistic genres and modalities (texts, lyrics, poetry, and other media), we learn from Williams’s work the manifold ways speakers of Afrikaaps actively produce sonic ecologies of language reclamation and hybridity expressed that reverberate with new voices and possibilities of linguistic citizenship, justice, and liberation. The process is transformative and generative of an activism at multiple scales that create new audiences and “an alternative politics of voice” that advances new African futurities. Similar to Williams’s work, the case study presented by Sherina Feliciano-Santos in the chapter “Colonialism and language politics in Puerto Rico” invites us to consider the need for new solidarities to address issues of language and social justice for the reclamation and revalorization of Indigenous language forms and varieties. And like Mangual Figueroa and Hernández, Feliciano-Santos’s work foregrounds the power of engaged research in practices of critical listening and storytelling. Feliciano-Santos underscores this point when she states: “It is important to listen to the stories speakers tell about their languages and their ways of transmitting them to more fully understand and apprehend how people understand their speech communities being anchored and realized.” It is this disposition that leads Feliciano-Santos to focus on the many ways that Taino/Boricua language activism grows out of, and affirms, indigeneity and linguistic and cultural sovereignty through Jíbaro Spanish, a variety of Spanish that indexes an ancestral language but a language that is deeply entrenched in practices of settler colonialism in Puerto Rico’s past and present.

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Building on the words of elder Abuela Shashira, Feliciano-Santos extrapolates, “Taíno ways of communication were more than just about the code being spoken, but also about Taíno knowledges, worldviews, and interactional patterns.” There are key instances in this chapter that compel the researcher and us as readers to recognize that millenarian knowledge exceeds the confines of a particular linguistic code. The recognition of this important worldview and expectation, of the power of ancestral knowledge, motivates Feliciano-Santos’s decisions as a researcher and writer. One such moment is the decision, on the moment, to deliver a paper in Spanish in the presence of Abuela Shashira at a Taíno symposium hosted by the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian where the symposium papers were actually given in English. Feliciano-Santos further shares Abuela Shashira’s frustration and impatience, and certainly, wisdom, when she admonished conference speakers for their (blatant) exclusion of Taíno elders (like her) and other Taíno speakers and attendees for not speaking Spanish, “the nearest ancestral language—the closest form of Taíno linguistic heritage.” This call for solidarity is deeply consequential. It is, importantly, an expression of relational accountability. As S. Wilson (2008, 100), referenced at the start of this commentary, adds in his call for research that is transformative, research too is relational, but it must also be relationally accountable (emphasis mine). As the case studies presented in this volume illustrate, research at the intersection of language and social justice is itself an intervention to valorize and support the language of those with whom we work, and in the particular example and actions shared by Feliciano-Santos, this position also means to disrupt the normative uses of English in academic settings. In this way, research and engagement of language and social justice work invites, if not demands, that those committed to this type of work, disrupt and rectify colonial emplacement of languages, codes, and expectations. In “Labels, codes, and language sovereignty in the Pacific,” Kathleen Riley and Christine Jourdan juxtapose their ethnographic case studies in two regions of the Pacific, the Marquesas (Riley) in Polynesia and the Solomon Islands (Jourdan) in Melanesia to call attention to language and social injustices resulting from European colonization (including managed conflict with other Pacific nations) and globalization as these nations engage in projects and politics of linguistic recovery and sovereignty. In these two cases, colonial languages dominate the public sphere and major social institutions, yet other codes, such as charabia (restructured from French and Marquesan) in the Marquesas and Pijin (which is English-based) in Solomon Islands have emerged alongside indigenous languages, some of which are becoming endangered. The two cases differ in the ways that colonization and globalization have impacted the linguistic choices and subjectivities of the people from these islands (or rather archipelagos). In the Marquesas, French and Marquesan have become imbued with social and economic capital diminishing the use and scope of charabia and other indigenous languages. The situation is different in Solomon Islands where Pijin has developed linguistic complexity and carries value as a unifying symbol of national identity; however, long histories of linguistic discrimination still impact and endanger indigenous languages. As the authors argue, “In both cases devalorizing the full spectrum of Indigenous languages (in all their dialectal variation) has long silenced and erased many speakers’ social identities and human rights.” In conclusion, the ethnographic and longitudinal case studies discussed in this section offer a deep and rigorous examination of language and social justice issues across timescales and transregional sites through semiotic modalities that range from family dinnertime conversations, embodied signs, lyrics and genres of social movements, code-switching/ shifting, and constructions of sovereign language and identity. The case studies model

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social justice approaches that variously exemplify relational epistemologies through the reflexivity of the researcher, the practice of critical listening, and the identification and awareness of issues that require collaboration at the individual and/or institutional level. They each contribute important global perspectives to the work of language and social justice, but more importantly, the work itself challenges restrictive language ideologies and their attendant practices of social and linguistic exclusion.

REFERENCES Avineri, N., and D. C. Martinez (2021), “Applied Linguists Cultivating Relationships for Justice: An Aspirational Call to Action.” Applied Linguistics, 42 (6): 1043–54. Avineri, N., and B. Perley (2019), “Mascots, Name Calling, and Racial Slurs: Seeking Social Justice through Audience Coalescence.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 147–56, New York and London: Routledge. Avineri, N., E. J. Johnson, B. Perley, J. Rosa, and A. C. Zentella (2021), “Applied Linguistic Anthropology: Balancing Social Science with Social Change.” In D. Warriner and E. Miller (eds.), Extending Applied Linguistics for Social Impact: Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations in Diverse Spaces of Public Inquiry, 171–94, New York: Bloomsbury Publishers. Kinloch, V., and T. S. Pedro (2014), “The Space between Listening and Storying: Foundations for Projects in Humanization.” In D. Paris and M. T. Winn (eds.), Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, 21–42, Los Angeles and London: Sage. Mangual Figueroa, A. (2016), “Citizenship, Beneficence, and Informed Consent: The Ethics of Working in Mixed-Status Families.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29 (1): 66–85. Wilson, S. (2008), Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

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PART II

Confronting Hate and Violence

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Chapter 6

The Humpty Dumpty Mistranslation and Misrepresentation Deployed in the British Colonization of Aotearoa/New Zealand MARGARET MUTU

INTRODUCTION Māori1 have fought continuously to end British2 colonization in Aotearoa.3 The violent dispossession the British perpetrated against us and other Indigenous Peoples deprived us of our lands, power, language, and lives, relegating us to poverty, deprivation, marginalization, and powerlessness in our own ancestral lands. It has not stopped us from refusing to accept false British rhetoric that New Zealand is their possession and that they took control legitimately. They did not. Rather we have continued to preserve accounts passed down to us by our ancestors in our own language in order to know what happened, to understand our British immigrant guests and to realize the promise of a just, peaceful, and balanced society in New Zealand. In the process, we identified British myths and lies fabricated to deny the atrocities they were committing and to perpetuate their wealth, prosperity, power, and privilege. A number of the myths and lies that persist to this day can be traced back to the mistranslations and misrepresentations of early British immigrants, including missionaries. Bruce Biggs (1989) identified a number of mistranslations in the 1840 Māori language treaty between Māori and the British Crown known as “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”. Several Māori words in Te Tiriti were assigned meanings that they do not have. He called this the Humpty Dumpty principle. My 1992 and 2003 papers identified further examples in other nineteenth-century documents, including the 1835 declaration of Māori sovereignty. When British immigrants embarked on large-scale land grabbing, some of the early thefts were recorded in Māori language documents which were accompanied by purported English translations. These contained serious mistranslations which immigrants later

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relied on to steal our land. The same behavior can be seen today as the New Zealand state continues to misrepresent its actions that dispossess and oppress Māori in order to maintain White control. The behavior of British immigrants in mistranslating the Māori language and misrepresenting their actions to justify killing people and stealing land, and then waging war on the Māori language, is a good example of the sort of linguistic colonization that has happened elsewhere in the world (Heller and McElhinny 2017). This chapter provides an overview of the history of British land grabbing in Aotearoa to provide the context for the assault on the Māori language and culture. It mentions examples of the same behavior elsewhere in the Pacific and in North America. It explains the Humpty Dumpty principle and the manner in which the British used it to deny the sovereignty of the Indigenous Peoples of Aotearoa. It argues that it was one of the tools used to introduce into Aotearoa the legal fiction known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” an old international legal construct that purports to give Europeans who practice the Christian religion the right to “discover” new territories and dispossess, enslave and commit genocide against peoples who were not White and not Christian in order to take over their territories (Deloria 1985; UNCESC 2010; Miller et al. 2010). It considers a number of examples of the application of the Humpty Dumpty principle in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa. It also argues that examples of British immigrants redefining words in English in the twenty-first century in order to entrench the Doctrine of Discovery are applications of this same principle. It briefly outlines and provides examples of Māori rejection of the Doctrine of Discovery and our refusal to accept the ongoing dispossession and oppression imposed on us by the state in New Zealand.

BACKGROUND For more than 1,000 years, the various dialects of Māori were the only language spoken in Aotearoa. We are Polynesians and we retain our traditions of the different Pacific Islands we came from that gave rise to our dialectal variations. Our population is made up of more than 100 iwi (nations) whose sizes vary from several 100 to over 100,000. Each preserves its own autonomy while maintaining diplomatic and many genealogical relationships with other iwi. We identify ourselves primarily according to our iwi affiliations. My main iwi affiliations are Ngāti Kahu,4 Te Rarawa, and Ngāti Whātua of the northern regions of the country. For this chapter, I draw mainly from my Ngāti Kahu side where I have held research and leadership responsibilities for several decades. The territories of iwi range over the entire country with almost all iwi located in the northern island. Within iwi, each hapū (grouping of extended families) has a territory over which they hold mana whenua (land power), that is, ultimate and paramount power and authority derived originally from the gods and handed down to us by our ancestors in respect of the land. The notion of mana whenua subsumes many aspects of the English cultural notion of sovereignty but is far broader and deeper. Spiritual dimensions of the world are an essential element of mana whenua and all-pervasive in our thinking. Mana whenua of each hapū invariably overlaps with that of neighboring and closely related hapū. Some 200 years ago, few British visitors, mostly poor people who had been driven from their homes in Britain, started arriving in our northern territories (Wynyard 2019). They came seeking wealth and prosperity from the lands and resources of Māori, bringing their English language and British culture. Free from the rules and constraints of British society, they quickly descended into lawlessness and barbarity, to the point that the village

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where most had set up their residences, Kororāreka, became known as the hell-hole of the Pacific (Wolfe 2005). Despite the lawlessness of early British visitors to Aotearoa, my ancestors decided they could remain, and others could come as well, on the condition that the Queen of England governed them and stopped their lawlessness and recognized that overall power and control of the country remained with Māori. In 1835, my ancestors issued “He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni” (The Declaration of the Sovereignty of New Zealand), a declaration of sovereignty or independence that declared that all power and authority, including sovereignty, belonged to the leaders of the hapū and they would never transfer that power to any other persons. The British Crown acknowledged this declaration. In February 1840, my ancestors signed a treaty with the Queen of England, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which recorded the agreement that she would govern her own lawless subjects while Māori retained overall power and sovereignty. Missionaries played a key role in explaining to Māori what the treaty meant. They had arrived a decade or so earlier and started developing an orthography for our language and teaching my ancestors to read and write. The Māori language document they drafted by translating a draft drawn up in English was read out to everyone present and captured the agreement accurately. Te Tiriti o Waitangi, along with its parent document, He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, are the country’s founding constitution. Te Tiriti is the only written authority that the British have to immigrate to New Zealand. The queen never succeeded in stopping the lawlessness of her subjects and the British ran amok. As in other countries they overran, they wanted the land and complete control and would stop at nothing to achieve that goal. In May 1840, British immigrants resiled from the treaty they had signed just three months before, leaving themselves with no written constitution, a situation that persists to this day. Instead, they issued an English-language proclamation asserting that they had taken over the country (Jackson 2019, 108). They relied on this to set up illegitimate British colonial power structures in the 1850s including a parliament, courts, and government agencies, to take control of the entire country including the lives, language, culture, knowledge systems, lands, and all the resources of Māori. They fabricated policies and laws that gave themselves unfettered powers to “rule by administrative fiat” (Miller et al. 2010: p.208; Rishworth 2016). Using these, they passed numerous pieces of legislation that condoned all manner of criminal behavior against Māori including invasions, land confiscations, genocide, banning the language, outlawing knowledge holders, and preventing political and commercial activity (Waitangi Tribunal n.d.). More than a century later, the Waitangi Tribunal, the permanent commission of inquiry established in 1975 to investigate breaches of the treaty, published hundreds of reports on the unspeakable atrocities that British immigrants committed against their hosts as they callously dispossessed the people who had provided them hospitality, protection, and land to live on (Waitangi Tribunal n.d.). Early in the twentieth century, New Zealand ceased being a British colony and became a dominion within the British empire. It remains a constitutional monarchy to this day as it continues to maintain very close ties to Britain and to adhere to the Doctrine of Discovery despite ongoing international criticism (Mutu 2020). British immigrants have always relied on their illegitimate power structures to legitimize their land grabbing. It had started in the North before the treaty was signed, using often fraudulent documents that claimed that Māori had sold huge tracts of land when in fact only small areas had been temporarily allocated (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). Crown commissions set up in the 1840s and 1850s to investigate these transactions

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generally supported the immigrants, effectively confiscating tens of thousands of acres of land (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). By the 1850s, my ancestors were refusing to allocate more land, so government agents started making false promises and then bullying and threatening them to force them into giving up their lands (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). By the 1860s, the insatiable greed of immigrants for land led to the Crown invading the territories of Māori of the central North Island and confiscating millions of acres of land (Wynyard 2019). In 1865, they established the Native Land Court to individualize communally held land and facilitate the theft of many more millions of acres of land by British immigrants (Wynyard 2019). For more than a century, the British denied what they had done and were continuing to do, hiding it under a blanket of amnesia, a common behavior of colonizers (Heller and McElhinney 2017, 30). For more than a century, our leaders who spoke of the atrocities were vilified and draconian measures were implemented in an attempt to stop them from transmitting their knowledge and oral histories to succeeding generations. Language has always been a tool of empire (Heller and McElhinney 2017, 36), and so the colonizers attempted to ban our Māori language, legislating against its use in schools in the 1860s and physically punishing children who spoke it well into the twentieth century.5 My ancestors recognized the tactics and set up wānanga (training sessions) to ensure that our language, history, traditions, and laws were not lost (Marsden 2003: xxx). Successive generations to this day have continued to organize wānanga and more recently, to start publishing the knowledge of our ancestors in order to counter the inaccurate accounts of Whites, in particular those of immigrant missionaries, Crown agents, ethnographers, historians, and anthropologists (Mutu et al. 2017). Despite this, the language became endangered as the number of native speakers dwindled. Efforts to revitalize it have had some success, an important aspect being restoring the pride of being a fluent speaker of Māori (Mutu 2020, 96). An important vehicle for the retention of our knowledge bases has been the research we conducted for the Waitangi Tribunal. When my elders called on several of my generation in the 1980s to help with our Tiriti o Waitangi claims, they were mystified about how the British had managed to steal so much from us. For many of our lands, they had no idea how the foreigners had gotten away with claiming it as their own or how the Crown6 could say it owned it. My elders were all native speakers of Māori and steeped in the laws and traditions of our people. They sent us to find out what the British had done and how they had done it. We found some of the documents British missionaries had written in Māori. We showed them to our elders and they said they were fine, they recorded what our elders knew had been agreed for particular lands. We then showed them what were supposed to be the translations of the documents. Their immediate reaction was, “No, that’s not right at all.” We then went painstakingly through each of the documents and found many mistranslations (Mutu 1992), the most serious being the mistranslation of tuku whenua (release land) as land sale, when in reality it means “temporary allocation of land use rights.” When we reported our findings to the Waitangi Tribunal, the government agents responded very angrily. They went as far as producing experts who told my elders they could not understand the Māori written in the 1830s documents because they were not alive then. Furthermore, only the Crown knew what those documents meant, and they were records of English cultural land sales (Mutu 2012, 105). The ignorance of the government’s experts, who were talking about the language of the grandparents of some of my elders, drew open derision and expressions of opprobrium from usually restrained

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and polite elders. Several left the hearing in disgust. Yet the government experts were unaware that they were being verbally abused because they did not speak the language and did not understand the dynamics of Māori gatherings (Mutu 2012, 105). The research we conducted for the Waitangi Tribunal revealed the lengths the Crown had gone to in order to cover up its criminal behavior. Underlying that behavior was the missionary attempts to redefine keywords in our language. The evidence we gave drew on the native speaker expertise of my elders to provide the correct meanings of these words. This exposed numerous errors in the dictionaries and grammar written by the missionaries in the nineteenth century, some of which Biggs had noted (Biggs 1989). The Waitangi Tribunal upheld our claims and promised to make orders for the return of our lands (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). The government rejected their report, telling my Ngāti Kahu nation that if we wanted our land back, we would have to buy it from them. We refused and are still fighting to recover our lands, which has included repossessing them (Mutu et al. 2017). We have also been in discussions with iwi across the country about the constitutional transformation that envisages the country returning to its constitutional roots of He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti using the international human rights standards set out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 2019, we had a significant breakthrough when the government agreed to draw up a national plan of action to implement the Declaration, although, predictably, it has drawn racist backlash from those intent on preserving White supremacy and the Doctrine of Discovery.

SIMILAR THREATS TO OTHER INDIGENOUS PEOPLES Each Indigenous nation invaded and dispossessed by the British, in Aotearoa and elsewhere, has its own history and traditions of the atrocities the British committed, and while they differ, they have the same disastrous effects. Invariably, the strategies used included trying to destroy Indigenous languages and cultures in order to maintain power and control. Elsewhere in the Pacific, Noenoe K. Silva writes of the fundamental Hawaiian values of pono and aloha `āina (love of the land) being deliberately mistranslated. Pono is a word that describes the ideal behavior of ali’i (leaders) and other concepts such as balance, completeness, and material well-being (Silva 2004, 33). Aloha `āina refers to the appreciation of the beauty of the land of Hawai`i recorded in hundreds of songs, and the genealogical links of her people to the earth mother and the sky father (Silva 2004, 11). Euro-Americans seeking to undermine Hawaiian resistance to their land grabbing attempted to manipulate the Hawaiian language and culture by redefining pono and aloha `āina as the Christian notions of “righteousness” and “patriotism” (Silva 2004, 33; 11). Santi Hito (2004) writes of Rapanui resistance to Chilean land grabbing that draws on the strong oral traditions of their Pacific island nation to demonstrate that the treaty they signed with Chile in 1888 was mistranslated. The traditions record the Rapanui people signing a treaty in which they agreed to retain and care for the Motherland while allowing Chileans to use the grass growing on it for their sheep and cows to graze on (Hito 2004; Chartier et al. 2012). Threads of that understanding are evident in the partially illegible, poorly articulated Rapanui language version of the treaty (Hito 2004). The clearly articulated Spanish “Treaty and Proclamation” falsely claims that the chiefs of Easter Island have declared cessation of the sovereignty of their island to the Republic of Chile. Hito points out that there is no word for cessation in Rapanui and his people continue to battle against the Chilean government to this day to recover their island,

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having been driven off their lands into the township of Hangaroa and forced to live at subsistence levels (Hito 2004). While Indigenous language treaties were signed in each of Aotearoa and Rapanui, the hundreds of treaties signed in North America were all written only in the language of the Europeans, most often English, and were the central vehicle Anglo-Americans and Canadians used and, particularly in Canada, continue to use to facilitate land grabbing (Deloria 1985; Harjo 2014; Manuel 2015). Robert N. Clinton, a tribal judge and retired law professor writes (in Harjo 2014:20): Indians often complain that the memorialized, signed, English version of a treaty fails to capture or misrepresents the nature of the understandings reached during the treaty negotiations. Of course, such claims often reflect disparities between the oral traditions surrounding a treaty and the written document memorialized in English. Documentary proof of this problem is hard to locate and cannot be found in North America because transliterated or other written versions of most Indian languages were developed after the treaty period. In New Zealand however, missionaries transliterated Māori into a written language that was widely employed by Māori before the negotiation of the allimportant Treaty of Waitangi of 1840.

THE CONTEXT: “TE TIRITI O WAITANGI” AND “THE TREATY OF WAITANGI” In his 1989 paper “Humpty Dumpty and the Treaty of Waitangi,” Bruce Biggs considered the language used in the Māori document “Te Tiriti o Waitangi” and in the English language document from which it was translated, “The Treaty of Waitangi.” Both were drawn up in February 1840 but, like the Rapanui treaty, were very different in their intent and meaning. Representatives of the British Crown drafted the Treaty. British missionaries carried out what they claimed was a translation of the Treaty into Māori. While acknowledging the inherent difficulties of translating between two unrelated languages and cultures, Biggs identified a number of deliberate mistranslations in Te Tiriti. He demonstrated that there was no reasonable sense in which the two documents could be considered equivalent (Biggs 1989, 310). The Waitangi Tribunal reports on the work of many scholars, including James Henare, Hugh Kāwharu, Patu Hōhepa, Erima Henare, Mānuka Henare, Nuki Aldridge and Margaret Mutu, who had all reached the same conclusion (Waitangi Tribunal 2014). The consequences of the mistranslations were serious. They triggered gross injustices against Māori that have plagued New Zealand to this day, the most serious of which was the denial of our mana, including our sovereignty, and the theft of 95 percent of our land. The treaty came to be acknowledged as the founding document of New Zealand. The mistranslations resulted in two very different understandings of what the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 actually agreed to. The purpose of the treaty was to set out the conditions under which British subjects were permitted to immigrate. Te Tiriti o Waitangi recorded the discussions and agreements reached between Māori and the British Crown over at least the previous decade. These have been passed down in the oral histories of the ancestors present at the signings and reported on by the Waitangi Tribunal (2014). The essential agreement was that Māori retain tino rangatiratanga (full sovereignty)—that is, the exercise of ultimate, absolute and paramount power and authority over everything throughout their territories. However, they would no longer

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be responsible for the hitherto lawless subjects of the Queen of England recently arrived in the country. Responsibility for them and others still to come was delegated to the Queen of England who would keep them under control using kāwanatanga (governance). This was the agreement that Māori and a representative of the Queen of England read, discussed and signed at Waitangi as a sacred covenant between them (Mutu 2010; Mikaere 2011; Waitangi Tribunal 2014). It is a treaty of peace and friendship (Mutu 2010, 35). The English language document was completely different. It reflected British aspirations to dispossess Māori and to claim New Zealand as their own. It recorded an agreement that Māori had ceded sovereignty to the Queen of England and would retain possession of their lands, forests, and fisheries until they gave them over to the Queen’s agent. This document was not read out, discussed or signed at Waitangi. In subsequent gatherings in other parts of the country, only Te Tiriti o Waitangi was read and discussed. More than 500 Māori signed Te Tiriti. At Port Waikato, thirty-nine signed the Treaty after the local missionary explained Te Tiriti to them and then misled them into believing that both documents had the same meaning (Mutu 2010, 19; Waitangi Tribunal 2014, 386). Māori have never accepted that the “Treaty” was what they agreed to. Initially, the British ignored both documents. In 1877, the chief justice declared the treaty a “simple nullity,” asserting that Māori were “primitive barbarians” and “savages” who did not have the capacity to enter into an international treaty (Prendergast 1877), and anyway, the British had “discovered” New Zealand in 1769 and issued a written proclamation in 1840 that Britain had taken over the country (Jackson 2019, 108). Māori persistence, including large protests and land repossessions, eventually forced governments to recognize the treaty as the founding document of New Zealand in the 1970s, but to this day governments continue to rely on the fraudulent English document.

THE “HUMPTY DUMTPY PRINCIPLE” The differences in meaning between the documents can be traced back to mistranslation. Biggs identified two mistranslation techniques that missionary translators used in Te Tiriti. First, he demonstrated that key terms had been assigned meanings from the source language (English) that they did not have in the target language (Māori). He called this the Humpty Dumpty principle. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less” (Gasson 1978, 168). Missionaries operated under the same presumption that they could redefine a Māori word by fiat, in order to make it mean what they chose it to mean (Biggs 1989, 304). Most of the mistranslations in Te Tiriti employ the Humpty Dumpty principle (Biggs 1989, 305). The most well-known example of the Humpty Dumpty principle in Te Tiriti is the use of rangatiratanga. Rangatiratanga was the word missionaries chose to translate “exclusive and undisturbed possession” in the English Treaty. The intensifier tino preceded it to translate as “full exclusive and undisturbed possession.” In the English Treaty, “full exclusive and undisturbed possession” was what Māori would retain after they ceded their sovereignty to the Queen of England. In English cultural terms, this meant that the inalienable power and authority that Māori held over everything in their territories, that is, their “sovereignty,” would be given to the Queen of England and replaced by the temporary notion of alienable possession, which the Queen or her agents could remove

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at will. In other words, the Treaty envisaged Māori being reduced to tenants on their own lands and subjected to the whim of a foreign overlord (Mutu 2010, 33–4). The missionaries had always known that Māori leaders would never agree to give their power and authority derived from the gods to a stranger living on the other side of the world. It was a bizarre notion that is both humanly and logically impossible (Mutu 2010, 33). Yet their task was to draft a document in Māori that the leaders would sign. So rather than use, for example, tino whiwhinga (full possession), or similar terms as a closer translation of “full exclusive and undisturbed [but alienable] possession,” they chose tino rangatiratanga which is not a translation of “possession” at all (Waitangi Tribunal 2014, 415). Rangatiratanga is the noun derived from rangatira. Our rangatira are our leaders. A rangatira is a person of mana (ultimate, absolute and paramount power and authority derived from the gods) who cares for and keeps the people together. Her/his role is simply and basically to ensure the well-being of her/his people (Mutu et al. 2017, 179–80). Rangatiratanga is translated literally as “leadership.” It is the exercise of leadership in a manner that ensures that tribal groupings preserve and uphold their mana. The distinguishing feature of rangatiratanga is encapsulated in the notion of “taking care of one’s people” (Biggs 1989, 310). In practical terms, it means exercising paramount power and authority in respect of the people and their resources, so that the people can prosper and enjoy social, economic, and spiritual well-being. Tino rangatiratanga is the exercise of ultimate, absolute, and paramount power and authority, that is, the exercise of mana. With ultimate, paramount, and absolute power and authority at the core of the meaning of rangatiratanga, it is at least an approximate translation of “sovereignty.” The missionaries knew that Māori would not agree to anything less than the exercise of their mana continuing unimpeded. That is unambiguously stated in Te Tiriti’s parent document, the 1835 declaration of Māori sovereignty, which the same missionaries had helped draft (Mutu 2003). Good faith, honesty, and integrity required the missionaries to change the wording of the English Treaty document. The phrase “Full exclusive and undisturbed possession” in the draft Treaty had to be replaced with wording such as “sovereignty” or “ultimate and paramount power and authority” to reflect the discussions and agreement that Māori would retain tino rangatiratanga. That did not happen. Instead, the missionaries chose to apply the Humpty Dumpty principle, assigning the meaning of possession to rangatiratanga. They knew it did not have that meaning, because in their translation of the Bible they used rangatiratanga to translate “kingdom” (Biggs 1989, 310).

Borrowing The second mistranslation technique was borrowing. Here the translator borrows a word, usually from the source language, in order to introduce a new concept into the target language. Biggs notes, “It should be obvious that when individuals meet a new word, in their own language or another, it has (for them) no meaning until they connect it with some aspect of their experience, and in one sense (the sense of not being a symbol for anything) it is not a word at all” (Biggs 1989:305). The well-known and most damaging example of borrowing in Te Tiriti is the missionaries’ use of the term kāwanatanga (a derived noun form of kāwana, which is the English word “governor” altered to conform with Māori phonology and orthography) to translate both “sovereignty” and “government.” They told Māori that kāwanatanga is the authority the

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Queen has to control her British subjects (Mutu 2010, 35). The rangatira were reassured repeatedly that kāwanatanga was for British immigrants, not for Māori. We would continue to live under tino rangatiratanga (Mutu 2010, 20; Waitangi Tribunal 2014). The disingenuous behavior of the missionaries in this instance is revealed in the oral traditions handed down by the rangatira involved in the discussions about Te Tiriti at Waitangi and reported on in detail by the Waitangi Tribunal (2014). The word kāwanatanga was not the missionaries’ first choice to translate “sovereignty.” They used the word mana in an earlier draft but replaced it when the rangatira told them they could never give their mana to the Queen of England and would not agree to anything that said they would (Waitangi Tribunal 2014, 451–2). It is significant that the British made no attempt to explain or discuss their desire for Māori to cede sovereignty to the Queen of England despite the questioning from the rangatira (Mutu 2010, 20; Waitangi Tribunal 2014). Once again, good faith, honesty, and integrity required the wording in the English document to be changed. The clause “[t]he Chiefs . . . cede to her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all rights and powers of sovereignty” in the draft Treaty had to be replaced with wording such as “The Chiefs delegate to Her Majesty the Queen of England full authority over her subjects recently arrived or still to come.” This would reflect more accurately what had been discussed and agreed. Yet the British chose to retain the statement about Māori ceding sovereignty in the English language document knowing that Māori did not understand that language. To hide their duplicity, the missionaries used the borrowing technique to disguise sovereignty as kāwanatanga in Te Tiriti, a word Māori had no lived experience of in 1840 (Biggs 1989, 305). This deception along with the mistranslation of “undisturbed and exclusive possession” as rangatiratanga meant that the English document could not be held out as recording the agreement reached at Waitangi and to do so would be fraudulent. That did not stop the British from creating the myth that the English language document is the founding document of New Zealand and that Māori did cede their sovereignty to the Queen of England, a lie that Māori have rejected for over 180 years but which the New Zealand government continues to perpetuate to this day.

Humpty Dumpty in Land Transactions The behavior displayed by the British at Waitangi in 1840 was not new. Earlier documents associated with land transactions conducted between Māori and the British in the 1830s provide numerous examples of mistranslations designed to hide the intentions of the British. The most damaging example here is the description of these transactions as land sales or land purchases. They were neither. In the 1800s and for some time after, there was no equivalent for land sale/purchase in the Māori language and no notion of this type of alienation of land in Māori culture (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). The Māori language documents that accompanied some of the transactions described them as tuku whenua (Mutu 1992; Waitangi Tribunal 1997; Mutu 2012). Tuku whenua are allocations of land and resources for a specific purpose and for a specific period ranging from a season to one or more generations. Many were conducted in northern parts of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century, initially with British subjects seeking to live among us, and then, after 1840, with Crown agents demanding allocations of land for new immigrants from Britain. In my 1992 and 2012 articles, I described the Māori and wider Polynesian custom we call tuku whenua.

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The Pākehā [Europeans] were our ancestors’ guests and the land resources were made available for their use, and in particular, for the use of the missionaries. However tuku whenua took place on the clear understanding that such a transaction was carried out primarily to benefit the hapū [tribal grouping] and to bind the Pākehā and his descendants into the hapū structures. There was also a clear expectation that when those Pākehā and their descendants no longer needed to use the resources associated with the land, control would return to the hapū. There was nothing in the discussions leading to the transactions which gave those Pākehā guests the right to alienate permanently, or sell, their hosts’ land. The resources were given for the use of a particular Pākehā and his descendants and the mana whenua, the paramount authority, power and control over the land, remained with the hapū. (Mutu 1992, 60) It is important to note that in respect of tuku whenua there is a clear distinction between allocating the resources associated with land, and allocating the land itself. A tuku whenua allocated the former, not the latter—it made no sense within tikanga [law] to allocate anything other than the land’s associated resources. The land was permanent and always remained and mana whenua, the paramount power and authority over the lands, remained with the hapū. (Mutu 2012, 101) British subjects who had been allocated land understood the temporary nature of these transactions and that ownership and authority over the land remained with Māori (Waitangi Tribunal 1997; Mutu 2012). Yet, after the signing of Te Tiriti, they applied the Humpty Dumpty principle to redefine tuku whenua as English cultural land sales, having recorded them as such in English language documents that reported the transactions, knowing full well that Māori did not read or understand English. They quickly entrenched this myth in order to fraudulently lay claim not only to the land they had been allocated and but also many hundreds of thousands of acres more that they had not been allocated. Most distressing for my ancestors was that agents of the British Crown condoned and encouraged this criminal behavior (Mutu et al. 2017). In my ancestral territories, the British succeeded in driving us off 95 percent of our lands, reducing us to poverty, deprivation, and marginalization and forcing most of us to relocate to British-built towns and cities in the territories of other iwi. A small number of us managed to survive on the remnants of our lands still in our control, but we have never accepted that our lands are no longer ours. We continue to fight to this day to recover what the British stole. My generation worked closely with our elders to make recordings of our oral histories and publish them in books so that the next generation will have much more ready access to them than we did and irrefutable grounds for taking back what is ours (Mutu et al. 2017).

Humpty Dumpty in He Whakaputanga Mistranslations are also present in 1835 He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (Declaration of Māori Sovereignty of New Zealand), the precursor and parent document to Te Tiriti. The same missionaries were involved in translating an English language draft of the declaration into Māori. For He Whakaputanga, only the rangatira signed it. No one signed the English draft. He Whakaputanga declared that mana (in the English document, “sovereignty”) resided in the rangatira throughout the country and that they would never give law-making powers to anyone else. Te Tiriti is in effect a codicil or addendum to He Whakaputanga. Māori, and in particular the descendants of the rangatira who signed He Whakaputanga,7 have fought to preserve it, along with

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its history and traditions. British colonizers variously denied its existence (yet kept the original in their archives) or refused to consider it. In my 2003 article, I examined and discussed the extensive use of Humpty Dumpty in He Whakaputanga, as missionaries attempted to assign to the rangatira the English social and cultural norms set out in the English language draft and to portray them as feeble-minded children, (Mutu 2003, 24). I demonstrated that none of these implications carried over into the Māori language He Whakaputanga, the document we continue to uphold as the primary founding constitutional document of New Zealand.

Humpty Dumpty and the Entrenchment of the “Doctrine of Discovery” In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty is rude, imperious, and selfimportant. In the 1800s, rangatira noted these uncivilized characteristics in many of the British, unaware that they justified this type of behavior as a right they inherited from their ancestors. It grew out of the illogical myth of White supremacy. Out of this myth grew another myth, that Whites had the right to dispossess, enslave, and commit genocide against peoples who are not White and not Christians in order to take possession of their lands, territories, resources, and lives (UNCESC 2010). That included silencing by killing Indigenous languages. Today this myth is known as the “Doctrine of Discovery” (UNCESC 2010; Miller et al. 2010, 1). Part of that myth involved dehumanizing Indigenous Peoples and recasting them as mindless savages in order to justify driving them out of their own lands. The Doctrine of Discovery lies at the foundation of New Zealand’s legal and administrative systems (Miller et al. 2010). The state continues to use it to justify withholding lands, resources, and rights from Māori, ignoring its rejection by the United Nations (Miller et al. 2010; Heller and McElhinney 2017, 30; Mutu 2018, 215). It also ignores the repeated recommendations from United Nations treaty bodies over the past four decades for New Zealand to bring an end to the racism, discrimination, and other human rights violations against Māori, attitudes and behaviors that derive directly from the Doctrine of Discovery (Mutu 2018, 208). Humpty Dumpty’s ability to assign new meanings to words and to invent words for his own purposes has been very useful for Crown agents as they continue to seek to entrench the Doctrine of Discovery and develop a false façade of legitimacy as they dispossessed Māori. In our 2017 book, Ngāti Kahu: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation, my Ngāti Kahu relations and I noted some of the terms British administrators invented to cover up the theft of our lands. They assigned these words pseudo-legal status, entrenched them in legislation, and then used them to give themselves false authoritative claims to our land. In our language and law, it was simply the brazen theft of our lands. The Waitangi Tribunal reported on these words when they upheld our claims in 1997. The terms we looked at included “surplus lands,” “scrip land,” “Crown grant,” and “Crown purchase” (Mutu et al. 2017, 197). The term “surplus lands” (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 6) refers to lands that British visitors claimed Ngāti Kahu had allocated to them in the 1830s as tuku whenua, but which the government then decided was in excess of what they could have. In the discussions held at Waitangi prior to the signing of Te Tiriti, the problem of immigrants claiming more land than they had been allocated was raised. Representatives of the British Crown promised that these false claims would not be ratified. However, when British agents invented the term “surplus lands” for these lands, they wrote legislation that asserted that this designation meant the lands now magically belonged to the Crown. More than 47,500

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acres of Ngāti Kahu land had the term “surplus” applied to them (Mutu et al. 2017, 252). Ngāti Kahu has never allowed these claims and continues to fight them. The term “scrip land” (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 128) was an even more devious ruse. In the 1840s, the government labeled more than 40,000 acres of Ngāti Kahu land “scrip lands” after Ngāti Kahu rejected claims made for them by British individuals. “Scrip” was a piece of paper that the government gave to a European who was unable to prove his claim to land. It promised that he could instead have some of another iwi’s lands in the new town of Auckland (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 129). But then, instead of simply acknowledging the lands as belonging to Ngāti Kahu, the government wrote legislation that falsely claimed that the term “scrip lands” made them, again magically, land belonging to the Crown (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 398). Humpty Dumpty was in full flight. Ngāti Kahu also never allowed these claims and has fought for six generations now to recover control of these lands. The term “Crown grant” (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 121) refers to pieces of paper that had fictitious accounts written on them about various parts of our lands. The author of the accounts was always the Crown’s representative, the governor, and he wrote these stories about 25,000 acres of Ngāti Kahu land. In the accounts, he declared that the Crown had magically become the owner of certain lands belonging to Ngāti Kahu, a statement that was nonsensical to Ngāti Kahu. Each of his accounts set out certain Ngāti Kahu lands that he wanted to give to his favored British subjects. Of course, the Crown did not own any land, and so it could not give any to anyone. And adopting a Humpty Dumpty persona and writing nonsense about the land could not change that fact. British immigrants were happy to pretend that “Crown grants” were real and to tell Ngāti Kahu that it meant that they, rather than Ngāti Kahu, now owned the land. Ngāti Kahu never believed the silly fantasies the British kept inventing. It was clear on the ground that the land still belonged to Ngāti Kahu. As it turned out, the pieces of paper were yet another ruse to steal Ngāti Kahu’s land; each of them recorded a particular piece of Ngāti Kahu or other peoples’ land that had been stolen (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 394– 7). Of course, theft does not establish ownership; these lands remain Ngāti Kahu lands. The term “Crown purchase” was the name the government chose for its program designed to steal the rest of Ngāti Kahu’s lands (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 399–401). It involved government agents bullying, threatening, and making false claims and promises to Ngāti Kahu in order to take over control of our lands (Waitangi Tribunal 1997, 185; 202–3; 209; 257–8; 261; 294; 337; 347; 348; 399–401). The treatment meted out to Ngāti Kahu by government servants and agents during this period became the benchmark that has been ruthlessly applied by all succeeding governments right to this day. This land-stealing program was pursued most rigorously between 1856 and 1865, but it was carried on sporadically after that for many decades. By 1900, the government was claiming 270,000 acres it had stolen from Ngāti Kahu using this technique (Mutu et al. 2017, 253). Again, theft does not establish ownership; these lands also remain Ngāti Kahu lands.

HUMPTY DUMPTY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The savage and barbaric attitude adopted by the Crown toward Māori has remained unchanged over the past 180 years. That has never stopped Māori fighting to put an end to British colonization and to repair the damage it has done. For almost a century, we followed the immigrants’ processes, sending thousands of letters and petitions to

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government representatives, and participating in numerous commissions of inquiry, only to see our pleas ignored or dismissed (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). Some had repossessed their lands only to be arrested and prosecuted (Waitangi Tribunal 1997). By the 1970s, rising Māori anger at continuing legislative land grabbing led to the 1975 Māori land march that involved thousands of Māori joining the protest to stop the theft of Māori land. They marched the length of the North Island to parliament (Harris 2004). Land repossessions were escalating as those arrested returned to continue their repossessions, drawing support, but also condemnation as some feared retaliatory reactions from Whites. These actions embarrassed the government into setting up the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent commission of inquiry, in 1975 (Harris 2004). Its function is to inquire into state, government, or Crown breaches of the treaty, to report and to make recommendations to the government for removal of the prejudice caused. However, the government’s primary intention was not to address the numerous breaches of the treaty but rather to take the protest off the streets and away from public and international view (Oliver 1991, 9–10). Māori have taken more than 3,000 claims to the Tribunal seeking ●

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return of stolen lands, waters, seas, fisheries, airways, minerals, foreshores, seabed and other resources; protection of the natural environment from desecration and unsustainable development; restoration and recognition of our language and culture; equitable access to commercial opportunities and to government resources and services including education, health, housing, and social welfare; recognition and upholding of our mana and sovereignty (Mutu 2020, 93).

Despite the tribunal being a state-appointed and controlled judicial body, it has upheld almost all of the claims it has heard. Not only has the tribunal unraveled carefully woven Crown myths, but it has also made hundreds of recommendations about the actions governments have to take to remedy the damage and destruction (Mutu 2015). That includes relinquishing stolen lands, territories and resources to their rightful Māori owners and upholding our mana and tino rangatiratanga. Yet implementing those recommendations would mean destroying the myths and repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, so governments usually reject or ignore tribunal recommendations (New Zealand Government 2018) or threaten to reduce its powers or abolish it if it ever used its powers to make recommendations ordering the government to return lands (Williams 2005, 367; McDowell 2018, 604–5; Hamer 2004, 7). This is a very serious breach of the rule of law, but there are no constitutional fetters on the New Zealand Parliament or the executive (Rishworth 2016) to stop it. Unlike other western democracies, New Zealand has no written constitution. Rather than implementing the Tribunal’s recommendations to remove the prejudice, the government unilaterally drew up a policy in 1994 to legally extinguish Māori claims and rights in respect of our lands, resources, and powers. The policy is their treaty claims settlement policy. It aims to stop the Waitangi Tribunal from using its powers to order the government to return land to Māori and to retain all decision-making power with the government (McDowell 2018). All governments since 1994 have refused to discuss the policy with Māori despite repeated calls from Māori and United Nations treaty-monitoring bodies for it to come to agreement with Māori on how claims are to be remedied. The policy includes the government deciding what it is prepared to pay as a quid pro quo

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for Māori giving up their rights (McDowell 2018). The process used to implement the policy has been ruthless and has left many claimants traumatized (Mutu 2018). Despite that, by 2021, more than seventy “settlements” have been legislated and many more are going through the government’s process. There are many hundreds of claims still to be addressed. For those who have accepted settlements, it has been a pragmatic stance to accept, in the short term, the limited nature of government “settlements” with the expectation that in the long-term broader change may still occur or be forced by Māori (Bargh 2012, 169) Examination of the government’s treaty claims settlement policy and the process used to implement it demonstrates that the Humpty Dumpty principle remains one of the key techniques for preserving the Doctrine of Discovery in New Zealand. The purpose of the policy is to extinguish all Māori treaty claims and to preserve power, wealth, and prosperity in the hands of Whites (Borrell et al. 2018). The rhetoric governments have adopted to sell the policy to both Māori and the general population belies its true intent. It is couched in terms of moral, social, legal, and political principles that seek to achieve positive, harmonious, and peaceful race relations. Government rhetoric claims that the Crown, a term British immigrants still cling to, seeks to acknowledge, apologize for and resolve historical injustices. It claims the Crown seeks to restore its honor and to remove the sense of grievance felt by Māori. It claims the Crown seeks to improve the social and economic status of Māori and to assure claimants and the New Zealand public that the settlements that are negotiated will be fair, full, and final (Office of Treaty Settlements 1994). Tiopira McDowell (2018) and I (Mutu 2018) highlight some of the terms they use. In the following, I analyze a selection of these terms: “settlement,” “negotiate,” “full and fair,” “apology,” and “agreed historical account.” The word “settlement” means extinguishment. There is no intention on the part of governments to reach settlements that claimants agree with. Rather the intention is to extinguish all claims as quickly and as cheaply as possible with claimants accepting a government-determined quid pro quo for them giving up 99 percent of what was stolen from them along with their sovereignty and rights (McDowell 2018; Mutu 2018). Interviews conducted with more than 150 claimants and negotiators between 2015 and 2019 have shown that many settled under duress having been subjected the same bullying, divide and rule, and misrepresentation tactics employed by Crown agents in the nineteenth century (Mutu 2018, 214–16). Their accounts reflected my experience as Ngāti Kahu’s lead negotiator. When my nation refused to settle, officials and government ministers singled me out. They came to my house, stood over me, and shouted at me; they lied about me to other Ngāti Kahu rangatira to foment divisions within our nation; then, when that did not work, they stole more than $2 million off Ngāti Kahu and sold large areas of our territories to neighboring nations (Mutu et al. 2017). The word “negotiate” means “government servants and ministers dictate.” Craig Coxhead, in his 2002 article “Where are the negotiations in direct negotiations of treaty settlements?” explains that negotiation denotes bargaining with a view to reach an agreement (Coxhead 2002, 26). He points out that the number of nonnegotiable aspects of the government’s treaty claims settlement policy means there is no negotiation. In interviews, claimants and negotiators confirmed this, providing numerous examples of government servants telling them that the government position on particular matters was nonnegotiable and refusing to discuss them. There is no negotiation, the government dictates (Mutu 2018, 214).

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“Full and fair” means the opposite, “partial and unfair.” Claimants and their negotiators vehemently disagree that settlements are full and fair. They point out that the return of less than 1 percent of what was stolen is neither full nor fair. Furthermore, they reject the disingenuous statements contained in state-authored deeds of settlement that Māori are being magnanimous in giving up almost all their lands and foregoing compensation “to contribute to New Zealand’s development” (Mutu et al. 2017, 287). The word “apology” is meaningless in this process. Claimants reject what the government calls its “apology” (Mutu 2018, 215). The Doctrine of Discovery and colonization are two of the nonnegotiable aspects of the government’s policy. This means that the government apologizes for the atrocities it committed and carries on committing them. For claimants, that makes the apologies meaningless. “Agreed historical account” means “government-determined fiction.” Almost all negotiators and claimants we interviewed rejected the historical account in their deed of settlement because it is not a true record of what happened, and they did not agree with it (Mutu 2018, 216). Many claimants reported drafting their own historical accounts only to have government servants rewrite them almost in their entirety. Among the many changes they make, they strip out any implication of unlawful or illegal behavior on the part of the Crown along with the names of Crown servants, agents, and representatives who perpetrated the crimes (Mutu 2018, 216). The perfidy of British immigrants today is the same as it was in the nineteenth century. Throughout their time in our country, they have applied the Humpty Dumpty principle in order to have Māori sign up for agreements that falsely claim to benefit Māori but are primarily designed to benefit Whites (Borrell et al. 2018). Māori have always fought, hitherto unsuccessfully, to rid ourselves of Humpty Dumpty in order to restore justice, balance, and peace to our country. In the following section, I will outline briefly the steps we have taken to transform the constitutional arrangements imposed by the British in order to achieve this.

CONSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION IN AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND: HUMPTY DUMPTY FALLING AND CRACKING It has been clear to Māori for a long time that the prospect of justice is unachievable under the current constitutional arrangements that operate in New Zealand. British immigrants created them in the absence of Māori consent. Māori have continually questioned the legitimacy of the New Zealand state (Mikaere 2011; Erueti 2017, 16) and debated the need for constitutional reform for many decades (Bargh 2012, 180). In 2010, a collective of leaders from hapū and iwi across the country known as National Iwi Chairs Forum (2021)8 established an independent working group on constitutional transformation called Matike Mai Aotearoa (Arise, Aotearoa) (Mutu 2020, 102–3). Its terms of reference were “to develop and implement a model for an inclusive Constitution for Aotearoa based on tikanga and kawa [(Māori)law], He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Tireni of 1835, Te Tiriti o Waitangi of 1840, and other Indigenous human rights instruments which enjoy a wide degree of international recognition” (Matike Mai Aotearoa 2016). Those instruments include the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which is a blueprint for implementing Te Tiriti. In other words, find a way to restore the mana of the myriad hapū and iwi so that we can make our own decisions about our own lives,

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lands, territories, and resources and live in peace and harmony with those our ancestors invited to share our country with us. In its 2016 report, Matike Mai Aotearoa recommended values-based constitutional arrangements. The values that were identified stressed the importance of relationships. They were conceptualized under the broad headings of tikanga (what is right or correct), community, belonging, place (protecting Mother Earth), balance, conciliation (to achieve a conciliatory and consensual democracy), and structure that promotes fair representation, openness, and transparency (Matike Mai Aotearoa 2016, 69). It also recommended consideration of six indicative models. Each provides Māori and the Crown the independent exercise of their power and authority in their “different spheres of influence,” with Māori making decisions for Māori in the “rangatiratanga sphere” and the Crown making decisions for its people in the “kāwanatanga sphere.” Where Māori and the Crown work together they will do so as equals in the “relational sphere” where Te Tiriti relationship will operate. The report notes that the relational sphere is “where a conciliatory and consensual democracy would be most needed” (Matike Mai Aotearoa 2016, 9). The report was the result of extensive consultation. It has received widespread support from Māori and from a number of non-Māori, including significant numbers of Whites. Not unexpectedly it has been subjected to strident attacks from those still clinging to the Doctrine of Discovery and its outlawed White New Zealand policy. In the meantime, the UN Committees for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2017), and Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (2018), along with the Universal Periodic Review of New Zealand (United Nations General Assembly 2019), all recommended to the government that it engage with Māori to discuss the report. In 2019, the government agreed to draw up a national plan of action to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In 2021, it released an independent working party report He Puapua (a break in a wave) that suggested guidelines for a plan of action to realize compliance with the Declaration (Charters et al. 2019). The report draws heavily on the work of Matike Mai Aotearoa. A White supremacist backlash continued in the face strong Māori and significant non-Māori support for the report. In the past, those non-Māori, including Whites who have always supported Māori, were often ostracized and demonized. World attention drawn to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States has contributed to a shift in attitudes in New Zealand, a growing lack of tolerance for racism, especially against Māori, and greater understanding of international human rights standards. While this is encouraging, New Zealand still has a long way to go to address the devastation caused by British colonization.

CONCLUSION It was inevitable that the linguistic gymnastics that British immigrants performed to hide their criminal behavior would fail. Mistranslating and misrepresenting keywords in He Whakaputanga, Te Tiriti, and nineteenth-century land transaction documents and then attempting to kill our language to wipe out our knowledge bases and oral histories would never work. They underestimated the strength and robustness of our oral traditions. Misrepresenting the meaning of words in their own English language in the treaty claims settlement process in the twenty-first century to inveigle Māori into giving up their rights would also never work. Assigning themselves supremacist labels like “Crown,” “colonizer,” and all manner of important-sounding official titles also doesn’t work. It is

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TABLE 6.1  Glossary of Maori Words Translation

mistranslation

Aotearoa

Land of the long dawn/white cloud; name of the northern island of present-day New Zealand; Māori name for New Zealand

hapū

grouping of extended families

subtribe

iwi

nation, people

tribe

kāwanatanga

governance, government

sovereignty

mana

ultimate and paramount power and authority status, influence, dignity, respect derived from the gods

mana whenua

ultimate and paramount power and authority customary authority exercised by iwi or hapū derived from the gods in respect of the land in an identified area

Māori

normal, usual, natural, ordinary, Indigenous person, Indigenous person of Aotearoa; Indigenous language of Aotearoa

Matike Mai Aotearoa

Arise, Aotearoa!

Pākehā

European

puapua

break (in a wave on the sea)

rangatira

leader, a person who has the ability to keep people together

tribal chief

rangatiratanga

exercise of mana, chieftainship including sovereignty, rights of self-determination, selfgovernment, the authority and power of iwi or hapū to make decisions and to own and control resources

possession

tikanga

law, correct ways of doing things, protocols

customs

tino

very (an intensifier)

tiriti

treaty

tuku

let go, release, allow

tuku whenua

temporary allocation of land use rights

Waitangi

name of place that Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed

whakaputanga

declaration

whānau

extended family

whenua

land, afterbirth

whiwhinga

possession

flea

land sale/purchase

(nuclear) family

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all just nonsense. They were the British immigrants our ancestors invited to live with us, and their descendants are still our guests, in spite of their bad behavior. The constitutional transformation recommended by Matike Mai Aotearoa therefore makes good sense to my Ngāti Kahu relations and most other Māori, and to many non-Māori including significant numbers of Whites. Despite the state’s insistence on dictating every aspect of our lives, we distance ourselves from them as much as we can so that we can live our lives according to our own tikanga and under our own authority. We have learnt to live with the poverty, deprivation, and hardship that delivers us, and the problems it generates. Significant numbers of our younger generations are finally being able to access training in European professions and trades so that they can start helping to lift us out of the worst negative statistics in the country (Mutu 2020, 91–2). Many of them speak Māori and are intensely proud of their heritage, a right denied to almost all of my generation. They are far more assertive than my generation has been about stopping the government and its public service imposing themselves on us and oppressing us. They demand that government hand back our resources so that we can get on with making our own decisions about our lives. They are very forthright about refusing to be dictated to by marauding foreigners whose sole interest is extracting as much as possible from us for their own personal gain. They know that is not what our ancestors agreed to.

NOTES 1. See Table 6.1 for a glossary including translations (and common mistranslations) of Māori words. 2. The term “British” applies to the English, Scottish and Welsh people who immigrated to Aotearoa pursuant to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. They all took part in the violent and brutal dispossession of Māori that is the primary feature of British colonization despite some, notably the Scottish, Irish and Welsh, having suffered the same treatment themselves as they were colonized by the English. Thus, the term “English” is reserved in this chapter for reference to the language (spoken by most British subjects at the time they were colonizing Aotearoa) as well as for a few sociocultural concepts such as “sovereignty” and “land sales’’ that were English in origin and deployed as part of the colonizing practices of the British Empire. 3. The first White visitors to Aotearoa named our country New Zealand using a place name from Holland. 4. Ngāti Kahu—the descendants of the ancestress, Kahutianui. 5. Many whānau (extended family) report themselves, their parents or their grandparents being beaten at school for speaking Māori. My father spoke of this happening to him and his brothers and sister. As parents, they feared their children suffering the same treatment at school and spoke only English to us with the result that almost all of my generation of Māori are not native speakers of our ancestral language. Some of us became language activists who fought to recover our language and set up Māori language immersion preschools and schools for our children (Mutu 2020). In my immediate family, my Scottish mother intervened and made my father teach my brother and me. 6. The government and its public service in New Zealand refers to itself as the Crown, especially when dealing with Māori, to give itself a false air of respectability and unchallengeable authority. 7. My great-great-great grandfather, Te Morenga, signed He Whakaputanga and passed on his knowledge and understanding of the document to his descendants. My whānau is one of many who holds the responsibility of preserving and passing that on.

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8. I am a member of National Iwi Chairs Forum, representing Ngāti Kahu. At the request of the Forum, I chair Matike Mai Aotearoa.

REFERENCES Bargh, M. (2012), “Post Settlement World (So Far): Impacts for Māori.” In N. R. Wheen and J. Haywood (eds.), Treaty of Waitangi Settlements, 166–81, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Biggs, B. (1989), “Humpty Dumpty and the Treaty of Waitangi.” In I. H. Kawharu (ed.), Waitangi, 300–12, Auckland: Oxford University Press. Borell, B., H. Moewaka Barnes, and T. McCreanor (2018), “Conceptualising Historical Privilege: The Flip Side of Historical Trauma, a Brief Examination.” AlterNative, 14 (1): 25–34. Charters, C., K. Kingdon-Bebb, T. Olsen, W. Ormsby, E. Owen, J. Pryor, J. Ruru, N. Solomon, and G. Williams (2019), He Puapua: Report of the Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Available online: https://www​.tpk​.govt​.nz​/documents​/download​/documents​-1732​-A​/Proactive​%20 release​%20He​%20Puapua​.pdf (accessed September 8, 2022). Chartier, C., A. Chirif, and N. Tomas (2012), The Human Rights of the Rapa Nui People on Easter Island: Observer’s Report, Copenhagen: Indigenous Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA). Coxhead, C. (2002), “Where are the Negotiations in the Direct Negotiations of Treaty Settlements?” Waikato Law Review, 10: 13–38. Deloria, V., Jr ([1985] 1974), Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Texas: University of Texas Press. Erueti, A., ed. (2017), International Indigenous Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington: Victoria University Press. Gasson, R., ed. (1978), Illustrated Lewis Carroll, London: Jupiter Books. Hamer, P. (2004), “A Quarter Century of the Waitangi Tribunal.” In J. Hayward and N. R. Wheen (eds.), The Waitangi Tribunal, 3–14, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Harris, A. (2004), Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest, Wellington: Huia. Harjo, S., ed. (2014), Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States & American Indian Nations, Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian. Heller, M., and B. McElhinny (2017), Language, Capitalism, Colonialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hito, S. (2004), “VAAI HANGA KAINGA: Giving Care to the Motherland: Conflicting narratives of Rapanui.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 25 (1): 21–34. Jackson, M. (2019), “In the End ‘The Hope of Decolonisation’.” In E. McKinley and L. Smith (eds.), Handbook of Indigenous Education, Singapore: Springer Nature. Available online: https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-981​-10​-3899​-0​_59 (accessed September 8, 2022). Manuel, A., and R. M. Derrickson (2015), Unsettling Canada, Toronto: Between the Lines, Marsden, M. (2003), The Woven Universe, Estate of the late Rev. Māori Marsden. Matike Mai Aotearoa (2016), Report of Matike Mai Aotearoa, The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, Auckland: University of Auckland and National Iwi Chairs Forum. Available online: http://www​.converge​.org​.nz​/pma​/Mat​ikeM​aiAo​tear​ oaReport​.pdf (accessed September 8, 2022). McDowell, T. (2018), “Diverting the Sword of Damocles: Why Did the Crown Choose to Settle Māori Historical Treaty Claims?” Australian Journal of Politics and History, 64 (4):

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592–607. Available online: https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/ajph​.12517 (accessed September 8, 2022). Mikaere, A. (2011), Colonising Myths: Māori Realities, Wellington: Huia. Miller, R. J., J. Ruru, L. Behrendt, and T. Lindberg, (2010), Discovering Indigenous Lands, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mutu, M. (1992), “Cultural Misunderstanding or Deliberate Mistranslation?” Te Reo: Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand, 35: 57–103. Mutu, M. (2003), “The Humpty Dumpty Principle at Work: The Role of Mistranslation in the British Settlement of Aotearoa.” In S. Fenton (ed.), For Better or for Worse: Translation as a Tool for Change in the Pacific, 11–36, Manchester: St Jerome. Mutu, M. (2010), “Constitutional Intentions: The Treaty Texts.” In M. Mulholland and V. Tawhai (eds.), Weeping waters: The Treaty of Waitangi and Constitutional Change, 13–40, Wellington: Huia. Mutu, M. (2012), “Custom Law and the Advent of New Pākehā Settlers.” In D. Keenan (ed.), Huia histories of Māori, 93–108, Wellington: Huia. Mutu, M. (2015), “Unravelling Colonial Weaving.” In P. Little and W. Nissen (eds.), Stroppy Old Women, 165–78, Auckland: Paul Little Books. Mutu, M. (2018), “Behind the Smoke and Mirrors of the Treaty of Waitangi Claims Settlement Process in New Zealand.” Journal of Global Ethics, 14 (2): 208–21. Available online: https:// doi.org10.1080/17449626.2018.1507003 (accessed September 8, 2022). Mutu, M. (2020), “Māori of New Zealand.” In S. Neely and D. W. Hume (eds.), Native Nations: The Survival of Indigenous Peoples, 3rd edn, 87–114, Vernon: JCharlton Publishing. Mutu, M., L. Pōpata, T. Williams, A. Herbert-Graves, R. Rēnata, J. Cooze, Z. Pineaha, T. R. I. Ngāti Kahu, W. Wackrow, and Davies Ltd (2017), Ngāti Kahu: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation, Wellington: Huia. National Iwi Chairs Forum (2021). Available online: https://iwichairs​.maori​.nz/ (accessed September 8, 2022). New Zealand Government (2018), The Section 8I Report, Wellington: New Zealand Government. Available online: https://www​.tpk​.govt​.nz​/en​/a​-matou​-mohiotanga​/crownmaori​ -relations​/the​-section​-8i​-report (accessed September 8, 2022). Office of Treaty Settlements (1994), Crown Proposals for the Settlement of Treaty of Waitangi Claims, Wellington: Office of Treaty Settlements. Oliver, W. (1991), Claims to the Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington: Department of Justice. Prendergast, C. J. (1877), Wi Parata v the Bishop of Wellington, Wellington: Supreme Court of New Zealand. Rishworth, P. (2016), “Writing Things Unwritten: Common Law in New Zealand’s Constitution.” International Journal of Constitutional Law, 14 (1): 137–55. Available online: https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/icon​/mow005 (accessed September 8, 2022). Silva, N. (2004), Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press. United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESC) (2018), Concluding Observations on the Fourth Periodic Report of New Zealand, Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. Available online: http://tbinternet​ .ohchr​.org/​_layouts​/treatybodyexternal​/Download​.aspx​?symbolno​=E​%2fC​.12​%2fNZL​ %2fCO​%2f4​&Lang​=en (accessed September 8 2022). United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (2017), Concluding Observations on the Combined Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Periodic Reports of New

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Zealand, CERD/C/NZL/C/21-22, Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Council, United Nations. Available online: http://tbinternet​.ohchr​.org/​_layouts​/treatybodyexternal​/Download​ .aspx​?symbolno​=CERD​/C​/NZL​/CO​/21​-22​&Lang​=En (accessed September 8, 2022). United Nations Economic and Social Council (2010), Preliminary Study of the Impact on Indigenous Peoples of the International Legal Construct Known as the Doctrine of Discovery, New York: United Nations Economic and Social Council. Available online: https://www​.un​ .org​/esa​/socdev​/unpfii​/documents​/E​.C​.19​.2010​.13​%20EN​.pdf (accessed September 8, 2022). United Nations General Assembly (2019), Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: New Zealand, A/HRC/41/4, Geneva: United Nations Human Rights Council. Available online https://digitallibrary​.un​.org​/record​/3804646​?ln​=en (accessed September 8, 2022). Waitangi Tribunal (n.d.), “Waitangi Tribunal Reports.” Available online: https://waitangitribunal​ .govt​.nz​/publications​-and​-resources​/waitangi​-tribunal​-reports/ (accessed September 8, 2022). Waitangi Tribunal (1997), Muriwhenua Land Report, Wellington: GP Publications. Waitangi Tribunal (2014), He Whakaputanga me Te Tiriti: The Declaration and the Treaty, Wellington: Legislation Direct. Williams, D. (2005), “Unique Treaty-Based Relationships Remain Elusive.” In M. Belgrave, M. Kawharu, and D. Williams (eds.), Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, 2nd edn, 366–87, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wolfe, R. (2005), The Hell-hole of the Pacific, Auckland: Penguin Books. Wynyard, M. (2019), “‘Not One More Bloody Acre’: Land Restitution and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Land, 8 (11): 162–76.

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Chapter 7

The Linguistic Defense of White Comfort in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil JENNIFER ROTH-GORDON

In a recent viral parody, white Brazilian social media influencer Maria Bopp calls into the Banco Reparação Histórico (Bank of Historic Reparations) to explain that lately, when people notice that she is white, they tell her she has a historic debt, and she’d like to know how to pay. The fake bank teller (played by Black1 actor Marcos Felipe Oli) responds in a polite professional voice, “Write down this account number please. You have a structural debt. What is this structural debt? Your grandparents, your ancestors, they never worried about paying it, and it only increased over time. Here’s what I show pending: Racial quotas, revision of the justice system, democratization of the media, genocides.” When Bopp protests, he continues, “I have here that your great-grandparents never compensated their Black workers who were enslaved.” “They always told me that was volunteer work!” she responds anxiously, “How was I to know?” She asks if instead of paying this debt she can raffle off a book on racism on her Instagram page or conduct a livestream interview with a famous Black actor. When he responds that the bank won’t accept that as a form of payment for this debt, she demands to speak to the manager and ultimately says she will call a competing and more racist bank. “Look, I tried,” she exclaims to the bank teller in frustration.2 This parody, an example of “anti-hegemonic racial humor” (Calhoun 2019), was produced on the heels of worldwide protests after George Floyd’s brutal murder in the United States in the summer of 2020 when Brazilian Black activists marched in street protests with banners proclaiming Vidas Negras Importam (Black Lives Matter). Awareness of structural racism and white privilege is now more widespread in Brazil, but these ideas are still not widely accepted, particularly among members of the white middle class. In this chapter, I explore how beliefs in white superiority and historical and societal structures of white supremacy and anti-blackness shape how white middle-class Rio residents think about where they fit in the world. I illustrate how we can watch— in real time—as they work to defend white comfort, which relies on differential access to resources that help secure the well-being of their families. In particular, I document two monologic linguistic strategies—“public words” (Spitulnik 2004) and moralizing narratives—that are employed in quotidian in-group interactions and serve to consolidate a shared white middle-class worldview. I draw on an ethnographic discourse analytic

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framework (Roth-Gordon 2020) that situates Bakhtinian linguistic analysis (Bakhtin 1981) within a broader ethnographic and sociopolitical context.3 Working toward greater social and racial justice entails understanding how everyday ways of speaking and ways of connecting to others uphold hidden racial logics of white superiority and racial hierarchy (Hill 2008). Building on a wide range of linguistic anthropological studies that examine how speakers use verbal play and daily discourse to negotiate their place in relation to larger societal discourses surrounding power, belonging, and exclusion (see, for example, Tetreault 2015), this study asks how people in positions of “privilege”4 use language to grapple with the situations of grave inequality that surround them and keep conditions of white supremacy in place.

THE STRUCTURAL SILENCES THAT REINFORCE WHITE COMFORT In Rio de Janeiro, white middle-class city residents frequently encounter situations of racial and social inequality and injustice, as they live in close proximity to what is now more politely and euphemistically called comunidades (communities) but remain under-resourced, marginalized, and vulnerable neighborhoods also known as favelas (shantytowns). The overwhelming majority of middle-class families also employ lowwage workers within their buildings as porteiros (doormen) and within their homes as babás, empregadas, and faixinheiras (women responsible for childcare, cooking, and cleaning). These domestic workers offer members of the middle class glimpses into the more humble, precarious, and sometimes dangerous living situations of their workingclass and poor neighbors who are often people of color. In addition to these connections, white middle-class Rio residents—like all Brazilians—are frequently exposed to brutal examples of racial violence in their country through social media and the news. For example, murders of Indigenous activists increased in 2019 and received widespread national and international attention, especially under a Bolsonaro regime that refused to cede or demarcar (demarcate) any lands to Indigenous tribes. It is also well-known that anti-black violence continues unchecked in Brazil, where the number of people killed by the police annually is nearly nine times the rate of people killed in the United States. On the eve of Dia da Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness Day) in 2020, a relatively new day of national recognition, a Black man named João Alberto Silveira Freitas was beaten to death in a supermarket in the south of Brazil by two security guards. Like George Floyd, Beto (João Alberto’s nickname) also died of asphyxiation, and his brutal killing, over a minor altercation after which he refused to leave the store, was also filmed and broadcast to the world. The Brazilian private security industry includes both formally trained, low-wage workers who are regulated by a special sector of the military police and those who work clandestinely, without work permits. Amid this heavily militarized security culture and Brazil’s long history of anti-black violence, President Jair Bolsonaro nonetheless reaffirmed to the world during a G20 summit right after Beto’s murder that Brazil did not suffer from racism. He claimed that ideas of racial protest were being imported (presumably from the United States) to create racial divisions that did not and do not currently exist in his country. Despite these explicit and high-level denials, Brazil clearly displays the patterns of racial violence found across the Americas in countries characterized by the “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007) and a “total climate” of anti-blackness (Sharpe 2016, 21), as well as the ongoing dispossession

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of land and brutal extermination and assimilation of Native peoples associated with settler colonialism (Poets 2020). And yet within Brazil, as in the United States, public acknowledgment of structural racism and racial violence is highly contested. Few Brazilians would agree that they are living through a “genocídio negro” (Black genocide), a term that activists use to describe the tens of thousands of premature deaths of Black Brazilians annually that includes lives lost to police violence, drug warfare, and structural racism (Alves 2018, Smith 2016a, Vargas 2011). While Brazilians have discussed racism more openly over the last few decades as in Maria Bopp’s parody, branquitude (whiteness) is not a term that has wide resonance, and many still prefer to describe Brazil as a country that suffers mostly from socioeconomic inequality. While the more liberal Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) administration has enacted anti-racist laws and policies including affirmative action, mandatory education on nonwhite people’s contributions to Brazilian history, and land redistribution to Indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, these social justice policies have been eroded and hotly contested in recent years. During his administration, Bolsonaro brazenly violated the norms of “cordial racism,” under which racial difference is not supposed to be mentioned in polite company (Roth-Gordon 2017),5 openly challenging Black people, Indigenous people, as well as women and the LGBTQ community (Alves and Vargas 2018; Silva and Larkins 2019). Throughout Brazil, there continues to be widespread support for Bolsonaro’s attacks on these anti-racist programs, and this backlash has included elected politicians outwardly advocating for state-supported racial violence through slogans such as “Bandido bom é bandido morto” (A good criminal is a dead criminal). This expression offers an excellent example of how racism works in Brazil, as it endorses patterns of racial violence that entail killing “criminals” and protecting “upstanding” Brazilian citizens, without unpacking how those categories are racially loaded. Thus, one can support this aphorism without acknowledging or critically analyzing how it benefits white people, who are assumed to be “upstanding” citizens, and how it terrorizes Black neighborhoods and communities that are commonly associated with criminality. While explicit racism is still frequently avoided and in fact illegal in Brazil, the country has a long history of covering up racial inequality, attributing it to differences of social class, and enjoying its reputation as a racial democracy, even as this status has been debunked by historians and social scientists (Roth-Gordon 2017; Sheriff 2001; Silva 2022; Skidmore 1974). In this chapter, I examine a shared worldview promoted by many (though not all) members of Rio’s white middle class who benefit from the “structural silences” (Sharpe 2016) that uphold white supremacy—as a pervasive racial order—in Brazil today. Scholarship conducted in other national contexts has sought to describe how white people justify positions of race and class privilege, particularly within contexts of inequality and racial violence. In her research with the descendants of white colonial settlers in Kenya, Janet McIntosh describes a condition of “structural oblivion,” in which white people engage in an “overlooking [of] the ways in which one’s ideologies, practices and very habits of mind continue to uphold one’s privilege” (2016, 10). Within the US popular press, Robin DiAngelo’s (2018) well-circulated term “white fragility” seeks to explain denials of racism, highlighting white people’s limited capacity to accept challenges to their whiteness and their desire to hold onto racial control, positions of dominance, and white advantage. While the concept of white fragility highlights weakness and avoidance strategies (which relate to the idea of structural silences), Jamaican political philosopher Charles Mills (2017) warns us not to be misled by the seemingly passive nature of what

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he prefers to label “white ignorance.” He calls instead for us to look at strategies of “misrecognition” by those who occupy positions of relative power as alternative forms of engagement. He entreats readers to: Imagine an ignorance that resists. Imagine an ignorance that fights back. Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly – not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge. (Mills 2017, 49) Here Mills suggests that white supremacy is upheld by a white worldview that actively defends itself. Building on the more generic term of “racism,” Mills (1997) describes the global racial order as one of “white supremacy,” advancing a trend in the field of critical race studies to expand white supremacy beyond its use as a label for individuals and groups that outwardly defend claims of white superiority or support calls for white nationalism. Along these lines, I describe Brazil as a white supremacist society because it relies on global racial ideologies of white superiority, structural racism, and statesupported acts of racial violence that are based on anti-blackness and settler colonialism. The term “white supremacy” thus reminds us to think of Brazil not merely as a country prone to acts of racism (individual or structural) or even a country that supports/suffers from racial inequality, but rather as a culture—or racial order—that promotes and defends whiteness and white domination. Charles Mills explains how governments (from Europe to the Americas) maintain and uphold this racial order through “The Racial Contract,” under which “the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them” (1997, 11). In what follows, I seek to illustrate the daily strategies through which white people uphold white supremacy, implicitly defend the racial contract, and make claims to “differential privileging.” I expand on the idea that white people benefit from “white privilege” (as an outcome of Mills’ racial contract) to describe with more specificity not something that white people “have” (as the term is often used), but expectations furnished by the racial contract about how white people should live. I use the term “white comfort” to describe a shared, as in widely recognized, understanding of white entitlement to and expectations for the protection of white life and well-being which includes abundant reminders of white racial superiority. White comfort includes what many might consider “the basics” such as access to high-quality food, healthcare, education, and safety—including a “nice” place to live (see Low 2009), but it also expands into what might be described under a broader banner of “lifestyle”—including the ability to consume freely, access to travel and leisure, and possibilities to provide desirable experiences and opportunities for one’s children (see also Currid-Halkett 2017; O’Dougherty 2002). As I will describe further, white comfort often requires soothing reminders of one’s racial difference from and superiority to nonwhite Others, a type of “white affect [that] sustains the project of white supremacy” (Bucholtz 2019, 490). The naturalization of white people’s greater access to a comfortable way of living and being in the world—and the assumption or expectation that it should be accessible

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to them because of their superior racial status—are central tenets of white comfort. Thus, I use white comfort to talk about the ways that a society is structured to secure white well-being at many costs to racialized Others, even and especially as it relies on structural silences to deny this underlying racial logic. As I will also describe, the duty to facilitate and protect white comfort for one’s children is also gendered, with white mothers more often taking up these responsibilities.

THE POLITICS OF RESPECTABILITY, VULNERABILITY, AND THE HYPERVALUATION OF WHITE LIFE In 2014, I moved to Rio de Janeiro and enrolled my three children in a well-known private school in Ipanema, one of Rio’s most celebrated neighborhoods that is enviably positioned between a scenic lagoon and the beach and filled with tree-lined sidewalks and prime shopping and dining establishments. The majority of Ipanema’s residents would describe themselves as part of the white middle and upper-middle class, but they share the city streets and beaches with neighboring residents from several favelas that climb the hills right next to Ipanema’s small strip of land. Many of the official city streets dead end at steep hills, where a limited number of entrances lead to communities that have not benefited from proper city infrastructure and attention. Members of the city’s poor and working class, who are disproportionately Black, have formed strong neighborhood ties here and benefit from easier access to jobs on o asfalto (the asphalt, the developed parts of the city below). These jobs—as security guards, garbage collectors, cashiers, construction workers, cleaners, and domestic workers—bring them into close contact with Brazil’s small middle class and an even smaller Brazilian elite (who were not part of my study). This “compulsory closeness” (Veloso 2010) is unusual in Brazil and much of the world and offers high levels of contact across race and class boundaries. I had moved to Rio to research how white middle-class families socialized their children into positions of race and class privilege, and I spent hours each day immersed in parenting rituals of families that have condições (conditions, meaning money). The families I met all lived in neighborhoods that surrounded the school: Ipanema, Copacabana, and Leblon, and while they ranged significantly in their financial situations and phenotypes, they all identified with the lifestyle and habits of what I will describe as the white middle class. Of those who would describe themselves physically using nonwhite color terms, most often moreno (brown), almost all would racially identify as white. As I have previously described (Roth-Gordon 2017), lifestyle distinctions between members of the white middle class and nonwhite residents from neighboring favelas were a critical way to establish one’s whiteness and to sometimes override phenotypic distance from “lightness.” These lifestyle distinctions included drawing on racial ideologies of whiteness to demonstrate one’s ability to follow rules and engage in “orderly,” civilized behavior, thus indicating one’s innate racial capacity for educação (civility) and good citizenship. In Excerpt 1, a group of white middle-class mothers are describing some of the parenting practices that they engaged in when their children were born. These included strictly following their pediatricians’ expert advice to not let babies touch the sand at the beach before they were 6 months old, when they received certain vaccinations. Given that I had not raised my children in Rio, or within walking distance of a beach, the small group of mothers present explained further:  

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Excerpt 1: Não pode na areia (they can’t go in the sand)6 Maya7: Não pode na areia. Rosa: Assim na areia. Na areia jáMaya: Por causa que eles não tomaram uma vacina que na verdade aqui essa vacina eles dão nas crianças que que são mais de de de- comunidade. Eles dão essa vacina no hospital. Porquê eles tem medo da criança não tomar e pegar alguma coisa. Porquê as crianças lá [. . .] essas crianças, essas pessoas normalmente né deixa criança de qualquer jeito . . .   Maya: They can’t go in the sand. Rosa: Like in the sand. In the sand alreadyMaya: Because they haven’t taken a vaccine that in truth here this vaccine they give to kids who who are more from from from the community. They give this vaccine in the hospital. Because they are afraid the kids won’t get it [the vaccine] and they’ll pick something up. Because kids there- [. . .] these kids, these people let their kids go anywhere. The other mothers present go on to clarify that the sand is suja (dirty), because people bring their dogs and fail to respect basic hygiene rules at the beach. Maya’s comment— that kids from the favelas who also live within walking distance to the beach receive this vaccination upon birth in the public hospitals where they are born—marks a distinction between how white middle-class mothers who can be trusted to “properly” care for their children are treated by their private doctors and in their private hospitals. She plays on the politics of respectability to justify how their responsible behavior allows their children a slower and more spaced-out vaccination schedule that is preferred and seen (by some) as offering babies a healthier start due to more time to build their immunity. As several historians have documented, “respectability” came to be associated with white women well over a century ago, through connections to domesticity: By the mid-nineteenth century, a cluster of forceful and widespread ideas about domesticity, the home and its role in marking boundaries, between classes and class fractions had emerged. Careful demarcations separated the genteel from the vulgar, the respectable from the rough, the uncivilized from the civilized as well as the English from other nations and races, both on the Continent and in the colonies. (Davidoff 1995, 5) Foundational scholarship shows that whiteness has long been constructed through relationships played out within the domestic sphere (Stoler 1995, 2002), and I would argue that today these notions about “right living in the home” (Davidoff 1995, 5) are most saliently tied to ideas of good parenting. In Excerpt 1, whiteness is established through the points of contrast with nonwhite others, and a family’s differential treatment is justified by a white mother’s racialized capacity for responsibility. Maya intentionally inserts structural silences to help support her point. The now pervasive euphemism comunidade masks the structural inequality in which these babies will be raised. The term “communities” can only be used to reference poorly serviced and informally developed neighborhoods that often lack stable access to city services and may feature open sewage lines in addition to a lack of regular garbage collection. Early vaccination of poor, nonwhite babies may more critically address their inability to escape unhealthy living conditions, rather than the individual parenting decisions of when to expose young

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children to sand, but this conversation’s focus on what a mother should and should not do precludes such discussions to focus on individual “choices” and white mothers’ claims to respectability. Throughout the years that I have spent among these families, both during a full year in 2014, my annual return visits, and frequent contact over WhatsApp, Brazil’s economic and political situation has deteriorated dramatically. Huge corruption scandals eroded confidence in the Workers’ Party and allowed for attacks on policies that were seen as helping the poor while ignoring the plight of the middle class. Confidence in the government fell to a new low, and the middle class found themselves scrambling to maintain their lifestyles. By contrast, the small Brazilian elite is understood to be so wealthy and globally mobile that they do not need to rely on government services. Levels of crime and violence, which have ebbed and flowed for decades, also increased. I was frequently warned by friends that I could never take out my cell phone in public—even, and especially, while walking on the streets in our neighborhood. If I received a call, I was instructed to duck into a store or a restaurant where there would be security guards to protect me from the risk of being mugged for my phone. This was not an imagined fear; many families I knew had stories of having phones stolen from them or their children while occupying public spaces, sometimes right outside their homes or their schools. Sometimes these robberies turned violent. These experiences all led to feelings of vulnerability among the mothers I knew, who frequently articulated their frustrations with the Brazilian government and its inability to protect them (Roth-Gordon 2023). Thus, while the white middle class knows they are treated differently, and shown more respect than poor Black city residents, they often decry their own lack of stability and support. In the excerpt below, in a conversation with an overlapping group of mothers from Excerpt 1, we discussed how the middle class turns to the private sector when they feel they can no longer rely on state and public services:   Excerpt 2: Tudo particular (private everything) Sofia: São situações . . . absurdas. Ana: Se a realidade da classe média tá difícil . . . Sofia: Imagina da classe pobre. Jen: Você não tem nenhum médico que aceita? Sofia: Nenhum. Nenhum pediatra, nenhum nada qualquer especialidade que você pensaAna: Surreal. Surreal nossa situação Jen. [. . .] Ana: Qual seria os serviços que teriam que ser- de excelência fornecidos pelopropiciado pelo governoSofia: Para quem pagaAna: Para quem paga imposto. Educação, saúde, segurança. Vamos falar agora de segurança. Tem que pagar um segurança particular daqui a pouco gente. Sofia: Eu pago.   Sofia: They are absurd . . . situations. Ana: If the middle-class realities are difficultSofia: Imagine for the poor.

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Jen: You don’t have one doctor who accepts it? [their private insurance policies; they pay out-of-pocket for preferred doctors, on top of paying for their private insurance policies] Sofia: Not one. Not one pediatrician, not one- not even whatever specialty you can think ofAna: Surreal. Surreal our situation Jen. [. . .] Ana: What should be the services that have to be- quality services providedoffered by the governmentSofia: For those who payAna: For those who pay taxes. Education, healthcare, security. Let’s talk about security. Pretty soon we’ll have to pay for private security. [They already pay for private education and healthcare.] Sofia: I already do. Sofia continued to explain that in addition to the private twenty-four-hour doormen who watch her gated residential building, her condominium joins with neighbors to pay a private guard who sits in his car overnight (after all of the street-level shops’ security guards have left) to watch over their buildings and their street. In this conversation, the white middle-class mothers continue to adhere to norms of racismo cordial (cordial racism) in their critique of a government that doesn’t provide for its (not racially described) “tax paying citizens” (a strategy that North Americans might call being “colorblind” or race neutral but is predated by Brazilians’ preference for racismo cordial). Unstated but strongly implied is their desire to see white middle-class “deserving” families receive public support (education, healthcare, and security), even if this isn’t always provided at the same level for the largely nonwhite poor, who aren’t paying the same amount of taxes. Their critique is a familiar attack on the “squeeze” neoliberalism has imposed on the middle class, and it speaks to their frustration of being caught between the real “haves” and the “have nots.” They appeal to my shared white middle-class position to suggest that I will also find their situation of middle-class instability “surreal.” Thus, while they were disturbed by the situation of the Brazilian masses and their far more precarious position (“imagine for the poor”), they frequently refocused narratives on their own situations of newfound vulnerability or, as I will describe later, their benevolent attempts to help those less fortunate. Through their personal narratives and explanations, they wanted me to understand that state failure was not illustrated solely by structural inequality or rampant acts of state-sanctioned racial violence. It was exemplified by a government that could not (or would not) ensure preferential rights to healthcare, education, and safety for members of its white middle class—in direct violation of the racial contract. Understandable concerns for their family’s well-being were thus grounded in the conviction that a functioning society should prioritize white comfort. My attention to white comfort—as a hidden but fundamental racial logic—has been profoundly influenced by Black theorists who have articulated the ongoing stakes of anti-blackness and white supremacy across the Americas. As Saidiya Hartman notes: If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed

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life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. (Hartman 2007, 6) Drawing on this scholarship, I seek to document the everyday process of hypervaluation in which white life comes to be seen as valuable only in relation to nonwhite life (Fanon 1967). This hypervaluation includes a “justifiable” entitlement to improved life chances and preferential access to services, as well as a neoliberal turn that relies on and helps promote health and wealth for white families. In the next sections, I explore two monologic linguistic strategies—public words and moralizing narratives—that offer a window into how white life and well-being are bolstered not only by what members of the white middle class have, but what they believe they should have in relation to nonwhite Others and how they entrench this worldview through everyday conversations.

MONOLOGIC LINGUISTIC STRATEGIES To illustrate how white comfort is justified and upheld as it is produced in unscripted real time and as part of daily discourse, I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) influential work The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin theorizes language as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization. (Bakhtin 1981, 271) As I will discuss in more detail, it is important to call out the ways that white supremacy is reproduced over time and throughout society and the role that language plays in normalizing a racial order of white domination (Bucholtz 2019; Hill 2008; McIntosh 2020; Trechter and Bucholtz 2001). A belief system that hinges on the hypervaluation of white life and well-being is not merely imposed from above (through governmental policies, for example), but also produced from below, in everyday, spontaneous interactions. In a recent edited volume entitled The Monologic Imagination, various scholars productively sideline Bakhtin’s main point—that all language is filled with dialogue, disagreement, and dissent—to show how daily discourse can be filled with “single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication” (Tomlinson and Millie 2017). These monologic utterances attempt to forge the unified and centralized consciousness that Bakhtin describes above. I add into the mix Debra Spitulnik’s (2004) classic study on intertextuality in which she draws attention to a society’s commonly shared public words. As she explains, “public words” include the refrains, standard phrases, and formulaic language that help construct an individual’s cultural membership, community belonging, and communicative competence in a society or subgroup. Referring to these terms as “common linguistic reference points,” Spitulnik (2004, 163) emphasizes the power these terms possess to bring people together around shared knowledge. I build on her well-established findings to suggest that speakers may also embrace these public demonstrations of shared (linguistic) norms to compel agreement and attempt to forge a unified worldview. Her focus on horizontal communication, rather than top-down messages from public figures, also allows me to look for monologism in the context of everyday discourse, as speakers take up an active role in shaping messages that come to be circulated widely.

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In the case of Rio, I turn to examine the frequent use of the expression lá é outro mundo (it’s a different world over there). This evaluative and comparative phrase was most typically used in discussions of places like the United States and Europe after someone had pointed out something positive about how things worked in the realms of healthcare, education, public transportation, security, and infrastructure. Either the person offering the (implicit) comparison or the person listening could chime in with this refrain. For example, if I described how my children attended a full-day public school for free in the United States, with options for a wide range of after-school activities, Brazilians would respond somewhat wistfully, “ah lá é outro mundo!” They themselves might describe to others aspects of their vacations abroad in Europe or the United States, finishing up their tale of feeling safe walking on public streets at night by exclaiming, “lá é outro mundo!” This common refrain made explicit comparisons to Europe or the United States as places “where things worked” in sharp contrast to Brazil. I also heard this refrain in a different context when members of Rio’s white middle class offered descriptions of life in a comunidade. Here the “otherworldliness” of the comparison implied the opposite: a place where nothing worked. In Excerpt 3, I am talking with Eduardo, the husband of Rosa (from Excerpt 1) and a father in the same school community. He is telling me about the one time he went up into a nearby hillside favela to visit the home of his empregada (domestic worker) to help her resolve a problem: Excerpt 3: É outro mundo (it’s a different world) Jen: Você ficou com medo de subir? Eduardo: Ah claro. Todo mundo fica, né? É … é … é outro mundo. [….] A vida na favela é uma desgraça, né. É uma desgraça. Porque não tem … não tem saneamento. Não tem- a agua eu acho que eu acho que fornecimento de água e fornecimento de luz. Mas saneamento básico não tem.   Jen: Were you afraid of going up there? Eduardo: Oh of course. Everyone gets afraid there, right? It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s another world. [. . .] Life in the favela is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace [on the government’s part]. Because there isn’t . . . there isn’t sanitation. There isn’t- I think I think there are provisions for water and electricity. But not for basic sanitation. In this example, my question about the middle-class fear surrounding favelas serves as a “stance prompt” (McIntosh 2009) that provokes a discussion of social and (again) implied but unmentioned racial differences. When Eduardo casually mentions that “everyone gets afraid there,” he means members of the white middle class (like us) who don’t often venture into favelas due to their association with blackness, criminality, and violence. He engages in discursive distancing, including linguistic gaps such as hesitations, repetitions, and dysfluencies, exemplifying what Bonnie McElhinny (2001) refers to as a “strategic inarticulateness” that distances him from the uncomfortable topics of racial difference and inequality (see also Bucholtz 2011, 2019). While he does offer these examples of structural inequality as evidence of state failure, he wants me to understand that this is not his reality. He later offers another example of how far this outro mundo is from his daily life and experiences: When frequent blackouts from the city’s electricity provider prevented his maid from keeping medicine refrigerated for her husband, she went to the local chefe da boca (the drug gang leader) who provided her with a generator. Drug gangs

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were known to not only hand down and carry out their own punishments for crimes but also to provide important services for favela residents (Penglase 2014). Early in the pandemic, the gangs in Rio received international attention as they stepped up to enforce mask-wearing and to make and distribute hand sanitizer to protect community members. The common saying é outro mundo (it’s a different world) in this case described a world of (racialized) disorder, where people were left by the government to fend for themselves and rely on well-known criminals for life-saving assistance. The different worlds Rio’s white middle class found themselves trapped between were the orderly, civilized world that I inhabited and that they could sometimes travel to visit—where (white) people were provided for—and the disorderly, lawless nonwhite worlds right in their backyard, which had been utterly abandoned by the state and had developed their own (uncivilized) sense of order. Their own positionality was formed and publicly displayed through their specific—and unified—reactions to these opposing worlds. In one context, they used this phrase to reveal a sense of “anxious belonging” (Middleton 2013) in a transnational white polity where the racial contract was upheld. In this use of the phrase, lá é outro mundo served as a lament for a world they believe they belonged in. In the opposing context, (lá) é outro mundo projected disconnection and distance, a comparison between apples and oranges, or lives and realities not worthy of comparison. Both the wistful laments and the dismissive claims of incommensurability created what Hilary Parsons Dick describes as “counterpoint lives,” or lives that are “refracted . . . in other interrelated places ‘beyond here’” (2018, 226). This common refrain of “public words” was therefore used to build consensus among members of the white middle class, as it articulated a unified and centralized understanding of the world—one that defended the hypervaluation of white life and well-being. To live unprotected as a member of the white middle class was a “surreal” experience. There was little one could do to draw out or dispute the racial presuppositions and monologic force in such an expression. While empathy was permitted (as Eduardo condemns the government for its abandonment of favelas), it is accompanied by a quiet but bold assertion of white superiority and the defense of white comfort. The structural silences conveyed by this expression—and the silent agreement that was expected to follow— constituted their own forms of violence. Always spoken from a position of confident authority and exuding a matter-of-factness, lá é outro mundo was not an invitation for dialogue or dissent.

BUILDING WHITE COMFORT THROUGH MORALIZING NARRATIVES OF WHITE BENEVOLENCE AND SUPERIORITY Public words in the form of common refrains show how people are encouraged to take up shared orientations or worldviews, to come to similar conclusions about how the world should work, and (of interest here) to endorse what are often covert, unspoken racial logics (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Hill 2008). Attention to monologism in everyday language allows us to see the linguistic strategies speakers take up to encourage further stances of agreement. As Kristina Wirtz notes: What counts as [the monologic] is not some notion of pure single-voicedness speaking only to itself, having silenced or erased all critics, but instead efforts to produce an ideal congruence across multiple voices, where we might imagine the links of a speech chain

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in which each addressee agrees and aligns with the prior speaker’s utterance, such that these “concurrences” (to use Bakhtin’s term) are replicated in the next iteration of the unfolding interdiscursive web, out across time, space, and ever greater numbers of participants, all sharing the same orientation. (Wirtz 2017, 94) I turn next to explore a particular genre of narratives that emphasized the benevolence and racial superiority of members of the white middle class. These stories carefully avoided any attention to structural racism and inequality, turning these into verbal taboos or “unmentionables” (Irvine 2011) and amplifying structural silences. These tales hinged on the differential access to resources that white people enjoyed but emphasized instead the ways that respectable white people understood the hardships of others (as noted in the two previous examples), shared their resources, and demonstrated care for others. As a genre, narratives are rife with monologic force and potential, in particular as they exemplify “controlled verbal performances” (Tomlinson 2017, 6) that are often based on one person’s lived experiences and their own interpretation of those experiences (Haviland 2005; Hill 1995). Not all narratives are organized in this way, of course, but in the case of benevolent morality tales, challenges by listeners were dispreferred and likely to be interpreted as face-threatening behavior. As Pagliai notes of similar racializing discourses which compel “acquiescence” in Italy, “The recipient is instead presupposed to share the same point of view” (Pagliai 2011, E95). Indeed, in these in-group settings, participants often followed up with similarly themed personal stories, helping to co-narrate the moral worldview of the first tale. While space prevents me from presenting some of these interdiscursive chains, we might think of cultural anthropologist Teresa Caldeira’s (2000) discussion of the “talk of crime,” in which one story of Brazilian white middle-class vulnerability was followed by another. As I demonstrate below, these monologic narrative strategies reinforce the racial logic of prioritizing white comfort, even at the expense of people of color. Maya, featured in Excerpt 1 above, had a close relationship with Sara, her Black empregada. Maya lived in the apartment she grew up in, with her widowed mother and her son, on a street in front of Sara’s comunidade that climbs the hill behind her building. Maya narrated to a group of mothers and me how, late one night, one of Sara’s children got very ill. Sara called Maya to ask if she could borrow money for a taxi to take her to the emergency room. While Maya does not drive, her mother does. She explained that her mother refused to let them travel by taxi, instead insisting on driving up the hill at 2:00 am in the morning to get Sara and her child and take them to the hospital herself. Maya’s story was not an isolated example atypical of their relationship. She had helped one of Sara’s daughters secure a job at the private school her own son attended; she spent many hours of her day talking with Sara about her family and her life. And yet, the narrative was carefully crafted to tell a positive morality tale of the “caring patroa” (boss/ housewife), one who treated her employee with care and respect. Here the layering of benevolence and concern illustrates the ways in which “the discourse strategies of whiteness are affectively saturated” (Bucholtz 2019, 488). Maya knows this type of relationship is familiar to the other mothers present, and she relies on our shared knowledge to make the story more “tellable” and significant (Morgan 2002). For members of the middle class, it goes without saying that driving up into a favela in the middle of the night would be perceived as a generous and even heroic thing to do—taking on risks that Rio residents who can avoid it rarely do. It also is critical cultural and racial knowledge that Sara was in an especially precarious position as a mother, potentially unable to ensure her child’s

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health in a country that frequently treats the death of Black children and babies as menos um (one less—i.e., to deal with, see also Smith 2016b). The fear and vulnerability Sara experienced, however, remains an unstated fact, one of many structural silences in the narrative. Maya does not comment on how or why Sara would need to borrow money for one taxi ride, which would emphasize their differential wealth. She does not note the difficulties that Sara faces to get help for her child, which include getting down to the asfalto from a hillside favela where there is no public transportation; it is difficult to hail a cab, and few residents have access to a car. Maya also does not discuss the fact that Sara cannot afford private healthcare on her own or through her employment in the informal sector. It is easy to see how structural silences fill this linguistic performance, but it is important to remember the risks and dangers they actively and even violently conceal, given that “structural silences . . . produce and facilitate Black social and physical death” (Sharpe 2016, 22). In this moralizing narrative of white benevolence, her own white comfort is obscured and naturalized and her family’s generosity is highlighted. In her study of domestic workers in Rio, Donna Goldstein (2003) similarly emphasizes the “ambiguous affections” embedded in these relationships and describes how individual acts of kindness preclude attention to structural inequality. As she notes, “Euphemization, the cleaning up of the official or public transcript, thus serves to hide domination” (Goldstein 2003, 89). Maya is truly concerned about the well-being of Sara and her family, and her actual ability to bridge the enormous gaps between the worlds they live in is limited. I emphasize here how her story nonetheless upholds differential white entitlement and a hypervaluation of white life and well-being through a politics of respectability and benevolence, offering evidence of how “intimacy and emotion soothed social inequality” (Ramos-Zayas 2020, 205). As Fellows and Razack (1998) similarly find, notions of respectability are often used by women to hide relations of domination. In Excerpt 4, a group of mothers participate in upholding the moralizing thrust of these narratives, as they weave in reminders of their presumed racial superiority. They are discussing recent policy changes which had improved the lives of millions of people in the lowest socioeconomic class. This group is commonly referred to in Brazil as a classe miserável (the miserable class) and includes the most vulnerable people who are sometimes homeless and frequently suffering from hunger. Their jointly constructed narrative serves as a linguistic performance of white respectability:   Excerpt 4: A classe miserável (the miserable class) Ana: Saiu da classe miserável, mas o que é que mudou? Mudou essa classe média baixa que consegue comprar uma televisão. Consegue comprar uma geladeira. Consegue comprar um fogão . . .  [. . . continuam falando sobre o consumismo da classe baixa] Rosa: As vezes você vê no Zona Sul. [supermercado] E a pessoa vai com o dinheirinho e compra o quê? Um pacote de biscoito e uma Coca Cola. Não compra um pacote de arroz, um legume. Outro dia, até fiquei impressionada. Vi duas alunas minhas mais velhas [de uma escola pública numa favela] dentro do mercado, lá no frango, escolhendo franguinho, coxinha. Sabe? Aí escolhendo a coxinha e tal, né? “Essa aqui está com a cara melhor.” Achei tão bonitinho, sabe? Comprando comida, cara. Porque o que eu vejo é comprar biscoito.

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Ana: Miojo. Rosa: Aí que chegou no caixa e eu paguei a conta. Tava atrás de mim.“Passa aqui junto com a minha, por favor.” Porque dentro de mim eu fiquei feliz com aquilo. Entendeu? Ana: Uh-ha. Rosa: Eram duas adolescentes comprando comida e sabiam comprar. Porque eu estava do lado, por acaso comprando frango também. “Esse está com a cara melhor. Esse não.” Então eu agradeci a deus porque existia uma mãe que orientou e que fez a criança aprender alguma coisa boa. Ela vai ser mãe também algum dia. Alias logo alí né? Semana que vem. Por aí. Alice: Se já não é. [ela dá risada]   Ana: They get out of the “miserable class” but what changed? What changed is that the lower classes now can buy a television. They can buy a refrigerator. They can buy a stove . . . [They continue talking about the consumerism of the lower classes.] Rosa: Sometimes you see this in Zona Sul [a supermarket]. And the person goes in with a little bit of money and what do they buy? Cookies and a Coca Cola. They don’t buy rice, vegetables. The other day I was so impressed. I saw two of my older students [from a public school where she works in a favela] in the market over by the chicken choosing what kind of chicken to buy. Choosing chicken legs, right? “This package looks better.” I thought it was so cute, you know? Buying food! Because what I normally see is them buying cookies. Ana: Ramen noodles. Rosa: I got to the checkout counter and I paid their bill. They were behind me. [I told the cashier:] “Put theirs with mine, please.” Because inside of me I felt so happy with that. You know? Ana: Uh-huh. Rosa: They were two teenagers buying food and they knew what to buy. Because I was next to them, buying chicken by chance also. “This one looks good. This one doesn’t.” So I thanked God because there exists a mother who taught these children something good. And she herself is going to be a mother one day. Probably soon, right? Next week or something. Alice: If she isn’t already! [she laughs] While the patronizing themes of this narrative come across clearly, it is important to situate these mothers’ linguistic construction of their superiority and benevolence in a larger context—one that includes what we might call “the afterlife of eugenics.” I refer here not to the scientific concern with better genes and the world’s dark history of forced sterilization and genocide, but instead to a concurrent movement that focused on the milieu in which a child was raised and the possibilities of maximizing the “fitness” of a country’s population through “good breeding.” From the end of the nineteenth century and for decades into the twentieth century, white families around the globe were encouraged to engage in practices of “race betterment” and self-improvement that included heeding professional advice on proper nutrition, home economics, and good parenting. In recent research, Kathleen Riley (2021) shows how these themes of healthy eating, “civilized dining,” and proper “care” for others continue to be taught and modeled for white children at an elite school in the United States.

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Eugenics encouraged white women, in particular, to take responsibility not only for the moral education of their own families but for colonial crusades that were meant to assimilate Indigenous peoples and other racialized groups into whiteness (Irving 2000; Jacobs 2009). To shirk one’s motherly duties in the proper grooming of one’s children was to risk the loss of their whiteness (Stoler 1995, 2002). Within Brazil, a country long obsessed with its lack of whiteness, the state encouraged similar eugenics policies through nutrition and hygiene programs in public schools. As historian Jerry Dávila notes, “Brazilian elites of the first half of the twentieth century tended to believe that the poor and the nonwhite were overwhelmingly degenerate. . . . [and] they claimed for themselves the power to remedy it” (2003, 3). Set within this history, securing white comfort for oneself and one’s family takes on a moral valence, and white women’s responsibilities under bourgeois domesticity seem to require a defense of this racial logic. Racial ideologies of white superiority and anti-blackness suggest that only white people possess the racial capacity for health, rationality, and self-discipline. Government policies reinforce these beliefs, as in Excerpt 1, as public hospitals vaccinate babies early because they assume poor nonwhite mothers cannot be trusted to follow up and take responsibility for their care. These policies model how domination and “care” become intertwined, as white supremacy justifies the retention of white power and control (McElhinny 2005). Along similar lines, the excerpts presented here show how white comfort and well-being are bolstered by soothing reminders of racial difference and domination (Roth-Gordon, Harris, and Zamora 2020). As these mothers take their place in a long line of “nice white women” who have drawn on racial contrast and embraced structural silences to protect the lives and well-being of their families, we must ask what it would take to convince them to struggle against this legacy and refuse the denial of Black humanity.

CONCLUSION Charles Mills notes that “white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and selfdeception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement” (1997, 19). When Maria Bopp of the opening parody is presented with an accounting of her role in the horrific genocides enacted under white supremacy, she is quick to dismiss her responsibility. But I suggest that we will only be able to encourage white people to take up new roles when we more clearly understand how white supremacy is not only historically and structurally produced, but also linguistically defended in daily interactions (see also McIntosh 2009, 2016). White supremacy has an uninterrupted history of telling compelling stories of white superiority and of convincing those racialized as white that the constant construction of racial contrast is necessary to protect one’s status as a moral, upstanding, and “civilized” white person (Bederman 1995; Schuller 2018). How do we interrupt monologic linguistic strategies that seek to compel complicity with white supremacy? Insights from scholars of color who reframe our present world as the “afterlife of slavery” and an ongoing “process” of settler colonialism demand that scholars engaged in whiteness studies find and interrogate similar continuities of life lived daily in a world of domination and violence. White people do not just benefit from historical events that they too quickly relegate to the past; they participate daily in the hypervaluation of white life and well-

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being in order to normalize a racial order of white domination with its underlying racial logic of white comfort. Tales of white benevolence show how white mothers can distort notions of “care” and their perceived obligations to actively defend their own white comfort. This racial logic includes not only their assumptions of how they should live relative to nonwhite Others, but also their need to send and receive comforting reminders of their own racial superiority. White comfort is thus produced through soothing daily interactions in which white superiority is established and reaffirmed in everything from tiny refrains of public words to longer moralizing narratives that together add up to a worldview that is more than the sum of its linguistic parts. These verbal acts of consensus-building must be understood as exercises of power, as speakers engage in a structural silencing that diverts attention from—and naturalizes—brutal acts of racial violence to protect white life and well-being. Members of Rio’s white middle class have only limited access to positions of power and wealth. But their expectations about white comfort—the need to secure it, their rights to defend it, and their actions to justify it through appeals to white superiority—constitute the legacy of white supremacy that they linguistically uphold.

NOTES 1. Note that I capitalize Black, Indigenous, and Native as a sign of respect when referring to actual people, their lived experiences, their identities, and their histories. For terms that refer to concepts, such as blackness and anti-blackness, I do not capitalize. I also do not capitalize any form of the term “white,” as capitalization in this case is often used by and associated with groups that intentionally identify with white supremacism or white nationalism. 2. See: https://www​.instagram​.com​/p​/CIBJx9MHIVy/ 3. To this end, some conversational excerpts are included to provide broader context and insight into the speakers lives, while others are analyzed for the monologic linguistic strategies employed within them. 4. I use scare quotes to indicate that I find the use of the term “privilege” problematic here. The majority of my research participants recognize their relative privilege in relation to those who are in far more precarious positions. But they also readily compare themselves to those they would say are truly privileged with access to far greater resources and security. Thus, they don’t always recognize themselves to be privileged. I also find that the term “privilege” fails to adequately convey respect for the life-threatening conditions that disproportionately impact poor Black Brazilians. 5. Racismo cordial could productively be explained as a form of covert racism (Dick and Wirtz 2011; Hill 2008), in which not noticing or discussing race leaves racial hierarchies in place and often emphasizes racial difference from whiteness, even by (glaring) omission (Sheriff 2001). 6. The original speech is in italics, followed by the translation. Transcription Conventions are as follows: (?)

Transcription not possible

(word)

Uncertain transcription

[laughter] Transcriber’s note (includes background noise as well as clarifications for the reader)

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Noticeable pause (untimed)

[. . .]

Excerpt cut

underline

Emphatic stress or increased amplitude

::

Vowel elongation

-

Self-interruption; break in the word, sound abruptly cut off

//

Simultaneous speech (noted before speech of both participants)

.

Sentence-final falling intonation

,

Phrase-final intonation

?

Question rising intonation

bold

Indicates lexical items or example to be illustrated

7. All names are pseudonyms.

REFERENCES Alves, J. A. (2018), The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Alves, J. A., and J. C. Vargas (2018), “Antiblackness and the Brazilian Elections.” NACLA, November 21. Available online: https://nacla​.org​/news​/2018​/11​/21​/antiblackness​-and​ -brazilian​-elections. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981), “Discourse in the Novel.” In C. Emerson and M. Holquist (eds.), M. Holquist (trans), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 259–422, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bederman, G. (1995), Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bucholtz, M. (2011), White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Bucholtz, M. (2019), “The Public Life of White Affects.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 23: 485–504. Caldeira, T. P. R. (2000), City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, Berkeley: University of California Press. Calhoun, K. (2019), “Vine Racial Comedy as Anti-Hegemonic Humor: Linguistic Performance and Generic Innovation.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 29 (1): 27–49. Currid-Halkett, E. (2017), The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davidoff, L. (1995), Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, New York: Routledge. Dávila, J. (2003), Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945, Durham: Duke University Press. DiAngelo, R. J. (2018), White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, Boston: Beacon Press. Dick, H. P. (2018), Words of Passage: National Longing and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants, Austin: University of Texas Press. Dick, H. P., and K. Wirtz (2011), “Racializing Discourses.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21 (S1): E2–10. Fanon, F. (1967), Black Skin White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World, New York: Grove Press.

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Fellows, M. L., and S. Razack (1998), “The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women.” The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 1 (4): 335–52. Goldstein, D. M. (2003), Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartman, S. V. (2007), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Haviland, J. B. (2005), “‘Whorish Old Man’ and ‘One (Animal) Gentleman’: The Intertextual Construction of Enemies and Selves.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15 (1): 81–94. Hill, J. H. (1995), “The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in A Modern Mexicano Narrative.” In D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim (ed.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, 97–147, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hill, J. H. (2008), The Everyday Language of White Racism, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Irvine, J. (2011), “Leaky Registers and Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorillas.” Anthropological Quarterly, 84 (1): 15–39. Irving, K. (2000), Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Modernity, 1890–1925, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Jacobs, M. D. (2009), White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Low, S. (2009), “Maintaining Whiteness: The Fear of Others and Niceness.” Transforming Anthropology, 17 (2): 79–92. McElhinny, B. (2001), “See No Evil, Speak No Evil: White Police Officers’ Talk about Race and Affirmative Action.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11 (1): 65–78. McElhinny, B. (2005), “‘Kissing a Baby Is Not at all Good for Him’: Infant Mortality, Medicine, and Colonial Modernity in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines.” American Anthropologist, 107 (2): 183–94. McIntosh, J. (2009), “Stance and Distance: Social Boundaries, Self-Lamination, and Metalinguistic Anxiety in White Kenyan Narratives about the African Occult.” In A. Jaffe (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, 72–91, New York: Oxford University Press. McIntosh, J. (2016), Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans, Oakland: University of California Press. McIntosh, J. (2020), “Whiteness and Language.” In J. Stanlaw (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Middleton, T. (2013), “Anxious Belongings: Anxiety and the Politics of Belonging in Subnationalist Darjeeling.” American Anthropologist, 115 (4): 608–21. Mills, C. W. (1997), The Racial Contract, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mills, C. W. (2017), Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, New York: Oxford University Press. Morgan, M. (2002), Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture, New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Dougherty, M. (2002), Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil, Durham: Duke University Press. Pagliai, V. (2011), “Unmarked Racializing Discourse: Facework, and Identity in Talk about Immigrants in Italy.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21 (S1): E94–112. Penglase, R. B. (2014), Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Poets, D. (2020), “Settler Colonialism and/in (Urban) Brazil: Black and Indigenous Resistances to the Logic of Elimination.” Settler Colonial Studies, 11 (3): 271–91.

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Ramos-Zayas, A. Y. (2020), Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press. Riley, K. C. (2021), “Negotiating ‘Good Food’ at an Elite Elementary School in New York City.” Signs and Society, 9 (1): 118–54. Roth-Gordon, J. (2017), Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro, Oakland: University of California Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2020), “Situating Discourse in Ethnographic and Sociopolitical Context.” In A. de Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, 32–51, New York: Cambridge University Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2023), “Protecting White Comfort and White Supremacy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” In M. A. Medeiros and J. Guzman (eds.), Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean, 84–94, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Roth-Gordon, J., J. Harris, and S. Zamora (2020), “Producing White Comfort through ‘Corporate Cool’: Linguistic Appropriation, Social Media, and @BrandsSayingBae.” International Journal for the Sociology of Language, 265: 419–40. Schuller, K. (2018), The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century, Durham: Duke University Press. Sharpe, C. (2016), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham: Duke University Press. Sheriff, R. E. (2001), Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Silva, A. J. B. da (2022), Between Brown and Black: Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Silva, A. J. B. da, and E. R. Larkins (2019), “The Bolsonaro Election, Antiblackness, and Changing Race Relations in Brazil.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 24 (4): 893–913. Skidmore, T. E. (1974), Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, C. A. (2016a), Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Smith, C. A. (2016b), “Facing the Dragon: Black Mothering, Sequelae, and Gendered Necropolitics in the Americas.” Transforming Anthropology, 24 (1): 31–48. Spitulnik (Vidali), D. (2004), “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 6 (2): 161–87. Stoler, A. L. (1995), Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2002), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tetreault, C. (2015), Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Tomlinson, M. (2017), “Introduction: Imagining the Monologic.” In M. Tomlinson and J. Millie (eds.), The Monologic Imagination, 1–18, New York: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, M., and J. Millie (2017), The Monologic Imagination, New York: Oxford University Press. Trechter, S., and M. Bucholtz (2001), “White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11 (1): 3–21. Vargas, J. C. (2011), “The Black Diaspora as Genocide: Brazil and the United States–A Supranational Geography of Death and Its Alternatives.” In M.-K. Jung, J. H. C. Vargas,

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and E. Bonilla-Silva (eds.), State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States, 243–70, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Veloso, L. (2010), “Governing Heterogeneity in the Context of Compulsory Closeness: The ‘Pacification’ of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro.” In M. Clapson and R. Hutchison (eds.), Suburbanization in Global Society, 253–72, Bingley: JAI Press. Wirtz, K. (2017), “‘With Unity We Will Be Victorious!’ A Monologic Poetics of Political ‘Conscientization’ Within the Cuban Revolution.” In M. Tomlinson and J. Millie (eds.), The Monologic Imagination, 89–120, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 8

(Con)sensual Sexual and Reproductive Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls through Beadwork and Burlesque BRITTANY JOHNSON

As an Indigenous academic who is also a burlesque performer/beadwork artist and full spectrum doula, I have often found that there is a disconnect between the forms of research that I do and the strict guidelines of what is considered legitimate or to hold value within the academy. More often than not, these guidelines are based in discourse created by and for historically white male, heterosexual audiences and therefore have a difficult time grappling with how something like burlesque performance or beadwork fit into academic discussion, or why they are of vital importance to sexual and reproductive justice for Indigenous women and girls. Slipping in and out of storytelling and academic writing––a writing choice common for Indigenous folks that specifically challenges structural “norms” of accepted scholarship––is often seen as improper, even though storytelling is a huge part of Indigenous cultures and is a way to reclaim our voices and teachings even within the academy. Our stories are part of theory and are necessary to bring sexual, reproductive, and social justice for Indigenous women and girls. Reclaiming traditional ways of knowing and being as they relate to things such as fertility, birthing, parenting, sexualities, and sexual health are vital. Without these teachings being passed on to the next generation, we risk not only losing these teachings, but we also risk passing on colonial violence via misinformation and a denial of bodily knowledge and autonomy. How can you know about safer sex when you are not allowed to talk about it? How can you understand your own anatomy when you are shamed for even having it? By passing on positive knowledge in new forms that emphasize consent––such as beaded vulvas and burlesque performances that often incorporate beadwork––the work to decolonize the Indigenous female body can reach a larger audience and break down the structures of settler colonialism imposed on our bodies and minds. This chapter is based on the current work I am doing for my dissertation and focuses on beads and beadwork as a

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central area of both artistic and research methodology through burlesque costuming and performance, embodied practice/doula teaching, and artwork as they relate to Indigenous women’s reproductive and sexual justice.1 Beads are understood to be animate storytellers, teachers, and relations. In nehiyawewin, the Cree language, mîkisis––a small bead such as those used for beadwork––is animate. If a bead is animate, what can this being teach us? What theories and teachings do mîkisisak hold within them? Sherry Farrell Racette writes that material objects such as beadwork are “master teachers, [. . . they are] animate storytellers” that we must read, training ourselves to see the stories they hold within them (Racette 2017a, 226). However, without an understanding of Indigenous approaches to social justice–– which include teachings about the body, fertility, and birthing practices; ceremonies; reclaiming our languages; protesting structural/gendered violence; working from with/ in the academy to make our voices heard––and a historicizing of colonial violence and policy in Canada as it relates to Indigenous women and girls, it will be nearly impossible to understand the complexities of the stories held within the beads. It is from within nehiyawewin that we can begin to understand how beads are animate beings, a teaching that cannot be understood from within the English language. What other teachings are held within other languages that were subjected to colonial violence and oppression? Without delving into the historical and ongoing narratives of colonization and marginalization, intergenerational trauma, and silencing of Indigenous languages and cultural traditions, there is no context from which to discuss Indigenous texts, languages, or beadwork. It is imperative that our ways of knowing, our artistic practices, and our languages are not merely included within “existing institutional or broader societal frameworks,” but that we are able to bring about “transformation of structures that have systematically privileged particular populations and marginalized others” (Avineri et al. 2018). As such, this chapter will provide a brief historicization of colonial narratives, stereotypes, and ongoing oppressive ideologies about Indigenous persons that have a profound impact today, and how these can be challenged and dismantled. In doing this historicizing, this chapter will expand on understandings of what it means to be an Indigenous woman or girl today: what is considered to be sexuality, what is allowable or acceptable when it comes to sexuality or reproduction, and how sexualities and reproduction are inherently tied to Indigenous knowledge.

A BRIEF HISTORY: WHY INDIGENOUS REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE IS NEEDED Historically, the knowledge systems and traditional teachings about the body–– especially in relation to fertility, birth, raising children, sexual health, and sexualities–– from Indigenous, Black, and other People of Colour (BIPOC) have been left out of mainstream understandings of what is considered legitimate medical, bodily, or acceptable knowledge. This refusal to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing and being as they relate to bodily autonomy and cultural transmission of knowledge is a form of colonial violence. Wenona Victor writes in her book Indigenous Justice: Clearing Space and Place for Indigenous Epistemologies that colonial violence is when “colonial ideology and relations work to suppress other worldviews using any means necessary including violence,” and that it can look like racially motivated physical and sexual violence, but can also be political in legislation created around who has the right to parent their children and who is considered to be an “Indian” under the Indian Act (Victor 2007, 8).

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The Indian Act2 determined which women were allowed to have Status: if she married a non-Indian man (even if he was Indigenous but had been enfranchised), then an Indian woman would lose her Status as would any children she had. Meanwhile, a non-Indian woman who married an Indian man would then gain Status, as would her children, and the Indian man would keep his Status. Further to this, Indian women were subjected to a determination on whether or not they were fit parents and could indeed raise their own children.3 In my own family, I am only now able to be a Status Indian due to amendments to the Indian Act as nohkom (my grandmother—in nehiyawewin) had her status stripped from her (which was later reinstated) as did her mother. The gendered colonial violence against Indigenous women written into the Indian Act led to increasing amounts of sexual and reproductive violence against Indigenous women and girls, which I will explain further. By making it legal that Indigenous women do not have the same rights as Indigenous men, Indigenous women and girls were viewed as having a lesser standing, even within their own communities. The Indian Act drastically changed the ways in which communities had been determining their own ways for generations. Having the ability to choose when and how or if you are going to carry and raise children––and whether or not those children will have the right to belong to the Nation they are born into––or who and how and when you choose to engage or not engage in sexual acts taken from you is a political act of colonial violence that has historically and continually been enacted on Indigenous women and girls. To be clear, the colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls did not begin with the Indian Act, but rather began when European settlers colonized Indigenous lands in what is now known as Canada. In the 1600s, The French attempted a strategy of acculturation of Indigenous groups, in which one part was promoting “mariages à la façon du pays”––common-law marriages between French settlers and Indigenous women––in the hopes of replacing the Indigenous population with a watered-down and primarily European one (Ray 2011, 62). Indigenous girls were sent overseas to France so that they could learn the Catholic faith and become acceptable wives for French men. In 1639, when the Ursuline nuns came to Canada, they ended the practice of sending girls overseas and rather taught the girls in convents so that they could be deemed suitable to Christian men as wives (Ray 2011, 62). Forcing Catholicism on Indigenous children was an easier way for colonizers to cause an entire new generation to become “good citizens,” to adopt European ways, and to gradually attempt to breed out the Indigenous population. In some areas, Indigenous peoples were allowed to adopt Catholic ways and also continue their traditional belief systems, but this was not the norm across the settler colonial state. Taking the girls away from their families ensured that these girls would not learn traditional practices related to their bodies and sexualities, to bead or work with textiles traditionally, and that they would not be able to then pass on or continue to practice these same traditions. In Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger write that in what is today the United States: Missionaries disrespected traditional Indian reproductive practices that had, for centuries, defined and marked birthing rituals and the connections between these rituals and maturity, manhood, womanhood, and other basic elements of culture. Typically, missionaries focused on ameliorating the deficiencies they saw in Native women, including their lack of knowledge of European birthing and child-rearing practices and their lack of traits associated with European femininity. (Ross and Solinger 2017, 21)

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Part of the ideal of European femininity was the submission of women to men, something that was not part of many Indigenous Nations throughout Turtle Island; many Nations were matrilineal, and/or the place of women was highly respected, and women were not viewed as being lesser than men. Women were understood to be life-givers and were highly respected for their ability to bring new life.4 These same beliefs of European supremacy were upheld in the settler colonial state of what would one day become Canada, ultimately leading to the development of the Residential School System and the atrocities of the Sixties Scoop.5 By removing the children from their families, they would not be able to learn their traditions, language, or culture. They would be more easily acculturated to European ideals of being and would adopt European customs, even though they would never be viewed as equal. Their traditional birthing methods and fertility teachings were viewed as subpar and uncivilized; they were viewed as deficient. This idea of Indigenous deficiency, a term that Daniel Heath Justice discusses in his book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, began with settler colonialism. If the Indigenous peoples were understood as being deficient, then it was the duty of European settlers to civilize them. Ross and Solinger go on to say, “A government agent to the Shoshone tribe in the 1880s explained that the problem was biological. If Indian children were to be raised to become proper Americans, he observed, they must be taken away from their families because the capacity to raise ‘civilized’ children was ‘not in their mothers’ milk’” (Ross and Solinger 2017, 27). Indigenous mothers were viewed as deficient, unable to raise “civilized” children. The same things that were happening in what would become the settler state of Canada were happening also in what would become the United States as we know them today. If Indigenous mothers were not believed to be capable of raising children worthy of the settler state, then it only made sense that colonial violence both physical and through government policies could be enacted on them. In fact, in the United States in the 1900s, poor women––of which, due to the impacts of settler colonialism and socioeconomics, BIPOC were more likely to be––could be subject to policing even further by having welfare-department surveillance staff bust into their house to catch them in the act of having sex, as it was against the law for those receiving welfare benefits to have more children; if caught they would lose their benefits (Ross and Solinger 2017, 41). Many of these women did not want to have more children, but rather wanted access to education on how to have sex and not get pregnant, teachings that were taken from them when BIPOC midwives were made out to be poor sources of information and deemed unsafe. Some legislators thought that these women should be imprisoned or sterilized for having sex while poor. Canada has a history of eugenics and forced sterilization, which is still happening today (although on a less obvious scale). By the late 1800s, physicians in Canada had made it so they were the ultimate authority on all things related to biological, sexual, and medical health (McLaren 2014, 28). Helen MacMurchy, the first woman in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Toronto General Hospital, believed that those from a lower socioeconomic status were in poor health, inefficient, lazy, unintelligent, and ultimately were responsible for their own poverty (McLaren 2014, 31). She believed that only those who were “efficient” with “strong character,”––who can be assumed were of European descent––were worth helping (McLaren 2014, 32). As McLaren discusses, through a report she wrote in 1928 on the state of Maternal Mortality in Canada, MacMurchy described that most women who died in pregnancy or birth were rural or minority women, and that the best thing for these women was to have more medical intervention via a largely male-dominated profession. In fact, doctors had all but

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convinced women living in Canada at the time that they would only have a successful pregnancy if they relied on medical doctors and did not turn to midwives or traditional practices (McLaren 2014, 34). However, the reality is that rates of maternal mortality were much lower when giving birth at home, most of the patients in her study were from a lower socioeconomic status (some of which were likely BIPOC) and would not have been able to afford the time or money for “proper medical care” or were suffering from malnutrition due to poverty, and she ignored the fact that many women died due to little access to safe abortions (McLaren 2014, 35). Many Indigenous women at the time were forced to leave their home communities in order to give birth in hospitals hours away by car from their homes, a practice that still occurs today. There are countless stories of Indigenous women being forced to give birth in a hospital, put under anesthesia, and waking up to find they had been sterilized. Indigenous women, who often were in a lower socioeconomic bracket due to the history of being forced onto reservations, starved by the government, put into Residential Schools, and deemed to be unfit due to their biology, were viewed as being inadequate mothers. Often, children were taken from women who gave birth in hospitals by social services, something that is still happening today.6 The fear of losing your children to the foster care system is a reality for many Indigenous women today, an echo from the days of having your children taken into Residential Schools or adopted as far away as Australia and the UK. Indigenous women have historically been and continue to be viewed as deficient in the eyes of the settler colonial state, especially when it comes to issues of motherhood, sexuality, and traditional ways of knowing. We see the ongoing views of Indigenous women and girls as being lesser than, as easy, as whores, or as disposable. Indigenous women and girls are seen as unworthy of support or respect. Oftentimes, we are tokenized. We are viewed as being “in a state of constant lack: in morals, laws, culture, restraint, language, ambition, hygiene, desire, love” and that “we can’t take care of our children or families or selves because of constitutional absences in character, or biology, or intellect” (Justice 2018, 2–3). If the settler colonial state has painted Indigenous women and girls thus, it excuses all types of colonial violence on our bodies, communities, and Nations. It allows for many of our women and girls to be murdered or go missing without proper procedures being followed by the RCMP or other government agencies to find us, such as the mishandling of the murder of Amber Tuccaro of the Mikisew Cree Nation.7 It allows for non-Indigenous persons to be blatantly racist and violent toward us without any consequence. One quick look at the comments section of any story dealing with Indigenous women or girls, such as the murder of Tina Fontaine in August of 2014, will show that ongoing settler colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls is still alive and thriving in Canada. In February of 2018, Raymond Cormier was acquitted of the second-degree murder of Tina Fontaine despite recordings and evidence linking him to her death. The anger over this was felt within every Indigenous community, with people renewing their call for the government to undertake the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, which ultimately was published in 2019. Amber and Tina are the names of only two Indigenous women who have been murdered or gone missing in Canada. It is important to also acknowledge the murdered or missing two-spirit persons, boys, and men. I have not yet been able to bring myself to read the Final Report from the Inquiry. Tina’s death highlighted the lack of and difficulty obtaining support for Indigenous women and girls in Canada, and also showed a continued ignorance of historical and ongoing effects of settler colonialism on the part of the settler colonial

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state. If our ways, our bodies, our languages, our family structures, and our cultural traditions are viewed as deficient or lesser than, then we will continue to be viewed as disposable to the settler colonial state. This needs to change. We must change this narrative that is being written by the state, on our own terms. We must rewrite colonial history through our own words, in our own ways, with our own teachings. Our stories are justice. Our stories are healing. Our stories are medicine. Our stories are legitimate and should be celebrated as such. When we begin to tell our stories in our ways, we can begin to break down the structures of settler colonialism that view us as worthy based on our adherence to colonial law alone and can reclaim our spaces, places, and bodies. Indeed, we can begin to use our stories on those sites of trauma to heal in or on our bodies, and begin the process of decolonizing our bodies and minds. We can bring justice to those who have been murdered or gone missing and can teach our young people about their bodies, sexualities, and self-love. We can change the ways in which we have been viewed as deficient through our own ways of knowing and being, and by passing on these teachings to the next generation. For myself and for other beadwork artists out there, a large part of this work is done through beading, and through gifting, holding, teaching, and wearing beadwork.

THE INTIMACY OF BEADWORK Beadwork is a huge part of my life—it is something that I do regularly, that I teach, and that I enjoy spending time doing with other people. While I bead on my own all the time, there is just something different about beading in a group with others. This is when the stories come out, when you learn things about your friends and loved ones that you may have never known before. Something about the act of beading creates intimacy. I want to tell a story about the first item I ever beaded to give away (Figure 8.1). This item was not the first thing I ever beaded as the first couple of things I ever beaded were absolute garbage. Perhaps saying they were garbage is inaccurate, as it implies that my

FIGURE 8.1:  Beaded flower for Kokum (photo credit: B. Johnson).

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first attempts were not important, which is not what I am trying to say. Even the finished product that I gave away, which was not one of these early attempts, was imperfect in many ways, and yet it was important and worthy of gifting. I was taught that every attempt or completed piece of beadwork was created for a purpose. Beads are animate beings, after all. I was taught that you should keep those things that did not turn out perfect because you learned something along the way. When I revisit that first sad attempt at an earring, I can see how I have learned since then to check both sides of my work for the right tension and no knots, how I have learned to listen to the beads for how much space they need for the section I am working on, how much more precise I have become with my stitches, how I have learned new and better ways to blend colors together. Looking back over how I have grown and learned has become a diary of beadwork that I continue to write into and document in various new ways, which I will elaborate on later. To continue my story, one night I felt this overwhelming need to bead. I grabbed my beads and started beading away. I found that I instinctively knew, that I heard from somewhere inside me how to stitch, how many beads I would need to complete the row, and which color was necessary to hit the light in the right way. One more row quickly turned into one more petal, which inevitably turned into nearly finishing the whole thing in one sitting. I can only describe it in that I felt like someone was sitting there with me and was showing me how and where I should place my beads, and that I could hear the beads speaking to me (not audibly, but they were still talking). I found myself singing love songs and praying for good things. After finishing the beading, I edged it onto a piece of moosehide. I gave this first piece of beadwork to Kokum (kohkom/Kokum technically means “your grandmother” in nehiyawewin, however, many modern speakers use the term to mean grandmother in general), and when she saw it she let out a gasp and said her mother used to bead the same kind of flowers, and that it reminded her of her mother. I have no doubt that it was my great grandmother who was guiding me to bead that night. Kokum took that piece of beadwork and hung it on the wall above her bed. She told me that she felt safe with it, that there was something about it that made her feel like everything was going to be okay. I can only explain the feeling she got from this piece of beadwork by understanding that the prayers and love songs I sang into the piece contained an energy that radiates out of it to this day. As Mel Chen discusses in their book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, “animacy and its affects are mediated not by whether you are a couch, a piece of metal, a human child, or an animal,”––or even a piece of beadwork––but rather on how you are interpreted or the power that is perceived within the object/being (Chen 2012, 210). The beadwork piece that I gifted to nohkom was not simply a pretty piece of art, it was and is rather a being that holds the loving energy that was stitched into it. This beaded flower goes beyond simply being perceived as holding power but rather is known and felt to have it. Kokum passed away in 2019 on my thirtieth birthday from an aneurysm we knew could go at any time. I got the call in the middle of the night. As I was driving to the hospital, a star fell from the sky right at the turn on the highway that we always said was her turn; she had suffered an injury while working at that same point on the highway years before as a flag person and it had changed her life and ability to continue the work that she was doing at the time. At the same time, Luke Combs’s song “Even Though I’m Leaving” began to play on the radio and I knew at that moment that she was leaving me. Seconds later my phone rang, and Mom told me that it was indeed the aneurysm, and that we did not have much time. I was able to get there with enough time to tell her I loved her, as was most of the rest of our immediate family.

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The day after her passing I went to her house and curled up on her bed and cried, breathing in her scent and just needing to feel close to her. I looked up at the wall and realized the beaded flower was no longer hanging there. I asked my family if they knew where it had gone and none of them had seen it. The day after that, my mother opened up Kokum’s purse to start the process of funeral arrangements, and inside her purse was the beadwork I had made for her. I will never know for sure why it was in her purse, but my heart tells me that she put it in there because she wanted to feel safe. She knew that this was her time, and she was completely at peace about it at the hospital. In fact, her last words to us all before she was no longer speaking were “It’s okay. I am at peace.” I have the beadwork now, and I carry it with me to feel close to her. I could look at it for all of its faults, for how uneven the circle work is, or how imperfect the petals are. But instead, I look at the beadwork and feel connected to nohkom. I hold the beadwork and become calm, I run my fingers over the beads and wonder how many times her fingers did the same and it makes me feel like she is still close. I am still connected to her through this piece of beadwork, even though she is physically no longer with me. To bead, to hold beadwork, to teach beadwork, and to wear beadwork are all intimate acts. What then does it mean to wear beadwork on a site of the body that has been subjected to trauma? To bead a part of your body that has been violated or abused? What power and decolonization of our own understandings of our bodies and our glorious anatomy can be taught and understood through the act of beading?

BEADED ANATOMY AND DOULA WORK In 2017, I was selected to take Indigenous full-spectrum doula training through the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and Indigenous Birth of Alberta.8 This training strengthened my desire to teach about sexual health and anatomy to Indigenous youth, particularly young women. As new forms of technology are always needing to be utilized in order to reach youth and connect us all across the world, I started up an Instagram account that centers around beaded female anatomy. In particular, I have focused on beading vulvas. When I am beading vulvas, it is done in a way to both teach and destigmatize discussions around female anatomy and sexualities. Part of the way I do this is through a series of earrings that are aptly named VulvEarrings. Each pair of VulvEarrings is completely unique, just as every single vulva in the world is unique; there is no real “normal” when it comes to vulvas. Each pair I bead comes with little cards that clearly label the major parts of the anatomy (labia majora, labia minora, clitoral hood, clitoris, urethra, vestibule, vagina, perineum, and anus). It is important to name the parts, to understand how they work, and to normalize words for our bodies.9 Our bodies are traditional. Our bodies are important. Having the ability to know and understand your own body parts for young Indigenous women and girls is crucial. As Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm discusses in her article “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style,” the silencing of Indigenous understandings and teaching about bodies and sexualities was a key component of colonization. She writes that in the late 1980s/early 1990s when she was doing work combating AIDS through awareness campaigns in Indigenous communities, she found that “in terms of sexuality many of our communities were at least as repressive (and hypocritical) as the colonizing cultures that surround us. [. . .] Imagine trying to inform [Indigenous communities when] it wasn’t acceptable to discuss sex publicly. How do you inform people of the risks . . . if you can’t make any reference to sex?” (Akiwenzie-Damm 2000, 100). If you are not

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allowed to even talk about sex without being shamed or embarrassed about it, how are you going to be able to talk about vulvas and menstruation and healthy relationships? As part of my work to assist in the decolonization of Indigenous sexualities for Indigenous women and girls, I not only bead VulvEarrings, but I facilitate workshops where we bead vulva keychains and have open discussions about topics related to healthy relationships and healthy selves. Most recently, I was invited to teach about healthy relationships, consent, and vulvas/uteruses to a group of young women at an outreach school in Edmonton. To begin our session, we went around the circle and introduced ourselves in whichever way felt the most comfortable. We then paired up and did a short exercise in consent: each member of the pair takes turns walking toward the other, and when the member standing still does not feel comfortable with how close their partner is to them, they say stop. Roles are then reversed. After the exercise, we talked about things we noticed, like how just because one person felt comfortable from a closer distance, it did not necessarily mean that their partner had the same boundaries. This led to a discussion on how we have the right to say no or to say stop, even if we are already engaged in an intimate act. Teaching consent is important. Once the consent discussion was finished, I shared my knowledge of all of the parts of the vulva using a large beaded vulva I created (see Figure 8.2). This vulva is on a small canvas, and features ribbon labia majora and clitoral hood, a ladybug for a clitoris, and green washi tape that says “beautiful” over and over for the vestibule. The vagina is represented by an oval cabochon bead. One of the labia minora (beaded with size eleven purple beads) is covering the labia majora, while the other is tucked in to show some of the diversity that is seen with vulvas. This canvas was passed around to each member of the group so that they could touch and feel it and ask questions they may have. Many participants offered insight they had.

FIGURE 8.2:  Large beaded vulva (Photo credit: B. Johnson).

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Shortly after this, each young woman was able to choose the four colors of beads they would like to use for their vulvas, as well as which gems they wanted to use to represent the vagina, urethra, and clitoris. Many young women, and even older women, are unaware of where their urethra is, or that they even have one, so I always make a point to explain it. As we beaded our keychains together, we talked about healthy relationships and getting tested for STIs, as well as orgasms and how every person with a vulva will have different things that feel good or not good for them, and how all of this is perfectly normal. I talked to the group about how the vagina is incredibly stretchy, relating it to an accordion. We talked about how the vagina connects to the cervix (which I described as a vagina hat), and that the cervix is attached to the uterus. It is incredibly common for young women to not understand where exactly their uterus is, and so I had each attendee feel their upper abdomen to notice how if you push inward it will feel hard. I explained that this is your abdominal muscles, and everyone will have that same feeling regardless of how fit they might be. The reason why I explained this along with showing where on my own body the uterus is in the lower pelvis is that many young women who have sex with men will sometimes think that they are pregnant when they feel their upper abdominal muscles. This has nothing to do with them being unintelligent but has everything to do with a failure to accurately and adequately explaining female anatomy and bodies to women and girls. Those teachings about our bodies need to be reclaimed. To put it in perspective I showed them how small a uterus actually is (3–4 inches by 2 ½ inches) and pointed out that until you are much further along in your pregnancy, you will not feel the uterus anywhere near the belly button. Using traditional beading methods in new and contemporary ways to teach about the body is an important political move to decolonize understandings of the female body and knowledge about our bodies. As Sherry Farrell Racette discusses in her article “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art,” Indigenous artists are “relearning the techniques and meanings associated with traditional media. [They] describe the transformative power of traditional materials that enable them to revitalize and mobilize endangered knowledge, and to confront trauma and hidden histories” (Racette 2017b, 123). Beading a vulva keychain using traditional beading techniques can be used as a way to pass on teachings about the body and help to confront traumas we may have experienced. It can also be a medium to discuss those histories that are left unspoken about, a way to reclaim bodily sovereignty in a world that sees female sexuality and bodies––especially those belonging to BIPOC––as problematic and unworthy of the time and effort to learn about. During these beading workshops, participants will often express things that have happened to them or to their friends that were traumatic or problematic. If we do not talk about and make it our new normal to be able to talk openly about these things, we are going to be unable to change the ways in which colonial violence continues and will be unable to pass on bodily teachings to the new generation. The cycle of viewing Indigenous sexualities and bodies as anything less than worthy and incredible must end. With their consent, I was allowed to take a picture of the vulvas in progress and have attached a photo (Figure 8.3). They were all excited to log on to Instagram (see @ ohbeadgyn for colour images) and see the vulvas they had made. This teaching has led to other organizations hearing about my workshop, and I have been tentatively invited to do a similar workshop with another group soon. While none of the attendees were able to finish their vulvas in the time we had together, they all stated they were going to continue

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FIGURE 8.3:  Workshop beadwork (photo credit: B. Johnson).

working on them, and perhaps share the final photos with me. This is embodied learning. This is reclamation. This is the intimacy of beadwork. This is traditional. Beads are teachers. Beadwork is a form of text, a form of theory; each piece of beadwork belongs to a collective memory of stories, knowledge, teachings, and histories. Having the opportunity to not only see but to touch and hold a beaded uterus and learn how your inner workings work, to bead a vulva and learn the names and connections of these parts is crucial; this is reproductive and sexual justice for Indigenous women and girls. Discussing our parts, including those parts where pain may also be present due to physical or emotional pain, normalizes experiences of sex and sexual stimulation and can be used as a tool for talking about abnormalities, exploration, and other important topics such as practicing safe sex and routine testing for sexually transmitted infections. As Tracy Bear discusses, Indigenous women can “reclaim their corporeal sovereignty,” through an emphasis on the importance of “Indigenous authors and artists who express the erotic” as contributors “to the decolonization of Indigenous women, girls, and genderful folk” (Bear 2016, 46). Teaching about the vulva and uterus through beadwork, storytelling, and artistic performance such as burlesque, provides a means to reclaim bodily sovereignty and decolonize Indigenous female bodies as powerful, sexual, and worthy.

BURLESQUE I am a founding partner of Beaver Hills Burlesque, an Indigenous and decolonial burlesque collective formed by myself and my colleague Kirsten Lindquist.10 Our name comes from the traditional place name for Edmonton in nehiyawewin––amiskwaciwâskahikan (roughly translated to Beaver Hills House). Beaver Hills Burlesque offers decolonial burlesque workshops, including pasties-making, group choreography, student showcases, and burlesque performance nights. Our burlesque work is informed by and related

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to Indigenous troupes like Virago Nation, and some of my costuming––including my beaded pasties––is strengthened by artistic works such as decolonial Ojibwe beadwork artist Summer Peters’ in her art installation Decolonize Your Gitch, and the art of Métis artist Christi Belcourt. Aside from burlesque teaching and performance, both Lindquist and I theorize about burlesque, bringing research-creation to our dissertation work. As discussed by Natalie Loveless, research creation is a crucial component to the development of new academic literacies that work to challenge what is considered knowledge within the institution; it acts as an affective and powerful way to speak “across and with disciplinary, political, ideological, methodological, and affective” differences within academia (Loveless 2015, 55). Burlesque done in an Indigenous way is a powerful way to reclaim our places and spaces as whole beings worthy of consent, respect, and free to embrace our sexualities and femininity (in all of its forms). It is also a powerful way to change the idea of Indigenous women and girls and their bodies/sexualities as being deficient in some way from within the very structures that deem us as such. Indigenous burlesque challenges institutional understandings of what is considered to be knowledge formation and critical research, while also changing the narrative in the public sphere of which bodies are acceptable for performance and (con)sensual viewing. Burlesque has a history of being understood as exploitative and objectifying women. Then why choose to perform in a form tied to exploitation and objectification? Portia Jane King writes about the troubled history of burlesque in North America in her master’s thesis “Shake it Hard: Feminist Identity and the Burly-Q.” In her thesis, King writes that “seeing the displays of femininity that the female performers exhibited in both their public and private lives both confused and threatened the greater society,” leading to burlesque being viewed as only for the working class or the poor as seeing the “sexualized women of burlesque” would change the proper disposition of upper and middle-class girls (King 2008, 3). Many performers engaged in “turkey” or “honky-tonk” style shows––highly sexualized shows that aimed to turn a profit, as sex sells––which became at least partially legitimized while still not being all that burlesque was or aimed to be. Burlesque and vaudeville troupes began working together to bring in patrons to their shows. Eventually, “with the emergence of movies as a retreat for the Depression era Americans, burlesque stayed on the street . . . while vaudeville became legitimized by moving to the big screen” (King 2008, 10). After this, striptease was introduced, as was the policing of burlesque performance and a huge decline in performers’ ability to do what they did as burlesque performers. Just as reproductive and sexual rights were being stripped from women, so too was the ability to perform in ways that were viewed as “sexualized” for the public; those art forms that were deemed for the poor or working class were crushed down in favor of those deemed admissible by the upper class. Burlesque re-emerged as an art form in the 1990s as neo-burlesque via cabaret, a form of burlesque that is aware of the older forms of burlesque and riffs upon them. Neo-burlesque can include modern music and dance, can contain a political message, and may or may not involve the element of striptease. As an Indigenous burlesque performer and sexual health advocate, my performances often tell a story, and this story always has a political message of some kind. For example, a recent performance I did at Tipi Confessions11 to Ariana Grande’s “God is a Woman” told the story of an Indigenous woman continually being told she is not enough by society. I emerged with makeup reflecting raven coloring, with long earrings with raven feathers made by Cree-Métis beadwork artist Melanie Parsons (2018); these earrings actually inspired the entire dance. The dance began showing that I was afraid, that I was hesitant to take the steps necessary

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to change the story being told. Gradually, I removed layers of lies (robe, lingerie), dancing more and more intensely, ultimately ending with me staring the audience down in raven-feather pasties, embracing the power of Indigenous female sexuality and power while the words “God is a woman” repeated over and over again. After the show, I was told by more than one Indigenous woman that the dance made them cry, as they were able to relate to the story and they felt the political message that was being told: you are enough, just as you are, and you are powerful. To do burlesque as an Indigenous performer, bringing with you the colonial histories etched into your DNA and the collective memory of your Nations, is a political act that subverts traditional ideas of what is acceptable as performance. It gives consent to those watching your performance to not only view your body as an element of performance but also to read the messages you bring with you into your performance. To perform burlesque as an Indigenous woman––who has been viewed as deficient by settler society and holds within her generations of trauma from colonial violence––is an act of political protest. As quoted in King’s work, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor believe that “evaluating the public displays of social movement culture is more complicated than determining whether they are hegemonic or oppositional, since protest groups typically mobilize by drawing upon identities, practices, and symbols that are already meaningful from the standpoint of dominant ideologies and frameworks” (Rupp and Taylor 2003, 19). As Indigenous burlesque performers, we draw upon our collective memory, make statements about climate change and the White Paper12 and appropriation through our dances. We use pasties beaded with traditional wild roses in size ten seed beads and display them to the audience, reclaiming our sexualities and our bodies as ours. This is what I describe as a (con)sensual act: while my performance is sensual in nature, I am acutely aware of the fact that I am giving you my consent to watch and interpret my body, just as the audience gives me their consent to perform by watching me, cheering me on, and remembering the stories I have told. Performing a burlesque number wearing beaded pasties is decolonial in multiple ways: through decolonizing a form of dance that at times encourages heteropatriarchy, through placing beadwork on sites of trauma, through dancing and performing a political argument for reproductive and sexual justice. Giving consent to the audience to view your body and your message puts the political power back into your own hands, your own hips and thighs and breasts. Accepting that burlesque may not be now or may not ever be an empowering act for everyone is also part of the (con)sensual nature of Indigenous burlesque. To honour our bodies and what is comfortable for each of us is an important part of consent, and of (con)sensual relationality.

CONCLUSION Beadwork, doula work, and burlesque collectively reclaim Indigenous sexualities, bodily sovereignty, and promote traditional teachings and ways of knowing about fertility, motherhood, and cultural traditions for Indigenous women and girls. Each of these three areas are intimately connected to one another. Through teaching about the body and about healthy sexualities in unexpected ways, the next generation of Indigenous women and girls can continue to reclaim the spaces, places, and tell the stories that change the narrative about who we are as Indigenous people. In order to make this change, we must be able to talk about sex and sexuality and incorporate traditional stories/arts alongside new technologies and realities. Allowing space for new academic literacies that include

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research-creation and performance-based study is vital in order to accomplish the kind of decolonization and healing I have discussed in this chapter. This is the important work that is needed and necessary within the academy and with/in the community in order to further reproductive and sexual justice for Indigenous women and girls in amiskwaciwâskahikan and beyond.

NOTES 1. While this chapter focuses mostly on reproductive/sexual justice for Indigenous women and girls in Canada and the United States, much of what I discuss here could be applied to BIPOC folks globally, as so many have been subjected to colonial violence enacted via Christianity and global capitalism. 2. Of course, the settler colonial misrepresentation/mislabeling of all First Peoples of what is now called The Americas as “Indians” is an example of linguistic injustice endured by many Indigenous peoples over the last few centuries, as is discussed by others in this volume (e.g., Perley and Riley&Jourdan). Delving deeper into these forms of structural and linguistic violence is beyond the scope of this chapter, but is important to note. 3. The Indian Act came into being through combining elements of both the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869. Under the Gradual Enfranchisement Act, the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs had the ability to determine who was considered to have good moral character—this extended to Indigenous women, who, for one example, would be subjected to a determination on if they were of high enough moral character to keep their children should their husband die. 4. This statement is not meant to be generalizing, but rather to point to a commonality. Also of note, one thing that deserves more attention than what I am able to write here is that what is often overlooked are teachings about infertility, miscarriage, or abortion––these are things that would require an entire project to discuss fully, but are worth mentioning as they are part of sexual and reproductive justice. 5. While both the Residential School System and the Sixties Scoop are important to understand, an in-depth discussion of these goes beyond the scope of this chapter. In short, the Residential School System forced Indigenous families to send their children to primarily Catholic schools where they were stripped of their language, culture, and sometimes their very lives. The Sixties Scoop refers to the practice of taking Indigenous children from their homes and adopting them out to white families, sometimes as far away as the UK or Australia. 6. Up until April of 2020, “birth alerts” were sent out to social services to apprehend infants in Manitoba if they were flagged as being “high risk” (Bergen 2020). In 2017, 87 percent of the infants seized in the hospital from their mothers in Manitoba were First Nations (MacDonald 2019). 7. Deputy Commissioner Curtis Zablocki, commanding officer of Alberta RCMP, issued an apology to Amber’s family (missing since 2012) in July 2019, stating that the “initial missing persons investigation was not our best work” and that “the early days of the investigation . . . required a better sense of urgency and care” (Weber 2019). Amber’s murderer has still not been found. You can find a recording of her last words and can hear her killer’s voice on the RCMP website; RCMP released the recording in the hopes that someone would come forward upon recognizing his voice. 8. Full spectrum means that I am a doula/support person for many aspects of sexuality and fertility for folks from all walks of life and sexualities/genders. We can provide harm reduction support, support when talking to medical professionals, pregnancy, birth,

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postpartum, infertility support, pregnancy loss, abortion, and many other forms of doula support. Our network can also connect you with ceremonial people or elders who can provide traditional teachings and medicines. My focus is on sexual health and fertility teaching at this time. 9. I eventually would like to have cards made in Indigenous languages as well. 10. My burlesque persona is Fanny LuPhine (@fannyluphine), and Pemmican Milkshake is Lindquist’s. 11. Tipi Confessions is a research-creation laboratory I have been and will continue to be a part of, which acts as a space of creative experimentation and action research, informed by and furthering existing research and teaching in decolonial and critical sexualities at the University of Alberta 12. In short, The White Paper of 1969 was an attempt by Pierre Trudeau’s government to abolish the Indian Act completely, effectively ending any legal relationship between the Canadian government and Indigenous Nations. Indigenous Nations from across Canada vehemently opposed this policy paper as it was yet another form of cultural genocide by forced assimilation. This brought about political organizing across many Nations to fight for amendments rather than abolishment of the Indian Act (Indigenous Foundations).

REFERENCES Akiwenzie-Damm, K. (2000, Fall), “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style.” Journal of Canadian Studies, 35 (3): 97–104. Aveneri et al., eds., (2018), Language and Social Justice in Practice Reimagining Language and Social Justice, New York: Routledge. Bear, T. (2016), Power in My Blood: Corporeal Sovereignty through the Praxis of an Indigenous Eroticanalysis, U Alberta, EBSCOhost. Available online: http://eds​.a​.ebscohost​.com​.login​ .ezproxy​.library​.ualberta​.ca​/eds​/detail​/detail​?vid​=0​&sid​=a24881f8​-0e64​-4965​-ae45​ -c5622b45b48a​%40sessionmgr4008​&bdata​=JnN​pdGU​9ZWR​zLWx​pdmU​mc2N​vcGU​ 9c2l0ZQ​%3d​%3d​#AN​=alb​.7655497​&db​=cat03710a. Bergen, R. (2020, January 31), “Manitoba to End Birth Alerts System that Sometimes Leads to Babies Being Taken.” CBC. Available online: https://www​.cbc​.ca​/news​/canada​/manitoba​/birth​ -alerts​-ending​-1​.5447296 (accessed May 15, 2020). Chen, M. Y. (2012), Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, Durham: Duke University Press. Justice, D. H. (2018), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter, Wilfred Laurier University Press. King, P. J. (2008, August), Shake It Hard: Feminist Identity and the Burly-Q, Colombia: University of Missouri. Loveless, N. (2015), “Towards a Manifesto on Research-Creation.” Polemics: RACAR XL, 1: 52–4. MacDonald, W. (2019), “Winnipeg Indigenous Woman Whose Baby Was Taken at Birth Hopes to Hear Wednesday If They Will Be Reunited.” Globe and Mail, January 15. Available online: https://www​.the globe​​anmai​​l​.com​​/cana​​da​/ar​​ticle​​-winn​​ipeg-​​indig​​enous​​-woma​​n​-who​​se​ -ba​​by​-wa​​s​-tak​​en​-at​​-​birt​​h​-hop​​es​-to​​-hear​/ (accessed May 15, 2020). McLaren, A. (2014), Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Racette, S. F. (2017a), “Pieces Left Along the Trail: Material Culture Histories and Indigenous Studies.” In Chris Anderson and Jean M. O’Brien (eds.), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, 223–9, New York: Routledge. Racette, S. F. (2017b), “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art.” Art Journal, 76 (2, Summer): 114. EBSCOhost. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/00043249​.2017​ .1367198. Ray, A. J. (2011), An Illustrated History of Canada’s Native People: I Have Lived Here Since the World Began, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ross, L., and R. Solinger (2017), Reproductive Justice : An Introduction, Oakland: University of California Press. Rupp, L. J., and V. Taylor (2003), Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “The White Paper 1969.” Indigenous Foundations, UBC. Available online: https://ind​igen​ousf​ ound​ations​.arts​.ubc​.ca​/the​_white​_paper​_1969/ (accessed April 3, 2021). Parsons, M., SavageRose on InstaGram. Peters, Summer (Mama Longlegz). “Mama Longlegz.” Facebook (accessed October 1, 2018). Victor, W. (2007, December), Indigenous Justice: Clearing Space and Place for Indigenous Epistemologies, National Centre for First Nations Governance. Weber, B. (2019, July 25), “RCMP Apologize to Amber Tuccaro’s Family; Say Investigation into Her Death ‘Not Best Work’.” Global News. Available online: https://globalnews​.ca​/news​ /5684457​/albertarcmp​-apologize​-amber​-tuccaro​-death/ (accessed May 15, 2020).

Chapter 9

Telling Truths, Keeping Silence in the Aftermath of War in Sarajevo KEZIAH CONRAD

Vera and I are in a café, each with a small pot of tea, a shallow teacup, a neat metal gadget for squeezing lemon into the tea. It’s a chilly day in Sarajevo, and the café feels like a warm, humid cocoon. She listens as I explain that I’m in Bosnia for a year this time, investigating what it is like to be part of a mixed-ethnicity family. I know that Vera comes from such a family and am hoping that she will agree to participate in my research. “Is that interesting?” she asks first. “You don’t have that in America?” This skeptical reaction has been taking me off guard for months, and I stumble to explain that I am interested in how mixed families and selves have fared in the aftermath of a horrific war that specifically targeted mixing, and in a political climate that continues to be characterized by radical polarization (Burić 2012; Hromadžić 2012; Mujkić 2007; Mujanović 2018).1 Vera considers what I have said. “The question is,” she says, “will you be able to tell the truth about these families?”2 Would I be able to tell the truth? At the time, I understood Vera to be asking whether I would have the nerve to voice experiences of loss, estrangement, and alienation—stories that seem at odds with a sympathetic portrayal of mixing and thus jive all too well with nationalist tropes of mixed marriage as a “dead end” (Hromadžić 2015). Many of the people who shared their stories with me and invited me into their homes tried hard to convince me that their private relationships were free of ethnic consciousness, let alone animosity. But as she painted the outlines of her story on that day in the café, Vera emphasized these tragic elements. She told me that although her parents’ own marriage was mixed—she had a Serb father and a Croat mother—her mother still objected when she married a Bosniak man,3 threatening Vera that she would be cutting herself off from the family if she did so. Later, in the midst of the war, Vera came into conflict with her brother as he allied himself with the Serbs and made scornful comments about Bosniaks and the Bosnian army. Vera felt unbearably betrayed not only by her brother but by her mother, who stood by him. Though she lived through the siege of Sarajevo in a front-line neighborhood, nursed her husband back to health after a life-threatening injury, and endured many difficult experiences, she named this family rupture as the most traumatic experience of her life.

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Vera’s question to me suggests that telling truths could be important, but that it might not be straightforward because some truths are difficult to articulate, unwelcome, or easy to misconstrue. It expresses doubt about how much or what sort of truth might be possible to tell, suggesting that there might be reasons why people would avoid telling truths to me, or why I might avoid being too explicit about truths they tell me. The question of whether it is possible to tell the truth acknowledges that truth-telling is always situated in specific relationships and circumstances which could threaten—or be threatened by—too much truth. Revealing or concealing truths is not usually an all-or-nothing calculus, but a matter of delicate negotiation that has real consequences (Ewing 2006; Hollan 2008). Truth-telling lies at the heart of the processes often set in place for achieving justice in deeply divided societies. The literature on transitional justice and peacebuilding emphasizes the central role of telling truths in reaching authentic transformation not just of political structures but of communal narratives and personal attitudes (e.g., Borneman 2002; Lederach 2005; Hayner 2011). In order to escape cycles of “enduring and escalating violence,” societies must directly confront the occurrence of serious human rights violations or international crimes (Villa-Vicencio 2006, 60). They must search out the truth, combat denial, and give voice to people who were silenced, building joint narratives or forms of public memory that allow members of opposing groups to imagine themselves as part of the same society (Kostić 2012; Simić 2020; Subotić 2016). They must confront dehumanizing stereotypes and nurture empathic forms of perspective-taking through dialogue processes (Halpern and Weinstein 2004; Cameron 2007; Zembylas 2007). They must provide opportunities for psychological healing and meaning-making (Staub et al. 2005). All of these transformational processes represent “a politics of truth and voice” (Briggs 2007, 315) that is idealized within contemporary democratic societies across public and private spheres (Clayman 2001; Carr 2010; Schröter 2013). Without denying the value of voice-oriented work for justice, in this chapter, I turn attention to the moments embedded in daily life when people hesitate to speak truth, demand accountability, or reveal their own position too clearly. Following scholars such as Erving Goffman and Veena Das, who draw attention to the everyday as a site of ongoing moral action and contestation, I look for the ordinary forms of justice that are meaningful in interpersonal interactions or relationships: the justice of having one’s experiences acknowledged and validated by others; the justice of obtaining an apology; the justice of being in the right or on the right side, of knowing the truth and standing up for it. These are forms of justice that may be much at stake, and an individual might choose to insist on them with all the strength of righteousness. On the other hand, a person might also choose restraint, letting justice slide to varying degrees in daily interactions in order to maintain smooth relationships. Vera’s story of family betrayal during the war illustrates both extremes, as she responds very differently to her brother and her mother. With Vera’s story, I sketch out some of the costs of truth-telling and the exchange of inner thoughts and highlight communicative practices of containment, avoidance, ambiguity, and even obfuscation. Such practices are well-documented resources for keeping peace or coping with uncertainty in many societies around the world (Basso 1970; Hollan 1988; Briggs 1994; Mac Ginty 2014; Mangual Figueroa 2017), and they stand out in my ethnographic work with members of mixed-ethnicity families in Sarajevo. As they maintain relationships in a context that remains volatile, Sarajevans like Vera carefully manage what they reveal about themselves. In public interactions, they may seek to create ambiguity about exactly who they are, for instance by using nicknames that evade ethnic denomination, by avoiding linguistic features that characterize Serb or Croat

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or Bosniak usage, or by using them all alternately in an excess of impenetrable symbolism. With neighbors and relatives, they may work to avoid tricky political questions, lean on “insincere” forms of polite small talk, or delicately emphasize certain shared ties without mentioning others. They may (mis)interpret potentially dangerous comments, strategically reframing them as mundane challenges or jokes (Conrad 2019; cf. Neofotistos 2012). In some cases, they maintain zones of silence within the most intimate relationships. Silence, writes Robert P. Weller, “is fully social and communicative” (Weller 2017). Hesitations, evasions, and absences “speak,” often with a powerful voice. Research into silence as a sociolinguistic phenomenon has shown how silence is a communicative resource that, like speech, can be used for almost anything: it can play a role in domination or resistance, can indicate rudeness or tact, social distance or intimacy, wisdom or cognitive difficulty (Tannen and Saville-Troike 1985; Jaworski 1993; Murray and Durrheim 2019. Through silence, a person might struggle to cope with circumstances she cannot control (Gammeltoft 2016). On the other hand, silences can be used strategically to draw out another and deepen engagement, as in psychotherapy or classroom settings (Carr and Smith 2014; Walsh and Li 2013). In this chapter, I join others who have sought to complicate our negative notions of silence through close ethnographic observation of communicative practices in daily life. Kidron (2009), for example, points out that our theoretical models assume silence to be pathological—a response to trauma that ensures the further transmission of trauma within families. But she says that for the children of Holocaust survivors in her study, absences, unspoken memories, and tangible mementos of the Holocaust were simply folded into everyday life and could even be part of how children experienced intimacy with their parents. Kidron argues that such silences are “nonpathological” and represent active “memory work” in their own right. In Vietnamese families, Shohet (2021) describes how silences and narrative practices emphasizing uncertainty, contingency, and sideshadowed alternatives are components of an ethic of self-sacrificial care for others. They are part of “the interactional work involved in sustaining . . . the so-called ordinary” in spite of forces that threaten to pull families apart (Shohet 2021, 16). My own publications have explored similar forms of careful intersubjective labor within families (Conrad 2020) and in public spaces (Conrad 2019) as Bosnians cultivate “normal” lives in dysfunctional circumstances.

CIVIL DISCOURSE Among the ordinary people, I came to know over five years of residence in Sarajevo between 2002 and 2012, it wasn’t that truth-telling did not occur or was not meaningful. It wasn’t that people suppressed or did not share stories of war and suffering, or that a Serb and a Bosniak or a Croat couldn’t talk about their experiences or imagine each other’s perspectives through dialogue. And it certainly wasn’t the case that Bosnians were conflict-avoidant or didn’t hold each other accountable. But over time, I began to develop a sense of a different structure of relationship altogether—a different set of relations between voice and silence, between transparency and concealment, between identity and language and accountability—that characterized daily life. As an outsider, at first, it was only the most direct refusals that I noticed: a young woman responding to me with a flash of anger, saying, “I don’t answer questions about faith and ethnicity. Who I am and what I am is well known to me, but it’s nobody else’s business!” Then gradually it was the subtler forms of everyday negotiation through which people kept themselves from being

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pinned down: the way that Amra brought baked goods to her coworkers to celebrate Muslim and Catholic and Orthodox holidays; the way that Dalibor called himself Dado because the nickname evaded ethnic categorization and didn’t automatically out him as a Serb in majority-Bosniak Sarajevo (Conrad 2020). I started to see significance in the way Milka established common ground with an elderly Catholic neighbor who stopped by for a visit, reminiscing at length about Christian relatives who were no longer alive or living in Sarajevo, while never once mentioning her Bosniak husband. I began to notice subtle acts of (mis)interpretation, such as how Refik’s potentially volatile remark about the authenticity of a particular Bosnian dish was taken up as banal cooking advice by his wife and daughter-in-law, who skillfully steered the conversation away from dangerous ground at a family gathering (Conrad 2019). It often wasn’t voice or clarity that people sought; rather, they seemed to prioritize containment, avoidance, and camouflage. These sorts of communicative practices have been noted by others working in deeply divided societies. Mac Ginty describes them as practices of “everyday peace,” tactics that people employ to navigate both inter- and intra-group encounters, minimizing risk and sustaining an atmosphere of ordinary life (Mac Ginty 2014). These tactics often draw on norms of politeness that involve “studied non-observance,” concealing an intense attunement to the slightest signs of affiliation and intention in others that might signal impending danger (Mac Ginty 2014, 556). Smyth and McKnight, for example, develop Goffman’s concept of “civil inattention” to understand the ways women with small children move around inner-city Belfast (Smyth and McKnight 2013). According to Goffman’s formulation, civil inattention is a common courtesy offered between strangers in modern urban societies: “[O]ne gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present . . . while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention so as to express that [the other] does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design” (Goffman 1963, 84). In sectarian Belfast, civil inattention becomes a precondition for movement through or to segregated neighborhoods, as women work to project indifference and to avoid calling attention to themselves. Smyth and McKnight describe the labor that goes into this—for instance, the care women take to avoid saying their children’s names out loud in a shop, or to arrange a taxi from a mixed interface area rather than one that would betray the neighborhood they come from (Smyth and McKnight 2013, 312). In a Balkan context, Neofotistos also writes about the careful “performances of civility” between ethnic Macedonian and Albanian neighbors in the Republic of Macedonia during a period of political instability. In one vignette from her ethnography, an Albanian woman absorbed in watching the news on TV receives a visit from a neighbor and friend who is Macedonian. Exclaiming, “Newscasts, newscasts! My head will explode!” the hostess quickly changes the channel as if uninterested and even exasperated by the coverage (Neofotistos 2012, 79). Her ostentatious display reassures the visitor that she will not be called on to explicitly state or defend her own thoughts on recent events, which might open up the possibility of disagreement or worse. Neofotistos portrays a deliberate and sustained cultivation of open-ended ambiguity—of never quite pinning things down— that depends on the active engagement of both parties. The hostess may change her TV channel; her guest must likewise turn a blind eye to the particular channel that was on when she walked in. Both of them tacitly agree to carry on their relationship without clarifying their privately held views. Neofotistos also observed an edgier set of performances in which Macedonian men came perilously close to confrontation with Albanian acquaintances. As Albanian

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paramilitaries threatened armed rebellion against the Macedonian state, Macedonian men would approach Albanian men in public spaces, loudly demanding their opinions on political events. But when the Albanian professed his ignorance or disdain for political matters, the Macedonian would abruptly reframe his own words as a joke, shifting to a smiling display of camaraderie. “[T]he true nature of these exchanges could not be discerned with certainty,” Neofotistos observes: “Were they amicable, hostile, defensive, offensive, or a combination thereof?” (Neofotistos 2012, 90). The joking framework allowed the men to raise the possibility of active confrontation without committing themselves to the serious consequences of such a confrontation (Briggs 1994, 169). Its very ambiguity also “left ample room for the avoidance of interpersonal friction and the safeguarding of the integrity of social bonds” (Neofotistos 2012, 83). To become aware of these tactics is to recognize an enormous tension between people’s desire for knowledge and control, on the one hand, and their desire to preserve harmony, on the other. People may want certainty about what is going on, but they often show a capacity to draw back from it—to tolerate and even build up unresolved tension in social situations. Stories of the war in Bosnia often involve a sense that it was exactly this capacity to sustain tension that collapsed as ambiguity came to an end.

TRUTH WITHOUT JUSTICE: VERA AND HER BROTHER Vera spent the entire 1991–1995 war in Sarajevo, in Mojmilo, a neighborhood adjacent to the front lines along the north-east part of the city, not far from the airport. It was a dangerous neighborhood, under heavy shelling. She lives in the same apartment to this day but describes what it was like during the war: unheated, the windows shattered and covered with UNHCR tarps. “I thought I would never fall asleep again,” she says, explaining how she would lie with her two adolescent children in the dark hallway as shells exploded nearby, knowing that there was only one floor above their heads, between them and the bombs. Her husband served in the Bosnian army and was often away. Vera fought a different battle, “to kill time and to stave off fear,” a constant struggle to keep up her children’s spirits, to remind them all of the good times. She whispered prayers, sang all the songs she knew, and told stories. She hoarded supplies and scrambled to prepare meals out of scanty and tasteless humanitarian aid packets. She waited anxiously for news of family members caught on the other side of military boundaries. Later, her husband was badly wounded and spent months in the hospital; Vera walked miles back and forth to see him and help care for him. She laughs about how she was as thin as a rake. With the passing of time and the accumulation of new events, she says, the war fades in her memory much like the terrible pain of giving birth. “Now you can practically tell stories about it with a comical twist,” she says, even if it was far from comical as it unfolded. Out of all these dreadful events, Vera picks out her confrontation with her brother, and her mother’s response, as one of the most difficult things that ever happened in her life—and one that she is still unable to make light of. She tells me the story twice, once in the cafe where we first sat down together, and then a couple of weeks later at her kitchen table. Vera sets the stage by telling me how her brother, Zoran, stopped by with his wife and children sometime in early 1994 while her husband was away at the front. Her story begins on a mundane note, with the observation that the gas was (for once) turned on and she was cooking a pot of beans. During the war, services such as gas, water, and electricity were only intermittently available in Sarajevo. Stories of the siege often indicate intense preoccupation with these basic necessities, describing people’s attempts to predict when

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utilities might come on, or be alert to their presence so as to take advantage of them even in the middle of the night (cf. Maček 2009). Here, Vera remembers that the gas was on and she could cook beans and prepare coffee for her guests. She explains to them that she expects the gas to be turned off again soon; her husband told her the Bosnian army is preparing an offensive action and he is hopeful that they will be able to break the siege. They will turn the gas off on purpose to prevent explosions. But rather than sharing her hope for an end to the siege, Vera’s brother shocks her by saying that the Bosnian army is too weak to do anything against the Serb army: V:

Kaže on, He says, Ko:ja deblokada? What do you mean, break the siege? ((sneering voice)) Ma srpska vojska je, kaže, broj tri u Evropi The Serb army is, he says, number three in Europe ((hitting the table)) Until this moment, Vera has obviously assumed that she and her brother have a common perception of unfolding events, a common understanding of right and wrong. The Serb army is the aggressor, while the Bosnian army valiantly fights to protect innocent civilians and the ideal of a multiethnic Yugoslav society. Yet Vera suddenly sees that her brother is not worried about the strength of the Serbs, but proud of it. As she portrays his words, she adopts a sneering tone, lifting her lip and impersonating his contemptuous dismissal of the Bosnian defense forces. She hits the table twice with her fists as she recalls him saying “the Serb army is number three in Europe!” As he speaks, Zoran reveals a truth about himself that Vera had never dreamed of. Vera is horrified to think that her husband might come home and hear him talking like this. Aghast, she seeks further clarification: V:

a ja kažem, rekoh (.) Zorane kakva ti je to priča? and I say, I said (.) Zoran, what kind of talk is this? Kaže, što? kaže, He says, so what? he says, Ja se osjećam kao srbin. I feel like a Serb. ((hitting chest twice)) Vera’s vivid retelling dramatizes her brother’s performance of chest-beating masculinity and her own flabbergasted, chaotic, high-pitched reaction. The interaction escalates quickly, as Zoran uses the word balija (an offensive word for Bosniaks) to describe the Bosnian army, and Vera tells him to go ahead and be a četnik (a term referring to Serb paramilitary units that is loaded with moral judgment). There is no common ground. Zoran cannot say that the Serb army is powerful without aligning himself with Serb interests, and then, in Vera’s mind at least, with četnik brutality and ultranationalism. Vera cannot hear her brother’s comments about the Bosnian army without feeling that she is personally implicated, that Zoran is insulting her husband and herself. Perhaps they start the encounter as brother and sister, but they finish it as enemies with battle positions drawn. The interaction comes to an abrupt end as Zoran and his family leave her house. Vera specifies that she did not offer them any coffee, after all, and this rupture in the order of domestic civility seems symbolic of the complete rupture that she says developed in their relationship after this time. “Everything totally melted down after that,” she says,

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explaining how her umbrage was so deep that even years later, when her brother was in the hospital dying of cancer, she refused to go visit him. Vera’s encounter with her brother illustrates a common statement about the war, which is that it revealed the truth about many people, ripping off masks to show their real faces. Civility and social etiquette were stripped away, uncovering ugly, once-and-for-all truths about people—even (or especially) people one trusted and loved. The blatant violence of the conflict profoundly changed the ways ordinary people thought of themselves and their neighbors, bringing ethno-national identity into the foreground of their awareness. Sorabji (1995) emphasizes the significance of personalized violence carried out by neighbors and colleagues and friends to obliterate positive associations of life together and replace them with the sense that safety is possible only among one’s own people. Less obviously dramatic, but surely even more common, were unnerving glimpses behind the scenes, the sudden exposure of others’ “true” hostilities and anxieties, such as Vera describes here. I think of my friend Aida telling me how much it bothered her when her friends at school in Sarajevo began to say that she “looked like a Croat,” or Tanja recalling visitors who turned to her when her father went to the bathroom and whispered, “Do you think he knows something?” as if he, nominally a Serb, might have insider knowledge of what the Serb army was planning to do to the citizens of Sarajevo. I think of Svetlana’s indignant rage when she told me how neighbors suggested she could keep her job and stay in Serb-held Pale if only she would let her Muslim husband and young son be deported without her. In the aftermath of the war, it is difficult to escape the truth that aggression and naked self-interest might lie concealed behind facades of civility. If Vera’s brother suddenly reveals a truth about himself, there is also a clarity about the way Vera responds to this truth: she expels her brother and his wife and children from her house. She draws a very clear line between her family and his, between herself and him. She calls herself a balija and him a četnik, taking away any remaining ambiguity that might remain when he says that he feels like a Serb. Serbs can be good or bad, allies or enemies; in fact, their father is a Serb—though one who expresses grief over the war and shame over the way his identity implicates him in it. Četniks, on the other hand, are unequivocally bad and unequivocally enemies to Vera and her family, threatening their lives at that very moment. Furthermore, Vera does not relent. Despite the end of the war and the cessation of open hostilities between Serbs and other Bosnians, despite changes in circumstances such that her brother falls into the position of a weak, helpless person dying in the hospital, she holds the line. It might be possible to say that Vera insists on the justice of her response and that she achieves a limited type of justice by repudiating him. Yet it would be equally reasonable to argue that Vera does not achieve justice at all, and indeed that she sees no possibility of achieving a just outcome in her relationship with her brother. Her brother went his way, and she went hers. She has no brother. This latter possibility that there is no path to justice here—so that Vera’s brother is as fully lost to her in 1994 as he is after he is dead—reflects the bleakest assessments of the larger political-economic situation in Bosnia today. Yes, armed conflict ended here in the last months of 1995, but it is common to hear people say that war continues, without bullets, in the political domain. The Dayton Peace Agreement divided power among ethnically defined leaders, cemented their control over “ethnically cleansed” territories, and created perhaps the most convoluted governmental system in the world. Despite judicial rulings that it violates the basic human rights of Bosnian citizens, “Dayton” remains the country’s constitution to this day. It provides for a tripartite Presidency, with one member elected by Bosnian Serbs, one by Bosnian Croats, and the third by Bosniaks.

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It divides the country into two territorial entities of roughly equal size: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has mostly Bosniak and Croat inhabitants, and Republika Srpska,4 whose population is almost entirely Serb. Individual human beings are left to fit themselves, sometimes quite awkwardly, into rigid categories and jurisdictions that structure their daily movements and ultimately, their affective experiences (Jansen 2013, Markowitz 2007, Hromadžic 2015). As Hromadžić writes in a 2020 blog,5 even “the acceptable frameworks for thinking about Bosnia,” the means of understanding reality and making sense of events, “have been hijacked by ethnicity and nationalism,” leaving other forms of social cohesion underexplored and often invisible in scholarship and daily life alike. Given this degree of polarization, it seems almost inevitable that efforts to authorize truth—for instance, by arriving at accurate statistics on numbers of deaths or by establishing accountability in criminal trials—often fail to create any common ground and instead only seem to reinforce differences, becoming bones of contention or highlighting competing claims to victimhood (cf. Helms 2013). In opinion surveys, acceptance of information revealed by truth-finding initiatives such as the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or the Research and Documentation Center (RDC) in Sarajevo depends substantially on respondents’ ethnic affiliation (Kostić 2012). Facts inconvenient to a certain communal narrative rarely seem to challenge the existing narrative or lead to justice. Possibilities for upholding the common interests of all Bosnian citizens are also undermined by economic processes that transfer wealth to powerful elites. The “transition” imposed by the international community starting in the 1990s has emphasized movement not only away from war, but also from socialism into a neoliberal capitalist economy. The privatization of industries and other collectively owned properties has been a violent process that began in the midst of the war itself with the capture of major public industries and state infrastructure by nationalist forces. It continued in the aftermath, as restructuring and donor aid encouraged private wealth creation and foreign investment, while austerity measures demanded the destruction of social safety nets (Pugh 2004; Donais 2002; Divjak and Pugh 2008; Mujanović 2018). Corruption and clientelism are endemic at every level of government, protected behind the “faux social contract” of nationalism (Ziabari and Mujanović 2019). When I completed fieldwork in 2011–2012, I heard dark assessments of the possibilities for life in Bosnia: “Either we become a mafia state, totally, or we become slaves of the mafia and shut up and bear it, or we get out of here, if we can,” one woman told me. Shortly afterward, in 2013 and 2014, widespread protests expressed popular disillusionment with the political and economic situation, demanding real reforms, and, for the first time, invoking ideals of social justice as protesters drew attention to the common needs of all Bosnians (Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). Nevertheless, even this hopeful “Bosnian Spring” seemed to dissolve without effecting obvious change, leaving people continuing to wait with a sense that the past matters more than their present needs, let alone their dreams for the future.

THE HARDEST THING: VERA AND HER MOTHER Part of Vera’s righteous anger toward her brother comes, no doubt, from the way his almost casual declaration of allegiance to the Serbs leads into a further betrayal by Vera’s mother. The story of Vera and her brother has a clear narrative arc and a stark conclusion, yet Zoran’s sudden departure from Vera’s house is not the climax of her story. Indeed, no

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sooner have her brother and his wife gone out the door than Vera rushes to her telephone, calling her mother to share what happened. “You won’t believe it,” she exclaims, and tells her mother how Zoran declared he was a hardcore Serb, called Izet a balija in a balija army, and claimed that the Serbs were going to beat the balijas. She expects her mother to share her shock. But her mother only compounds the situation: V:

Kaže mama, a:::a, pa kaže, Mama says, A:::h, she says, Zar tebi još nije jasno (.) Isn’t it clear to you yet (.) da smo Zoran i ja na jednoj a ti na drugoj strani. (4) that Zoran and I are on one side and you on the other. (4) Vera pauses for several seconds before she goes on: A (.) to je. (.) nešto teže što sam u životu doživjela. So (.) that is. (.) one of the hardest things I ever experienced in my life.  Ja sam rekla, °dobro, dobro, nisam znala.° Stvarno nisam do sad znala. I said °okay, okay, I didn’t know.° I truly didn’t know before now. Until this point in the narrative, Vera has been fired up with indignation, offended by her brother’s behavior and ready to take him to task. Suddenly, the wind goes out of her sails. She is left with nothing to say, nothing to do. “Okay,” she says quietly to her mother, “I truly didn’t know.” She hangs up the phone and then is overcome by physical sensations—trembling, tingling in her hands, a pounding headache. She feels that she is going to faint. The noise of her children playing in the next room overwhelms her. To quiet them, she raps on the door between the rooms, but the force of her blow is such that her hand goes right through the glass pane in the door. The glass shatters. Her children stop, startled and afraid: “What will we tell Daddy?”; her hand bleeds all over the floor. She cannot explain to the children what has happened, but sobs and sobs uncontrollably. Her husband comes home in the midst of this dramatic scene and listens soberly to the tale. “What can you do,” he says. “You have us.” Interestingly, Vera does not confront her mother. She does not react with open anger or stand up for the world she believed in, a world in which she, her mother, and her brother were all on the same side. She also does not turn away from her mother, cutting her out of her life in the way she so neatly cuts her brother out. Instead, Vera goes on acting as a daughter. She continues to see and call her mother regularly. She refuses to go to her brother’s bedside when he dies of cancer, but she drives her mother to the cemetery for the anniversary of Zoran’s death, even though her mother once again wounds her by crying for the loss of her “one and only child.” Vera’s tenacity in going on being her mother’s daughter has always stood out to me. How does she manage it? One thing she seems to do is to concentrate her feelings of hurt and hatred on her brother, perhaps displacing them away from her mother. She also accomplishes it, I think, by introducing a different sort of silence into the midst of her relationship with her mother. This is not a total silence but a careful, self-protective silence, a silence that consists in not sharing, not seeing, not asking questions or demanding much of anything from her mother. In her work on illness and poverty in Delhi, Das depicts the moral imperative of “infinite responsibility” that can be felt within families, and the ways that people come up against—and come to terms with—their own human limits in

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meeting such responsibilities (Das 2015). In this case, it seems that Vera is on the other side of that equation: she is trying to find ways of curtailing her own infinite desire for the love and care of her mother, or her deep conviction that a mother has an infinite responsibility to her children. As she grapples with the limits of what her mother is able to offer her, and the extent of the hurt she experienced from her, Vera has made deliberate decisions about how to act. This includes a sort of strategic deafness and blindness to certain things her mom does and says (or fails to do and say), and a choice to abstain from saying things that she could say. I get the feeling that Vera and her mother have reached an uneasy truce; they are sometimes even companionable allies. They gossip pleasantly about Vera’s daughter, who has recently married and struggles with finding her role as daughter-in-law in a new extended family. But Vera says there is still something about the relationship that is not quite right. She describes a day recently when she and her husband Izet drove her mother to the grocery store, took her to lunch, spent time with her, and when they dropped her off, she got out of the car and turned away without a word. V:

Nešto ružno ima. Something ugly is there. Samo i dalje se pravimo da to ne vidimo We just go on pretending that we don’t see it i dalje znam da joj moram and I go on knowing that I have to radi (.) svog (.) mira for (.) my own (.) peace of mind biti na usluzi, pomoći, sve to. be at her service, help her, all of that. Šta je u njenjoj glavi, ne znam. What’s in her head, I don’t know.

Vera suggests that she does not pry into her mother’s thoughts because she suspects she would find ugly, deep-rooted prejudices. She tells me how her mother refers to some of her least favorite neighbors as “that balija,” “that Serb woman,” and so on. “If you didn’t know you might say it was just that she’s old,” Vera says, but that would miss something about the depth of her prejudice, which is not a recent outgrowth of peevish old age but related, somehow, to the events of the war: V:

Naprosto kao da je to čućalo negdje zatvoreno It’s simply as if that was crouching somewhere closed in ((closes hands around imaginary sphere)) I samo je rat to (.) otvorio. and just the war (.) opened it. It bothers Vera, though she seems determined to heap burning coals on her mother’s head by ignoring the ugliness and helping her no matter what. While on the one hand, she appears to have taken the approach of forbearance, meekly accepting her mother’s unjust behavior without protest, Vera talks of justice. I imagine that in her shoes, I might feel resentful of a mother who treated me badly and now, increasingly, makes demands on my care. But Vera inverts this relationship. Positioning herself as a daughter who magnanimously provides care for her mother in old age, she construes herself as a figure with power. Her silence is not that of a young daughter who must put up with a

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domineering, unfair mother, but that of a mature woman who is responsible and respected in her own right, and who cannot be threatened by the actions of her perhaps slightly senile mother. Vera sees a poetic justice in the fact that her mother has now lost her son to cancer, lost touch with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and is forced to turn more and more to her daughter’s family. “Now Mama has us,” Vera says, “as family and as people who help her out and cheer her up and who do everything for her that she needs in her life. That’s us.” She calls this “the finger of fate” and a punishment ordained by God.

SILENCE AND SINCERITY Vera talks with her mother—their relationship is by no means silent—yet it might be thought of as one that is bounded or shadowed by silences, marked by the unspoken awareness of “poisonous knowledge” that must be contained lest it contaminate the dayto-day (Das 2007). As I have said, this is a mode of being together that grew familiar to me during the years that I spent in Bosnia. Careful silences of this sort were often in the background of public encounters, as strangers delicately tried to gauge each other’s identities and dispositions or respond to the inadvertent missteps of others (Conrad 2020). They were part of meetings between neighbors, friends, and relatives. In the midst of a spirited family discussion, for example, I recall one woman breaking off and insisting that we have been sidetracked into arguing about historical facts that none of us can verify. “This doesn’t interest me,” she says to her husband and son, “and don’t you get into it either!” Habits of communicative vigilance are intrinsically ambivalent, resisting final interpretation or evaluation. They allow people to avoid the exposure of affiliations, stances, and feelings that may place them in opposition, keeping up some degree of polite ambiguity and preserving a smooth interaction order (Goffman 1983). In a divided society where people from different groups nevertheless come into contact with one another, a turn to silence or the phatic mode of talk may serve to keep a wary distance from others, yet may also provide space for some type of relationship to take root or keep growing among those who might, indeed, find reasons to distrust or even hate each other if they looked (cf. Coupland 2000, Jaworski 2000). To return to Mac Ginty’s formulation, these are practices of “everyday peace” in a divided society (Mac Ginty 2014). Mac Ginty, writing from the perspective of a political scientist and peacebuilding practitioner, anticipates possible criticisms of everyday peace. Above all, he worries that everyday peace could be perceived as a limited or unfinished form of “negative peace” that “seeks to minimize the impact of conflict through toleration and coexistence, rather than through measures that are directed at the underlying causes of the conflict” (Mac Ginty 2014, 557). The strategies of avoidance and ambiguity cultivated by Bosnians like Vera and her mother allow them to go on about their daily lives as if there is no conflict between them, but they do so by sweeping a host of real concerns under the rug. Everyday practices of looking the other way, talking about the weather, joking, and holding one’s tongue express resignation to things as they are. They do not represent proactive attempts to press forward into “positive peace” by transforming the basis of relationship, addressing grievances, or finding healing, even in the microcosm of the family. Mac Ginty suggests that ceremonial forms of politeness may take precedence over substantive respect or trust-building in everyday peace (Mac Ginty 2014, 558). The practices of everyday peace may make possible shallow, conventional, public-facing relationships or performances of relationship, but they do not challenge people to move

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beyond private, concealed feelings of hatred or deepen the forms of participation in each other’s lives. In a space where dialogue is urgently needed, everyday peace consists of small talk. These critiques, suggesting a deep mistrust of “empty” or “shallow” forms of communication, reflect not just the voice-oriented priorities of peacebuilding and transitional justice practitioners but a pervasive Euro-American ideology that language should be used in ways that are aligned with one’s “true” attitudes and intentions. They rest on a contrast between “sincere,” authentic engagement and “insincere,” ritualized performances of civility, and fit into a broader cultural trend “to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (Seligman et al. 2008: 103, cf. Coupland 2000). Linguistic anthropologists have traced this implicit view of what language is and should be in domains ranging from Protestant missions to therapeutic drug treatment programs and middle-class American family life (Keane 2002; Carr 2010; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2015). In each of these settings, talk that is transparent, sincere, and self-revealing is valued as a critical means for displaying a moral self, improving or transforming the self, and achieving intimacy. Shallow or ambiguous forms of talk, on the other hand, are construed as meaningless, at best; at worst, they “keep people sick” (Carr 2010).6 Ideologies prioritizing sincere congruence between language and inner selves have consequences, of course—and do not necessarily lead to greater intimacy, higher morality, or positive transformation. In her ethnography of a drug treatment program for homeless women, Carr shows how the demand for “honest, open, and willing” speech tends to take away power from court-mandated patients, requiring them to voice feelings of individual responsibility for their difficulties and making it almost impossible for them to critique the institutions in charge of their fate (Carr 2010). Seligman et al. argue that a preoccupation with sincere modes of being represents a reaction against the ambiguities of living in the world or an attempt to pin down final truth, and goes hand in hand with fundamentalism (Seligman et al. 2008). And in a moving ethnographic essay about her mother’s dementia and the ethics of recognition, Taylor (2008) suggests that a strong emphasis on authentic self-revelation as the basis of relationship could contribute to the isolation and “social death” of many people with cognitive limitations who are unable to take part in this sort of reciprocal exchange. Taylor’s essay, portraying a mother-daughter pair who are in many ways quite different from Vera and her mother, stands as a powerful defense of “superficial talk” in a relationship that continues to be intimate. Even as her mother loses track of “the facts” of her life and becomes less and less able to speak coherently, Taylor finds that interactions with her are not desolate or meaningless. Instead, they continue to be pleasurable, caring, and even intimate: Our conversations go nowhere, but it hardly matters what we say, really, or whether we said it before, or whether it is accurate or interesting or even comprehensible. The exchange itself is the point. Mom and I are playing catch with expressions, including touches, smiles, and gestures as well as words, lobbing them back and forth to each other in slow easy underhand arcs. That she drops the ball more and more often doesn’t stop the game from being enjoyable. It is a way of being together. (Taylor 2008, 327) Taylor has learned not to quiz or correct her mother in an endlessly frustrating project of bringing her back to “the truth,” but engages with her in easy, companionable ways.

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Interacting with a communication partner whose ability to produce meaningful content is limited, Taylor recognizes that language is not simply a conduit for a message, but a game-like, rule-governed form of social organization in which one person’s turn invites and shapes the other person’s, creating momentum for continued interaction: When I make a joke, she laughs. When I tell some small story about something that happened, she murmurs sympathetically. When I express an opinion, she agrees. When we sit together, she attends to my presence, reaches out to me, pats my hand. (Taylor 2008, 328) Through participation in these ritualized forms of communication, Taylor and her mother continue to be drawn into relationship—not the relationship it used to be, and surely not the mother-daughter relationship Taylor might wish for, but one that remains meaningful and rewarding, an expression of care. Vera’s reflections on her relationship with her mother, similarly, remind me that human sociality may not always be based on truth, self-disclosure, or alignment between two people’s inner worlds. Indeed, an insistence on voicing “the facts” might call into question a relationship that Vera finds crucial to her sense of herself as an ethical, responsible being. Yet the ritualized frameworks of kinship and polite civility offer a space within which their connection can go on, bounded by careful silences but not breaking down entirely. What I am suggesting in this essay is not that sincere talk or truth-telling should be replaced by silences, performances of civility, and polite small talk—of course not!—but that people in post-war settings, like people anywhere, move through a world in which “the right thing to do” is often genuinely difficult if not impossible to discern. It is a world in which people long for justice, but often see no possibility of achieving anything like it. Writing of Bosnia’s often discouraging contemporary reality, Jansen points out that “to many people who lived through the war in [Bosnia and Herzegovina], justice would be a world, a life, a history, in which the war had not happened” (Jansen 2013, 234). In a world where the war did happen, Vera’s experiences with her mother and her brother may not serve as a recipe for how to act justly, but they point to the dilemmas of truth-telling that face all of us as we strive to sustain relationships and a sense of our own integrity when justice remains out of our control.

NOTES 1. My fieldwork in Bosnia took place during 2011 and 2012 but builds on an additional four years of living and working in Sarajevo between 2002 and 2006. I used a “person-centered” approach (Hollan 2001), exploring people’s subjective experiences and life-worlds through extended open-ended interviews and by spending time with them repeatedly in daily activities. Participants consented to audio recording and (less often) to video recording of interviews, gatherings, or routines. Each was given a pseudonym. While I introduced broad themes for our interviews (e.g., early family experiences, love, “mixing,” the war, or faith), I sought to follow each interlocutor’s own train of thoughts and associations wherever they went, looking not for “objective truth” but for the ways they created connections and made meaning of their own experiences. In most cases, I worked with multiple members of the same family unit to gain a complex, overlapping sense of individuals and their relationships. Vera deflected my efforts to meet with her closest family members, which gave her sole control over her own narrative and seemed to make possible a particularly reflective, confiding series of encounters.

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2. Throughout this chapter, I move between quotes embedded in the flow of text and detailed transcriptions of audio or video recordings. In this paragraph, I am quoting the substance of what Vera said based on my field notes, since I did not record this early conversation. At other points, I have presented my English translation of Vera’s words without giving readers access to the full transcript in Bosnian simply in order to maximize efficiency or clarity. Full transcriptions of her words in Bosnian, together with an English gloss, mark moments of analytic urgency, when I want the reader to understand not only what she said but how it emerged—how she delivered the words, voiced other people, or struggled to articulate something crucial; how she used gestures; or how the interaction unfolded in time. When presenting transcripts, I follow Conversation Analysis conventions for the representation of talk in social interaction, using ordinary punctuation symbols to represent prosodic features, dysfluencies, and speaking “errors” (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). .

A period indicates falling intonation, not necessarily the end of a sentence.

?

A question mark indicates rising intonation, not necessarily a question.

,

A comma indicates slightly rising, “continuing” intonation.

::: Colons indicate elongation of the preceding sound, roughly proportional to the number of colons. word Underlining indicates a part of an utterance that is stressed in some way. (( )) Text appearing within double parentheses is a description of behavior, gesture, gaze, or other aspects of the utterance difficult to reproduce in the transcript. (.) A dot in parentheses indicates a short pause, hearable but not necessarily measurable. 3. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs are the “constituent peoples” of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They are each associated with a religious tradition (Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity, respectively) that also evokes historical and current connections to distinct centers of power (e.g., the Ottoman Empire/Islamic world, Western Europe, and the Eastern Orthodox or Russian East). Croats and Serbs have a long history as recognized “ethnic groups,” but the term Bosniak emerged more recently as a way to refer to Bosnian Muslims in an equivalent, “ethnic” sense without regard to a person’s actual religious affiliation. For more on the everyday consolidation of ethnic categories and terminology during and after the war, see Hromadžić (2015); Jansen (2013); Maček (2009); Markowitz (2007). 4. The construction Republika Srpska roughly means Serbian Republic but is not straightforwardly translatable. In the local language(s), as in English, adjectives such as srpska (Serbian) come before the noun. In this rather marked form, however, Republika Srpska echoes the official name of the country next door, Republika Srbija (the Republic of Serbia), emphasizing the separateness of this territory from the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its alignment with Serbia. 5. This is from Azra Hromadžić’s contribution to “Political Action and Generations, Part I, Emergent Conversation 12: A Discussion with Nataša Garić-Humphrey, Andrew Gilbert, Azra Hromadžić, and Larisa Kurtović” posted on the blog of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Blog. It is available online at https://polarjournal​.org​/2020​/12​/29​/ political​-action​-and​-generations​-part​-i​-emergent​-conversation​-11/ 6. Note that, if this is an ideology of language, it is also wrapped up with ideologies elevating active intervention and the need to address problems head on, solving them once and for all. For critiques of this notion, see Sampson (2003) and Jackson (2004).

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Sacks, H., E. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson (1974), “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language, 50 (4): 696–735. Sampson, S. (2003), “From Reconciliation to Coexistence.” Public Culture, 15 (1): 181–6. Schröter, M. (2013), Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Seligman, A. B., R. P. Weller, M. J. Puett, and B. Simon (2008), Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, New York: Oxford University Press. Shohet, M. (2021), Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam, Oakland: University of California Press. Simić, O., ed. (2020), An Introduction to Transitional Justice, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Smyth, L., and M. McKnight (2013), “Maternal Situations: Sectarianism and Civility in a Divided City.” The Sociological Review, 61: 304–22. Sorabji, C. (1995), “A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” In R. A. Hinde and H. E. Watson (eds.), War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence, 80–98, London: Tauris Academic Studies. Staub, E., L. A. Pearlman, A. Gubin, and A. Hagengimana (2005), “Healing, Reconciliation, Forgiving and the Prevention of Violence After Genocide or Mass Killing: An Intervention and its Experimental Evaluation in Rwanda.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24 (3): 297–334. Subotić, J. (2016), “Political Memory as an Obstacle to Justice in Serbia, Croatia, and BosniaHerzegovina.” In M. Fischer and O. Simić (eds.), Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans, 121–38, New York: Routledge. Tannen, D., and M. S. Troike, eds. (1985), Perspectives on Silence, Norwood: Ablex. Taylor, J. (2008), “On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 22 (4): 313–35. Villa-Vicencio, C. (2006), “The Politics of Reconciliation.” In Tristan Anne Borer (ed.), Telling the Truths: Truth Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies, 59–81, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Walsh, P., and L. Li (2013), “Conversation as Space for Learning.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 23, 247–266. Weller, R. P. (2017), “Salvaging Silence: Exile, Death and the Anthropology of the Unknowable.” Anthropology of This Century, 19. Available online: aotcp​​ress.​​com​/a​​rticl​​es​/sa​​ lvagi​​ng​-s​i​​lence​/. Zembylas, M. (2007), “The Affective Politics of Hatred: Implications for Education.” Intercultural Education, 18 (3): 177–92. Ziabari, K., and J. Mujanović (2019), “Nationalism in the Balkans Predates Brexit and Trump.” Fair Observer, January 30. Available online: https://www​.fairobserver​.com​/region​/europe​ /balkans​-bosnia​-herzegovina​-serbia​-croatia​-balkan​-states​-european​-news​-today​-23902/ (accessed September 5, 2022).

Chapter 10

Arabic and the Discursive Contours of IslamoLinguistic-Phobia in Spain and France INMACULADA M. GARCÍA-SÁNCHEZ AND CHANTAL TETREAULT

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines contemporary discursive and indexical shifts of Islamophobic rhetoric in continental Europe, particularly in Spain and France. We build on a strong body of scholarship that, over the last two decades, has thoroughly documented the ideological underpinnings of Islamophobic mistrust of Muslims in Europe. These misrepresentations of Muslims stem, on the one hand, from historical attribution of “otherness” to Islamic culture as critical to the construction of the modern notion of Western European Civilization (e.g., Asad 2000, 2003; Said 1978; Werbner 2002) and, on the other hand, from the more recent security discourse of the so-called war on terror that links Muslim communities with religious fanaticism and terrorism (e.g., Bowen 2009; Rogozen-Soltar 2012; Silverstein 2004; Werbner 2005). Islamophobia, however, like other forms of discursive racism, is constantly adapting and morphing (cf. Hill 2008). We bring together social justice approaches to linguistic diversity in liberal democracies undergoing rapid change due to migration and globalization (Piller 2016) with our long-term ethnographic research and involvement with North African immigrant communities in France (Tetreault 2015) and Spain (García-Sánchez 2014) to analyze recent policy and political debates in these countries and to trace new and shifting indexical and discursive contours of Islamophobia. In particular, we investigate how current discourses have evolved from a heightened focus on headscarves (e.g., Abu-Lughod 2013; Ramírez 2010; Taha 2010) and other traditional/pious garb as semiotic markers of “Islamic radicalism” and of the supposed “gender oppression” in Muslim communities to focusing on educational discourses and policies surrounding the children of Muslim immigrants, particularly at the intersection of language and religion. In a comparative fashion, we examine the conflation of the teaching/learning of Arabic with the teaching/ learning of Islam in French and Spanish public schools, and how this conflation is, in turn,

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used as an index of radicalization that organizes a renewed Islamophobic rhetoric of fear, exclusion, and hostility. We refer to this as “Islamo-linguistic-phobia.” Before proceeding, we want to be clear about what we are arguing: we are not saying that the tropes of gender oppression and Islam’s incompatibility with secular, democratic values—two of the most important pillars of contemporary Islamophobic discourse in Europe—are no longer relevant. These two sociocultural logics are still very productive in public discourse about immigration and Islam in Europe, as they are part of the ideological and historically sedimented logics of the West colonial project to construct Arab inferiority (Asad 2000; Said 1978). Additionally, in both Spain (García-Sánchez 2020) and France (Fernando 2014) the charges of gender oppression against Muslim immigrants have greatly facilitated the discursive and political investments in imagining and producing a twenty-first-century modern national identity predicated on secularism and (purported) gender equality as key elements. We are not saying either that Islamo-linguistic-phobia, or the conflation of language (Arabic) and religion (Islam) as an organizing principle of suspicion and hostility, is new, as even a cursory search of attacks for speaking Arabic (or any other code that can be metonymically associated with it) will show. In both national contexts, however, earlier controversies about headscarves seem to have peaked1 and, therefore, can be deployed to more limited effect. However, it is not just that the headscarf issue—and the gender equality issues indexed by these discourses— is not as heightened currently, but also that when controversies about pious garb inevitably sometimes still flare up, the ideological work that they support seems to have shifted: these moments are strategically used as a discursive put down rather than structural exclusion2 (Tetreault 2021). What we are claiming is that dimensions of Islamophobic discourse that a few years ago were more marginal, such as those at the intersection of language and education, have become more central to how Muslim exclusion is being structured in western Europe.

BRIEF NOTES ABOUT THE COMPARATIVE APPROACH AND SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH While we acknowledge the salient differences in our research sites that can impinge more directly on the (re)production and circulation of Islamophobic discourse in the two different national contexts—chiefly among them, the different histories of migration in Spain and France, quantitative and qualitative differences in colonial involvement in Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, different judicial frameworks for the display of religious symbols in institutional spaces, and the long-standing historical maurophobia in Spain (e.g., Martín-Corrales 2004)—there is also a strong convergence of shared geopolitical, thematic, and discursive concerns that make a comparative approach particularly productive. This convergence is particularly significant in the face of the increasingly belligerent nativist, nationalist, and racist discourses that have swept the Continent in the last decade (Dominguez et al. 2017). The discourses associated with these movements have made the “weaponization of language” (Pascale 2019) one of the most important tools of far-right authoritarian political movements to suppress and deny the humanity of Muslims of immigrant background in Europe, especially after the socalled Syrian refugee crisis of 2015. The discursive manufacturing of Muslim migrants and refugees as perceived threats that ensued, intensified Islamophobia not only in European

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countries with a substantial Muslim minority, such as Spain and France, but also even in the absence of a significant Muslim minority, as in Poland (Buchowski 2017). This cross-continental politically calculated fearmongering has given rise to renewed modalities of Islamophobic discourse that are particularly adept at blending local concerns with supranational logics. Against this backdrop, we argue that comparative approaches are not only productive (Beaman 2020), but also becoming increasingly necessary given the current supranational social media environments that allows for the widespread circulation of racist discourses (like Islamophobia) and the close collaboration of those who espouse these views across national borders,3 and given how successful these groups have been in making this kind of language and discourse part of mainstream political discussion and public discourse. These two distinct but related national case studies allow us to theorize more holistically the imbricated links among linguistic racism, religious discrimination, educational justice for youth from Muslim immigrant backgrounds, ideologies of neoliberal globalization, and the re-birth of the far right in continental Europe. I (Chantal) began to conduct online research dealing with Arabic language instruction in France—my first foray into sustained online research—initially out of necessity. After receiving a Fulbright award in 2020, Covid travel restrictions delayed in-person research until spring of 2022. My past research with Arab-Muslim French youth focused exclusively on naturalistic audio recordings and ethnographic observations of face-to-face communication, primarily among teenaged peers. Prior to Covid, my first formulations of this new project included a “linguistic landscapes” (LL) approach to track the public presence of Arabic in France, which was a successful approach taken elsewhere (c.f. C. Suleiman 2017). However, I began to be interested in the ways that online “landscapes” are notably absent from this (LL) approach, even though they increasingly occupy our time and capacity for social interaction. In a sense, I began to think of the online “landscape” as a missing piece of the story that a linguistic landscape approach might be able to tell about Arabic in France. Furthermore, due to the increasing politicization of Arabic language instruction in France emanating from politicians in both French conservative and liberal traditions, I felt that engaging with public discourse regarding Arabic required an emphasis on online communication, particularly in social media as, increasingly, it has become the purview French politicians, as it has also become in American politics. Although my initial goal was to generally track online public discourses about Arabic language instruction in France, the posts that I found were overwhelmingly conservative and anti-Muslim, in line with Inma’s findings in the Spanish online landscape.

DISCURSIVE BAD FAITH: OLD & NEW ISLAMOPHOBIAS & THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE FAR RIGHT IN SPAIN In Spain, I (García-Sánchez) examine the shifting discourse of Islamophobia as tied to the rise of the new far right party Vox from 2014 to 2020. The semiotics of this signifier is itself ideologically saturated with far right populism. Latin for “voice,” it is a direct index of the expression “Vox Populi” which is a widely understood Latin aphorism in Spain, referring to the “Voice of the People.” In addition, Latin still carries heavy indexical weight, as ideologically associated with traditional education and with Catholicism. To contextualize the analysis, I begin with a brief timeline of the rise of Vox.

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Founded in December 2013 by former regional politicians of the conservative Partido Popular (People’s Party—PP), Vox did not gain real momentum until 2017 coinciding with the broader rise of far-right nationalist and populist parties in Europe mentioned above. Its first parliamentary breakthrough, however, came in the Andalusian regional elections in Fall of 2018, where it went from zero members of parliament (henceforth MPs4) to thirteen, coinciding with a surge in undocumented arrivals on southern Spanish coasts after Italy closed its borders.5 Later that spring, in April, Vox had another breakthrough, going from zero to twenty-four MPs in the national parliament. When these elections were repeated six months later in November 2019, due to a failure in achieving a stable governing coalition, Vox almost doubled its representation to fifty-two MPs. Vox has continued its electoral success becoming key partners in governing coalitions after regional elections in Madrid (2021) and Castile (2022), barely missing becoming part of the national government in the contested July 2023 elections. While the reasons for the rise of Vox are multiple and complex, they have put an end to the notion of the “Spanish exception”—referring to the fact that Spain did not have a far-right party and that levels of anti-immigrant sentiment were fairly low as compared to other European countries—much-touted in social science research until relatively recently (Larson 2016). In this analysis, I focus on the kind of discourse and language Vox has used in its rise. Using a combination of ethnography and discourse analysis of new media (Thurlow and Mroczek 2011; Wortham and Reyes 2020), I have examined two kinds of data: (1) Vox’s political discourse itself, in the form of live speeches or newspaper opinion pieces, whose principals and animators (using Goffman’s participant roles, 1981) can be directly traced back to Vox’s political leadership, particularly (though not exclusively) those of its president, Santiago Abascal.

(2) A corpus of short videos (thirty-nine) and memes (sixteen) about immigration, particularly, Muslim immigration, circulated via the platform WhatsApp by a group of retired male friends living in the region of Andalusia, collected from fall 2018 through Fall 2019. I use this sample of men because, according to data from the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), 67 percent of Vox voters are male; similarly, I focus on Andalusia because this is where Vox had its first political breakthrough.

Unlike the political speeches mentioned above, these multimodal new media texts/artifacts cannot be traced directly back to Vox’s political leadership. In fact, given that they circulate anonymously via thousands of media users, it often can be difficult to ascertain who the principal or the animator is, much less the actual author. However, among these multimodal artifacts there often are important intertextual similarities in form and content, as well as ideologies sustaining discursive structures, that can be traceable directly to Vox rhetoric. Given the methodological advantages of exploring intertextual connections across technologies and platforms (Jones, Schieffelin and Smith 2011), I also examine these two kinds of data to illuminate how these intertextual connections inform the circulation of hate speech.

An Anatomy of Hate Speech The ideological platform and discursive tenets of Vox political rhetoric can be organized around what they perceive are three major threats, perhaps most clearly stated in the now

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famous “100 proposals” unveiled during a Fall 2008 rally at Vistalegre Palace in Madrid under the slogan “Españoles Primero” (Spaniards First):6

1. The Catalonian Threat: Vox has cultivated and exploited a hardened Spanish nationalism. It has accused the other two conservative parties of not being hardnosed enough with Catalonian separatists. They want Spanish flags flown in all public places, a modification of the Constitution to drastically reduce the power of regional governments or el estado de las autonomías (a state of autonomous regions), and enforcement of a language policy that would give primacy to Spanish language over Catalonian in Catalonian schools.



2. The Feminist and LGBT Threat: Vox is the first party to run an explicitly antifeminist agenda. They want to abolish the Gender Violence Law protecting victims of domestic abuse, ban same-sex marriage, and forbid public hospitals from carrying out abortions or sex changes. Vox leadership and followers have popularized in Spain the hashtag #feminazi (a pejorative combination of feminist and nazi).



3. The Immigrant/Islamic Threat: which I am referring to as primus inter pares (first among equals) because although Vox seems to consider all three threats as dangerous to their vision of the nation, the Immigrant/Islamic threat is the one that, during its rise to parliamentary representation, was made more central to their staged provocations and political propaganda.

Vox built its rise on being an anti-immigration party, attempting to create a niche for themselves among a crowded field of right-wing parties, Partido Popular and the nowdefunct Ciudadanos (Popular Party & Citizens) that over the last twenty-five years had not been particularly anti-immigration, mostly because these other parties understood that it was difficult to mobilize the electorate around anti-immigrant sentiment, which has been relatively weak, hence the “the Spanish exception” mentioned above. A hard anti-immigration stance is discursively at the core of one of Vox’s most successful political slogans to date, the aforementioned, “Españoles Primeros” (Spaniards First). This rhetoric is discursively amplified in some of the memes collected around the time Vox was using and popularizing this slogan for the Andalusian regional elections in Fall 2018, as in the example (Figure 10.1), which stoke the sense of grievance and the sense that the needs and rights of Spanish people are being subordinated to those of immigrants. The meme shows a fabricated (for anyone who knows how social services work in Spain) leaflet announcing free training and unemployment benefits for immigrants only, staged as if someone has unintentionally left it on a photocopy machine. In clear intertextual parallelism to Vox’s slogan of “Spaniards First,” the text of the meme starts by saying: Immigrants first and fuck Spaniards [literally translated: “Spaniards have to take it in the asshole”]. This is the way the Andalusian Government treats Andalusian citizens; it gifts training courses to immigrants and it sends us to the unemployment line.7 That Vox’s voters understand the anti-immigration core of these messages is suggested by Vox’s rising hegemony in those Spanish towns and municipalities with the highest percentages of immigrants (especially in those with more than 30 percent), particularly of immigrants that are readily identified as Muslims. For example, in the southcentral Spanish town where I have been doing my research since the mid-2000s and where the

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FIGURE 10.1:  Immigrants First.

Moroccan immigrant population has been well over 40 percent in the last decade, Vox became the party with the highest percentage of votes (33.5 percent of the total vote) in the November 2019 elections. Indeed, one of the most noted characteristics of Vox’s cultivation of anti-immigrant sentiment has been its ready and easy slippage into anti-Islamic sentiment. Vox realized early on that in order to outflank a slew of other conservative parties, in a country where general anti-immigrant sentiment had not delivered all that much politically, it needed to link anti-immigration sentiment with Islamophobia, thus deepening what has been called in Europe the “islamization of immigration” (Allievi 2005; Mijares and Ramírez 2008). Not surprisingly, Vox considers human rights groups that defend the rights of migrants/refugees and rescue ships that operate in the Mediterranean, such as Open Arms, the worst cómplices (accomplices) in what they call the invasión Islamista en España (Islamist invasion in Spain). In addition, it is easy to find many examples of both

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political speeches8 and interviews given to the press,9 in which Vox has promoted overtly the idea that immigration should be regulated according to both economic and “cultural” issues of the receiving country. It is important to note that, as I have discussed in previous work (García-Sánchez 2014), this is not dissimilar from the actual immigration policy that supposedly moderate conservative politicians, like former prime minister José María Aznar (1996–2004), actually carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s. The difference is that these previous governments did it quietly, and the ideological bases were almost never overtly articulated; in fact, by design such articulation was deliberately avoided. Dating back to 2015, barely a year after its founding and before its electoral success could even be seriously predicted, Vox’s political rhetoric is characterized by explicitly and centrally capitalizing on Islamophobia to mobilize voters. This has been documented and duly noted by watchdog groups. For example, the Spanish Plataforma Ciudadana Contra La Islamofobia (Citizens Platform Against Islamophobia) listed for the first time in their 2017 report the increasing Islamophobic stance of political leaders, particularly among the far right, as one of the top problems of the growing Islamophobia in the country. One of the most important findings of my analysis of Vox’s political discourse is not only that it has made Islamophobia front and center, but also that it is shifting the contours of Islamophobic discourse in Spain. If, up until very recently, Islamophobic discourse in Spain has consisted of an increasing coalescence of a more local historical maurophobia with broader lines of attack against Muslim communities in Europe based on secularism and gender inequality, particularly the latter (García-Sánchez, 2020; Rogozen-Soltar 2017), Vox has rallied around an issue that, up until recently, has had relatively little presence in contemporary Islamophobic discourse in Spain: what Vox glosses as “the teaching of Islam” in Spanish public schools, and the false claim that the state is bestowing upon Islam a “dangerous privilege.” This was, for example, already the main tenet of an Op-ed titled Caballo de Troya (Trojan Horse) written by Santiago Abascal for the far-right online publication Libertad Digital (Digital Freedom) in early 2015.10 Textual analysis of this piece illustrates some central rhetorical strategies of Vox’s brand of misinformation and of what I call its ”discursive bad faith”: stoking a sense of grievance, appeals to authority through vague reference to always unnamed and probably nonexistent “experts,” the promotion of widely held stereotypes as facts, and last but not least, a dominance of the present tense when discussing decades-old educational laws and other adverbs that distort the temporal frame. An excerpt from this piece demonstrates several of these strategies: El Estado español permite que la comunidad musulmana predique en las escuelas proponiendo a Mahoma como “modelo de vida.” No sabemos si se incluirá la recomendación de casarse con niñas de seis años. Esta ley, según expertos, ha sido redactada en su totalidad por los responsables de la comunidad musulmana en España, sin apenas revisión alguna por parte del ministerio competente. La ley sorprende por su carácter marcadamente confesional en cada uno de sus artículos, y desarrolla una vocación proselitista, revistiendo de tolerancia los aspectos más polémicos de un estricto sistema teocrático. De todos son conocidas las polémicas predicaciones de los imanes en nuestras mezquitas, muchas veces rayanas en el delito. Y todos sabemos de la falta de libertad, cuando no persecución directa, que padecen las mujeres y los cristianos en los países islámicos.

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(The Spanish state allows the Muslim community to preach in schools, holding up Mohammed as a “model of life.” We do not know if that includes the recommendation of marrying six-year-old girls. This legislation, according to experts, has been written in its entirety by the leaders of the Muslim community in Spain, with hardly any revisions by anyone from the appropriate ministry. This legislation shocks for its stark confessional character in each of its sections, and it develops a proselytizing vocation, dressing up as tolerance the most controversial aspects of its strict theocratic system. Everyone is aware of the controversial preaching of imams in our mosques, often bordering on criminality. And we all know about the lack of freedom, often direct persecution, suffered by women and Christians in Islamic countries.) It is important to note that the idea of a quiet, slow but steady so-called Islamic invasion via immigration that will destroy the country from within, akin to the myth of the Trojan Horse that the title references, is also commonly found in the anonymous memes that I collected circulating around social media. Figure 10.2 features the cutoff facial image of a woman wearing a hijab that seems to be smiling, while the text of the meme starts by saying: Go on calmly . . . enjoy your soccer, Sálvame and Gran Hermano [popular reality tv shows in Spain] . . . don’t worry about a thing. You are fine just like that. While you give us shelter and food, we continue to penetrate your society and institutions,

FIGURE 10.2:  Trojan Horse.

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bringing about changes that you will end up seeing as normal. And those who do not allow them will be accused of being of racist and inhuman by you yourselves. The intertextual links between the meme and the OpEd are not subtle. I highlight this 2015 OpEd in particular, not only because it is one of the earliest, but also because it was the first time that, with these arguments, Vox was able to generate a controversy that went beyond the political fringes within which they were operating at the time and become the focus of more mainstream national media attention. The OpEd, and the later response to it by the then president of the Islamic Commission of Spain, Natalia Andújar, was picked up by most mainstream news outlets in Spain. The theme of “Islam in public, state schools” is one that Vox has capitalized on over and over in their rise to popularity, whether in interviews given to the press11 or in their Facebook (FB) posts, such as the one posted on September 13, 2016, on the Facebook page run by party officials in the province of Málaga.12 I reproduce below the text of the social media post, along with an English translation. Islam In School—Málaga Vox Facebook (FB) Page: VERGONZOSO E INDIGNANTE Se garantiza a los alumnos musulmanes, el derecho a recibir enseñanza religiosa islámica en los centros docentes públicos. La enseñanza religiosa islámica será impartida por profesores designados por las Comunidades pertenecientes a la Comisión Islámica de España. Las directrices, que anuncian la enseñanza de todos los aspectos de la doctrina islámica, la cultura y la historia, se entremezclan con terminología “políticamente correcta”, pero el objetivo general es claro inculcar en los jóvenes una cosmovisión islámica. Las pautas del programa están dirigidas a agitar el fervor religioso y a promover la identidad islámica entre los jóvenes musulmanes en España. https://www​.boe​.es​/ diario​_boe​/txt​.php​?id​=BOE​-A​-2016​-2714 En Vox consideramos un auténtico dislate que para la enseñanza de la religión católica todo sean problemas y dificultades, -cuando no oposición manifiesta-, mientras que para la del islam todo facilidades, en un momento en que los símbolos religiosos cristianos están siendo sistemáticamente eliminados por los guardianes oficiales del secularismo. Además habremos de financiarla entre todos, ya que se espera que los contribuyentes españoles paguen por la educación religiosa de hasta 300.000 estudiantes musulmanes. SHAMEFUL AND OUTRAGEOUS Muslim students are guaranteed the right to receive Islamic religious teachings in public schools. Islamic religious teachings will be carried out by instructors designated by Communities belonging to the Islamic Commission of Spain. The guidelines that govern the teaching of all aspects of Islamic doctrine, culture, and history are peppered by “politically correct” terminology, but the general goal is clear: to inculcate youth with an Islamic worldview. The requirements of the program are designed to agitate religious fervor and to promote an Islamic identity among Muslim youth in Spain. https://www​.boe​.es​/diario​_boe​/txt​.php​?id​=BOE​-A​-2016​-2714 In Vox we consider completely absurd that the teaching of Catholic religion meets all kinds of problems and difficulties -and often overt opposition-, whereas for Islam, everything is made easy, particularly at a time when Christian religious

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symbols are systematically being eliminated by the official guardians of secularism. Furthermore, we will have to finance it among all of us, since it is expected that Spanish taxpayers will have to pay for the religious education of up to 300,000 Muslim students. The secret to Vox’s success in exploiting this topic and inserting its racist disinformation as fact in mainstream public opinion is revealed once again when examining intertextual connections across technologies and platforms which leave little doubt about, at the very least, its role as principal, if not author (Goffman 1981), of these messages. These connections are perhaps most striking when comparing the Vox Facebook post with a meme that was denounced by the organization Salam Plan—Periodistas Contra El Odio (Peace Plan—Journalists Against Hate), whose mission is to raise awareness and combat Islamophobic disinformation. As part of this mission, in a section of their website titled ¿Verdadero o Falso? (True or False?),13 this journalistic organization flags and exposes social media posts and memes that are considered particularly dangerous because of the high misinformation content. Table 10.1 reproduces a meme that this organization condemned around the same time Vox was using this type of discourse. Putting side-by-side the English translations of Vox FB post and of the meme denounced by the organization Salam Plan (see Table 10.2) shows not just similarities in discursive logic, but even the exact same phrasing, from the purposefully incendiary headings Vergonzoso and Indignante (Shameful and Outrageous) to whole sentences that appear in both FB post and meme and that have been bolded and italicized in the table. In addition to the verbatim overlap, the two texts share similar affective stances toward the supposed “information” given. For example, while the meme ends with the sentence

TABLE 10.1  Meme Denounced by Salam Plan Meme Denounced by the Organization Salam Plan

English Translation

*¡VER-GON-ZO-SO!* Se garantiza a los alumnos musulmanes, el derecho a recibir enseñanza religiosa islámica en los centros docentes públicos. La enseñanza religiosa islámica será impartida por profesores designados por las Comunidades pertenecientes a la Comisión Islámica de España. https://www​.boe​.es​/diario​_boe​/txt​.php​?id​ =BOE​-A​-2016​-2714

*¡SHA.ME.FUL!* Muslim students are guaranteed the right to receive Islamic religious teachings in public schools. Islamic religious teachings will be carried out by instructors designated by Communities belonging to the Islamic Commission of Spain. https://www​.boe​.es​/diario​_boe​/txt​.php​?id​ =BOE​-A​-2016​-2714

¡¡¡INDIGNANTE!!! Que todo el mundo se entere de esta aberración: o sea para la enseñanza de la religión católica todo sean problemas y dificultades, cuando no oposición manifiesta, y para el islam….todo facilidades…

¡¡¡OUTRAGEOUS!!! Let everybody learn about this aberration!: So, for the teaching of Catholic religion, everything is a problem and difficulties, if not overt opposition, whereas for Islam everything is made easy.

¡¡SOMOS UN PAÍS DE IMBÉCILES….!!

¡¡WE ARE A COUNTRY OF IDIOTS….!!

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TABLE 10.2  Comparison of “VOX Málaga” Facebook Post and Meme Denounced by Salam Plan English Translation of the “VOX Málaga” Facebook Post (September 13, 2016) SHAMEFUL AND OUTRAGEOUS Muslim students are guaranteed the right to receive Islamic religious teachings in public schools. Islamic religious teachings will be carried out by instructors designated by Communities belonging to the Islamic Commission of Spain. The guidelines that govern the teaching of all aspects of Islamic doctrine, culture, and history are peppered by “politically correct” terminology, but the general goal is clear: to inculcate youth with an Islamic worldview. The requirements of the program are designed to agitate religious fervor and to promote an Islamic identity among Muslim youth in Spain. https://www​.boe​.es​/diario​_boe​/txt​.php​?id​ =BOE​-A​-2016​-2714 In Vox we consider it completely absurd that the teaching of Catholic religion meets all kinds of problems and difficulties -and often overt opposition-, whereas for Islam, everything is made easy, particularly at a time when Christian religious symbols are systematically being eliminated by the official guardians of secularism. Furthermore, we will have to finance it among all of us, since it is expected that Spanish taxpayers will have to pay for the religious education of up to 300,000 Muslim students.

English Translation of the Meme Denounced by the Organization Salam Plan *¡SHA.ME.FUL!* Muslim students are guaranteed the right to receive Islamic religious teachings in public schools. Islamic religious teachings will be carried out by instructors designated by Communities belonging to the Islamic Commission of Spain. https://www​.boe​.es​/diario​_boe​/txt​.php​ ?id​=BOE​-A​-2016​-2714 ¡¡¡OUTRAGEOUS!!! Let everybody learn about this aberration: So, for the teaching of Catholic religion, everything is a problem and difficulties, if not overt opposition, whereas for Islam…. everything is made easy… ¡¡WE ARE A COUNTRY OF IDIOTS….!!

“Somos un país de imbéciles” (We are a country of idiots), the Vox FB post develops this affective stance by pointing out the supposed cost of this program to the Spanish taxpayer. Thus, the casual discourse regular citizens share and circulate via memes through their phones contains language and arguments that are virtually identical to those used by extreme-right party Vox in its nativist political discourse. But what did Vox gloss as the “teaching Islam in state schools” in 2015 and beyond? From the examples I have analyzed, Vox is firstly conflating two different policies/ programs together. On the one hand, the LACM Program Programa de Enseñanza de Lengua Árabe y Cultura Marroquí (Arabic Language and Moroccan Culture Teaching Program), which dates back to the mid-1980s, was intended to promote children’s first language. The origins of this program had little to do with either the management of immigration or with the management of Islam in schools; rather, it was part of a series of similar bilateral agreements that Spain signed at the time with many of its neighboring countries. Moreover, even at the height of Moroccan immigration to Spain in the first

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decade of the 2000s, the LACM program remained relatively small with presence in only half of the fifty-two Spanish provinces and offered only in elementary schools on a discretionary basis.14 The second agreement that Vox conflates with the LACM program is the cooperation agreement signed between the Spanish State and the Islamic Commission of Spain in the Spring of 1992. The agreement is fairly comprehensive and, for state schools in particular, it acknowledges Islam alongside the majority Catholic religion (which is still mandatorily taught in state elementary schools and as an optional subject in high schools). Within this framework, it regulates the possibility of Islam being taught to Muslim children, instead of Catholic religion. Much like the LACM program, these agreements had very little to do with immigration, which at that time the agreements were signed, was barely beginning to gain momentum in Spain (in fact, around the same time, similar cooperation agreements were established with representatives of Evangelical and Jewish groups). Representatives of Moroccan immigrants were not part of the negotiation of these agreements, which were mostly negotiated by Spanish Muslim converts and elite, professional, well-educated migrants from the Middle East. Despite the fact that Muslim students and their families have had this right since 1992, there are still many hurdles to the implementation of these agreements. In fact, in the 2017/2018 academic year there were only forty-five teachers of Islam (slightly up from thirty-three in 2006) in public schools in the whole national territory for the 290,000 Muslim students matriculated in Spanish schools, versus the nearly 3,000 teachers of Catholic religion. All this context is extremely relevant, because one of the main findings of my analysis is that the crux of Vox’s discursive bad faith boils down to the power of “contextualization.” That is, in its political discourse, when Vox refers to “the teaching of Islam” in Spanish schools, always in the present or in the future tense, and linking it falsely to the latest educational laws approved by the government, they are engaging in a process of “recontextualization” that simultaneously de-historicizes these policies and programs, erasing their original context and significance, and re-historicizes their effects in a context of heightened Islamophobia, in a way that exaggerates those effects. Their bad faith discursive conflation of these policies/programs becomes “entextualized” (Silverstein and Urban, eds., 2001) in an apocalyptic political narrative of imminent threat and sense of worsening crisis. Indeed, a closer analysis of the online comments that people shared on Facebooks posts like the one discussed above certainly seem to indicate that the most common uptake is for regular people to interpret these posts as current developments of the so-called immigration crisis. The effectiveness of Vox’s particular brand of disinformation, straddling strategically deployed half-truths and outright bulos,15 rests in no small measure on its ability to establish a false, but plausible context through which everyday citizens are (mis)interpreting decades-old and disparate policies that, on the one hand, allow for Arabic language instruction for immigrant children in public schools and that, on the other hand, allow for religion classes in public schools for all children. And the distortion of the temporal frame (see Figure 10.3: Temporal distortion timeline) is key to both their success at recontextualization and the discursive bad faith with which they operate. It is through this, and similar bad faith discursive strategies, which Tetreault will also explore in the French case study that follows, that the far right accomplishes the pedagogical functions of their disinformation (Haynes, Ward and Patton 2021), namely, to teach regular citizens to fear when there is no threat and to normalize Vox’s extreme racist views as reasonable.

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FIGURE 10.3:  Temporal distortion timeline.

ARABIC AND POLITICAL ANXIETIES IN POSTCOLONIAL FRANCE Despite the fact that Arabic is the second most widely spoken language in France after French, currently only 13,000 students, or 0.2 percent, of all middle and high school students who take a second language in France have access to studying Arabic (“Teaching Arabic,” 2018). Although wider access to Arabic in public schools has been deemed necessary by successive Ministers of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem (2014–2017) and Jean-Michel Blanquer (2017–present), these proposals have been met with mediatized panic and vitriol (Barontini 2017). Research on the cultural and linguistic ideologies that frame Arabic language educational reform in France is particularly timely due to the current influence of right-wing Islamophobic political discourses. Competing language ideologies that align with competing political agendas frame the question of whether and where to teach Arabic in different terms. Discourses on the left attempt to secularize and legitimize Arabic by moving instruction out of mosques and neighborhood associations, where it is currently often taught, and into state-run public schools. At the same time, Islamophobic discourses emanating from the right politicize any type of Arabic educational reform in France as “dangerous.” However, despite these differences across the political spectrum, Arabic remains institutionally and symbolically marginalized across France and continues to be framed as a threat to the sovereignty of the Republic in both left- and right-leaning discourses within the current political field in France. The educational landscape of Arabic language instruction in France is vast and complex, with ties to a colonial past and a postcolonial present. One of the earliest French colonial institutions in the metropole to house the instruction of Arabic was INALCO or

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L’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations). Founded in 1795, the Institute received continued support under Napoleon after his invasion of Egypt in 1798. To this day, INALCO is one of the only French institutions where instruction in Darija (colloquial Arabic) occurs, including Algerian, Egyptian, and Moroccan varieties. Over the course of two centuries, teaching Darija within INALCO served as a way to shore up knowledge and power for the French colonial administration. the oral exam offered at INALCO in colloquial Arabic maintained its status as a subject worthy of points received on the Baccalauréat until 1999, when the exam was eliminated by President Jacques Chirac (Caubet 2008). Thus, through its representation in the colonial-era institution of INALCO, Arabic was framed and maintained as knowledge that was validated for its use in colonial projects, including the maintenance of an administration as well as codifying knowledge about and by the colonial subject.16 Given France’s continued dominance in the economic, political, and cultural affairs of the Maghreb, one might assume that Arabic language instruction would continue to have an outsized role to play in educational institutions when compared to other languages. In addition to its potential value for students of North African Arab heritage, Arabic is of vital importance to France’s political, cultural, and economic ties to MENA countries even beyond its colonial past and migration history. However, despite continued geopolitical stakes in the region and in the Arabic language, France, unlike other European Union countries, has not increased Arabic language instruction since the global “war on terror” fostered widespread surveillance of Arab and Muslim citizens in France and elsewhere. In fact, France has repeatedly refused to make Arabic a national priority in its policies, educational and otherwise. For example, France was the only country in the European Union not to ratify a 1999 treaty to recognize minority languages, which would have included North African Arabic along with regional languages such as Breton (Caubet 2008). Rather than a minority language, Arabic has been more often framed as an immigrant language in France. After decolonization in the 1960s, the global oil crisis in the 1970s, and the 1974 moratorium on economic migration in France, migration patterns from North Africa shifted toward regroupement familiale (family reunification). An outgrowth of this change was the establishment of the ELCO program or Enseignements en langue et culture d’origine (Teaching language and culture of origin). Starting in 1972 and until 2016, Modern Standard Arabic (Fusha) was taught in ELCO classes outside of the regular public-school curriculum and schedule. Bilateral accords signed by a majority of Western European countries provided classes in Arabic (Modern Standard), Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Serbo-Croatian (later Croatian). Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia all signed such bilateral accords with France that allowed them to supply and pay for M.S.A. Arabic teachers to teach children of migrants living in France. Rather than a strategic or minority language, Arabic was framed by this program as the language of migrant laborers and their children from former colonies Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Under the ELCO program, second language instruction for primary-school-aged children was framed in terms of the rights and needs of migrant parents and children who were often themselves migrants. A strong emphasis was placed on learning the language of the sending country with an eye for maintaining fluency in the children’s anticipated return to their so-called “home” country. Thus, a national emphasis on the assumed temporary nature of labor migration shaped how second-language Arabic instruction took place. ELCO was striking not only for the fact that sending nations were training, vetting,

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and paying for Arabic (and all ELCO) teachers. The program was also unique because, unlike programs for other foreign languages such as German, the classes themselves were not part of the French public-school curriculum. Instead, ELCO classes were offered after normal school hours and potentially in settings outside of a child’s school. Migrant children’s access to their “home” language and culture was institutionally recognized and yet marginalized. The current controversy over Arabic language instruction derives in part from re-envisioning Arabic as the language of postcolonial citizens rather than of temporary migrant laborers and their children. Rather than viewing Arabic as a heritage language needing to be maintained for the benefit of historic immigrant-descendant communities, Arabic language instruction is increasingly framed in mainstream French political discourse as emblematic of communautarisme (roughly, “factionalism” or “ethnic enclaving”), which serves to politicize children’s access to Arabic language in any context including public schools, after-school programs such as ELCO, mosques, and neighborhood associations. Compounding the issue, over the past twenty years, ELCO classes have fallen out of favor (Durand 2020). Whereas, at their height, ELCO students of Arabic numbered as many as 100,000, today that number is roughly half (Durand 2020). At the same time, there has been a steep rise in the number of elementary school-aged children who are taking Arabic in Saturday classes either at a neighborhood mosque or association: 80,000 students now take such classes (Durand 2020). Thus, while ELCO Arabic classes have fallen out of favor, community-led Arabic classes have blossomed, making the teaching of Arabic central to ongoing and entrenched national discussions regarding education and laïcité (roughly, “secularism”). Scholarship on contemporary French interpretations of laïcité is central to this analysis (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2014; Scott 2009). Scott’s (2009) historical analysis of laïcité frames it as the result of France’s adoption of a Republican model for civic participation that eschews the clergy and nobility in favor of individual citizens’ direct participation in the French state. Bowen’s (2007) analysis similarly takes up this historical thread with an in-depth look at how the hijab is apprehended as a particular challenge to French laïcité. In contrast, Fernando’s (2014) analysis, while also historicizing French discourses and policies relating to laïcité, argues for the active negotiation of laïcité by “French Muslims” as they navigate their own participation in a secular French state as practicing Muslims. It is this notion of the active negotiation and navigation of practices and discourses surrounding the concept of laïcité that I hope to engage through my analysis of discourse generated by French political and public actors such as Vallaud-Belkacem, Macron, and online posters. In their formulations and re-formulations of how Arabic might fit or not fit within a secular French school system, they actively attempt to re-negotiate meanings and symbolic values of Arabic language with respect to the concept of laïcité as integral to public schools and more broadly to French sovereignty itself. Past national policies and politicized debates regarding laïcité and French public schools focused primarily on excluding the Muslim headscarf (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2014; Scott 2009). Now that the hijab (Muslim headscarf) is effectively excluded by law from public schools, current educational debates in France have refocused upon Arabic language instruction as the supposed new “threat” to laïcité. The idea that Arabic is a language significant for eventual return migration has shifted among migrant heritage communities toward framing Arabic as a language more appropriately taught and learned in the context of religious instruction in neighborhood associations and mosques; it is this shift that informs current conflicts over whether and

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how Arabic should be taught in a postcolonial France. In the case of many Arabic classes taught in neighborhood mosques and associations, teachers, who also frequently serve as local Imams, are sent by international governments; rather than former colonies such as Algeria and Morocco, Saudi Arabia and other gulf states often fund these programs. Right-wing and right-leaning political discourse currently frames Arabic classes taught in neighborhood contexts, and thus outside of direct state institutional control, as potentially radicalizing to Muslim youth, particularly in the larger context of recruitment programs that send and fund Salafi Imams who adhere to a conservative form of Sunni Islam. Initially, educational reforms proposed in 2016 by Vallaud-Belkacem under President Hollande framed the inclusion of Arabic in public schools as contributing to Republican sovereignty through inclusiveness toward children of immigrants (Barontini 2017). Currently, despite the fact that he has continued to pursue Vallaud-Belkacem’s (unchanged) plans for reform, President Macron has publicly reframed such reforms as the exclusion of Arabic from schools (due to the suppression of ELCO) and has rhetorically aligned with right-wing Islamophobic discourses in this reframing. In President Macron’s public rhetoric and in that of his administration, Arabic comes under renewed scrutiny as a supposed challenge to laïcité. In tracking these discourses and their changes over time, I (Tetreault) explore the challenges of transforming Arabic from a “migrant” language to an “international” second language in the context of French public schools in relation to entrenched national debates regarding French sovereignty and laïcité. Below, I analyze a preliminary corpus of public texts, policies, and media materials collected online from 2019 to 2020 that address Arabic educational reform in France. This data collection and analysis focuses on the shifting public discourses and fractured politics surrounding the Arabic language and the role it has to play in French education. In my selection of texts, I attempted to select an array of posts and materials that provide a spectrum of right- leaning and centrist political views emanating from dominant French political discourse. Although not necessarily representative of all political discourse regarding Arabic language reform, the texts that I have chosen represent views that widely circulate in both print media journalism and online platforms (tweets, memes, FB posts). By looking at how particular discourses about Arabic are produced across these types of media, I hope to show how dominant discourses about Arabic as a perceived threat to French sovereignty are produced and circulated. My discursive framing of Arabic educational reform emerges from three distinct, yet related, political vantage points. I analyze educational reforms as well as attendant political rhetoric emanating from the Arabic language education program Enseignements internationaux de langues étrangères (International Teaching of Foreign Languages) (EILE) proposed in 2016 as well as President Macron’s related political discourse issued as part of his campaign against so-called Islamist separatism (Durand 2020). Finally, I analyze extreme right-wing political rhetoric and online discourse that cast the above Arabic language educational reform, as well as Arabic more generally, as threats to French sovereignty. In my treatment of the corpus of media materials, I analyze how contemporary political and online discourses produce and circulate language ideologies surrounding Arabic language educational reform in France. Following Bauman and Briggs (2003), I join my coauthor in the notion of intertextuality as a means to analyze historical and politicized discourses, such as laïcité, which authorize particular constructions of language and education. My methodological aim is to analyze how particular ideologies regarding Arabic track across public texts, including political rhetoric, educational policies, and

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online discourses. As Falconi and Graber (2019) note in the introduction to their recent volume on narrative approaches within linguistic anthropology, our current moment is one in which we “need to rethink the lines that we as scholars draw around particular genres of discourse and communication” (p. 20). Accordingly, in my analysis of the shifting ideological discourses in the national debate regarding Arabic language education, I employ an intertextual approach to analyze the productive intersections between official French political discourse and public online texts. While the reforms to revamp ELCO as EILE were proposed in 2016 under former minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and former president François Hollande (2012-2017), these reforms continued to be implemented under the new Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer when President Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017. Macron’s public discourse regarding Arabic language reform demonstrates evidence that collusion between the extreme right-wing and online hate groups is driving policy, or at least the ways that policies are framed discursively. I draw from public political rhetoric issued by French officials, politicians from right-wing and centrist perspectives, and widely circulating tweets, memes, and social media posts that address Arabic language reform during the period of 2017–2020. Similar to my coauthor’s analysis of the Spanish case, I argue that Arabic language instruction has become a central focus for new forms of Islamophobia, or what we are calling “Islamo-linguistic-phobia.” On February 18, 2020, during a press conference in Mulhouse that was explicitly touted by the French President to “present measures against ‘Islamic separatism’” (Durand 2020, p. 3), Macron publicly promised to end ELCO classes completely as soon as the start of school in September 2020. Not only were such plans already in place, but Macron also appeared to omit half of the equation during his speech, which was that EILE classes, paid for by the French government and offered as regular curriculum, would replace ELCO classes. Macron’s approach has been to shape his message regarding Arabic language classes in terms that emphasize the suppression of ELCO (and thereby suggesting the suppression of Arabic) as opposed to reform through EILE, even though both processes are concurrent. In doing so, Macron also appears to claim the initiative to ban ELCO classes as his own, although this shift was already in the works under Education Minister Vallaud-Belkacem as early as 2016. In French politics such a move is often called a “double discourse,” meaning that an utterance has an element of embedded truthfulness that is misrepresented on the surface for ideological effect, thus creating a “double” message, a rhetorical move similar to what my coauthor refers to as “discursive bad faith.” In this case, the willful misleading emphasis is upon the suppression of (ELCO) Arabic classes while the actual policy is to include more Arabic classes (EILE) in regular French school curriculum. Thus, this “double discourse” allows Macron to manage and redress the French right wing’s highly negative casting of him as in the pocket of Muslim extremists, as demonstrated in Figure 10.4, which circulated on the internet. President Macron is walking the dangerous line of engaging in reform while feigning the suppression of Arabic language classes. For example, Macron explicitly framed Arabic language classes in terms of religious influence of foreign Imams in his press conference against so-called Islamic separatism. Specifically, Macron linked the elimination of ELCO to the progressive de-funding of roughly 300 foreign Imams working in France who were recruited from Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey (Battaglia 2020). In terms of responses to Macron’s announcement, Minister of Education Vallaud-Belkacem, under whom the reforms were proposed and implemented, responded with the following

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FIGURE 10.4:  Islamophobic meme of Macron as a “useful infidel.”

tweet after Macron appeared to take full credit for eliminating ELCO classes. In the tweet, Vallaud-Belkacem describes her reaction when she hears the announcement that Emmanuel Macron would eliminate all ELCO classes in Fall 2020. Écouter sa radio et tomber de sa chaise. Entendre le chef de l’Etat annoncer une fois de plus le « lancement inédit d’une démarche » visant cette fois-ci à remplacer les Enseignements en langue et culture d’origine (ELCO) par des Enseignements internationaux de langues étrangères (EILE) . . . (Listen to the radio and fall from your chair. Hear the Head of State announce once again the “unprecedented launching of a process” aiming this time to replace Teachings in Language and Culture of Origin (ELCO) by International Teachings of Foreign Languages (EILE) . . .). (Cometti 2020) This tweet alludes to the fact that EILE had been put into place by Vallaud-Belkacem herself in 2016 when she acquired the signatures of two countries at that time, including Morocco. The new program automatically replaced and thus eliminated ELCO rather than anything that President Macron initiated. Additionally, Minister of Education Vallaud-Belkacem, the first woman and first person of Moroccan origin to hold the post, framed the EILE reforms as a way to ensure better integration and success of North African heritage students. More specifically, Vallaud-Belkacem proposed moving Arabic language instruction into the school system as regular curricula, and away from ELCO classes where there was little federal oversight. When she proposed such changes during her tenure as minister, Vallaud-Belkacem received scores of online vitriolic attacks as well as public attacks in print and television journalism, ultimately leading to her resignation in 2017. These attacks attempted to discredit Vallaud-Belkacem as holding allegiances to Arabic and North African Muslim immigrants rather than to the French language and a secular

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FIGURE 10.5:  Meme falsely depicting minister Vallaud-Belkacem as a shepherd girl.

French state. False accusations included the erroneous claim that the former minister intended to require Arabic as a curriculum for elementary school children including non-heritage (non-Arab) school children. One way that these attacks attempted to foster such views included highlighting Vallaud-Belkacem’s Moroccan upbringing to downplay her current status as a French citizen and French public servant serving at the highest level of government. To this end, a widely circulating meme regarding Vallaud-Belkacem depicted two photos (Figure 10.5) showing an image of the adult minister on the right and a falsely identified photograph of a child herding sheep on the left. The false image— which is not in fact a photo of Vallaud-Belkacem—depicts a rural setting that includes a seemingly impoverished child with messy hair, open-toed plastic shoes, and dirty, shabby clothing, leaning in apparent exhaustion on her shepherd’s staff. The overtly racist and sexist meme was widely circulated online in an attempt to discredit Vallaud-Belkacem’s authority, but ironically also as an “inspirational” message regarding her supposed victory over poverty and lack of opportunity while growing up in Morocco (which is, in fact, her birth country). The supposedly positive message that this meme encoded for some users of new media illustrates the ways that the semiotics of memes take on complex interpretations and unexpected directions when they are repurposed in a variety of online environments (Wiggins 2019, 27). Despite its use as a “positive” albeit still racist and sexist meme, the image is very much in line with other extremist viral memes and online internet attacks that currently emanate from a variety of right-wing groups and which have largely reshaped the political landscape of proposed educational reform for Arabic language classes. North African culture and the Arabic language are posed as backward, religious, and non-modern, whereas French culture and French language are depicted as socially evolved, secular, and modern. Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric surrounding Arabic, or “Islamo-linguistic-phobia,” emanates from a variety of sources, including right-wing politicians. The rhetoric is exemplified in the following quote by Annie Genevard, Representative from the Les Républicains party, during an interview on Sud Radio (Radio South): “I think Blanquer is making a mistake: Teaching Arabic in secondary school will not take a child out of the Koranic schools and will not solve the

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problems with teaching preaching [sic] in Arabic and the rise of Salafism” (Lewandowski 2018, para. 9). The implication of her statement is that teaching secularized Arabic in school will not preempt religious radicalization via the language. Furthermore, emerging forms of Islamophobic discourses center upon locating the threat of religious radicalization in the Arabic language itself (Barontini 2017). Both right-wing political rhetoric and online fearmongering collude to frame the extreme exclusion of Arabic and its erasure from public schools as the only “solution” to the “problem” of Islamic radicalization. Such views are widely disseminated through online memes, which attempt to discredit the agents of change and reform, such as the former minister of Education Vallaud-Belkacem. As mentioned above by my coauthor, another common online form of “Islamo-linguistic-phobia” employs seemingly official documents to erroneously claim an increase in Arabic and a supposed lack of other languages offered in schools. A post on Facebook by the pro-Alsace independence site “Elsass frei” (“Free Alsace”), widely shared across other platforms soon after, included a bogus ELCO/EILE application to falsely claim that it is impossible to take alsacien (Alsatian German) in public French schools in Bischwiller (a community in Alsace-Lorraine), and yet, “no problem [to take] Arabic or Turkish.”17 A complete lack of attention to many other languages listed on the form— Croatian, Italian, Portuguese, and Serbian—and narrow focus on the two languages most closely associated in France with predominantly Muslim populations, Arabic and Turkish, reveals the Islamophobic thrust of the Facebook post. The image of the fake ELCO/EILE application was widely circulated as supposed evidence of the predominance of Arabic (and Turkish) in the French school system at the expense of other languages such as Alsatian German in Alsace-Lorraine (“No, German classes,” 2019). As the Facebook post of this phony application shows, within the far right-wing spectrum of political discourse that is increasingly present in French social media, any access to Arabic (as well as Turkish) provided by the national educational system is framed as a threat. Interestingly, Turkish is the only language that will not be continued at all under EILE classes; therefore, the claim that it is “no problem” to take Turkish under ELCO/EILE is incorrect under the new guidelines for these programs, which were announced in 2017 by Vallaud-Belkacemn (Durand 2020). Of relevance to our broader argument in this chapter is the way that the xenophobic, racist, and Islamophobic contours of this post move from a rather narrowly defined separatist Alsatian movement to a wider scope and general frame. That is, whereas this Facebook post originally signifies a lack of adherence to a unified French nation in favor of strict adherence to a separatist Alsatian identity, the thrust of Islamophobic rhetoric regiments Arabic and Turkish as having “less” value than Alsatian, despite their supposed ubiquity. The emphasis on the threat or “invasion” of Arabic then makes this image easily repurposed by French nationalists, who are undoubtedly emphatically against Alsatian separatism, but who disseminate the Islamophobic rhetoric through widely sharing the post. Indeed, the post went viral on many sites that had nothing to do with Alsace-Lorraine. This discursive move—to repurpose the nationalistic and fascist rhetoric of a separatist group to promote French nationalism—can be considered an example of fractal recursivity (Gal and Irvine 2000), in which an initial discursive distinction (Alsatian nationalistic exclusivity vs. French cultural inclusivity) is reproduced ideologically but in a new context (French nationalist exclusivity vs. multicultural inclusivity). That is, this form of racist Alsatian linguistic nationalism that within one context runs counter to culturally inclusive French nationalism, is rehabilitated and repurposed in order to

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argue for a culturally and linguistically exclusive French nationalism that is posed against Muslim immigrant cultures and languages (Turkish and North African Arabic). The connection between French nationalism and fomenting fears about the Arabic language (and by extension, Arabs) as “invasive” has continued during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right-wing party Rassemblement National or RN Representative and Holocaust denier Alain Mondino posted on Twitter and Facebook a photograph featuring side-by-side French and Arabic versions of a poster issued by the Minister of Public Health advocating best practices for avoiding the spread of Coronavirus.18 In his commentary about the image, Mondino claims (erroneously) that Arabic has become the “second national language of France.” The poster (translated into English) reads, “Coronavirus: How to Protect Yourself and Protect Others. Wash hands very frequently. Cough or sneeze into your elbow or a tissue. Use a tissue once and throw it away. Greet people without shaking hands and avoid cheek kissing.” In his Twitter and Facebook posts of a photo of side-by-side French and Arabic versions, Mondino transforms the public health message into a supposed linguistic threat with the comments: “I didn’t know that Arabic had become the second official language of France?? No one is supposed to ignore the law but to ignore French apparently does not matter.” Much as the above bogus ELCO/EILE application omits vital information, such as the fact that Alsatian was never offered under these programs but is widely available in Alsace-Lorraine public schools, Mondino elides many relevant facts regarding the image (which does apparently depict actual posters created by the French Health Ministry) and relies on false information regarding official languages in France. According to a recent electronic article in Le Monde regarding Mondino’s post on social media, the poster on Covid health facts was translated and published in twenty-four languages (“Non, l’arabe,” 2020). Furthermore, Mondino’s interpretive captioning of the image, “No one is supposed to ignore the law, but ignoring French apparently doesn’t matter,” seems to infer that to include other languages in official public health communication constitutes “ignoring French” and that this in turn constitutes breaking or “ignoring the law,” and yet neither is the case. It is not illegal in France to use languages other than French to communicate official state documents. It is merely that, as the official language of France, French must figure first and foremost (but not exclusively) in public communications between the government and citizens. A troubling collusion is emerging between the above left-leaning or centrist policies with right-wing Islamophobic discourses. Whereas the left poses Arabic language instruction as a threat outside of public schools, extreme right-wing discourse claims that any exposure to Arabic is potentially harmful through Islamic radicalization. Recent policies and political discourses evidence the spread of these views, which cast Arabic as central to Islamic radicalization. Macron’s recent framing of the suppression of ELCO classes as part of his fight against “Islamic separatism” is part and parcel of the mounting influence that right-wing French nationalist rhetoric has achieved of late. As seen by the wide access that social media gives to these Islamo-linguistic-phobic discourses, it would seem that the online environment is increasing this trend. The French case provides comparable evidence that collusion between the extreme right wing and online hate groups is driving public discourse related to Arabic language educational reform, even in mainstream French politics. This new form of Islamophobia centers upon locating the threat of radicalization in the Arabic language itself as well as erroneously claiming an increased inclusion of Arabic in the school system that comes at the expense of other languages. Both right-wing political rhetoric and online

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fearmongering collude to frame the extreme exclusion of Arabic and its erasure from public schools as the only “solution” to the ”problem” of Islamic radicalization.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have documented the indexical and discursive shifts in Islamophobic rhetoric, and its intensity, happening now in Spain and France. In particular, we have highlighted how contemporary Islamophobic discourse has developed a new central focus at the intersection of education, language, and religion, which we refer to as “IslamoLinguistic-Phobia.” Through a methodological integration of text and context, we have described how these indexical shifts are being multimodally and intertextually constructed and deployed in public and political discourse, as well as the discursive bad-faith strategies that sustain them. At a time of heightened Nativism and resurgence of xenophobic, farright movements, it should not be surprising that there is a renewed focus on the nexus of education, language, and religion, as this has long been a central triad in debates about socialization, social/national cohesion, and sociocultural reproduction and change through the generations (e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Ochs and Schieffelin 2012), particularly with regards to groups affected by overlapping geographies of migration and postcoloniality (e.g., Silverstein 2018). Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the Spanish and French cases allows us to show that the danger of Islamophobic discourses cannot be dismissed as relegated to the fringes of far-right disinformation. One of the most important take-away messages of our chapter is how successful these far-right nationalist movements have been at manufacturing moral panics about nonexistent dangers (i.e., what they call the new “Islamist invasion” of Europe) to mainstream and normalize their nativist and racist views. The fact that these views are increasingly accepted as “reasonable” by many regular citizens is due in no small part to the language and discursive bad faith in which these messages are cloaked and circulated. Of course, this is not a matter of wording alone. The discursive bad faith that turns Spanish and French Muslims into threats, particularly those of immigrant background, is the fodder that ultimately leads to these groups being subjected to surveillance and violence, as the recent widespread surge in Islamophobic hate crimes show (e.g., Buchowski 2017; Mir and Sarroub 2019). In Spain alone, cases of documented and reported Islamophobic incidents went from twenty-nine cases in 2009 to five hundred and seventy-three in 2016, with a 106,12 percent increase between 2015 (two hundred and seventy-eight cases) and 2016 (Plataforma Ciudadana contra la Islamofobia, 2017 Report). In France, according to official complaints registered by the government’s National Human Rights Commission, anti-Muslim acts in 2020 jumped fifty-two percent compared to the previous year (Onishi and Alami 2022). Our research compels us to join Shoshan (2019, with Middleton) in calling for anthropologists to be more centrally involved in the study of far-right nationalists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. To that, we add that, in light of the central role language plays in forms of weaponized misinformation, linguistic anthropologists are particularly well positioned to document and expose these racist and antidemocratic discourses. Finally, another important implication of our chapter brings us to the question of what these imbricated links among linguistic racism, religious discrimination, and disinformation mean in terms of educational justice for youth from Muslim immigrant backgrounds. While fleshing out this complex issue falls beyond the limits of this chapter, it is still important to start thinking about it because, in traditional formulations, education has always been considered one of the central spheres of distributive justice (Walzer 1983);

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a right that has been enshrined into policy in many European democracies. Given the consequences (e.g., emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, marginalization, etc.) that Islamophobic approaches to Arabic language education (or lack thereof) can have on Muslim students’ sense of self and identity, however, we want to expand ideas of justice and education not just as the right to education, but also as the right to an education that humanizes and that is culturally sustaining (Paris and Alim 2017). In this case, justice and education would mean, at the very least: first, investment in anti-Islamophobic language education policies that value and center the multilinguistic, cultural, and educational needs of Muslim students (particularly those of immigrant descent); and second, the active incorporation of pedagogical tools to interrupt (Islamophobic) disinformation in anti-oppressive education programs. The stakes for both Muslim communities and the strength of our democracies could not be higher.

NOTES 1. In Spain we can date the high watershed mark to 2010-2013, particularly after the February 14, 2013 Spanish Supreme Court ruling that ruled on the side of civil liberties, freedom of ideology, and respect for the presence of religious symbols in public settings. In France, the dates could be placed between the 2004 law that banned headscarves in public schools and the 2011 ban on face coverings in public places. 2. Indeed, leaders of the Spanish right-wing party Vox have used the “gender oppression” trope as a strategic put down to great effect, especially when Muslim women of immigrant descent have publicly defended themselves against their attacks, e.g. the openly contemptuous and disrespectful tweet that in December 2018 Santiago Abascal directed to Najat Driouech, the first woman of Moroccan immigrant descent elected to public office in Spain [El Diario​.e​s, “Santiago Abascal señala a la diputada musulmana de ERC y desata una ola de comentarios xenófobos contra ella”, December 14, 2018]. 3. As journalist and historian Anne Applebaum reported in The Washington Post, contacts between Vox, the other far-right parties of Europe, and CPAC in Washington have intensified in the last decade. These parties rarely collaborated before (“Want to Build a Far-right Movement? Spain’s Vox Party Shows How”. May 2, 2019). 4. This result was enough to secure their presence in the governing coalition with the other two conservative parties PP & Ciudadanos, Citizens Party, Cs. 5. In Spring of 2018, Italy’s new right-wing interior minister, Matteo Salvini, made good on his campaign promise to close Italy’s borders to refugees and immigrants from war-stricken MENA nations, most emblematically not allowing humanitarian migrant rescue ships to dock at any Italian port. 6. This rally was at the time livestreamed in You Tube and other social media platforms ) 7. All translations from Spanish into English throughout the chapter have been done by one of the authors Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez. 8. Abascal’s speech in Gran Canaria: No es lo mismo un inmigrante hispanoamericano que la inmigración de los países islámicos (It’s not the same an immigrant from Latin American than immigration from Islamic countries) (Hyperlink: https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =Jl43Neqlf3c) 9. Interview with journalist Carlos Herrera - COPE Radio Station (Hyperlink: http://www​ .carlosherrera​.com​/web​/noticias1​.asp​?Id​=7977)

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10. 11. 12. < https://www​.facebook​.com​/MalagaVOX> 13. Salam Plan – Periodistas Contra El Odio (Peace Plan – Journalists Against Hate): 14. For more information about this program, see García-Sánchez 2010 & 2014. 15. Bulo is a colloquial Spanish word that refers to a false piece of news or story that is fabricated and circulated with the intention of harming an individual or a group of people. 16. To further complicate matters, Arabic itself might be construed as a language central to colonizing Tamazight [Berber] populations in North Africa; however, this topic is beyond the scope of this chapter. 17. Source:https://​www​.20minutes​.fr​/societe​/2455819​-20190220​-non​-enseignement​-allemand​ -supprime​-ecole​-alsacienne​-profit​-arabe 18. https://www​.lemonde​.fr​/les​-decodeurs​/article​/2020​/05​/25​/non​-l​-arabe​-n​-est​-pas​-devenu​-la​ -deuxieme​-langue​-officielle​-pendant​-la​-pandemie​_6040691​_4355770​.html

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Martín-Corrales, E. (2004), “Maurophobia/Islamophobia – Maurophilia/Islamophilia en la España del siglo XXI.” Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internationals, 66–67: 39–51. Mijares, L., and A. Ramírez (2008), “Mujeres, Pañuelo, e Islamofobia en España: Un Estado de la Cuestión.” Anales Revista de Historia Contemporánea, 24: 121–35. Mir, S., and L. K. Sarroub (2019), “Islamophobia in US Education.” In I. Zempi and I. Awan (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Islamophobia, 298–309, New York: Routledge. “No, German Classes Were Not Replaced by Arabic at a French School.” (2019, March 16). Fact-check EU. Available online: https://factcheckeu​.info​/en​/article​/non​-lenseignement​-de​ -lallemand​-na​-pas-été-supprimé- dune-​école​-alsa​cienn​e-au-​profi​t-de-​larab​e1. “Non, l’arabe n’est pas devenu la « deuxième langue officielle » pendant la pandémie.” (2020, May 25). Available online: https://www​.lemonde​.fr​/les​-decodeurs​/article​/2020​/05​/25​/non​-l​-arabe​-n​ -est​-pas​-devenu​-la ​-deux​​ieme-​​langu​​e​-off​​iciel​​le​-pe​​ndant​​-la​-p​​andem​​ie​_60​​40691​​_4355​​770​.h​​tml. Ochs, E., and B. Schieffelin (2012), “The Theory of Language Socialization.” In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.), The Handbook of Language Socialization, 1–22, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Onishi, N., and A. Alami (2022), “The Quiet Flight of Muslims from France.” The New York Times, February 13 (updated April 8). Available online: (accessed September 9, 2022). Pascale, C. M. (2019), “The Weaponization of Language: Discourses of Rising Right-Wing Authoritarianism.” Current Sociology Review, 67 (6): 898–917. Paris, D., and H. S. Alim, eds. (2017), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, New York: Teacher’s College Press. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramírez, A. (2010), “Muslim Women in the Spanish Press: The Persistence of Subaltern Images.” In F. Shirazi (ed.), Muslim Women in War and Crisis: Representation and Reality, Austin: University of Texas Press. Rogozen-Soltar, M. (2017), Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rogozen-Soltar, M. (2012), “Managing Muslim Visibility: Conversion, Immigration, and Spanish Imageries of Islam.” American Anthropologist, 114 (4): 612–24. Said, E. (1978), Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Silverstein, M., and G. Urban, eds. (2001), Natural Histories of Discourse, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverstein, P. A. (2018), Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic, London: Pluto Press. Silverstein, P. A. (2004), Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scott, J. W. (2009), The Politics of the Veil, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shoshan, N., and C. L. Middleton (2019), “Considering an Anthropology of the Far Right.” Anthropology News, November 5. https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/AN​.1300. Suleiman, C. (2017), The Politics of Arabic in Israel: A Sociolinguistic Analysis, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Taha, M. (2010), “The Hijab North of Gibraltar: Moroccan Women as Objects of Civic and Social Transformation.” The Journal of North African Studies, 15 (4): 465–80. Tetreault, C. (2021), “What Is Arabic Good For? Future Directions and Current Challenges of Arabic Language Educational Reform in France.” Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity (J-BILD), 5(1): 60–82.

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Commentary to Part II LUISA MARTÍN ROJO 1

The five chapters that make up part II of the volume Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives present a gallery of forms of hatred and violence that mutually reinforce each other, generating a spiral of violence from which societies, groups, and individuals barely manage to escape. Thus, the material violence of colonial plunder and labor exploitation is compounded by the symbolic violence of the production of knowledge through discourses that subalternize the other, question their humanity, deny them recognition, alienate and stigmatize them. Symbolic violence2 becomes then a source of hatred and misrecognitions, exercised on bodies and minds, which, in turn, reinforce the social position of their targets as oppressed. In all the cases presented in this volume, discourses play a key role in shaping, fueling, and justifying symbolic violence. This is how the violence suffered by domestic workers, condemned to living outside the perimeter of luxury in Brazil, takes shape. The same violence is endured by migrants and migrants’ descendants in European countries, who are discursively represented as embodiments of the conspiracy theory that racialized populations will demographically and culturally replace the white population of the continent—or, as the alt-right in France calls it, the “Grand Remplacement” (Great Replacement ). Stratification, segregation, exclusion, and racism take on an even more brutal dimension in the ethnic and religious civil wars that conceptualize the Other as an enemy to be exterminated and, therefore, condemn them to nonexistence and silence, as in the case of members of mixed-ethnicity families in Sarajevo. The same brutality reveals itself under the colonial enterprise and in the “(after)life of slavery” that legitimizes the violent colonization of the bodies of oppressed peoples, considering them inferior, deficient and even non-human, as in the case of indigenous women in the settler colonial state of Canada and of the inhabitants of Aotearoa, who often face deceit, lies and contempt toward them. The “symbolic murder of the Other,” representing them in hegemonic discourses as enemies, as criminals, as non-humans, is, therefore, the foundation of violence and exploitation (Levinas 1979). Internal colonialism (Pinderhughes 2011), like external colonialism (Maldonado-Torres 2007, among others), keeps the same racial and ethnic criteria of exclusion or inclusion alive and, therefore, allows the pure material exploitation of others’ territories, their labor and their bodies, and justifies the continued exercise of violence by assigning human beings the categories of first- and second-class citizens. Both colonialities of being referred to a violation of the meaning of human alterity to the point

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that the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter, which is mobilized to justify a world in which exceptions to ethical relationships become the norm (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 257). The violence described in these chapters illustrates the intertwined exercise of different forms of power: exploitation, domination, and subjection (Foucault 1982; see, also Akram, Emerson and Marsh 2015). These three forms work together in the production of inequality, shaped by gender, race, class, indigeneity, and religion. Exploitation is found in these texts in the occupation of land and in turning the local population into servants or slaves on their own land. Exploitation consists of the “appropriation of surplus labor” such as in the relations between a slave and a slave owner, a serf and a landlord, or a worker and a capitalist (Rutar 2017). Domination of a majority over a minority, grounded on racist and classist criteria, is added to this exploitation and, at the same time, it legitimizes it. For instance, in their analysis of political campaigns, media discourses, memes and so on, in France and Spain, Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez and Chantal Tetreault show not only that foreign workers are exploited with worse wages and working conditions, but also that the alt-right tries to restrict their access to some of the most valued social domains (e.g., public services) by mobilizing nativist and essentialist forms of nationalism. Likewise, in the case of Brazil, Roth-Gordon examines how a middle-class white minority imposes itself and expels the low-wage racialized workers who serve them to the favelas. Domination is, then, a state in which asymmetrical power relations have become fixed, and any set of institutions and social norms may promote this state of domination (Foucault 1984). This is the case in the land theft and plunder that takes place in New Zealand/ Aotearoa, where different institutions, such as the Church, the government, and the Crown allied to impose settler rule and hurt the objective interests of the local population, suspending its own institutions of government, and fundamentally restricting their democratic rights. In all the cases presented, power relations seem to be irreversibly asymmetrical to a certain extent. However, we must go one step further to understand another component of the phenomena we are examining. Both exploitation and domination are inextricably bound to subjection. This form of power targets individuals, imposing on them a particular set of knowledge and principles and a “value-giving measure,”3 that provides a quantitative means to value the abilities, the level, and the “nature” of individuals through social hierarchies become naturalized (Foucault 1975). In the case of (neo)colonialism, as Fanon (1967) has argued, the existential experience of racialized subjectivity cannot be separated from the calculative logic of colonial rule. Colonialism is a “totalizing project” that does not leave any part of the human person and its reality untouched. Although not always taken into account, subjection does not only occur within the structure of colonialism. Indeed, modern states and, even more so, the neoliberal order have been very effective in implementing this form of power, which scrutinizes the individual, compels us to self-examine and regulate our “conduct,” and submit to the demands and values that discipline our bodies and appropriate our minds. When these values and demands permeate the individual, as Fanon (1967) teaches us, it can lead them to think of themselves in a certain way: as servants of god, as servants of the lord, as servants of the market and entrepreneurs, as people without agency who are incapable of changing the status quo. The very existence of this volume shows that collective struggles can restrain if not overcome exploitation and domination, and it is also possible to reverse or resist subjection. If it were not so, it would be impossible to write a book like this one in which both historical cases and enduring contemporary manifestations of colonialism

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are denounced. To transform the “reality” we live in, it is imperative to know how to generate alternative knowledge and build new hegemonies. However, in order to produce such novel knowledge firstly we need to problematize the consent of dominated people and trust the potential of collective struggles. Finally, as we shall see in the next section, for all this to happen, we need to critically reflect on the role of language and discourse.

HATE AND VIOLENCE, MEDIATED BY LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE To a greater or lesser extent, every chapter in this section illustrates how the coloniality of knowledge and power function. Coining these terms, Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000, 2007) elucidates how the legacy of colonialism survives within the domains of knowledge and power and explains the lived experiences of colonized peoples. The term “coloniality of knowledge” refers to the production of knowledge within the context of the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism on Latin America and other colonized areas, which prescribes value to certain peoples/ societies while disenfranchising others. Through the imposition of these hierarchies, power is exercised, and colonial subjects are turned into victims of another form of coloniality, the coloniality of being. Although the colonial system has been and is still very efficient in creating this mechanism of knowledge production and exercise of power, it is not exclusive to colonial logic. Rather, under other forms of government, and in all circumstances, exploitation, domination, and subjection require the production of knowledge that rationalizes and justifies the ways in which power is exercised. However, to be materially possible, the power/knowledge dyad needs a third axis, discourse. It is in discourse that knowledge is produced and circulated, and it is through discourse that particular forms of power are exercised. From this perspective, discourse goes from being understood as a “mirror of reality” to being understood as social action: every discursive practice may create, reinforce or question the present status quo and the hegemonic values that underpin it. Therefore, it is urgently necessary to explore the connections between discourse, knowledge and power, on the one hand, and language on the other. As for language, as the chapters collected in this part of the volume show, it is an effective mechanism available for enacting different forms of power. For that reason, we should seek to understand how this dynamic has come into being, at different moments in history and in different political geographies. The authors’ contributions to this line of thought are undoubtedly very illuminating and offer a deep understanding of the role of language and discourse on political rationalities (nation-state and colonial rationalities, in this case), which are conceptualized as a set of logics by which politics and forms of government are able to rule at specific times and places. The first element that stands out in this understanding of the role of language and discourse is what Foucault termed “discursive formation.” This refers to a large body of knowledge within which we can discover a set of “discursive regularities” (Foucault’s 1969, 62). These regularities can include references to the same objects, types of statements, concepts, or thematic choices, as those we find in the discourses of coloniality, including the construction of the subaltern, or the creation of “the enemy” during war. These regularities can, in fact, be traced among the discourses analyzed here, which are

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produced in different enunciative conditions but have, to some extent, similar effects with regard to power. Following this line of thought, I understand the “Doctrine of Discovery”, presented by Mutu, as a discursive formation that illustrates how knowledge is produced within “old international legal construct” (this volume, p. 138). This doctrine “purports to give Europeans who practice the Christian religion the right to ‘discover’ new territories and dispossess, enslave and commit genocide against peoples who were not White and not Christian in order to take over their territories” (Mutu, this volume, p. 138). In relation to power, “this doctrine entails a process of dehumanization, which involved seizing ‘native’ histories and representing them as backward, depraved and savage, awaiting the arrival of European civilization” (Boucher 2019, 1). This knowledge about the subaltern and their history has been produced by religious institutions (doctrine) but also by disciplines (law, medicine, linguistics, psychology, etc.), which have classified individuals as human, non-human, mad, sick, lazy, savages, barbarians, criminals, or even bad mothers. This has allowed and continues to allow institutions to keep an individualized record of people’s capacities, character, educational qualifications, illnesses, sexuality, languages, and “corrupt” ways of speaking. This disciplinary knowledge manages to justify the use of correlative disciplinary techniques and violence against individuals, collectives, and even nations in a given time and place, as part of the governing of the population. For example, Johnson analyzes the case of indigenous mothers, who were presented as incapable of raising children worthy of the settler state. Once this discourse passes as truth, it justifies both the physical and symbolic colonial violence that is exercised through government policies, institutions and interpersonal relationships. The discursive formation of “bad faith” in Spain and France has similar effects. It turns Spanish and French Muslims, particularly those of an immigrant background, into threats. This doctrine has recently developed a new central focus at the intersection of education, language, and religion, which García Sánchez and Tetreault call “Islamo-Linguisto-Phobia,” which also promotes disciplinary techniques of power by means of which these groups are subjected to pervasive surveillance and violence, as demonstrated by the recent widespread surge in Islamophobic hate crimes. Within this context, producing alternative knowledge necessarily requires questioning these discursive formations and generating others. This process is far from simple. Discursive formations, according to Michel Foucault (1994, 670), enter the “game of truth and falsehood” and appear as true at a particular time and place (regardless of their form, that is, moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). As Conrad reveals in her chapter, facts that are inconvenient to a certain communal narrative rarely seem to challenge the existing narrative or lead to justice. As a result, efforts to generate and legitimize alternative discursive representations of people and events—like, for instance, calculating accurate statistics on numbers of deaths or establishing accountability in criminal trials—often fail to create an alternative interpretation and instead only seem to reinforce difference, thus becoming bones of contention regarding claims to victimhood that nonetheless fail to question the underlying discourse framework. Conrad explains how these games of truth and falsehood restrict the acceptance of information revealed by truth-finding initiatives such as the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or the Research and Documentation Center (RDC) in Sarajevo. Acceptance of the data constructed by these organizations depends substantially in these cases on respondents’ ethnic affiliation, a marker that influences the degree to which groups of people take for granted or question the information provided.

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The examined discursive formations produce knowledge that goes beyond creating and maintaining an “enemy” or a “sub-altern”: The menacing presence of the enemy creates the conditions for a permanent discourse that establishes coherence for the system itself. Thus, the construction of migrants, colonized peoples, religious and ethnic minorities, people with a marginalized social and economic position or with dissident sexual orientations becomes “convenient” and necessary. The image constructed by these discursive formations, which incarnate the enemies and assign them features such as injustice, pitilessness, irrationality and wildness, give the illusion that colonizing and dominant societies, which are themselves governed by violence and oppression, are instead ruled by principles of reason, justice and respect for nations and human beings. Only by opposition can the attribution of similar characteristics to both a “them” and an “us” be sustained, and typological differences that are pure nonsense can be established. As a result of such polarization, whether implicitly or explicitly articulated, the presumed rationality of one makes the other’s civilization appear irrational. In the cases studied in part II, the exclusion of “others” orients emotions toward them and, above all, justifies war, colonization, social exclusion, and marginalization (Martín Rojo 1995). Polarization opposes an “us,” white, civilized, who have created an orderly, efficient, prosperous world, and a “them,” of color, anomic and uncivilized. This reifying effect of polarization is attested in the persistent use by upper-middle-class families in Rio de Janeiro, studied by Roth-Gordon, of the expression “lá é outro mundo (it’s a different world over there)” (this volume, p. 167). However, the destructive and annihilating effects of this polarization and the hatred it exudes are unbearable for both victims and perpetrators. Conrad opens the question of whether, in post-conflict societies, it is even possible to tell the truth, acknowledging that truth-telling is always situated in specific relationships and circumstances which could threaten—or be threatened by—too much truth. Revealing or concealing truths is not usually an all-or-nothing calculus, but a matter of delicate negotiation that has real consequences (Villa-Vicencio 2006). Bosnians, for instance, do not proactively attempt to transform the basis of their relationship, to address grievances, or to find healing, even in the microcosm of the family. On the contrary, everyday practices of looking the other way, talking about the weather, joking, and holding one’s tongue, for example, allow them to go on about their daily lives as if there were no conflict and convey resignation toward the way things are. Beyond discourse, languages and how they are conceptualized and managed also play a significant role in the production of knowledge and in the exercise of power. In fact, all the processes we are studying are mediated by language. Foucauldian theory did not address this point, which also receives less attention from grassroots initiatives and social movements, even though it was considered a key tool by which settlers imposed colonial rule. The declared war against languages, such as Arabic, Maori, and indigenous languages in the Americas are good examples of the sort of linguistic colonization that has happened everywhere in the world (Heller and McIhinny 2017). In fact, the vision of language that settlers held, as Johnson describes, seems to have been closed to that of linguistic relativism, which they used to their advantage and led them to atrocious practices, such as removing Indigenous children from their families. “Deslenguadas” (with their tongues torn out), as Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) painfully describes, they would not be able to learn their traditions, language, and culture. Depriving populations of their language and preventing its transmission result from an unequal distribution of symbolic and material resources that reinforces cultural asymmetry: it is stated that

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the colonizers have languages with history, while the languages of the colonized are represented as inferior. Furthermore, language eradication reinforces social asymmetries: if speakers lose their languages, by correlation they lose access to different institutions and social fields where the colonizing language is imposed (school, administration of justice, government, etc.). It is precisely within these institutions that the narratives of inferiority are constantly reproduced and legitimated without contestation. As such, the unequal distribution of resources also leads to a lack of recognition which sustains the fiction that the colonizers are superior on a spectrum of civility that is constructed as true. Thus, policies of negation, suppression, and removal of nondominant languages are based on the assumption that, without their heritage language, children would be more easily acculturated to European ideals of being and so adopt European customs, even though, as Johnson argues, they would never be viewed as equal. The persistence of the belief that it is necessary to exterminate the Other’s languages in order to neutralize their possibilities of resistance to exploitation, domination, and subjugation is strikingly alive in relation to migrants of Arab origin. Emerging forms of Islamophobic discourses center upon locating the threat of religious radicalization in the Arabic language itself (Barontini 2017), which is presented as a risk to other languages, their speakers and the “European way of life.” Both right-wing political rhetoric and online fearmongering collude to frame the extreme exclusion of Arabic and its erasure from public schools as the only “solution” to the “problem” of Islamic radicalization. Similarly, in Mutu’s chapter, beyond the negation, suppression and removal of the Maori language, we find a detailed description of linguistic fraud, a quintessential example of language appropriation, through what she calls the Humpty Dumpty principle. This principle relies on the appropriation of the meaning of different terms in the language of the colonized. For instance, in the translation of English documents into Maori, terms meant just what British representatives chose them to mean because they attributed to themselves the position of the masters. Mutu documents several myths and lies that can be traced back to the mistranslations and misrepresentations of early British immigrants, including missionaries, and still persist to this day. Bruce Biggs (1989) had already identified a number of mistranslations in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the 1840 Maori language treaty between Maori representatives and the British Crown which recorded the agreement that British Queen would govern her own lawless subjects while Māori retained overall power and sovereignty. Several Māori words in Te Tiriti were assigned meanings that they do not have. Mutu has documented further examples in other nineteenth-century documents, including the 1835 declaration of Māori sovereignty. When British immigrants embarked on large-scale land grabbing, some of the early thefts were recorded in Māori language documents which were accompanied by purportedly accurate English translations. These contained serious mistranslations, which immigrants later relied on to steal Māori’s land. In Mutu’s words, “the same behavior can be seen today as the New Zealand state continues to misrepresent its actions that dispossess and oppress Māori in order to maintain White control” (this volume, p. 148). Having examined the role of language and discourse in the production of knowledge and in the exercise of power, it is worth asking what can be done to build more just societies and to what extent a volume such as this one can contribute to that goal.

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THE EFFECTS OF DOMINATION ON SUBJECTS AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RESISTANCE AND COLLECTIVE ACTION The contributions within this part of the volume allow us to interrogate the extent to which knowledge produced and disseminated in a book like this can push us toward a more just society. However, acting to transform requires a priori identification of a situation that is both undesirable and inherently unjust. The contexts described by Conrad, García-Sánchez and Tetreault, Johnson, Mutu, and Roth-Gordon, fully correspond to this consideration. However, this is still not necessarily the hegemonic interpretation today. Indeed, it may be controversial among privileged social groups where inequality may still be considered a natural occurrence, or the fruit of a misfortune, or an unchangeable state of affairs (Gamson 1992). Thus, for the will to transform and overcome states of domination, exploitation, and subjugation to take root in the collective, we must question these kinds of interpretations that position oppression as part of the natural order of things. From this perspective, the analysis and problematization of discursive formations such as the “Doctrine of Discovery” acquire an unexpected transcendence. As a result, other worlds can be prefigured, alternative knowledge can be generated, and the correlative techniques of power can be subverted. The term “problematization” refers, in this context, to a procedure to be followed by researchers, social movements, and individuals in general, whereby the primary task consists mainly in calling into question taken-for-granted assumptions and identities involved in the construction of inequality. The principal targets of this problematizing approach are “the apparently self-evident assumptions of a given form of life and the (supposedly) natural or inevitable and unchangeable character of given identities” (Geuss 2002, 211). As I have done in this essay, it is necessary to examine the discourses through which these understandings have emerged and to question them, to interrogate them. Through this approach, it becomes possible to highlight the techniques of knowledge production and how they cannot be separated from the techniques of domination: that is, how these “problems” are treated in each time and place, such as how violence against the other is “treated/handled,” and how the discourses that justify these forms of treatment are controlled (Martín Rojo 2022). From this critical position, we can carry out a genealogy of mentalities as well as interrogate how these become political rationalities that shape and explain forms of exploitation, domination, and subjection. It is here that we can capture both the social and political function of problematization and situate our work as researchers. The function of problematization, as Díaz Marsá (2008) points out, is not to lead others by telling them where the truth is and how to find it. It is, on the contrary, to create the conditions for other pronouncements, other interpretations, and to liberate the judgment of citizens to stimulate a decision that all people must make for themselves. It is clear that discourses of coloniality, and specifically the discovery doctrine, are encountering more and more resistance in our world, as is shown by the increasing destruction of the symbols of colonial imposition, from the annulment of settlers’ right to name peoples and territories to the renaming of New Zealand with the Māori name of Aotearoa. Equivalent examples are multiplying today, such as the increasingly frequent boxing up, spray-painting, or beheading of statues and monuments that have long honored racist figures in different parts of the world. However, much remains to be

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done, especially now with the rise of the alt-right that is reopening a cultural war against the reinterpretation of the colonial past and coloniality. In this line, the scholars in this volume do not limit themselves to describing the state of events but also aim to actively intervene in transforming them. Thus, two of the authors give an account in their texts of how they act in the world to confront social injustices mediated by language. Mutu reports how she has become involved in legal battles to rebut mistranslated treaties and the threats and attacks that this has brought her, and Johnson uses bead workshops and burlesque performances to put an end to the misinformation and abuse that indigenous women have been suffering for a long time. Moreover, the will to transform and overcome states of inequality also requires the problematization of the discursive representation of people and the questioning of categories that classify, racialize, and degrade the exploited, the dominated and the subjugated. The very relevance of the axes that make up the racial, political, and social hierarchical order and that give meaning to these categories must be questioned. Social actors are constituted, on the basis of gender, race, class, indigeneity and/or religion, as inferior, excluded, wholly other or simply invisible; in other words, as less than full partners in social interaction, which leads to misrecognition and status subordination (Fraser 2000). Misrecognition, according to Fraser, does not mean the depreciation and deformation of group identity, but social subordination—in the sense of being prevented from participating as a peer in social life. Relatedly, in Fraser’s words: “to redress this injustice still requires a politics of recognition, but in the ‘status model’ this is no longer reduced to a question of identity: rather, it means a politics aimed at overcoming subordination by establishing the misrecognized party as a full member of society, capable of participating on a par with the rest” (2000, 107). From this perspective, misrecognition is an institutionalized relationship of social subordination. Therefore, being misrecognized does not simply mean being misthought of, disregarded or devalued in the attitudes, beliefs or representations of others. Rather, it is the denial of full membership in social interaction. Therefore, we must transform the institutionalized patterns of linguistic and cultural value, particularly within Academia. Thus, other non-hegemonic voices must not only transmit their knowledge and their world understanding, but they must gain the same relevance and be afforded the same academic resources. This is precisely one of the values of this volume: to contribute to reclaiming a position previously questioned or denied (Martín Rojo 2021). Achieving this objective is no easy task. First, equal participation is impeded when some actors lack the necessary resources to interact with others as peers. In such cases, maldistribution constitutes an impediment to parity of participation in social life and thus results in forms of social subordination and injustice. Academics working from the periphery often lack access to the resources and spaces generated from and for the center, whether it be conferences, grants, or access to the hegemonic languages of academia. The global perspective chosen by the publishers of this volume is at once an example of both redistribution and recognition of status, moving at least one step in the direction toward justice. But there are other obstacles. Since the way in which individuals understand and relate to themselves is conditioned by the specific power structures in which they are socialized, attention to the effects of subjection is crucial. Subjection can limit participation not only from the outside but also from the inside. However, just as we have focused on how subjection produces subjects who struggle against misrecognition and the cultural patterns that degrade them, there are also procedures of self-transformation by which

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the subjects constitute themselves. They are, however, limited by the social conditions in which these capacities are formed and in which they are to be realized. Reaching for this self-transformation seems to be a necessary step in resisting the power structures we have examined in this essay. A prerequisite to resisting the devasting consequences of subalternizing discourses is to (re)claim our voices. In this sense, this volume can be understood as an act of self-recognition in its character as the result of power relations and a chain of successive problematizations. What the chapters reveal is the intention to show the genesis of our conceptions of ourselves in such a way as to reveal the points at which resistance is possible, as well as to mobilize the agency of others who identify with the same causes that we do.

NOTES 1. This paper has benefited from discussion with members of the MIRCo Research Center for Multilingualism, Discourse and Communication at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. 2. Defined by Bourdieu as “a form of power that is exerted on bodies, directly and as if by magic, without any physical constraint” (Bourdieu 2001, 37). 3. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault introduces the concept of “value-giving measure,” as part of normalizing judgment. Life necessarily involves moments of judgment that make people conform to or reduce to a norm or standard. Thus, a value-giving measure is a mechanism that draws the limits of conformity that a person must achieve.

REFERENCES Akram, S., G. Emerson, and D. Marsh (2015), “(Re)Conceptualising the Third Face of Power: Insights from Bourdieu and Foucault.” Journal of Political Power, 8 (3): 345–62. Anzaldúa, G. (1999), Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Barontini, A. (2017), “Un proche trop lointain: A propos de l’enseignement de l’arabe en France.” Moyen-Orient, 34: 52–3. Boucher, D. (2019), “Reclaiming History: Dehumanization and the Failure of Decolonization.” International Journal of Social Economics, 46 (11): 1250–63. Biggs, B. (1989), “Humpty Dumpty and the Treaty of Waitangi.” In I. H. Kawharu (ed.), Waitangi, 300–12, Auckland: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001), Masculine Domination, Stanford University Press. Díaz Marsá, M. (2008), “¿Qué quiere decir pensar? Acerca de la noción de problematización en Michel Foucault.” Daimon: Revista de Filosofía, 43: 51–70. Available online: bit​.ly​/2Z6v0​ Vf. Fanon, F. (1967), Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press. Foucault, M. (1969), L’archéologie du savoir, tome 1, Paris: Gallimard; [Archaeology of knowledge, London: Routledge, 2013]. Foucault, M. (1975), Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris: Gallimard; [Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin Books, 1991]. Foucault, M. (1982), “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, 8 (4): 777–95. Foucault, M. (1984), L’usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité, tome II, Paris: Gallimard; [The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality, vol. II, Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1986].

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Foucault, M. (1994), “Le souci de la verité.” In D. Defert, F. Ewald & J. Lagrage (eds.), Dits et écrits, vol. IV, 668–78, Paris: Gallimard. Fraser, N. (2000), “Rethinking Recognition.” New Left Review, 3: 107. Gamson, W. (1992), Talking Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R. (2002), “Genealogy as Critique.” European Journal of Philosophy, 10 (2): 209–15. Heller, M., and B. McElhinny (2017), Language, Capitalism, Colonialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Levinas, E. (1979), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, vol. 1, Luxemburg: Springer Science & Business Media. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007), “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3): 240–70. Martín Rojo, L. (1995), “Division and Rejection: From the Personification of the Gulf Conflict to the Demonization of Saddam Hussein.” Discourse & Society, 6(1): 49–80. Martín Rojo, L. (2021), “Hegemonies and Inequalities in Academia.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2021 (267–268): 169–92. Martín Rojo, L. (2022), “Power and the Role of Language.” Handbook of Pragmatics: 25th Annual Installment, 25: 107–28. Pinderhughes, Ch. (2011), “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism.” Socialism and Democracy, 25: 235–56. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/08854300​.2011​.559702. Quijano, A. (2000), “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from the South, 1 (3): 533–80. Quijano, A. (2007), “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, 21 (2–3): 168–78. Rutar, T. (2017), “Clarifying Power, Domination, and Exploitation: Between ‘Classical’ and ‘Foucauldian’ Concepts of Power.” Revija za sociologiju, 47 (2): 151–75. Villa-Vicencio, Ch. (2006), “The Politics of Reconciliation.” In T. A. Borer (ed.), Telling the Truths: Truth Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies, 59–81, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Decoding Globalized Interactions

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Chapter 11

Seafarers’ Talk about the “Good Ship” JOHANNA MARKKULA AND SONIA N. DAS .

INTRODUCTION I don’t like to go back to that system I started before, like, you know, that Spanish thing, Asian thing, captain is the captain, the hierarchies thing. Because when I was there just 2007 in the dry dock, one month, I noticed that the Singaporean bosses, every time we met in the alleyway, I was just saying: “Morning.” Well, I know that he expects me to bow, like I used to do, because I came from that kind of system from my first three ships. I was working with Koreans and one Japanese. But when I start with Swedish, well, it’s better to do like this, people are treated the same, you know. “Hi, hello,” just like that. You can call just by the name of the captain. (Markkula, interview with Filipino rating)1 This quote from an interview with a Filipino rating (non-officer) onboard a cargo ship shows how seafarers in the global shipping industry talk about communicative practices in the context of their global worksites. The maritime industry is crewed by workers from many different countries who live and work together in close proximity. In addition, ships are hierarchical worksites with defined ranks and roles onboard, which in turn come with certain expectations of what the right ways of interacting with others are. However, as the quote also highlights, there are cultural differences in seafarers’ understandings of how such hierarchies should be navigated and what is considered appropriate in terms of social interactions. Finally, the quote also offers an example of a moral evaluation of what we in this chapter conceptualize as the “good ship.” That is, for this sailor, “it’s better” when “people are treated the same,” when you can use informal language and even call your captain by their first name. This type of talk, we argue, exemplifies a vernacular discourse of “social justice” that is different from most activist and academic understandings of social justice. It also constitutes an example of what is referred to in linguistic anthropology as “language ideology” in that it comments on and evaluates what kind of communicative practices make a ship “good” in the contemporary political economy of global shipping. This chapter is a joint ethnographic study of talk and social justice at sea. We draw on ethnographic research onboard cargo ships of various vessel types, registries, and

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crew compositions, as well as research in and around ports, to explore how language intersects with economic and political processes integral to global shipping. By adopting a linguistic anthropological approach, we pay attention to how economic flows and forms of labor organization onboard ships both produce and disrupt the relationship between everyday interactions and language ideologies. Although this ethnographic research has been conducted separately, our shared focus on the inequalities of global capitalism, labor recruitment, social interaction, and mobility allows us to theorize the role of language in producing value at the scale of the global maritime industry. Markkula has carried out research on the maritime industry for over ten years. Her research focuses on the emerging forms of sociality onboard cargo ships with mixed national crews, and in particular, how people onboard negotiate and navigate their intercultural and multiethnic work sites. Her ethnographic research includes six months of participant observation onboard four different cargo ships where she worked as part of the crew. Being a crewmember allowed her to participate both in the everyday work of the ship as well as in the social life onboard. She also conducted life story interviews with crewmembers. In addition to her onboard fieldwork, she also did research for one year with maritime organizations and businesses in the Philippines, a major source country for contemporary maritime labor. This research phase included regular visits to maritime training centers and manning agencies as well as a three-month-long internship at MARINA, the Maritime Industry Authority of the Philippines. During this period, she also lived in a seafarers’ boarding house in Manila. Das conducted research at the Port of Montreal and the Port of NJ/NY. She volunteered with the Seamen’s Church Institute and the Montreal Mariner’s House and conducted routine visits on four single-nationality and seven multi-nationality ships at both ports to offer the crew counseling and religious services, sell phone cards, and drive seafarers to shops, restaurants, and tourist attractions at port and in the city. She interviewed ratings and officers about their language choices, their views on social interaction among crewmembers, and their education, training, and job mobility experiences. She spent time informally with seafarers during their coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and shopping excursions and accompanied several Protestant and Catholic chaplains on ship visits to understand the differences in the religious missions to seafarers. From this research, she has described the pervasiveness of a technocratic language ideology on ships that equates modernization with ICT-mediated talk. The chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, we give a brief background of the maritime industry, seafaring labor, and ships as global worksites. We then situate our intervention within the existing literature on social justice and address some of the particularities of language and social justice in the context of contemporary shipping and maritime labor. We explain how our linguistic anthropological approach and ethnographic material offer an on-the-ground look at the cultural and communicative practices of seafarers who are negotiating rank and other labor inequalities shaped by a neoliberal industry. The second section delves into our ethnographic material as we explore seafarers’ vernacular discourses of “just” and “fair” through everyday talk, discussions and evaluations of social injustices onboard, and how talk and interaction onboard ships are considered to impede or facilitate social justice within these frameworks. Our third section turns to examine language ideologies pertaining to making the “good ship,” which focuses on the pragmatic goal of making a tolerable and functioning social environment in a worksite that is organized according to racialized hierarchies and inequalities shaped by global shipping’s recruitment practices and labor politics.

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We conclude that shipping’s recruitment strategies of hiring diverse crews on unequal contracts compel workers to find ways to get along across such inequalities in order to make the ship workable and livable while at the same time hindering the in-depth social relations and intimate interactions that could lead to solidarities across ranks and nationalities. In this sense, the vernacular discourses of what is “just” and “fair” onboard ships and the language ideologies of the “good ship” are different from activist and academic understandings of social justice. As seafarers navigate and negotiate their working environment, they try to make a decent living situation through everyday interactions that focus on sociability and camaraderie as a means to making a “good ship.” This, we argue, often happens at the expense of organizing for social justice in the academic or activist sense of the term.

GLOBAL SHIPPING, MARITIME LABOR, AND LANGUAGE AT SEA In the global shipping industry of today, most ships sail with multilingual, multinational crews (Das 2019; Markkula 2011, 2018; Sampson 2013). Although cultural and linguistic diversity onboard ships is not something new (Broch and Jahr 1984; Delgado 2019; Drechsel 1999; Ghosh 2008; Khalili 2020; Linebaugh and Rediker 2000), over the last four decades, the shipping industry has increasingly come to rely on outsourced flexible labor, automation, and deregulation (Alderton et al. 2004; Cowen 2014; Das 2019; Khalili 2020; Leivestad and Markkula 2021; Markkula 2018, 2021a, 2021b; McKay 2014). This means that in the contemporary setting, crew diversity is organized according to neoliberal logics and practices that essentialize ethno-national differences in new ways and structure the localized hierarchies on ships according to global inequalities that can be interpreted as social injustices. One important development has been the increased use of so-called open registers, more popularly referred to as Flags of Convenience (De Sombre 2006; Van Fossen 2016). These are commercial flag registers that allow ship owners to register their ships under foreign flags that are more “convenient” in the sense of the regulations and taxes imposed. One benefit of these flags is that they exempt shipowners from restrictions on crew nationality. Whereas most “traditional” flags require crews to be drawn from the country of ownership and national registry, open registers do not impose such limitations, thereby giving shipowners the freedom to recruit their workforce from whatever countries they see fit. This means that today’s crews are typically composed of seafarers from different national backgrounds, with source countries such as the Philippines, Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia, China, Turkey, and India providing the majority of workers to the maritime industry (Alderton et al. 2004; McKay 2014). Enabled by these economic practices of “flagging out,” the preferential recruitment and strategic placement of sailors on ships by nationality exemplify a “divide and conquer” strategy that institutionalizes ethnic and racialized inequalities onboard, thereby discouraging the formation of cross-ethnic and cross-rank solidarities. Changes in the ethno-national composition of crews have also had effects on how hierarchy is organized onboard ships. The overt hierarchical shipboard organization includes the division of the crew into ranks (i.e., officers and ratings) and into departments (i.e., deck and engine), with distinct employment contracts and labor conditions. Whereas the historical literature on maritime labor has tended to assume that rank overrides ethnic, class, linguistic, and social differences, our ethnographic research on contemporary

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ships shows that hierarchies onboard are often mediated by language ideologies and crewmembers’ moral evaluations of appropriate social interaction. In addition, language and communication skills or the ability to convey obedience and respect constitute different kinds of commodities and values by which the recruitment and promotion of seafarers are differentiated. Specifically, higher ranks can be linked to competence in English (Sampson and Zhao 2003) or the national language of the ship (Das 2019). Less openly discussed differences include those introduced by the captain’s discretion or superior officers’ preferential or discriminatory treatment of their subordinates, often centering on language ideologies about the proper ways of interacting with others across ranks (Markkula 2018). These official and unofficial distinctions may, in turn, translate into differential access to occupational mobility and promotional opportunities, thereby introducing social injustices that pose challenges to the livability and workability of a ship.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND LANGUAGE AT SEA Social justice as a concept usually refers to institutionalized and activist responses to perceived political, economic, and social problems and inequalities encompassing race, education, health, law, and policy, among others (Avineri et al. 2019; Piller 2016). As Avineri et al. discuss, the concept of social justice emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to address common themes such as the distribution of resources, human rights, political representation, and social recognition for collective as well as individual rights (Avineri et al. 2019, 5). The present volume adds to this scholarship on social justice with many of its chapters (e.g., Karrebaek and Kirilov; Riley and Jourdan; Menna and Codó; Schein and Yang) centering post/colonial, intersectional, and ethnographic perspectives that highlight how language carries value to facilitate and challenge injustices. Such situated theoretical perspectives are also imperative for our understanding of how maritime labor is valued in terms of language and communication skills and the particular problems of social justice and language posed by ships as global worksites. Moreover, while previous scholarship on language and social justice has explored issues pertaining to rights, policies, and discourses (Avineri et al. 2019), it has often been nationally based and has not sufficiently considered how global capitalism organizes linguistic and cultural diversity. The global nature of the maritime industry and cargo ships with their multinational crews, racialized labor hierarchies, and unequal recruitment practices offer a particularly salient case for addressing this gap. The ethnographic study of ships and their crews provides important insights into how people perform power and hierarchy through language in ways that highlight the economically productive and disruptive intersections of the neoliberal and postcolonial in a global context. With a linguistic anthropological approach, we attend to how social justice takes on multiple meanings in specific contexts and how different genres of talk and communicative practices bring attention to injustices. The scholarship on language and political economy (Duchêne and Heller 2012; Gal 1989; Heller and McElhinny 2017; Irvine 1989; Piller 2016) and language and materiality (Keane 2008; Shankar and Cavanaugh 2017) suggests that communicative practices convey value through material affordances and aesthetic properties, the social organization of linguistic skills in workplaces, the commodification of language in economic exchange systems, and the reevaluation of language hierarchies in the context of political transformations. The ways seafarers negotiate power and inequality through everyday interactions that facilitate or challenge the racialization of

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laborers, rank disputes, contract inequalities, and other questions of rights onboard ships highlight issues of social (in)justice in a global perspective and emphasize the organizing role of political-economic processes, such as outsourcing and deterritorialization of labor markets and commodity flows. This chapter focuses on language and social justice in two different ways: everyday interactions and negotiations, which we conceptualize as vernacular discourses of what is “just” and “fair,” and language ideologies about the “good ship.” To discern how language relates to social activities, persons, institutions, and events, the concept of “language ideologies” (Irvine 1989; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998) has been used to demonstrate how language not only contributes to the reproduction of inequality but also how it can be a vehicle for social action and change. Our research on vernacular moral discourses and language ideologies investigates how crewmembers onboard ships organize, comment on, and negotiate different genres of talk in their everyday interactional practices and contexts, thereby showing how efforts to maintain a workable and livable ship environment—that is, “making the good ship”—are evaluated in morally and economically inflected ways. Due to the contradictions inherent to the logic of global capital, there are competing systems of value regarding what is considered economically and ethico-morally productive that are revealed through language, discourses, and interaction onboard ships.

VERNACULAR DISCOURSES OF “JUST” AND “FAIR” Structures of inequality due to the neoliberal politics in the shipping industry have become subject to seafarers’ negotiations over fair working conditions and a decent living environment. These negotiations are contextualized and embedded in social relations and vary significantly from ship to ship depending on variables such as crew composition (e.g., single-nationality versus multi-nationality crews), and they rely on reified categories and practical considerations of ethno-national differences. Our ethnographic research shows that everyday talk about the financial aspects of maritime labor, such as wages, salaries, contracts, and promotional opportunities, is animated by moral evaluations of the uneven distribution of resources between crewmembers of different backgrounds and linguistic skills. In this chapter, we conceptualize this kind of talk of what is “just” and “fair” as vernacular discourses of social justice onboard cargo ships. These discourses are directly influenced by differences in rank and opportunities for social mobility and how these map onto different ethno-national groups. In what follows, we explore several examples from onboard ships of how these negotiations unfold. On one ship where Markkula did research in 2009—a Swedish-flagged ship with ten Swedes and twenty Filipinos—tensions between crewmembers around what was perceived as unfair treatment were largely guided by nationality. For example, there were significant discrepancies in salaries, working conditions, and length of contracts. The Swedish crewmembers were hired on permanent contracts and paid a monthly salary, regardless of whether they were onboard or ashore. They worked on a so-called one-one system, spending five weeks onboard followed by five weeks of paid vacation. The Filipinos, on the other hand, were hired on a per-voyage basis. They typically had contracts lasting for six months, but once their contracts were finished, they were unemployed until being assigned to a new vessel by their manning agent in Manila. They, therefore, did not know whether or not they would be coming back to the same ship for their next assignment. More importantly, their future contracts depended on

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receiving good evaluations from their Swedish superior officers onboard. However, despite the different contracts, crewmembers of both nationalities dealt with a precarious employment situation since shipowners can sell or change the flag of their vessels, with little regard to how this impacts the crew’s employment. For example, when Markkula came onboard this particular ship, the owner had just announced to the crew that it was going to change the flag to an open register, a so-called Flag of Convenience. This meant that the Swedish crewmembers were expected to lose their positions as crew onboard and be replaced with additional Filipino workers. The Swedish crewmembers described this as “unfair” because they claimed that the ship “belonged to them” and that they cared more about the ship than the Filipino workers who only had temporary contracts. The Filipinos, some Swedish crewmembers believed, were “only in it for the money,” whereas the Swedes generally had a different affective relationship with the vessel, expressed as feelings of love and care for the ship. In this context, discussions about unequal monetary benefits for the same job became sources of tension between the Swedish and Filipino workers. One Swedish rating asked Markkula, “They live in mansions, and I live in a small one-bedroom apartment, is that fair?” He pointed out that “the Filipinos make ten times my salary” when adjusting for the costs of living. According to him, in order to be fair, the crewmembers’ salaries should differ based on the living standards of the countries of residence. However, if the Swedish seafarers were to be paid more, the company would be incentivized to hire Filipinos instead to lower labor costs, which is, in fact, what happened with the flag change as the Swedish rating did later lose his position onboard. Interestingly, a Filipino rating made the opposite argument, claiming that Filipino seafarers who make less money than European seafarers for the same job face discrimination. In his view, international unions should create a standardized system of salaries for seafarers regardless of their nationality. Yet, if the salaries were exactly the same for seafarers regardless of nationality, there would be little incentive for shipping companies to change flags and employ foreign seafarers on their ships. This would leave Filipino seafarers limited to domestic employment where job opportunities are fewer and salaries and standards are much lower. Moreover, the differences in contracts contributed to divergent interactional strategies for promotion onboard the ship. As the Filipinos depended on their Swedish superiors’ approval for being rehired on the same ship for future contracts, they were careful not to upset or offend their officers. Around the dinner table of the Swedish officers, Markkula heard Filipinos described as bootlicking. One officer explained, “They are so worried all the time . . . that we will dislike them and stuff. They often come storming in here in the cabin to ‘brief’ and check that everything is ok.” Swedish officers and ratings with permanent contracts preferred a more direct way of talking. While Swedes criticized Filipinos for being obsequious and fawning with their superiors, Filipinos found it unfair that Swedes could behave in ways that were not acceptable for the Filipinos. There are also significant differences in expressions and interpretations of hierarchy. For example, Northern European officers often expect ratings to show initiative and ability to act independently and even to question their superiors’ decisions in cases where mistakes are made. While it is important to know one’s place in the hierarchy, Northern seafarers prefer a certain expression of pride and integrity (Markkula 2018), and the performance of subservience is often seen in these contexts as fake niceness, while the person performing it is perceived as a worker who cannot be trusted. Eastern European officers, on the other hand, tend to see questioning of superiors as insubordination, a lack of respect for authority, and a failure to comply with the onboard hierarchy. For instance,

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one Polish captain told Markkula that any questioning of a superior’s authority equals mutiny (Markkula 2018). In maritime education and training centers in the Philippines, seafarers are often explicitly taught the “intercultural skills” deemed necessary to navigate these different expectations in the performance of hierarchy and crew organization onboard ships (Markkula 2021b).2 Competing ideologies about the moral attributes of shipboard talk are also linked to divergent career trajectories. Das’s (2019) research onboard multinational ships suggests that English language abilities are critical to climbing the ranks and being promoted to officer. In this regard, Filipino sailors are seen as being at an advantage compared to seafarers of other ethno-national backgrounds, such as Eastern Europeans. The ability to communicate in the same national or local language as the captain or chief mate and to socialize with other officers informally can also play an important role in affording opportunities for promotion. For example, on another of Markkula’s field-ships, all the officers onboard were of different Eastern European nationalities, whereas most of the ratings were from the Philippines. There was only one junior Filipino officer. Rather than taking his meals in the officer’s mess, he ate together with the other Filipinos in the crew mess. The rationale given by the leadership onboard was that this officer would be more “comfortable” eating with his compatriots, as well as eating Filipino food. This, however, had consequences for his promotional prospects as his placement with the ratings instead of with his officer colleagues restricted his access to opportunities to advance in rank through informal dinner conversations and sociality. In addition, many Filipino seafarers who had trained as officers and had passed their board exams still ended up working as ratings. Filipinos often felt that European cadets and junior officers would climb the ranks much faster than non-Europeans. Europeans were imagined to start off their first contracts as third mates, renew their second contracts as second mates, and then be promoted to chief mates within just a couple of years, while Filipinos could remain as junior officers for years without getting promoted. The only solution to this glass ceiling seemed to be to move from a multinational ship to a single-nationality vessel. For example, one Filipino captain whom Markkula interviewed had switched from a Japanese-owned multinational ship to a ship with a full Filipino crew where Tagalog was spoken (Markkula 2021b). Reflecting on his experiences, he stated, “I remained a third officer with hard work and low salary for so many years, whereas my Japanese colleagues advanced rapidly in the ranks.” Similarly, one Filipino chief officer working on a single nationality ship explained to Das (2019) that he did not want to join a multinational ship despite its better amenities due to the opportunities for promotion and social interaction in Tagalog on his ship. The choice between a single nationality and a multinational ship and the everyday discussions and disagreements about differences in contracts, wages, linguistic abilities, and promotional experiences illustrate that interpretations of inequality are based on positionality, defined both by rank and nationality. Therefore, notions of “fairness” and “justness” suggest that a rights-based framework does not capture the transience and precarity of a deterritorialized global worksite. Crew diversity and the institutionalization of differential contracts and conditions by nationality are strategically used by shipowners and management to undermine attempts by workers to organize for labor rights and collective bargaining. This means that justice onboard the ship often remains at the level of inter-group arguments about inequalities between crewmembers rather than for them to come together as a collective to demand better working conditions from their employers.

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LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES OF THE “GOOD SHIP” We now turn to issues of how language and social justice intersect on ships by focusing on language ideologies and exploring how people comment on the different genres of talk that are perceived to make a ship “good.” In some cases, language ideologies mediate issues of social justice by linking everyday interactions to the political economy of the global shipping industry. These ideologies also comment on the moral dimensions of interactions to structure and thus contribute to, or detract from, the sociable living and working environment. Interactional strategies take on differential value in achieving what seafarers conceptualize as the good ship. While definitions of the good ship vary, many of them index styles of interaction characterized as camaraderie, friendliness, and conviviality. Others include the notion of good leadership as the ability of captains and officers to reflect upon and create opportunities for social interaction and an environment conducive to sociability, such as through social activities, visits from outsiders, leisure, and eating. In our ethnographic research, we found that good food and crew are sometimes used as a shorthand for a good ship. For example, the chief officer on one of Markkula’s field ships introduced the ship to Markkula in the following terms: “It’s a good ship. The food is good. Crew is good.” Seafarers also pointed to small pleasures such as barbecues, karaoke, basketball, shore leaves, or the possibility to talk to family as contributing to to making life onboard more tolerable. These were the “little things” that determined whether a contract felt short or insufferably long and whether a ship was a “happy ship” or not (Markkula 2018). The captain plays a key role in shaping and evaluating the types and frequency of social interactions onboard the ship. A Sri Lankan captain on a multinational ship with other South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino crewmembers told Das that he enjoyed making jokes in different languages and lending out money to his crew to buy SIM cards and go shopping ashore. In another case, the captain’s discretion instead limited social interactions. Markkula encountered one captain who, upon being assigned to the ship, immediately restricted the crewmembers’ privileges, such as having parties, using the internet, going on shore leave, enjoying karaoke, and playing basketball. As the austerity measures added up, one Filipino rating muttered, “Lahat ay bawal” (everything is forbidden, in Tagalog). Talk on this ship focused on the leadership, who were seen as overworking the crew. One Filipino rating stated to Markkula: “The officers now on this ship, they only want us to work, work, work. Puro trabaho dito [only work here, in Tagalog].” Other moral evaluations of leadership styles include discussions of how leaders give orders, talk to subordinates, and manage meetings, as well as their interactions with office representatives, ship agents, or port authorities ashore. Ship captains, industry leaders, and port officials acknowledge that the lack of social interaction and camaraderie onboard ships may have adverse effects on crewmembers’ productivity. To remedy this, they welcome visitors from seafarer centers and other welfare organizations located at port, including Christian maritime ministries providing pastoral care, to visit ships and talk to seafarers about their problems or create socializing opportunities among the crew. Historically, maritime ministries have provided sacraments to seafarers, who were historically depicted as a “godless lot” (Miller 2012, 106). Starting in the nineteenth century, Protestant and Catholic priests traveled aboard ships to distribute Bibles, prayer books, homilies, and psalms printed in different languages to be read aloud on ships for entertainment and Christian enlightenment (Das 2019). By the end of the century, Protestant ministries saw Bible reading among seafarers as

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“barrier[s] to reaching Christian truths” (24) and instead favored face-to-face talk and ship visitations. In 1949, when the International Transport Federation began approving only one grant per port for religious missions, Catholic and Protestant ministries put aside their differences and started to work together ecumenically. Their collaborations now jointly emphasize ship visits and the therapeutic properties of talk as the most efficient strategy for seafarers’ mental health. The Episcopalian Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI), located in a newly renovated hospitality center at Port Newark, provides “concierge services” for seafarers and longshoremen who visit the center. Although the Episcopalian chaplains occasionally bless ships and cargo and raise funds by selling phone cards or sermonizing at local churches, their primary responsibility is to talk to seafarers aboard cargo ships (Das 2019). At the Mariners’ House in Montreal, multifaith volunteers drive seafarers around the city, socialize with them at the center or onboard ships, and sell phone and SIM cards. Both centers offer religious services, if requested, in different languages. Whereas the Catholic priest at the Mariner’s house listened to the confessions of crewmembers and provided counseling about marital problems, depression, and addiction, the Protestant chaplain at the Seamen’s Church Institute, who is from the Philippines and speaks Tagalog, sought to create a convivial atmosphere but neglected to sell SIM cards. A visit with this chaplain ranged from thirty minutes to three hours, depending on work schedules and his rapport with the particular crew. On one visit, his ribald jokes and a controversial discussion of the American and Philippine presidential elections extended the duration of the visit from lunch through coffee (Das 2019). The practice of food sharing is central to sociality, and Das sought to plan her visits to coincide with coffee and lunch breaks to maximize opportunities to talk with off-duty seafarers. When visiting a multinational ship crewed by Bulgarian officers and Filipino ratings during lunchtime, she was escorted to the officers’ table at the mess hall and saw that most of the Filipino ratings were seated together at separate tables. The chief mate discussed the lack of camaraderie between officers and ratings as being due to his lack of knowledge of Tagalog and the ratings’ lack of familiarity with Bulgarian. It is common practice for seafarers on multinational ships to show politeness or friendliness by learning a few words and phrases in the crewmembers’ different languages, something that the chief mate had tried to do to show respect to the Filipinos (Das 2019). Some seafarers referred to their friendships on multinational ships as more authentic and meaningful compared to those forged on single nationality ships and valued even such minimal efforts of friendliness as helpful for making the ship “good.” On another multinational ship with officers and ratings having separate messrooms, European officers were referred to as “potato eaters,” whereas the Asian ratings who mostly socialized together were “rice eaters.” Separate tables may be designated for different ethno-national groups based on their culinary preferences, such as on a multinational ship where Croatian, Montenegrin, and Polish officers ate pasta together, and halal meals were served to the Indonesian and Samoan ratings (Das 2019). Yet, when food sharing was restricted by the captain’s discretion, people hid drinks and snacks in their cabins for more selective gatherings, spending time in their private cabins with only their closest group of friends instead of in the common crew dayroom (Markkula 2018). In all these examples, talk among seafarers is conceptualized as conducive to making a “good ship.” However, talk can also be conceived as disruptive to sociability. Sometimes seafarers expressed that they were afraid to let things out “in the open” and thereby “rock the boat.” As one experienced seafarer explained,

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Yeah, because you know, people here are avoiding conflicts. People onboard ships, they are avoiding to . . . you know . . . it’s very scary for us, to rock the boat, as . . . figuratively. The thinking is, if you say something, it might “rock the boat.” It might open something up that would give more friction than solve it. So most of the time, the people don’t . . . so it’s really, really hard. (Markkula, interview with Filipino rating) While too much talk, especially gossiping about other crewmembers behind their backs, was generally perceived as a problem onboard, it was sometimes seen as a way of building alliances among the crew. As one crewmember expressed it rather cruelly, “The best way is to find someone to hate together.” However, although this kind of venting could serve as an outlet to ease crewmembers’ frustrations, most seafarers identified such “talk,’’ as they called it, as disruptive to harmony among the crew and something to avoid. One young seaman stated, “If there is one thing that I have learned here, it is to keep my mouth shut.” When people discussed friendships onboard, they tended to understand these as limited to the time shared onboard, serving an instrumental purpose to improve their well-being and mental health in a socially isolating environment. For example, one Filipino rating on one of Markkula’s field ships explained: Friendship here is very transient also. I mean, you are here, close for one year, or ten months, or six months, and then you go to another ship separately, so you lose him again, you lose your friend again, you form another friendship. It’s very loose. It’s very transient. You don’t form a close friendship that lasts because you lose touch with each other. (Markkula, interview with Filipino rating) There was also an understanding of these relations as limited not just temporally but also in terms of depth. For example, as another Filipino rating explained, “for most of us, the socializing we do is like . . . how could I explain this? You are socializing like drinking . . . karaoke . . . But, if you mean sharing personal things, personal feelings, something like this, I don’t know about this.” A common expression onboard ships, “friendship ends at the gangway,” suggests that fleeting and superficial relationships are intended to help pass the time rather than build durable relationships. In short, the neoliberalization of the maritime industry, with its hallmark of short-term, flexible contracts, has shaped how friendliness, rather than enduring friendships, is enacted and negotiated through talk and informs language ideologies about making the “good ship.” What we are discovering through these language ideologies is that there is a strong focus on friendliness, getting along, and not disrupting social cohesion by “rocking the boat.” All of these interactional practices are crucial to the functioning of work on the ship and, thus, also to the generation of economic value in the context of global shipping in terms of maintaining logistical flows and meeting just-in-time schedules. The flip side of this, which is also to the benefit of capitalism, is that people do not form close relationships that enable solidarities with possibilities for real social action in the activist social justice sense of the term.

CONCLUSION Approaches to social justice in linguistic anthropology focus on how communicative practices refer to, contextualize, and create or limit possibilities for challenging or reproducing social injustices. When such social injustices are contextualized in a global

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perspective, as we have done here, one begins to notice the organizing role of politicaleconomic processes, such as the outsourcing and deterritorialization of labor markets and commodity flows, for determining the forms of sociality and solidarity that are possible. As shipowners strategically use different flags and practices of labor outsourcing to create economically productive assemblages of crews that are cheap, flexible, and collaborative, they also simultaneously produce divisive social relations. Differential recruitment strategies, unequal hiring practices, and different pay scales and contracts determined by nationality lead to multinational crews with embedded conflicts of interest as seafarers within the same crew are pitted against one another in direct competition for positions and power. Our joint ethnographic study of ships as global worksites, we argue, reveals different entanglements of language and social justice that are not well captured by activist and academic notions of social justice. We have identified different genres of talk and interactional practices associated with making the “good ship” and how these are evaluated by crewmembers. Vernacular discourses of the “just” and the “fair” and language ideologies focusing on making the ship “good” are (re)constituted through interactions among crewmembers in terms that index camaraderie, respect, harmony, and productivity. The ship needs to be “just,” “fair,” and “good,” but only to the extent that it makes the ship workable and livable. In short, seafarers favor day-to-day sociability and well-being, but, in doing so, they forego the types of relationships that would enable them to organize for more sustained labor rights. When crewmembers limit their interactions to friendly talk, they are unlikely to form collective responses to social injustices and discriminatory practices onboard. In conclusion, what this means is that shipping companies’ recruitment strategies deter solidarity among workers and limit their possibilities for social action and demands for better working conditions and contracts. Shipping companies and other actors in the maritime industry have economic interests in seeking laborers from around the world who are willing to accept unfavorable working conditions, who know how to collaborate and get along well enough for the ships’ logistical operation to function smoothly, and who limit their demands for a “just,” “fair, and “good” ship to one that is livable and workable, but without making substantial claims to social change in the industry. Similarly, the pastoral care offered by Christian missionaries alleviates the symptoms of seafarers’ suffering but without addressing the underlying causes. Our ethnographic research on seafarers as a precarious workforce thus shows how language, in the form of everyday interactions, vernacular discourses, and language ideologies, is integral to the workings of the political and economic context of shipping, thereby constituting a productive force in global capitalism.

NOTES 1. Unless otherwise indicated, quotes are in original language 2. The teaching of intercultural skills has grown with globalization.

REFERENCES Alderton, T., M. Bloor, E. Kahveci, T. Lane, H. Sampson, M. Thomas, N. Winchester, B. Wu, and M. Zhao (2004), The Global Seafarer: Living and Working Conditions in a Globalized Industry, Geneva: ILO.

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Avineri, N., L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa, eds. (2019), Language and Social Justice in Practice, New York: Routledge. Broch, I., and E. Jahr (1984), “Russenorsk: A New Look at the Russo-Norwegian Pidgin in Northern Norway.” Scandinavian Language Contacts, 21: 65. Cowen, D. (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Das, S. (2019), “The Unsociability of Commercial Seafaring: Language Practice and Ideology in Maritime Technocracy.” American Anthropologist, 121 (1): 62–75. Delgado, S. (2019), Ship English: Sailors’ Speech in the Early Colonial Caribbean, Berlin: Language Science Press. De Sombre, E. (2006), Flagging Standards : Globalization and Environmental, Safety and Labor Regulations at Sea, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Drechsel, E. (1999), “Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific: Evidence for a Maritime Polynesian Jargon or Pidgin.” In J. Sato, J. Rickford, and S. Romaine (eds.), Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse: Studies Celebrating Charlene, 71–96, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Duchêne, A., and M. Heller, eds. (2012), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, New York: Routledge. Gal, S. (1989), “Language and Political Economy.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1): 345–67. Ghosh, A. (2008), “Of Fanas and Forecastles: The Indian Ocean and Some Lost Languages of the Age of Sail.” Economic and Political Weekly, 43 (25): 56–62. Heller, M., and B. McElhinny (2017), Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Irvine, J. T. (1989), “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist, 16 (2): 248–67. Keane, W. (2008), “Market, Materiality and Moral Metalanguage.” Anthropological Theory, 8 (1): 27–42. Khalili, L. (2020), Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, London: Verso. Kroskrity, P. V. (2000), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, Santa Fe: School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. Leivestad, H., and J. Markkula (2021), “Inside Container Economies.” Co-authored with Hege Høyer Leivestad. Focaal, 2021 (89): 1–11. Linebaugh, P., and M. Rediker (2000), The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon. Markkula, J. (2011), “‘Any Port in a Storm’: Responding to Crisis in the World of Shipping.” Social Anthropology, 19 (3): 297–304. Markkula, J. (2018), “Moving Worlds: Maritime Work and Life on the Social Ocean.” PhD Diss., Stanford University, Stanford. Markkula, J. (2021a), “Containing Mobilities: Changing Time and Space of Maritime Labor.” Focaal, 2021 (89): 25–39. Markkula, J. (2021b), “‘We Move the World’: The Mobile Labor of Filipino Seafarers.” Mobilities, 16 (2): 164–77. McKay, S. (2014), “Racializing the High Seas: Filipino Migrants and Global Shipping.” In J. Park and S. Gleeson (eds.), The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants, 155–76, New York: Routledge.

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Miller, R. W. H. (2012), One Firm Anchor: The Church and the Merchant Seafarer, an Introductory History, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, New York and London: Oxford University Press. Sampson, H. (2013), International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sampson, H., and M. Zhao (2003), ‘Multilingual Crews: Communication and the Operation of Ships.” World Englishes, 22 (1): 31–43. Shankar, S., and J. R. Cavanaugh (2017), “Toward a Theory of Language Materiality: An Introduction’. In J. R. Cavanaugh and S. Shankar (eds)., Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations, 1–28, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, B. B., K. A. Woolard, and P. V. Kroskrity, eds. (1998), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, New York and London: Oxford University Press. Van Fossen, A. (2016), “Flags of Convenience and Global Capitalism.” International Critical Thought, 6 (3): 359–77.

Chapter 12

Barcelona Street Vendors’ Voice and the Crossing of Narrative (B)Orders LAURA MENNA AND EVA CODÓ

INTRODUCTION: THE VALUE OF VOICE During the last election campaign in Barcelona (2019), irregular street vending was one of the most frequently discussed issues by mayoral candidates and journalists in interviews and debates, despite it not being by far the main worry for citizens, as polls showed (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019). The goal was to undermine the image of the then current mayor (from the Barcelona en Comú party, henceforth BeC, a citizen platform led by former activists), who stood for reelection, by accusing her of mismanaging “the problem” of street vending. This was clearly seen in a YouTube-broadcast debate1 organized by a Catalan (social) media-known human rights activist and MP for the Catalan Republican Party (ERC). Based on the agenda of “giving voice” to street vendors, the debate took place between five of the eight candidates (from center-right, centerleft and left-wing parties) and the Barcelona Street Vendors Union’s (henceforth SVU) spokespersons—all Senegalese black men. One of them reproached the mayor for not “having ever sat down to talk to us.” For the Union, “sitting down to talk” means having a voice that matters (Couldry, 2010) politically. In fact, most discussions about the significance of the Union are structured around the symbolic and practical affordances of having acquired “a voice.” As the same Union representative put it in one of our research interviews, “[before] we didn’t use to have a voice to denounce, we didn’t have a voice to speak, and now, since we’ve founded the Union, we already have a voice to denounce discrimination, persecution, racism” (interview, 6th July 2019).2 However, the committed listening that this political voice requires is something that the party in power (BeC) had failed to engage in. As a matter of fact, during their term of office, police pressure on street vending had increased rather than diminished. In the debate, the incumbent mayor candidate responded to her alleged refusal to engage in conversation with the Union by underplaying the police issue and claiming that she had put forth an innovative “social perspective” to street vending based on “seeing” the very people involved, their needs and social realities. She also made a point of distancing herself from the three conservative candidates, who had actually declined the invitation

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to participate in the debate, because they “dehumanize” the vendors by focusing on their illegal activity and refuse to “talk” to them. The absence in the debate of the conservative parties was seen as paradoxical because they were said to be the ones “who talked the most” about street vending. In the debate, then, the real battle over “talk” took place among parties on the left and at the center of the political spectrum. For one, the social democratic party candidate (PSC) began one of his contributions by arguing that “it was necessary to talk and look vendors in the eye.” He then went on to claim that Barcelona had a mayor who “doesn’t talk to vendors or business owners” (supposedly affected by street vending). Meanwhile, the Catalan Republican Party candidate (center-left) and main contender for the mayor, underlined the latter’s failed attempts at fruitful dialogue and insisted on politicians’ duty “to talk and listen to” street vendors in search for solutions. These claims were striking as they came from two of the parties that, in the previous term of office, had called for a “firm hand” and had demanded that “no concessions” be made to vendors. While it is only to be expected that conservative parties will not want to engage in any kind of talk with actors like the street vendors, for the progressive parties this comes at a cost; they are, therefore, forced to assume a voice-giving agenda. In this vignette, that agenda materialized in a race in which candidates tried to capitalize on their “willingness” to talk rather than on their actual practice and political responsibility of talking, listening, seeing or looking vendors “in the eyes.” This debate was, in fact, a profoundly unequal scenario. Speaking turns were unequally distributed. The Union had very little time to clearly state its demands and was given no space to respond to the politicians’ proposals and arguments (cf. section 4.1). This putative dialogue ended up banalizing what “talking to” or “being listened to” meant. The goal of having the vendors physically present in the debate appeared to serve the purpose of basically displaying candidates’ openness to conversing with them rather than having both parties equally participating in the event. In fact, the tightening of the repression of street vending right after the polls, which got the same mayor elected, proves that the will to “give vendors a voice” was clearly instrumentalized in the preelection context to confer legitimacy to progressive politicians’ stances. However, it is also true that the actual presence of the vendors was ambivalent in itself. The fact that their voice was hardly heard is telling of its value. Like a huge elephant in the room, it forced politicians to find a difficult balance between ignoring and acknowledging it. The willingness to “talk” that candidates fought over—and the fact that the debate itself took place—underlined their awareness of the potential value of the vendors’ voice, a value that was already recognized in wider social fields and that politicians attempted to capitalize on, govern, or discipline. That awareness explains, for example, the maneuvering that took place before the debate. Some candidates imposed conditions on their participation; others advertised their presence or absence; still, others kept their participation on hold until the last minute (as we could ethnographically attest). So, even if it was not heard, the Union’s voice seemed to somehow shape and push the debate forward. We hope our ethnographic vignette has shown the centrality of the voice as a key emic category that was widely used across the discursive space (Heller 2007). Its empirical saliency, and the multiple tensions that its heterogeneous interpretations and appropriations generated, compel us to position it as a central category for analysis whose circulation we can empirically trace. In this chapter, we will try to show to what extent the voice as a “potential for political action” (Arendt 2013) is interwoven with the SVU’s seeking of

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“material, cultural and political social justice” (Fraser 2009). To that end, we shall take some narrative elements, that is, manta (blanket), mantero (vendor), and cayuco (small boat), as analytical categories that we can follow through their embeddedness in various discursive encounters (section 4). Our purpose is to see in what ways what we shall call “hegemonic narrative (b)orders” attempt to subordinate that emergent voice that, in turn, pushes to cross, subvert or destabilize those same (b)orders. After the analysis of those encounters, we will move onto the examination of the discursive features of a particular entextualization of that voice, what we will refer to as “the story of the mantero” (section 5). By considering its material and political consequences, we will claim this to be the most autonomous, free-of-(b)order-imposition, and complete version of the Union story. To contextualize all this, we will first offer a succinct description of the circumstances surrounding street vending in Barcelona (section 2) and of the emergence of the SVU, which we will characterize as a social movement (section 2.1). Then we will situate the SVU within a space with multiple actors and interests (section 2.2.). This will be followed by a brief epistemological and theoretical framing of our analytical endeavors (section 3). After the detailed examination of various pieces of narrative data, our conclusions will emphasize the idea that progressive spaces of thought and action (and their narrative orders) are often not fertile grounds for the materialization of a subaltern voice; however, sometimes cracks to these hegemonic orders appear and a newly enregistered voice pushes to widen the horizons of representative social justice.

AFRICAN MOBILITY AND STREET VENDING IN BARCELONA: A BRIEF CONTEXTUALIZATION At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spain started to be a final destination for African postcolonial mobility (Sow 2004) to Europe, and no longer a stop-over country. The processes of decolonization of African territories with their subsequent conflicts (as in the case of Western Sahara), and the later economic “restructuring” imposed by the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, constitute the structural matrix of African transnational migration to Europe (Espinosa 2017). Many African states suffer from the plundering of natural resources by international powers—as happens in Senegal, the country from which the vast majority of street vendors have migrated. The fishing agreements with the European Union have undermined the artisanal exploitation of shoals that used to be one of the local economic bases. During the first decade of the 2000s, the unauthorized arrival of black Africans, who entered Spain in small, precarious boats called cayucos (see section 5) via the Canary Islands, intensified; this became known as “the cayuco boat crisis.” But as De Genova (2018) observes, any so-called migration crisis calls into question the very systems of migration control and becomes, actually, a “racial crisis.” This contestation of the border regime by human mobility is the critical perspective that our work seeks to adopt, thus going beyond the traditional view of structural or push/pull factors. It is by focusing on the subjective practices of transnational migrants (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) that we can understand the emergence of movements such as SVU in its sociohistorical context. In Barcelona, as in every tourism-centered city in Europe, street vending can be seen along its main avenues3—even if not permitted by local and national law. Although the regulation of street vending has varied over time, at present it is considered a criminal offence, according to the latest version of the Spanish criminal code, passed in 2015 and known as Ley Mordaza (Gag Law4). This means that, if arrested, street vendors

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can eventually be imprisoned. However, it must be noted that the penalization of street vending is not new in Barcelona; persecution hardened as far back as 2005 when a new city ordinance, the Ordenança del Civisme (Civility Ordinance) was passed. All this results in vendors being continually fined by the local police and accumulating not only debt but criminal records. The double persecution (legal and economic) of vendors has a significant impact on them, most of whom are illegalized and racialized African migrants. In fact, the intersection of the criminal code/city ordinance with the Ley de Extranjería (Spanish Migration Law) complicates access to legal status, as many vendors end up having criminal offences in their police records. This opens up the possibility of their being detained as a first step to deportation. The combination of legal mechanisms—what De Genova (2004) calls the “legal production of migrant illegality”—condemns vendors to a long-lasting struggle over legalization and against racism and criminalization. Thus, the political organization of vendors becomes necessarily “intersectional” (Crenshaw 1989) as we will explain in the next section.

The Barcelona Street Vendors’ Union The Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Barcelona (Barcelona Street Vendors’ Union, henceforth SVU) was created in October 2015. The ascent to city power of BeC, a newly created citizen platform, in May 2015 was viewed by street vendors, activists and allied social movements (mainly anti-racist) as a window of opportunity to open a dialogue with the local authorities. BeC had included in its electoral program a proposal to derogate the local ordinance (mentioned in the previous section) and dissolve the riot branch of the city police. The SVU, which quickly gained legitimacy in the local grassroots political scene as well as visibility in the (social) media, aimed to find alternatives to street vending as well as a fairer regulation of that activity. The framing of the new movement as a union was linked to the vendors’ main material claim to justice, that is, being recognized as workers, and thus, as subjects able to negotiate their work conditions with governmental actors. As Delclós (2016) argues, their stigmatized work activity keeps these workers out of mainstream debates about work conditions and secludes them in the realm of “informality.” In fact, the racialization of poor and precarious work is constitutive of the new social composition of labor and of its struggles, where the very category of “worker” is in dispute. Paradoxically, however, this being-out-of-the-labor-market condition is a productive place from which a sense of class belonging can be sought outside the traditional apparatuses (Pirita and Sánchez 2015). The vindication of vendors’ work that the SVU undertakes is intermingled with performative political actions where they present themselves not only as workers but also as involved in wider migrant and anti-racist struggles. This intersectionality of class and race constitutes a double articulation of this movement into a form of “social unionism” (Pirita and Sánchez 2015). Following Fraser (2005), it could be argued that the SVU seeks, on the one hand, “redistributive justice” for vendors as workers, and on the one hand, “recognition” (or cultural justice) for them as racialized migrants and postcolonial subjects, thus, ultimately, joining the global fight against racism. But the most relevant dimension for our analytical purposes in this chapter is the third-level dimension of social justice posited by Fraser (2009), that is, “political or representative justice” (see section 3), which the Union seeks to achieve as a new political actor in the city of Barcelona. In our study, then, we describe the SVU as a hybrid political artifact that combines traditional

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union demands with social movement practices interweaving the local and the global, as well as the material, the symbolic and the political into one single struggle. The SVU is popularly known as sindicato mantero (Manteros’ Union). The adjective mantero is a keyword that has undergone a process of resignification (Chun 2016), from being a popular and derogatory term for vendors, to adopting new political and cultural values (for a detailed analysis, see section 5). It derives from manta because of the blankets that the vendors employ to carry and display the products they sell in the streets. Manta then gives rise to topmanta, an expression originated in the 1990s with the popularization of digital audiovisual products, when street vendors sold CDs or DVDs that were copies of music or film hits. Thus, the English top in topmanta evokes music or video rankings and it is mockingly conjugated with manta. Although the type of product sold has evolved to fashion objects (like handbags) and accessories, the expression has remained in use. It is most often employed in a pejorative, even racist sense, to refer both to the activity and to the vendors (the topmanta). In the resignified Union discourse, the mantero becomes the political subject of the street vendors’ struggle and topmanta designates not only the dignified survival job of street vending but also the ability of the Union to create new and autonomous forms of labor for the subsistence of the community. One key step in that direction was the creation of an autonomous worker cooperative (called TopManta) for the design and production of clothing and accessories. This co-op project aims to improve vendors’ material circumstances and solve their legal hurdles through self-employment. But this project also serves to achieve other political goals such as the possibility of questioning and altering the criminalized image of the mantero through the telling of their own story in their own terms, that is, by “having an (autonomous) voice” (see section 5). In this chapter, we use “mantero” in its abstract political significance, and “union member,” “unionists,” or “(self-)organized vendors” to refer to the group of street vendors who are politically engaged in the Union; “(street) vendors,” in turn, refer to the rest of the community (although often represented by the organized ones). It must be noted that the population of street vendors is a changing one, not only because of uneven tourist flows but also as a result of unsteady labor demands and the fluctuating rhythms of migration. Needless to say, racialization and criminalization obscure the visibility of vendors. Either way, describing the vendor community as such is beyond the scope of our study. Rather, we focus on the group of vendors who articulated themselves in the Union described above and, in so doing, entered new political processes.

The Discursive Space of Street Vending As Porras and Espinosa (2016) show, the attempts at regulating informal street work in Barcelona have systematically failed; and, when they have succeeded, it was only through demobilizing or co-opting self-organization. Very soon after their election in 2015, the self-proclaimed “government of change” (BeC) ended up writing the latest page of that history of failures. The newly elected cabinet continued the fierce persecution of street vending using the Civility Ordinance and the riot branch of the city police, thus failing to deliver on one of their main electoral promises (see section 2). And while that happened, large segments of the public opinion continued to see them as the “friends” of street vendors. That image was carefully built by the opposition parties, mainstream media and the local commerce, which viewed the ascent to power of BeC as a threat to the established order. A political-media battle started on the issue of street vending in which

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BeC yielded to pressure by hardening police controls. So, street vendors’ black bodies became the field on which the battle over city power was fought. Taking these dynamics as our site of ethnographic-participant observation,5 we draw on Heller’s (2007) idea of “discursive space” to delineate a space where access to discursive resources and tensions about whose account is more valuable determine social actors’ positions and the value of those positions. Within this discursive space, we observe, on the one hand, the struggles among the powerful actors in the city, that is, mainstream media, businesses, police and the various political parties—including the party in office. On the other hand, we witness the emergence of the Union as a new political voice pushing to make its way into that space and to actively participate in the discursive struggle despite the vendors’ racialization and silencing. These have been the main speaking parties in an openly conflictive dialectics. Characterizing street vending as a city “public order issue,” the first group of actors have harnessed discourses such as “tax evasion,” “security and coexistence,” or “improper occupation” of the so-called public space. The SVU counter-discursive activity, in turn, has been carried out by the vendors themselves and a series of allies. Right at the center of the space, however, we observe the struggle of the organized vendors to be able to construct a discourse of their own. This chapter will focus on examining one portion of that discursive struggle, more specifically, the attempts by the progressive actors to impose their discursive (b)orders in the act of “giving voice” to the vendors. In the next section, we will expound our general thinking around the notion of voice drawing on a number of theories from various disciplines in the social sciences. We shall also present our theoretical and analytical tools, taken from the fields of critical sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, which allow us to operationalize the concept of voice and empirically trace the processes through which it gets materialized.

OUR THEORETICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACH “Voice” is an under-defined concept from a linguistic/discursive perspective—where it is often reduced to the act of speaking and/or to the provision of an individual point of view. Our take on the notion of voice, by contrast, goes beyond that rather reductionist stance. Drawing on contemporary thought in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and communication studies we characterize voice as something that occurs between constraints and possibilities in socially established orders. More specifically, in our study, voice is understood as the process by which certain claims to justice enter the public debate. This view enables us to shed light on the SVU’s discursive possibilities and strategies for political action, as well as on the many (b)orders it encounters and their nature. Since the fabric of voice is woven in interaction, the materialization of the Union’s voice and its emergence in the discursive space is the outcome of different interdiscursive encounters where street vendors have to “give an account of themselves,” what Butler (2005) defines as the act of taking responsibility by narrating one’s life in front of others who ask for it. The narrative form of the account implies not only a plot but the presence of an audience that has to be persuaded. The “you” that asks the “I” for accountability, Butler argues, needs to consider the agency of the “I,” whose precondition is “having a voice,” in other words, having the narrative capacity to produce that account. But the “you” interpellates the “I” from “historically changing horizons of intelligibility” (Butler 2005, 134) ruled by norms and values of narrativity. These are the normativities that

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we dissect in this chapter. Along similar lines, Malkki’s seminal fieldwork on misheard refugee accounts also focuses on the analytical relevance of the audience. For this author, the notion of voice is linked to narrative authority, that is, “the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums” (1996, 378). The SVU fight to have a voice of their own is inscribed into those horizons of intelligibility or instances of interpellation that will, to a large extent, determine what is credible and what is not. As we shall see, the main type of narrative evidence that the manteros offer to give an account of their own circumstances is the structural and historical link between colonialism and racism. However, their audiences often only validate their personal experience, a depoliticized and dehistoricized version of the story (see biographization in section 4.1). These are audiences that treat manteros as victims and not as political subjects. But, as Butler advances, the norms of narrativity can be critically discussed in the search for intelligibility, thus giving way to new subjectivities. It is through that process of critique that the SVU forges its autonomous voice. This issue is intimately linked to the political dimension of social justice put forth by Fraser (2009). Fraser conceptualizes the political dimension of justice as tied to representation, that is, as the possibility of equally participating in a political space and in its procedures, that is, in the mode of political deliberation. Representation entails an elucidation of who counts as the subject of justice and what the appropriate framing is for this subject’s constitution and justice claims. What Fraser calls “parity of political participation” (2009) is the democratization of the process of establishing the proper frame within which to consider questions of social justice. Thus, Fraser’s politics of framing are the “efforts to establish and consolidate, to contest and revise, the authoritative division of the political space” (2009, 18). As we will see, the normative national framing imposed on manteros, which relegates them to a position lying between criminality and victimization, is contested through the SVU’s historical and transnational narrative, as an attempt at redefining the rules and practices of political participation in the city of Barcelona (section 4.1). Likewise, the denial of racism (in favor of classism or other political framings) rejects the validity and legitimacy of the manteros’ main historical demand (section 4.2). In all these cases, “having a voice” amounts to attempting to participate equally in the politics of framing and for the organized vendors to constitute themselves as subjects of justice in a globalized world. In the realm of sociolinguistics, the concept of voice is intimately related to the notion of inequality. Thus, Blommaert (2005) dissects the conditions of possibility of one’s voice. He proposes a theory of voice that draws on the tension between success and failure in trying to make oneself understood. The balance depends on the available discursive resources that speakers deploy in interaction. Blommaert analyzes the nature and effect of those resources in the context of the totally asymmetrical interaction that occurs between asylum seekers and migration control officers, who gatekeep the access of the former to European legal protection through complex processes of institutional entextualization. Voice stands for “the capacity to accomplish functions of linguistic resources translocally, across different physical and social spaces. Voice, in other words, is the capacity for semiotic mobility” (2005, 69). If that semiotic mobility does not occur, Blommaert considers it to be a failure and he identifies “pretextual gaps” (Maryns and Blommaert 2002) as the reason for the resulting “narrative inequality” (Blommaert 2001). But the political potential of voices such as those of the Union and its attempt at enregisterment (Agha 2005) also draw on entextualization as one way to ensure the

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circulation of their alternative political framing (section 5). In our study, thus, the notion of entextualization can adopt liberationist overtones that are absent in the work previously cited. For this reason, while the notion is understood in the literature as “..​.the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object [. . .] [it being] an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority” (Park and Bucholtz 2009, 485), our case study requires expanding the concept to a political praxis that aims to intervene in the discursive space by constructing a voice worth hearing. This semiotic praxis is misaligned with respect to the stereotyped criminal and illegal migrant. By enacting an emergent and positive figure of personhood, that of the mantero, the narrative entextualization that we dissect in section 5—as an example of the SVU wider practice of constructing texts—seeks to expand the cultural values added to the hegemonic registers of vendors and transnational African migrants (Agha 2003). Similarly, in the kind of interactions we analyze in section 4, where the voice is elicited according to the unequal distribution of discursive resources (especially narrative ones) the notion of pretextual gaps requires a theoretical extension. Defined as “socially anchored and often invisible differences between what is expected in communication and what people can bring and deploy” (Maryns and Blommaert 2002, 11), pretextual gaps are considered to embody an unbridgeable narrative distance causing a failure in the attempt at making oneself understood. In our examples, while failure is still a possibility, it is the gap between a synchronic (dominant) and a diachronic (alternative) vision of the same social reality that defines each actor’s position and account. In other words, it is by grabbing a chronotopical contrast—opposing depictions of time-space-personhood (Agha 2007)—that the Union defends its voice in uneven participatory frameworks. The uneven distribution of narrative resources between migration officers and asylum seekers has been conceptualized by Blommaert through the idea of “narrative inequality” (2001). While this concept is useful to show structural forms of injustice articulated by narrative circulation, entextualization, and language ideologies, it fails to capture the possible strategies that migrants might apply in their favor in the process of construction of a new political subjectivity. We imagine narrativity as an “order” or even a “border” that can be contested or crossed by migrants’ subjective practices. This is the kind of process we observe in encounters between the organized vendors and journalists, activists and scholars (section 4) where the authorized positions of these actors impose narrative (b)orders to Union accounts, while unionists struggle to keep their voice out of those and orient it to new registers. In a similar vein, the “speechlessness” or “muteness” of refugees depicted in the humanitarian discourse that Malkki describes does not exactly correspond with the “not committed listening” processes that we want to shed light on. Again, there is a difference in subject production. While the refugee is constituted in the realm of humanitarian aid, the mantero emerges from assembly driven, autonomous, anti-racist, and anti-colonial politics. But probably the most relevant difference has to do with cultural politics. Indeed, as we have advanced in the opening vignette, current progressive stances toward migrant and subaltern voices need to display a willingness to listen to them. In other words, silencing, muting, or practicing any form of explicit narrative inequality in the public space puts the legitimacy of left-wing politicians and progressive sectors at risk. We claim that the path adopted to keep (b)orders active is the politics of “giving voice.” This idea can be better understood in relation to what Couldry (2010) calls “apparent spaces for voice” created by market rules in our neoliberal media-saturated age. In this

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context, the individual himself and his personal stories are the ones that become valuable commodities. But the counter-neoliberal narratives have no room to emerge in those spaces and this is why they are just apparent spaces of voice; otherwise, the real voice would “interrupt” the neoliberal narrative (Couldry 2010, 2). We think it is in this very scenario that the Union—as it tells a counter-narrative—has to push to have a voice even when it is supposedly given the opportunity to do so. This is what we will try to show in what follows.

ATTEMPTING TO GIVE UNIONISTS A VOICE The attempts at materializing the Union’s voice often get entangled in a web of dissimilar interests. The physical presence of SVU members in the communicative events to which they are invited can be explained in relation to those intersecting endeavors. While part of the Union’s struggle is discursive—to convey the message of colonialism and racism as a historical continuum—for other actors, such as journalists, politicians, or even academics, the need to have vendors’ first-person testimonies may not mean an actual will to listen to that message. In the next pages, we will show some examples of what happens to the Union story when it gets inserted into others’ attempts to give them a voice. These forms of elicitation by different actors in the discursive space imply deracializing, dehistorizing, and biographizing discursive moves.

Between Victimhood and Criminality: Individual Biographizing as a Narrative (B)Order The activist and MP we introduced in the opening vignette, also a founder of a refugee solidarity organization, is a public figure especially concerned with “giving the Union a voice,” and during the last few years, he has been making efforts in that direction. Using his position and visibility, he voiced the mantero struggle in the media or by organizing discussions such as the political debate we showed in the opening vignette. He usually presents himself as one of the few people who listen to the vendors; he imagines the manteros as vulnerable subjects that need advocacy (Wagensberg, 2018). In December 2018, he and one of the Union’s spokespersons were interviewed on the Catalan national TV channel.6 Expectedly, the activist deployed his role as mantero defender and “voice giver” when he first took the floor to introduce the reason for the interview: having the opportunity to listen to “a group that is frequently talked about but rarely listened to.”7 He was construed (and construed himself) as an expert, speaking about vendors’ legal problems in third person, denying rumors of criminality around them, and even exposing their decisions, desires or goals. The pre-electoral dimension was also left to him to discuss. He foregrounded the failures and responsibilities of both the Barcelona city hall and the Spanish government. Meanwhile, the Union member’s contributions were confined to answering questions about his individual life experiences, as we will see in the next section.8 The form of biographizing called for by journalists tends to foreground individual accounts rather than collective, structural problems that might be denounced through one’s life experience. Union members are often asked to narrate the same lived episodes by answering questions from a personal—often intimate—angle, which fluctuates between victimhood and criminality. Unionists are compelled to perform imposed forms of social personhood, either the always-migrant persona (through detailed retelling of their suffering journey) or the always-vendor one (through the scrutiny of their work

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and living conditions). A case in point is the interview we examine here, in which the always-migrant framing is imposed right from the beginning. Even though the arrival of the interviewee happened more than a decade ago, the decision to migrate still needs to be explained. Interviewed unionist’s effort to escape this narrative (b)order is clear in the next excerpt, where he repositions himself from migrant to citizen status, and he moves from an individual to a collective frame, from forced to autonomous decision-making, from personal to historical reasons: J: journalist; UM: union member9 J: tú eres de Senegal/ naciste en Senegal\ por qué te fuiste de tu país/ J: you’re from Senegal/ you were born in Senegal\ why did you leave your country/ UM: bueno\ yo:::\ llego aquí hace 12 años/ ((sonriendo)) [. . .] me considero parte de esta ciudad/ porque llevo aquí::/ desde los 16 años\ [. . .] yo era un alumno rebelde/ [. . .] me castigaban/ por no hablar francés\ [. . .] lo que nos enseñaban/ de los libros que estudiábamos\ la cultura francesa/ lo más bonito/ nunca te dicen que\ [. . .] nos han quitado la riqueza/ [. . .] muchos de los compañeros han venido aquí/ por lo que nos enseñan\ . . . UM: well\ I:::\ I got here 12 years ago/ ((smiling)) [. . .] I consider myself part of this city/ because I’ve been he::re/ since I was 16\ [. . .] I was a rebel student/ [. . .] they punished me/ for not speaking French\ [. . .] what they taught us/ from the books we studied\ French culture/ the most beautiful/ they never tell you what\ [. . .] they’ve taken our wealth away from us/ [. . .] many mates have come here/ because of what they teach us\ . . . The Union member’s answer was longer than we can possibly show here. For example, at one point, he attributed the lack of jobs in Senegal to Europe’s extracting activities (see section 2). This point led him to ironically comment on the claims that migrants take Europeans’ jobs away, suggesting that it is actually the other way around. Indeed, irony is the main strategy employed by the unionist to contest imposed (b)orders in this particular interaction. The unionist’s historically grounded account of the reasons to migrate did not fit the narrativity norm expected to be fulfilled by the answer; so, the journalist deactivated it by repeating the question, insisting in the search for a personal reason: J: . . . y te vas/ por qué/ porque no ves futuro/ J: . . . and you leave/ why/ because you see no future/ Questions such as “Why did you abandon your country?”, “How old were you by then?”, “What did your parents say about it?” recreate the well-known stereotype of the migrant who runs away. Within this narrative (b)order, the narrative elements that always circulate in SVU interactions (i.e., Senegal, the cayuco, the manta) lack the political depth of the Union story when it is autonomously constructed (as we will see in section 5), as they were appropriated and construed by the journalist. Thus, Senegal is just a poor place to be abandoned and the cayuco a means for running away as an irrational child. Since being sixteen is problematic for the horizon of intelligibility the journalist was asking for, the responsibility of his family was also evoked in another part of the interview. Trying to redirect the account toward a larger picture, the Union spokesperson’s answer pointed

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to a different abandonment, that is, that of the Spanish State regarding unaccompanied migrant children. He collectivized his personal experience, denouncing the impossibility of accessing a residence permit when minors come of age and the state protection ends. As we just said, the roles alternate. A migrant is both a victim and a lawbreaker who acts illegally in order to land and stay in Europe. The explicit reference to mafias in the next excerpt reframes the decision to migrate in that oscillating (b)order. As in the previous case, the answer was unexpected and constituted a new attempt to keep autonomy in the center of the debate: J: tú/ tuviste que paga:r a::\ a alguien/ a alguna mafia/ para hacer este viaje\ para llegar hasta aquí/ J: did you/ have to pa::y so::m\ somebody/ some mafia/ to do this journey\ to get here/ UM: no hay mafia/ yo no lo veo mafia\ [. . .] yo:::\ estuve trabajando/ [. . .] ahorrando dinero\ y:::\ yo mismo/ tomé mi decisión/ de viajar/ de buscar dónde tengo que ir/ [. . .] pagué el viaje/ y:::\ vine aquí\ UM: there is no mafia/ I don’t see a mafia\ [. . .] I:::\ worked/ [. . .] and saved money\ a::nd\ I myself/ made the decision/ to travel/ to find out where I had to go/ [. . .] I paid my journey/ a:nd\ came here\ We again see how the unionist rejected the narrativity norms imposed and vindicated his unconstrained decision to migrate. Later in the interview, the interviewee’s vendor identity was introduced through the following question: “How did you end up becoming a street vendor?”, where the use of the verb “end up” permeates street vending with a sense of it being a morally inappropriate course of action only justifiable out of desperation. Again, the realm of victimhood evokes the inability to make a better decision. Despite the efforts of Union members to causally expose the historical and political reasons linking colonialism, illegalized migration and racism with street vending, and after conceptualizing it as a collective solution chosen by the Senegalese community, what remains for the journalist is a dubious activity that needs scrutiny. Questions such as “How much money do you earn?” or “What do you spend it on?” create a hierarchical social interaction where the upper position—that of the journalist—is legitimized to ask whatever it takes to clear up suspicions, and ultimately reinforces the victim-criminal frame. In turn, the lower-positioned interlocutor—the migrant vendor in this case—has some of his elementary rights, such as a person’s right to privacy, not respected. Once again, irony worked as a way out when the unionist answered that his daily earnings depended on police persecution; the money they earned, he insisted, they spent back in Barcelona, as a reminder that he and his community are also part of the city. What we are trying to argue in this section is that journalism, even when it aims to listen to the voice of the Union, tends to present facts in a flat, static, frozen-in-time chronotope. This has implications for the perceived production of subjectivity, if we consider the notion of subjectivity as one “which oscillates between the subject as subjected by power and the subject as imbued with the power to transcend the processes of subjection that have shaped it” (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 83). While becoming autonomous political subjects is the most remarkable outcome in the Union’s version of story (see section 5), media portraits build on two static images: the “distant sufferer” (Chouliaraki 2006) who arrives in the cayuco; and the “illegitimate outsider” (Hepworth 2016, 30) who dares to

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sell pirated goods in the manta. Here, cayuco and manta appear as disconnected elements and are considered only in their negative value: the first one as linked to risk, mafia and illegal border crossing, and the second one as an issue of public (dis)order. The loss of dynamism in this elicitation leaves no room for causality relations among narrative blocks (unlike what we will see in the Union version, section 5), but most importantly, it erases political activism, unionism and cooperativism. A sort of chronotopical lag is created that constantly relocates Union members back to the sea or in the streets. The focus on the suffering and the problematic versions of the cayuco and the manta is not exclusive of journalism, though. Progressive politicians tend to take the same stance, particularly in a (pre)election context such as the one under scrutiny in our ethnography. This was also the case during the YouTube preelection debate cited in our initial ethnographic vignette. By the time of the debate, the same “voice-giver” activist and organizer considered that there had been enough talking about street vendors and that the time had come to talk to them. The event was widely promoted on social media with the name of Debate Mantero; it was broadcasted live and covered by several local and national news corporations. Despite that, the unionists themselves—as representatives of street vendors—were the least represented actors, in a very unbalanced distribution of the floor. Although, this time, the activist kept behind the scenes, he managed to have the same journalist we analyzed above back to moderate the event and to recreate, six months later, the same personal questions with the same Union spokesperson in the initial ten minutes of the debate. Being interpellated again as an individual victim rather than as a representative of a political organization, this kind of biographical elicitation left little room for unionists to deploy his political subjectivity in front of the mayor and other candidates. He was again left to the difficult task of overcoming, in his answers, the narrative (b)order being imposed on him. The situated structuring of the event and the timing of contributions advantaged politicians and disadvantaged the unionists. While politicians had an initial round of turns to define their position in relation to street vending and took another one after each unionist’s turn, the Union members had only one—and shorter—chance to articulate everything they wanted to say; this was an almost impossible mission taking into consideration the multiple discursive threads and issues at stake. So, the very structure of the event worked to silence the Union’s voice that struggled to convey the message of colonialism, structural racism, and police violence as the explanatory grounds for their situation and as a point of departure for any eventual discussion or negotiation among political parties. The proposals of the different candidates cited in the debate revolved around welcome and integration policies, on the one hand, and the regulation of public space (or the disciplining of vendors), on the other. As in the media interview analyzed earlier, two difficult-to-reconcile versions of the figure of the mantero, that is, the victim and the criminal, underlay these proposals: politicians’ accounts did not acknowledge causality, as the manta was not considered a consequence of illegalized postcolonial migration (unlike in the story told by the Union, section 5). This point was made especially clear by the social democratic party candidate when he first took the floor and laid his foundations for the debate: to separate the “topmanta phenomenon” from “the migration phenomenon.” The left-wing mayor, along with the Catalan Republican center-left and centre/right-wing candidates, defended an increase in police control together with socio-labor insertion programs. Tellingly, the silencing of the Union’s present time and their already found alternatives ran throughout the debate. In fact, none of those present pronounced, not

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even once, the words “union”, “cooperative,” or “TopManta Project.” This way, the debate imposed, once again, the just-arrived-migrant and the always-street-vendor chronotopic figures that worked to invisibilize their current anti-racist activist, unionist and co-op partner forms of personhood.

The Denial of Racism In addition to journalists and politicians, some leftist, politically committed academics also tend to focus exclusively on the manta element of the story, but with a different goal. They want to contest the disciplinary discourse (and practice) of not permitting certain activities in common/public spaces. But, like the rest, these attempts also erase the dynamic nature of the story by not considering the historical causality, the vendors’ organization around the Union or the TopManta Project. This is because this contestation also relies on the always-vendor chronotopic persona who does not evolve but ultimately dignifies the vending practice. The mantero that some intellectuals imagine is someone who, through vending, contests the capitalist system by widening imaginable forms of working and living. One notable case is that of a critical Catalan anthropologist whose theories have been largely cited in studies of exclusion strategies in urban contexts. His presence is even required in grassroots debates about the current persecution of street vending. “The mantero embodies the truth of the street as opposed to the lie of a public space that, incidentally, does not exist any longer, since everything in it has been privatised,”10 he said in the progressive-liberal newspaper El País (Delgado and Espinosa 2018). In March 2019, the anthropologist and a few colleagues gathered with some of the Union’s representatives for a public debate11 organized by a migrant squat in the inner-city neighborhood of Raval. The anthropologist began by stating his willingness to talk about vendors’ persecution, as a “civil servant”12 (indexing his professional “duty”), but not on behalf of them: “only the vendors are interested in solving the vendors’ problems,”13 he said, claiming to quote Marx. He confessed to a “certain feeling of imposture” in deploying a voice considered worth hearing. As in the preelection debate, the voice appears as an ambivalent category that forces interlocutors to take a stance. In his attempt to answer the question, “Why are street vendors persecuted?”, the anthropologist challenged the concept of public space in advanced democracies; according to him, the mere presence of the street vendors questions the supposedly democratic and egalitarian values attached to that idealized notion of public space, which, in fact, obscures the capitalist operations behind the persecution of vendors (and of poverty more generally). This synchronic and economy-focused view of the problem contrasted with the diachronic and subjectively vivid experience of racism that the Union’s voice, once again, exposed. For the anthropologist, police persecution is caused solely by the unexpected presence of poor people in a highly commodified space; thus, for him, the color line does not cross-cut the criminalization of vendors. To reinforce this argument, he cited the migratory experience of his parents’ generation, from southern Spain to Catalonia. Escaping poverty, they were also detained and deported despite their national status. This way, the persecution of the manteros was re-affiliated to a different History: a homogeneous war against the poor. An explicit denial of racism was conveyed through the anthropologist’s ironic and deracializing statement addressed to unionists: “if you were US Marines, you wouldn’t have any problems.”14 By contrast, for the Union, the long history of segregation of African peoples explains the legitimation of police violence on their bodies: “racism has forgotten history,”15 said

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one of the Union’s spokespersons present. A careful reading of this encounter allows us to observe that, even in a climate of collusion and comradery, a deep, ineffable disagreement lies: that of class versus race as the proper frame to discuss the mantero stigma. Despite the initial respectful position toward the Union’s voice taken by the anthropologist, he ended up deliberately denying the Union’s main argument and reframing the discussion along the social class axis, which, according to his authorized speech, was the appropriate one. This way, the anthropologist did not acknowledge the relevance of intersectionality— which black politics has historically claimed for the specificity of their oppressions (Bucholtz 2016, 275). All through this section, the most salient narrative (b)order is related to what Bucholtz (following Squires) considers a case of “indexical bleaching,” used as a technique of deracialization, that is, a process through which an indexical form loses its racial affiliation (2016, 275). In this case, the figure of the mantero is not recognized as a racialized political subject but as an ambivalent victim-criminal figure or an embodiment of street poverty. By explicitly deauthorizing or reframing unionists’ claims and even by not naming the Union itself and its political work, the voice of the Union does not get to index historical and structural intersecting systems of oppression and subordination. That way, the topic is not even discussed, thwarting the SUV’s aspired parity of political participation. In what follows we will analyze the attempts at enregistering an alternative voice indexing a political subjectivity that fights for narrative authorization and legitimation, and ultimately, parity of participation in the public discursive space of Barcelona.

THE STORY OF THE MANTERO: A POLITICALLY RESIGNIFIED VOICE After the failure of their negotiations with the municipal authorities in 2015–2016 and the toughening of police persecution, Union members and their allies started a process of rethinking their struggle. As we have advanced, they came up with the idea of organizing themselves as a worker cooperative. This was considered to be the most feasible option, and one that was coherent with their communitarian philosophy. The cooperative would not only be a means of economic survival but also a way to solve the legal issues they faced, most notably in relation to obtaining a work and residence permit. Yet creating the cooperative would not be a rapid or easy process. After a period of collecting money by offering cheap Senegalese food at street fairs and other grassroots events, they managed to print a small number of t-shirts with a design of what would eventually become their clothing brand’s logo (see Figure 12.1b). Soon after, in the summer of 2017, the brand was launched. This move was certainly surprising for the general public and it was widely covered on (social) media. Following the advice of designers, the brand logo represented three elements at once: the manta, the cayuco (see section 2) and the sea waves of their migration journey. After a battle against the Spanish Patent Office, they were finally allowed to name their brand TopManta. This provocative gesture was a key initial step in the process of anti-racist resignification (Chun 2016). The idea of the brand caught the attention of the department of social impact and innovation of a digital cultural magazine. This media outlet offered unionists basic training on fashion design and brand communication. A few months later, a designer line of tote bags, t-shirts and sweatshirts came to light. They had original designs printed on them that synthesized the story of the mantero (see Figure 12.1a-e). The project was then ready to be launched on a Spanish crowdfunding platform. A set of promotional videos and a social

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media campaign publicized the initiative; the main TV, radio and digital channels also interviewed the SVU spokespersons. Thus, the circulation of this version of the story was transmedial and multimodal. The fast and unexpected big success of the fundraising (it was supported by almost 2,500 people from all over Spain and Europe) allowed the kickoff of the project. Contributors received a piece of clothing containing a piece of a story. From then on, in a small shop located on an alleyway in the district of Raval hangs a TopManta sign. There the Union continues its political work while printing and selling t-shirts. These designs are an excellent semiotic site for analysis. The story is condensed into five very simple images (see Figure 12.1a-e) that work as visual metaphors (Feng and O’Halloran 2013) along with the short texts that accompany the images and that serve as emic interpretations of each image. It is when analytically placing these elements in a temporal relationship that a narrative structure (Labov 2010) emerged, one that was very similar to the biographizing accounts analyzed in section 4.1. However, this entextualization of the Union story added to its structure key political values that did not usually appear in the media elicitations, thus, reappropriating it performatively (Chun 2016) as an alternative way to gain narrative authority. This analytical instance is also meaningful from an emic perspective, because it includes what the SVU considers the capacity of the mantero to surprise, a stage of overcoming adversity in their struggle for rights (see Figure 12.1e). This aspect also works as a sort of moral conclusion or “coda” from a classic narrative perspective (Labov and Waletzky 1997). The analysis of this multimodal production of the voice allows us to see a rich ambivalence of meanings and causality relations in its added values that distinguishes this articulation of the story from those elicited by the mainstream media. The story plot can be rewoven as this: a set of little colored houses (Figure 12.1a) stand for the union members’ geographical origin, Senegal; the already mentioned logo (Figure 12.1b) represents the sea journey to Europe; an unfolded blanket or manta with its ropes—as used for vending—with the motto: “legal clothing, illegal people”(Figure 12.1c)16 symbolizes the mantero’s means of survival but also the reason why he is persecuted; a black sad face with a tear running down (Figure 12.1d) embodies the hardness of illegalized and racialized migrants’ survival; and a mantero carrying the folded manta over his shoulders (Figure 12.1e) is the main character in the storytelling and the agent of the final achievement, that is, the overcoming of adversity, represented by the brand’s logo and name. Although disseminated in a politically unconventional way, we claim that each of these narrative elements is not part of an individual story, but a sociohistorically situated and political statement. This is clearly visible in the short texts written to describe the designs for the online shop.17 One of the most interesting features of this storytelling is the ambivalence of its elements, as each of them articulates at least two distinct meanings. The colored houses—representing the traditional Senegalese form of communitarian construction—are more than a reminder of the land left behind because of its devastation. A metaphor for the mantero heritage and a key element in the symbolic construction of their identity, this design conveys values that the Union often holds up as exemplary to westerners: the exchange of goods and tasks based on community work, as opposed to the individualism of a market-based economy. This moral representation of Senegal is part of a larger counterargument that tends to challenge the land of misery represented in media biographizations. The suffering entailed by the journey (the cayuco and the sea waves) also incarnates determination, autonomy and freedom of movement. The cayuco contests not only the

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  FIGURE 12.1:  TopManta T-shirt designs.

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FIGURE 12.1:  (Continued).

European border regime but also the lack of work and resources in Senegal produced by multinational intervention; it represents an effective exercise of the “right to escape” (Mezzadra 2005), moving away from any victimization or criminalization reading of migrants’ sea arrival. The street vending (the manta) is not only the reason why manteros are persecuted and criminalized; it is their symbol of resistance and survival. It represents an alternative way of life and legitimate subsistence that the Senegalese community practices and that is grounded on their solidarity networks. It is the symbol of contestation of the legal inner borders that regulate work and space occupation; it represents an effective exercise of the “right to the city” (Harvey 2003). The black sad face and the mantero are thought of as two sides of the same coin. The first one stands for racist violence, persecution, and the hardness of their work,

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represented by the weight of the blanket and the tear on a black sad face. The other side is the need for political organization, that is, the Union and the projects that came out of it, and the mantero becoming a political subject. Finally, as for the brand name and idea—the “surprise” of the mantero—they recall that this is not just a commercial project, but a political, symbolic, and material one. It is important to highlight the causal links among these narrative elements. Causality is the basis on which the re-historicization and re-politicization of the account is constructed. Each element in the story is the cause for the next one and those causes are historical-political. They can only be read as a continuum that started in Senegal and its process of (de)colonization; from this, a number of consequences derive. As an example, when they state that the manteros formed a Union and created a brand, they are pointing at their autonomous search for alternatives in order to overcome a legal system that excludes migrants from the regular labor market and, also, at the historical segregation of black people; in so doing, they are linking the cayuco, the manta and the mantero elements. To recap, what we have tried to show in our analysis is that, in the case of the SVU, an autonomous voice is constructed through the political and semiotic re-appropriation of narrative elements. This is the way in which the manteros make themselves intelligible in multiple instances of interpellation. Following Butler, we can claim that with the political depth added to their story in the process of re-appropriation, the horizons of intelligibility widen, and the SVU’s enregistered voice gets inscribed into the political and discursive space of the city of Barcelona.

FINAL REMARKS: NARRATIVE (B)ORDERS AND “CROSSING” PRACTICES Throughout this chapter we have tried to demonstrate that the practices of “giving voice” that characterize many a progressive endeavor are not neutral; on the contrary, they can actually encapsulate ways of doing that do not recognize the voice of the other, do not listen to them and do not establish any dialogue with them. In that case, the parity of political participation is called into question. Yet, we have also shown that it is necessary to analyze the specific shape of these discursive processes in close detail since, although they might end up silencing certain enregistered voices, they are quite different from the typical silencing strategies of the conservative sectors—which, as we have discussed, often criminalize vendors through false arguments (i.e., by stating that they are violent people or that they belong to a mafia-like organization)—nor do they have the same practical and symbolic consequences. In that sense, we discussed the ambivalence inherent in the politics of voice-giving: on the one hand, the voice-givers come across as well-intentioned actors whose privileged position in the discursive space remains, however, unaltered; at the same time, in the process of voice-giving (or rather of voice-getting) several cracks might open that will bring to the fore the contradictions involved. These are also the cracks through which the autonomous voice of the subaltern other might leak—as we clearly saw in the media interviews examined—and bring taken-for-granted narrative hegemonies into the open. Our contribution to the sociolinguistic literature, then, goes beyond the detailed examination of subject positions in unequal power relations. Instead, we have underscored the multifaceted, complex, and indeed capillary, manifestation of processes of oppression and subordination, in this case within the space inhabited by relatively progressive political

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parties and socially committed activists and academics. Our second analytical focus has been placed on the discursive trajectories and strategies of politicized subaltern actors, such as the members of the SVU analyzed in this chapter. While there has been abundant research on how migrants or refugees are subject to different forms of institutional power and control (border, linguistic, legal, educational, etc.) that severely constrain their chances of “speaking” or “being heard,” in this chapter we have attempted to understand what happens when subaltern actors attempt to cross those boundaries and take the floor. We have examined the ways in which discursive forms of control—including the appropriate framing for narrating one’s own life—can and do get challenged. We have suggested that the subaltern voice, as a counter-narrative political potential, can follow other paths, and in so doing, receive recognition or intelligibility outside of and beyond institutional sites or established political spaces. The case of the TopManta cooperative and the circulation of the project through the story of the mantero is a type of entextualization that, far from being trapped in a hegemonic discursive order, tries to enregister other types of social personae in different chronotopic scenarios. The national and international success of the crowdfunding initiative bears witness to that. Its patrons supported the launching of the brand name but also, and above all, the Union’s political project—as the terms and conditions of participation specified. This is but one step in the recognition of the Union’s voice, a sociopolitical recognition received autonomously outside the circuits of traditional power dynamics. Through a process of slow sedimentation in the wider social arena, the manteros’ embodied account of racism has increasingly been considered in various anti-racist and anti-colonial fora in which the union is interpellated as the main political actor in those struggles. This social prominence has forced a certain degree of institutional recognition of the Union’s political narrative—although still mostly on the symbolic level. The discourse of colonialism, embodied and shared by the SVU, has permeated some of the debates in Barcelona in the last few years and has had its correlate in some institutional measures such as the knocking-down of a statute of a famous Catalan slave trader. This was a historical demand of the pan-Africanist and other anti-colonial and anti-racist movements in the city. The SVU endorsed these demands. Taking advantage of the window of opportunity that its new voice and the physical presence of its members created, it headed some of the several actions that led to the withdrawal of the infamous statue. But far from these affordances, what we have seen is that the act of “giving voice” tends to impose norms and patterns of narrativity on recipients, and draws the boundaries of what is sayable within a given discursive space. Ultimately, we have argued that, as a potential carrier of social justice demands, the voice is not transferrable; it cannot be “given”—unlike what some actors imagine. Instead, an autonomous voice is constitutive of the subjectivities that struggle to participate equally in a political space.

NOTES 1 https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=sOVpLRJPvuQ 2 Original text in Spanish: [antes] no teníamos voz de denunciar, no teníamos voz de hablar y ara, desde que hemos formado el sindicat, ya tenemos voz de denunciar la discriminación, la persecución, el racism. 3 Notice that what we discuss here has radically changed since the 2020 pandemic lockdown. Since our study depicts pre-pandemic scenarios, we reconstruct them here.

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4 The Organic Law on Public Security meant a setback in fundamental rights and freedoms such as those of protest and demonstration. Its application was controversial and criticized by organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. 5 Our fieldwork traced the manteros’ semiotic practices since the creation of the Union. They ranged from demonstrations in the public space to talks in different types of events, media contributions, and activities in the Top Manta workshop-shop. The spaces in which those practices took place got defined as the manteros’ political agenda unfolded. For a detailed description of the ethnography conducted, see Menna (2022). 6 https://www​.ccma​.cat​/tv3​/alacarta​/preguntes​-frequents​/lamine​-bathily​-i​-ruben​-wagensberg​ -a​-preguntes​-frequents​/video​/5808291/ 7 Original text in Catalan: un col·lectiu que se’n parla molt, però que, en canvi, se’ls escolta ben poc. 8 This sort of division of communicative labor between experts—knowledge and opinion— and unionists—experience—is recurrent in our corpus. 9 Symbols used in the transcripts: \ falling intonation; / rising intonation; [. . .] omitted talk; (.)short pause; a::: lengthening of sound; (( )) paralinguistic or nonlinguistic behavior. Informed consent to conduct this ethnographic piece of research was obtained from the Street Vendors’ Union, including permission to reproduce the images and texts analyzed in this chapter. 10 Original text in Spanish: El mantero encarna la verdad de la calle frente a la mentira de un espacio público que, por cierto, no existe, puesto que todo él está ya privatizado. 11 Fieldnotes March 29, 2019. 12 Tenured academics are civil servants in Spain. 13 Original text in Spanish: solamente los manteros están interesados en resolver los problemas de los manteros. 14 Original text in Spanish: si fuerais Marines, no tendríais ningún problema. 15 Original text in Spanish: el racismo ha olvidado la historia. 16 The analysis of the brand mottos is left out of our endeavours here. Our emic perspective leads us to conclude that these slogans are not fundamental to the construction of the Union’s narrative, and serve, basically, a commercial purpose—as does the use of English (to reach a global audience). 17 Some of these texts are as yet unpublished. We collected them during fieldwork in January 2019.

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Malkki, L. H. (1996), “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3): 377–404. Maryns, K., and J. Blommaert (2002), “Pretextuality and Pretextual Gaps: On De/Refining Linguistic Inequality.” Pragmatics, 12 (1): 11–30. Menna, L. (2022), « ‘El oro negro de la ciudad’: Una Etnografía sobre la Producción del Sujeto Mantero y Su Voz ». Unpublished PhD. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge. Mezzadra, S. (2005), Derecho de Fuga. Migraciones, Ciudadanía y Globalización, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Mezzadra, S., and B. Neilson (2013), Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor, Durham: Duke University Press. Park, J. S., and M. Bucholtz (2009), “Introduction. Public Transcripts: Entextualization and Linguistic Representation in Institutional Contexts.” Text & Talk, 29 (5): 485–502. Pirita Tenhunen, L., and R. Sánchez Cedillo (2015), “El Sindicalismo Social de la PAH y el Problema de la Verticalidad de las Luchas.” Periódico Diagonal, October 27, 2015. Available online: https://www​.diagonalperiodico​.net​/blogs​/fun​daci​onde​losc​omunes​/sindicalismo​-social​ -la​-pah​-y​-problema​-la​-verticalidad​-luchas​.html. Porras Bulla, J., and H. Espinosa Zepeda (2016), “Crónica del Fracaso Continuado de la Regulación del Trabajo Callejero en Barcelona.” Periódico Diagonal, November 11, 2016. Available online: https://www​.diagonalperiodico​.net​/libertades​/32233​-regular​-para​-olvidar​ -cronica​-del​-fracaso​-continuado​-la​-regulacion​-del​-trabajo. Sow, P. (2004), “Prácticas Comerciales Trasnacionales y Espacios de Acción de los Senegaleses en España.” In Á. Escrivá and N. Ribas (eds.), Migración y desarrollo. Estudios sobre remesas y otras prácticas transnacionales, Córdoba: CSIC. Wagensberg, R. (2018), “Levantando la Manta.” Catalunya Plural, August 13, 2018. Available online: https://catalunyaplural​.cat​/es​/levantando​-la​-manta/.

Chapter 13

Interdiscursive Dimensions of Mobility and Precarity for Guatemalan Indigenous Youth JENNIFER F. REYNOLDS

INTRODUCTION: NETWORKS/REDES, TRANSBORDER MIGRATION, AND ANTHROPOLITICAL LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION As a scholar of language socialization and migration who has conducted ethnographic studies with generations of Guatemalan indigenous children and youth, I examine their pursuit of mobility (social and physical) as a cultural value project. This requires attending to the social formations, infrastructures, and policies that afford and obstruct human mobility in addition to the communicative practices that produce the perception of mobility as circulation between events. These analytic foci are not mutually exclusive; communicative practices mediate all social relations and social formations (Agha 2007; Dick 2011; Gal 2018; Kockelman 2010). An anthropolitical approach to language socialization (APLS) enables scholars to address how and why people pursue some mobility projects over others (Paugh and Riley 2019). It features analyses of social actors navigating exclusion and marginalization, produced by structural inequalities and complicated by generational and community conflicts (García-Sánchez 2016; Dick and Arnold 2018; Reynolds and Chun 2013). Over my career, I have analyzed the forms of social organization, semiotic resources and ideologies, as well as the social identifications that are marshalled in mundane discourse practices to ideologically interpellate Guatemalan indigenous children (Reynolds 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013a, 2013b, 2019). Here I draw attention to “redes” (networks) and “networks,” to focus on the multiple conceptual traditions and senses that inhere and inform this interdisciplinary work. The sociological and anthropological literature on Latin American migration to the United States lends import to social networks in shaping different historical periods of migration. It neglects, however, the culture-specific conventions governing interdiscursive practices when enabled or cut off within networks, as well as where and how signs are perceived

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to circulate (Kockelman 2010; Smith and Barad 2018). This is where the social justice work of APLS scholars make an important contribution. We underscore the channeling function of communication. Individuals as social signers become nodes with complex ties, some multiplex and dense, others weak and diffuse, always oriented to interpreters, comprising the human infrastructure of social networks (Arnold 2019, 2020; Dick 2017, 2018; Mangual Figueroa 2013, 2014; Paz 2018; Reynolds and Orellana 2009). Language socialization practices involve signers channeling both recurring and variable linguistic and discursive forms in chained acts of semiosis. Practices take place within diverse constellations of caregiving, differentially distributed across time and place with kith and kin. My first study conducted during the 1990s was a time when Guatemala’s warring factions underwent an internationally brokered peace process (Jonas 2000). A fragile coalition was forged between popular revolutionary organizations and indigenous activists invested in cultural and linguistic revitalization as well as the legitimization of claims to land (Nimatuj 2013). Transborder social networks encompassing North American and Guatemalan indigenous linguist-activists configured part of this movement. Some language ideological projects were codified within the Peace Accords (Fischer and Brown 1996; French 2010; Maxwell 2017; Reynolds 2009, 2019). Indigenous activists now occupy positions within ministries of government and enacted a social justice agenda to facilitate a peaceful transformation of society (Bastos and Brett 2010; Bastos and Camus 2013). Yet efforts to make structural changes were undercut by the interests of intertwined kin and business networks of Guatemala’s powerful oligarchs. Oligarchs switched from past tactics of labor coercion and deployment of military violence to the anti-politics of technocratic solutions and corporate social responsibility. They green washed forms of indigenous land dispossession in the promotion of cattle ranching and mono-crop agriculture in the service of biofuels (Grandia 2012; Oglesby 2013). This alliance between landed and military powers continues to court transnational conglomerate partnerships in oil and mineral speculation taking place in the areas most devastated by violence of the counterinsurgency (Jonas 2000; Nelson 2015; Pederson 2014; Solano 2013). These were codified in multilateral trade agreements and other neoliberal reforms which led to a “democratization of corruption” with ex-military benefiting from expanding forms of dispossession and increased sociopolitical insecurity (Dudley 2016; Nelson 2009). For non-elite Guatemalans, hopes harnessed to dreams of dramatic change were accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and extreme forms of risk-taking (Copeland 2011; Reynolds 2013a). The indigenous youth and their families in my studies have had to make decisions about how to sustain themselves, one speech event at a time, always in dialogue with members of their network, which produced aggregating consequences (Nelson 2015). Sometimes they only imagined possibilities without acting on them. Other times they seized upon contingent opportunities enabled by un conecte (a contact or a connection). All actions were directed by the greater goal to realize different lives and identities (Nelson 2009). And immigrant pathways, once formed, became self-channeling channels of circular and chain migration (Kockelman 2010). Concurrently, political-economic restructuring within United States agribusinesses relies upon the recruitment of migrant labor from northern triangle countries and Mexico to work in meat-packing plants, dairy production, and tobacco fields (Hallet 2014; Harrison and Lloyd 2011; Keller 2019; Vogt 2013; Ybarra 2019). Indigenous Guatemalans in particular accommodated the international call, escaping carceral forms

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of labor extraction at home as well as (para)militarized “shadow organizations” oriented to death over life. Indigenous kin networks literally hedged their bets in putting down roots in new destinations (Jonas and Rodríguez 2014; Reynolds and Didier 2013), though they now must contend with the US crimmigation system, its detention and deportation regime and new forms of precarity (De Genova 2010; Green 2011; Reynolds 2013b). Indigenous youth are active social actors in these processes even though the US humanitarian regime pathologizes their mobility (Heidbrink 2013, 2020; Reynolds 2013b). Their mobility projects are enabled via network internal exchanges, which can affectively intensify their resolve or help redirect a decision, evaluate the veracity of a story, and work through and around obstacles that might cause friction along the way. In sum, indigenous migrant redes/networks materialize in different forms of publicness through interdiscursive chains of semiosis, aggregating to produce communicative circuits, which comprises a semiotic approach to figuring youth citizenship (Paz 2018, 2019; Reynolds and Chun 2013). A focus on redes/networks within the APLS scholarship can thus contribute to nuanced understandings of mobility and precarity, including its linguistic and discursive dimensions.

REDES/NETWORKS: INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS In recent work theorizing the social organization of movement as “circulation” in both its physical and especially its semiotic formations via interdiscursivity, Susan Gal (2018) reminds that early linguistic anthropological work, which includes studies in developmental pragmatics and language socialization, privileges social approaches in the study of face-to-face speech routines and events, with the greater goal of understanding “how society is communicatively constituted” (2018, 1). Longitudinal single-sited ethnographic studies of recurring language socialization practices set a high bar in this regard. Scholars employed different practice theorists to examine caregiving within kin groups that challenged psychological and linguistic universalizing frameworks in child language acquisition studies (Ochs 1988; Schiefflein 1990). Socialization studies of other social groups across the lifespan, including peer groups in and out of institutional settings, advanced frameworks that theorized trajectories of multimodal, embodied action within situated activity systems (Goodwin 1990, 2006), across social networks (Zentella 1997, 2016) as well as speech events (Wortham 2005). The focus on trajectories, when paired with the field’s language ideological turn, emboldened scholars of language socialization to contend with how the transformation of individuals into subjects operates (Kulick and Schieffelin 2004), especially for those who are marginalized and contending with simultaneous, stigmatizing interpellations (García-Sánchez 2016; Mangual Figueroa 2013; Paugh and Riley 2019; Reynolds 2013a; see also Rosa 2019). Ana Celia Zentella (1997) was the first to bridge anthropological approaches to language socialization and the sociolinguistic scholarship. Using Milroy and Milroy’s (1985, 1992) concept of speech network as an alternative to the Labovian consensus based approach to speech community, Zentella’s study depicted the density, frequency, and social conventions governing interactions among members of New York Puerto Rican children’s social networks within a neighborhood block. Not only did speech networks methodologically square with Zentella’s interactional approach, they afforded conflict-based theoretical frameworks to society that highlighted how structural inequalities predicated on ethnoracial and class-based categories operated in urban locations. The

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study published in 1997 took place during an earlier period of urban deindustrialization, resulting in the dispossession of NYPRs. Her analyses of shifting patterns of multilingual discourse practices featured the importance of attending to how social networks both constrained and enabled youths’ pathways and emerging multilingual communicative competencies across the lifespan. Zentella noted how vital generational and gendered kin and social networks were to families’ survival. They were sustained through back and forth migration between different places in NYC and the Island of Puerto Rico and required multiple moves in search of better educational and economic opportunity. Zentella forcefully urged social scientists of language to combine all of the methodological and conceptual tools at our disposal with a social justice objective. She gave this long-term ethical commitment which embraced interdisciplinary innovation a name: anthropolitical linguistics. Its charter was to critique the myriad language ideologies and practices that accelerate centripetal forces resulting in the intensified patrolling of regimented social and linguistic boundaries. At the same time Zentella was advancing an anthropolitical linguistic approach, Don Kulick and Bambi Schieffelin (2004) and Stanton Wortham (2005) pivoted the field toward semiotic and performative approaches to socialization as the ideological interpellation of individuals as particular kinds of subjects that could be studied via variable, not just recurring nor ritualized boundary-marking discourse practices as was theorized by Louis Althusser (2001[1971]). In Wortham’s first school-based ethnography, he tracked how African American students were differentially identified through pedagogical exchanges within classroom culture. He emphasized movement and temporality across speech events in the recognition and abjection of student subject positions along institutionally sanctioned identities. Intertextual and interdiscursive connections, he argued were forged like links in a speech chain (Agha 2007). Identifications in earlier speech events were at first amorphous and fluid. Over the academic year and across a range of classroom exchanges between teachers and peers, the boundaries dividing those who were included from those who were excluded congealed and hardened. In a subsequent longitudinal community-based study of new Latino immigration to a town in Pennsylvania, Wortham and his students elaborated the study of networks, still envisioned as semiotic chains of communication within which cross-event trajectories shape young people’s developing communicative competencies and forms of social identification. They mapped the different nodes (people positioned within ethnic social networks) and institutional text-making practices (police crime reports, news media stories) that eventually took shape as payday mugging stories. Characterizations of victims within stories patterned by one’s membership in White, African American, or Latino social networks (Wortham, Mortimer and Allard 2009; Wortham, Allard, Lee and Mortimer 2011; Nichols and Wortham 2018). Wortham and students, however, framed these cross-generational interpellative narrating events using actor-network theory rather than sociolinguistic approaches to speech networks. Actor-network theory emphasizes heterogeneity of semiotic resources and actors whereas the sociolinguistic social network studies used purposive sampling based on relatively homogeneous kin and co-ethnic network composition to address phonological and morpho-syntactic variation within system-internal constraints. Other scholars who retain the focus on interpellation have moved away from individual developmental trajectories toward looking at the process of channel-making itself. Kockelman (2010) explicitly compared how structuralist, cybernetic and actor-network theories differently approach the “channeling” dimensions of semiosis. He

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suggested that signer-directed signers and channel-directed signers reveal system internal and external dynamics respectively which direct where a sign moves (and is perceived to move). Alana Lemon’s (2017) work on phaticity ethnographically explored which infrastructures (including institutional policies) compel and or block networks of people on the move from coming into contact with each other as well as how that contact is sensorially interpreted in Russia. (See Smith and Barad 2018 on phaticity in networks of socialization.) This reflexive shift retooled existing frameworks, adding semiotic precision to ethnographically grounded analyses. In a more critical approach to social semiotics, building on scholarship on language, race and modernity, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores (2017) provide a raciolinguistic language ideological critique of the educational infrastructures that constrain and contain immigrant youth’s conditions of possibility in the United States. Rosa (2019), for example, forcefully argues that socio-historic structures overdetermine Latinx intersectional mobility projects, and result in “ethnoracial contortions” performed both by youth and even administrators who seek to reform educational institutions and open up different pathways for students to pursue. Rosa and Flores strike an anthropolitical linguistic stance like Zentella, to demand a decolonization of the senses and underlying policies as most phatic contact between teachers, students, and their parents presumes a de facto monologic listening perspective of White privilege—such that teachers and administrators fail to hear the actual emerging languaging and literacy abilities that students are developing. To wit, all channels are tuned into a deficit perspective no matter the empirical realities, and educators are unable to hear the harmonious chords of students’ speech made up of heterogeneous resources. Other anthropologists of education also now concede that the interpellative practices impact Latinx residents in new destinations in the United States are not as elastic nor as flexible as once presumed (Hamman, Wortham, and Murillo 2015). APLS scholars draw upon different strands of these frameworks for different projects. Some even work collaboratively with other actors and agencies that are in a better position to redirect and channel resources that are life-sustaining in marginalized communities. In the next ethnographic sections, I delve deeply into public sociopolitical debates within Guatemala figuring children and youth precarity and their mobility during the 1990s. I focus on the forms of simultaneous interpellation that entangled indigenous youth as well as emblematic examples of interdiscursive chained speech events within kin networks. Children and youth within quite mundane activities would seize upon the productive properties of youth style, play and narrative to mediate relations of close distance and critique their delimited present much like the ethno-racial contortions that Rosa (2019) emphasized in his study of Chicago-based Latinx youth. They did so without undercutting communal ties to kin and community when Guatemalans were starting to feel hopeful. I then take stock of youth mobilities years later when it was clear that the socioeconomic conditions were not improving. Gains nonetheless had been made with greater indigenous political participation and representation in governmental institutions which implemented progressive social justice reforms to recover historical memory and implement multilingual education (Bellino 2017; Maxwell 2017; Reynolds 2009, 2019). During this time the youth in my original study came of age and joined a third wave of migration (Jonas and Rodriguez 2014). Ethnographic descriptions feature young adults as well as their children who traveled unaccompanied to be reunited with kinsmen in Postville, Iowa in the mid-2000s. I switch analytic lenses to interrogate how they have

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withstood contemporary racializing discourses of migration that reordered indigenous identities and opportunities (Reynolds 2013a). The longitudinal, lifespan focus that APLS scholars employ is especially powerful in challenging hegemonic perspectives and forms of structural violence that blame families and youth for the precarious (im)mobilities they must navigate (Paugh and Riley 2019).

ASSESSING RISK AND FIGURING CHILDHOOD IN REDES: MASS-MEDIATED (STATE) INTERPELLATIONS CUTTING INTO THE NETWORKS OF THE INTERPELLATED News media enables a circuit of communication with a mass-mediated participation framework that interpellates citizens as communities of coverage, and often directly addresses them via a fetishized voice of the state (Briggs 2007; Cotter 2010; Paz 2018). In this first ethnographic section, I chronicle how dueling elite interests exploited news media outlets in the interpellation of the majority of its population which was indigenous and under the age of eighteen. This was a cultural politics of childhood which grafted racializing discourses within humanitarian and universal rights discourses which were simultaneously championed and derided. During the early years of Guatemala’s postwar era, images of children and youth saturated mass media outlets. Organizations and agencies diffused images through print, radio, and broadcast media that the state was in legal compliance, implementing provisions fostering children’s rights as mandated by the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Guatemala was a signatory. Television broadcast channels 3 and 7 aired a series of public service announcements titled, “pegate a tus derechos” (“stick to your rights”). All featured footage of middle-class ladino children (i.e., an ethnic minority comprised of mestizo children) busily engaged in pretend play. This series sought to inform Guatemalans about what different rights entailed and how they were supposed to secure all children’s well-being, though the visual iconography deployed was restricted to bourgeois representations preserving childhood innocence. A different figure of criminalized children and youth emerged via major newspaper headlines, which regularly decried a surge in youth delinquency and related violence associated with organized crime and paramilitarized groups comprised of ex-soldiers and ex-civil patrollers who had fought in the genocidal war—animating all sorts of positions from the Right (evangelicals, National Civil Police, Guatemalan army, neoliberal reformers). Historian Deborah Levenson (2013) described how Guatemalan adults from these groups in the 1980s–1990s mistreated maras (poor Guatemala City youth gangs) both physically and representationally, turning them into targets for eradication. Levenson found that the Army Intelligence selectively kidnapped members of youth gangs and trained them in paramilitary death squad tactics used in the countryside before releasing them back into the city. The military thus had a direct hand in transforming Guatemala City’s poor mixed-ethnic urban youth from peer groups who had been participants in the radical working-class coalition protesting the state for economic reform into groups that worshipped death. News commentaries authored by special interest groups in the late 1990s were sensationalistic. They reflected elite fears of uncontrollable masses of violent males— los delincuentes (the delinquents) (Reynolds 2013a)—and fed concerns that only maras

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and other delincuentes enjoyed special protections from the Office of Human Rights (PDH). The powerful Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF) representing the interests of Guatemala’s oligarchs mobilized to redirect public attention away from neoliberal reforms toward the rise of organized forms of crime. In 1998, CACIF sponsored the production of a thinly veiled piece of political propaganda, which lobbied for implementation of the death penalty for those convicted of committing such heinous crimes as kidnapping, child rape, and murder. Social delinquents and their victims were anthropomorphically depicted as a vulture guarding a cage containing a blindfolded canary. The commercial’s dramatized script and its translation goes as follows: Porque las aves de rapiña aún viven, urge la aplicación de la pena de muerte por el organismo judicial. No más secuestros. Guatemala está de luto. Guatemala exige justicia.

Because birds of prey still live, it’s urgent that the death penalty be applied by the judicial system. No more kidnappings. Guatemala is in mourning. Guatemala demands justice.

The formal properties of the omniscient voiceover narrator included a decidedly masculine voice, striking an affective stance of moral outrage. It iconized a presumptive Guatemalan vox populi commanding via the imperative form exige (demand) a return to authoritarian exercises of justice. Note, however, that the phrasing of “Guatemala demands justice” is nomically calibrated to the mythos of the state, suggesting that it is the People and not elites who eternally authorize the coercive power of the state apparatus. Finally, in the text-metrical structuring, the existential clause of urgency gives rise to the necessity of sanctioned acts of state violence, which presumably deterred “new” violent crimes to free the public from a chronic state of mourning due to the ineffectual and corrupt criminal justice system (Torres 2008). Other ethnographers working in Guatemala and across Central American states have noted that “security” became a keyword characterizing the deformed democracies engendered in militaristic responses throughout the region more broadly (Burrell and Moodie 2015, 383). CACIF’s commercial and other broadcast segments moreover framed impunity as solely enjoyed by imagined delincuentes, and this particular postwar imaginary of impunity had powerful effects. In 2000, the electorate swung toward the military right and elected the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party candidate Alfonso Portillo Cabrera (backed by ex-dictator, Ríos Montt) against the neoliberal National Advancement Party (PAN) party candidate, Óscar Berger. Portillo was the first, in what now is a long line of candidates to run on a party platform of mano dura (iron fist) policies, which included increasing the size of the civil police force (begun under PAN president Arzú) and reauthorized a domestic role for the military to enforce internal security. This was a controversial policy in the immediate postwar era as it reinstated a military role to provide law and order for domestic crimes and was against the intent of the Peace Accord to demilitarize and circumscribe the military’s role in domestic affairs (Godoy 2005). Other elections since reveal deep ambivalences within elites’ social networks and display fault lines of elite interests. Populist political and military leaders like President Portillo enjoyed class mobility along with political power which prompted oligarchic imperialist responses to distance themselves as gente decente (decent people) from nouveau riche,

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gente corriente (commoners), and other racialized cosmopolitans from below (González Ponciano 2013). Representations I documented during that timeframe deployed meta-discourses identifying and differentiating modern childhoods (or childhood lost) that depicted children and youth using different stereotypic figures of personhood as either “at risk” or “as risk” to society (Boyden 1990; Stephens 1995). The aforementioned, pegate a tus derechos public service announcements sought to empower a subset of privileged children. As young neoliberal citizens in Guatemala’s fledgling democracy, they were to be armed with power/knowledge to avoid becoming “at risk” to abuse and neglect. Youth featured as delincuentes, however, were not interpellated in this way. Instead, they were “as risk” youth and disposable (Reynolds 2013a). While similar forms of identification and differentiation recurred in the indigenous highlands, they were refracted through the particulars of those places and parasitically spread as rumor. Sometimes this too resulted in violent removal. That was certainly the fate of Alfonso, an indigenous Mam returned migrant youth, who, after having escaped lynching in 1997, was subsequently shot and killed by police officers in 2003 (Burrell 2013a, 2013b). The police and other villagers accused him of being a dangerous gang member. In San Antonio Aguas Calientes, where I conducted my ethnographic research within the Kaqchikel Mayan language community with Spanish-dominant Kaqchikel youth, local news about mara activity also formed within network communicative circuits as chisme (gossip) as well as rumor. As San Antonio, did not yet have a sizeable return migrant population to scapegoat, a different segment of the youth population became targeted for suspicion. It included the young venders in my study who experimented stylistically with mass-mediated forms of fashion and entertainment from urban youth culture in Los Angeles and Chicago that they had gained access to through splicing into cable TV networks. This cholo-style was used performatively within near-peer kin group interactions (Mendoza-Denton 2008; Nakassis 2016; Reynolds 2007)1. No Fear T-shirts and gear and national reggaetón boy bands were especially popular. Peers appropriated nicknames from sports figures and action films akin to Terminator and Tiburón (Shark) for males, emphasizing hyper-masculinity, though the names adopted by or attributed to female individuals—for example, la Reina (the Queen)—were nonspecific though still gendered.2 Nicknames, as signs operate like proper names, in that they were indexically anchored in baptismal events witnessed by members within peer networks. Nicknames that evinced iconizing qualities of the baptized, once authenticated by interpreters were taken-up as rhematic interpretants, especially by individuals with weak social ties. They recurred and were amplified in specific ways. For example, during a multiparty cross-generational speech event framed as gossip between venders, some of whom had overlapping kin-ties, an adult female in an evaluative coda, interpreted La Reina’s behavior as worthy of public lynching, “Deben de quemarla viva!” (“They should be burned alive!”) She effectively occupied the interpellated participant role of outraged members of the public and displayed alignment with vigilante expressions of justice. Given that chisme metapragmatically is a network-internal signer-directed signer relation of contact (Kockelman 2010; Paz 2018), it reflexively operated as an affective pronouncement to intensify fear and discourage overhearing younger male siblings from associating with La Reina and other members of her peer network. One of the primary means to undercut the affective power of chisme interactions involved instances of when an authenticated interpreter and high status member within the network first demanded to know the source of information, which in

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turn be followed swiftly by a counter evaluation of source credibility. This took shape as a metapragmatic attack (Jacquemet 1996), typifying the message as nothing but casaca (exaggeration or lie), and the principal and/or animator of the message a casaquero/a (liar, male or female) a particular enregistered discursive figure of personhood who is talkative and untrustworthy, infamous for playing tricks on fools who would believe them. Chisme and other admonitions against cholo-style and persona revealed local ambivalences associated with horizontal forms of youth sociability. Youth’s refracted uptake of multimodal expressive forms tacitly challenged not only Guatemalan elite racial and class privilege associated with knowledge of US popular culture and English, but also their caregivers’ relative age-based forms of authority. And as such they figured into discourses of risk that shaped indigenous youths’ mobility and precarity. In the next section, I delve into situated instances of how different figures were rescaled during kin and peer group exchanges within the same sector of the local economy.

LAMINATING AFFECTIVE VALUES THROUGH CLASPING AND SPIRALING: THE SEMIOTIC RESCALING OF FIGURES OF “YOUTH AT/AS RISK” The Lopez Balam, Pop, and Quej families who participated in my 1990s study were entrepreneurs reliant upon the sale of artisanal commodities to weekend tourists from Guatemala City to Antigua as well as seasonal international tourists. Specifically, all the adult women and some of their children (both male and female) were ambulant venders, which meant they did not have to rent a location to sell their wares. While this lowered the costs associated with breaking into the business of la venta loca (the crazy sale), it made them vulnerable in many different ways. Legally, ambulant venders suffered police intervention being charged with loitering and other violations associated with improper use of public space when trying to sell to tourists. This is one way that unequal access to commercial space racialized the cityscape, as only expatriate foreign nationals (US citizens) and ladinos typically commanded enough capital and had the know-how to own and rent prime locations within the Spanish colonial era buildings which drew tourists to the city. Socially it subjected venders to a patriarchal inflected class-based system of surveillance and norms of propriety which differentially entangled young venders who had to acquire street savvy behavioral skills while staving off its imagined corrupting effects. And finally, personal safety was also as much an issue for them as it was for the international tourists. Consequently, discussions about signs of crime, poverty, and lack of security recurred within venders’ redes of communication as it did in the national news media coverage (see also Paz 2018). These topics were ripe for the citational play of semiotic signs in mediating familial relations as well as providing meta-commentary on their social conditions. Consider the following exchange that took place between three male siblings from the Lopez Balam family during a competitive game of marbles. The socio-indexical meanings evident in the game speak to the particulars of the situated activity itself, and how these male siblings mediated relations with others. Specifically, they co-constructed and semiotically rescaled those relations within their own forms of social organization (see Smith 2016). Throughout the game, while the boys sought to knock each other’s marbles out of a circle drawn in the sand, they enacted embodied strategies of masculine bravado to distract their opponents. One exchange in particular caught my attention.

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Fourteen-year-old Ernesto style-shifted into the social voice of a journalist or even perhaps a televised announcer and sarcastically enacted a public service announcement about “at risk” children. He swaggered in-between his two lithe younger brothers, placed his hand on Venacio’s shoulder and deadpanned into my video camera just as he was about to take a shot, “ese es el problema que tiene San Antonio, los desnutridos” (“that is the problem San Antonio has, malnourished ones”). Ernesto semiotically plotted a social matrix involving indexical presupposition and entailment through which the deictic form ese (that) co-textually pointed to how the unstated, but inferentially recoverable problem of uneven socioeconomic development in Guatemalan places such as his hometown are visibly manifest in stunted bodies which were contextually present, his slender younger brothers. Ernesto tightly calibrated his performance to enregistered humanitarian discourses, as a clasping movement (Gal 2018), which constructs people and their relations by conjoining different social domains while also laminating preexisting social voices with new values. Both siblings interpreted Ernesto’s statement as an instance of teasing. Rolo laughed out loud and shot his marble while Venancio struck a nonchalant stance to this playful verbal sneak attack. He responded to Ernesto’s editorializing/public service announcement by directly addressing him sarcastically, “bueno, gordo” (“Okay fatso”). In this way, he contrasted Ernesto’s image of the brothers’ presumably malnourished bodies with its opposite, Ernesto’s gluttonous one. His sarcasm relied upon co-participants (including imagined distal audiences to the footage) being able to visually observe that Ernesto was no larger than they were. Thus, the boys’ verbal play within this interaction ritual was heightened precisely because rhematizing statements are revealed to be not as they seem; children’s bodies can be simultaneously indexical of immature and malnourished bodies. Ernesto and Venancio both exploited the ambiguous yet nonetheless perceivable qualities of bodies as qualia, they semiotically rescaled nationalist discourses of failed economic policies as a local social problem. This is a clear example of how youth citizenship is figured in quotidian ways within kin network discourse practices (Reynolds and Chun 2013; Paz 2018); it illustrates youths’ practical critical consciousness even as it was refracted and redirected in near peers’ contests of character and skill within the context of a game. While still retaining focus on Ernesto as a case study youth experiencing simultaneous interpellations of childhood and youth citizenship, I next move from playful exchanges to a serious one. Among the part-time venders in my study, it was Ernesto who most experimented with cholo-style in his peer group. He was a middle child among eight living siblings. He had not yet completed his básico (middle school) education, and at age 14 he was a legal adult according to Guatemalan labor codes. His knowledge of American popular culture enabled him to relate to and sell inexpensive wares to US tourists. His older siblings also used their peer networks to vigilantly keep watch over him when hanging out with friends as well as when he was working. One day on the job, Ernesto was made a party to an act of delincuencia. He witnessed the armed robbery and murder of a Chilean tourist during a tour of La Merced, one of Antigua’s historic colonial Catholic Churches. Ernesto came home, visibly shaken. A few days later, he stayed out late with friends, returning just before sunrise. His mother, who still had not recovered from the shock of him nearly becoming a crime-victim, severely scolded him for always desiring to be in the street “En la calle! En la calle!” (“In the street! In the street!”) she shouted. She also threatened to whip him with a cane. Ernesto’s older sister, Yesenia, intervened and retold a third-party account of an unspecified grandmother,

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jailed for using corporal punishment to discipline a child. Their mother scoffed, turned to Ernesto, and sarcastically challenged him to dare denounce her to the local Office of Human Rights as if he were un niño de la calle (an abandoned street child) with no home to go to and no family to feed him. Thus, within this familial dispute appeared a different figure of at-risk child, “the street child” used to shame the cholo son who was also feared to be at risk of being drawn into delincuencia. In this cross-generational multiparty exchange, different actors adopted dueling social voices which animated conservative, liberal and neoliberal stances. Ernesto received verbal blows and his sister prevented the escalation of discipline away from corporal punishment. Simultaneously, they navigated specific tensions within postcolonial expressions of Mayan ontology, which required respect for an individual’s autonomy as well as demanding displays of deference to status, manifest as intersectional identities configured by relative age, gender, and kinship (Reynolds 2009). Months later in the Pop household, I documented still other third-party accounts as rumors which emphasized young children’s vulnerability being preyed upon in public spaces in Guatemalan crimes stories warning stranger danger. Nineteen-year-old Horacio shared news from a neighborhood on the opposite side of town in San Antonio Aguas Calientes where his oldest married sister Piedad lived with her three children. Piedad’s husband had recently departed for the United States in the wake of Hurricane Mitch to seek work at a meat-packing facility in northeastern Iowa. Horacio would drop in to see her when visiting his affines who lived in that neighborhood. It was on one of those visits when he heard about two young children who disappeared when playing in the street. A local civil patrol was called to action and search for the missing children. Horacio immediately jumped to the conspiratorial conclusion that they must have been kidnapped by smugglers for their organs to be harvested and sold to the highest bidder on the black market serving US clients. In my fieldnotes describing that narrating event, Horacio syntagmatically chained together five crime stories. The associational links he made moved from depictions of “as risk” vulnerable local children being preyed upon by forms of adult delincuencia to translocal expressions of antisocial peer group involvement in the illicit exchanges, selling stolen gilded colonial antiquities from Catholic Church Cathedrals. The sequencing of these first narratives produced a spiraling effect, a progressive deepening that amplified and stabilized typified figures within-network signers, much in the same way Valentina Pagliai (2009) described how conversational exchanges become unaccountable and seek agreement in the racialization of new immigrants in Italy. Horacio’s final story, however, was much more ambivalent about public responses. He recalled how the church bells rang in the adjacent town of Santa Catarina, alerting the town’s residents to an unfolding crime. One citizen brought a gun and joined the throng assembling in the municipal center and in front of the cathedral. Meanwhile, a youth volunteered his help; he climbed the bell tower to survey the area and see who might be attempting escape. The man with the gun, mistook the youth for a thief and shot him dead. Upon surveying the body, the man realized that a case of mistaken identity was compounded by personal tragedy. He had in fact killed his own son. The people protected the man and blamed the thieves for the death. The funeral was well-attended, Horacio concluded, and the youth heralded a martyr and protector of the community. The last story in the chain made the biggest impression on me as it was one of the few I heard anyone tell that could be remotely construed as questioning this particular postwar expression of public outrage. It performatively paired sensational news media crime stories with rumor within this

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narrating event and exposed them as antidemocratic interdiscursive graftings. The last story effectively put a stop to the recursive spiral through laminating a different value to an otherwise racializing sequence, and semiotically rendered defeasible the figure of un delincuente by opening up a different condition of possibility. It was also a story that Horacio continued to tell others even years later but in very different sets of social circumstances when he had extended his social network becoming a chain migrant to the North in the mid-2000s.

YOUTH MOBILITY AND PRECARITY IN MIGRATION: CROSS-REGIONAL CONDITIONS DURING DIFFERENT ERAS OF IMMIGRATION AND ENFORCEMENT POLICIES Horacio was not alone in his decision to become a transborder immigrant. A significant cross section of youth within the kin networks from my 1990s study in the 2000s participated in transnational migration. But their destinations reflected different trajectories of migration. The Lopez Balam and Quej families have extended their business networks through South-South circular migration where their transborder mobility is not restricted. Half of the adult siblings from the Lopez Balam family and their children established part-time residences in Costa Rica and Belize in the sale of handicrafts. The oldest brother has grown prosperous and built a two-story home in San Antonio. This was one pattern of circular labor migration that other families from San Antonio deeply involved in the handicraft trade successfully pursued. San Antonio had a sizable segment of its population heading north to the United States. A majority settled around Santa Fe, New Mexico, while others tried their luck in California, New York, and Iowa. One kin network became nodes within a chain migrant network established by Piedad Pop’s husband, Serapio, to Postville, Iowa to work in a kosher slaughter and meat-packing facility. “Chain migration” is a concept coined in interdisciplinary studies and especially sociological approaches to migration to capture migrants’ reliance on kin and diverse community ties to “sending” and “receiving” contexts across national boundaries. These studies span periods when capital in social democratic states demanded disposable labor and legal regimes restricted which populations could be legitimately recruited and prevented circular forms of transborder migration that had been previously permitted. Scholars of the current immigration legal regime in the United States argue that these laws emerged from and supported Cold War-era capitalist forms of production. Agro-industrial production, in particular, relied on a deportable labor force to recruit the most docile and “disciplined” workers comprised of ethnically segmented groups who shouldered all of the risks (Burrell and Moodie 2013; De Genova 2002, 2005, 2010; Harrison and Lloyd 2011; Menjívar and Abrego 2012). In recent mass-mediated representations, chain migration has since been rhetorically weaponized as a dog whistle by White supremacist, and anti-immigration political discourses advanced by John Tanton and others of his ilk (McIntosh and Mendoza-Denton 2020). When social scientists interview the first migrants who forged paths to the United States, narratives highlight how the protagonists seize upon an emergent and contingent opportunity to go abroad. Once a chain migrant network is established, at times at great personal cost, the social ties to initial migrants provided the human infrastructure for subsequent members of their community to travel. This is the case for indigenous Guatemalan transmigration to the US Contingent logics and ephemeral forms of

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decision-making continue to operate throughout the journey long after a migrant chain has been established (Galemba, Dingeman and DeVries 2021). Jacqueline Hagan’s research from the 1980s was an early ethnographic case study establishing the importance of shifting social networks in the unauthorized chain migration of K’iche’ Maya families, connecting a major municipality within the province of Totonicapán to Houston, Texas. In Deciding to be Legal, Hagan (1994) described how the growing populations of Latin American migrants kept Houston real-estate firms from declaring bankruptcy after the boom years of the oil petrochemical industries went bust. Firms were desperate to fill high-end vacant residential housing stock and readily accepted poor, indigenous laborers as tenants. Hagan found also that after the initial and reunification phases occurred, these migrants’ social networks remained key long after the initial settlement process. Indeed, there were significant gendered differences in the composition of social networks which empowered Guatemalan indigenous men over women to not only secure higher paying forms of employment, but also supplied them with accurate information and the social support to pursue legal status under the legalization provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. While this reform bill was one of the first to set additional restrictions on who in the future could become legal, Hagan noted that the legalization program was an overwhelming success based on the size of the eligible population that were able to regularize legal status. Subsequent studies of Mayan communities in the Diaspora have noted similar dynamics within social networks, though the forms of housing and labor recruitment vary depending on regional political economies (Fink 2003; Jonas and Rodriguez 2014; Mendez 2012; Reynolds and Didier 2013). The types of housing that migrants who work in agriculture have access to are substandard and the working conditions are extremely exploitative and socially isolating (Reynolds 2013b; Reynolds and Didier 2013). And in rural destinations, specific legal policies and practices within the larger institutional assemblage can shift at different scales, like tectonic plates, moving in different directions both opening up and closing opportunities that can increase the magnitude of support and suffering (Silver 2018). The first sibling in my study to migrate North from San Antonio was Manuel Pop who, with the help of un conecte at the US embassy, secured a tourist visa to travel to the United States and join his brother-in-law. Manuel overstayed the period allotted and lost legal status. A few years later Horacio then Piedad, followed with the help of a different conecte when access to the first one was cut off. A distant cousin was in the transnational business of smuggling people from Guatemala to the United States. This same smuggling network helped Manuel’s and Piedad’s children and others to eventually make the journey to the border between 2005–2006 as “unaccompanied minors.” Some turned themselves in to Customs and Border Patrol enforcement who in turn had to release them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for processing until it could be determined if they might qualify under the Trafficking Victims Protection Authorization Act. Given that most Immigration Courts could not handle the volume of cases nor could ORR adequately house the minors, they were placed with parents or a close relative until called for their court date. At that time unaccompanied minors from Guatemala had not yet been constructed via national discourses as a symptom of crisis or as criminals to be retained in detention facilities as was typical under the Trump administration before the Migrant Protection Protocols (i.e., the “Remain in Mexico” policy) went into effect in January 2019.

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The extended Pop kin network along with other families from central highland towns were thriving in Postville, as were their children who had grown into teens. Manuel would take his children, nieces and nephews fishing on the Mississippi River. All the cousins formed friendships that crossed ethno-racial lines. Piedad’s sons were doing well in school and played in the newly formed soccer league. The public elementary school in Postville did not impose English-only policies even though the teaching staff were mostly limited to the English language. Children as language brokers were important resources and points of contact between the families and school staff when adult bilingual staff were not available to interpret. The local school district’s vision was to expand the linguistic repertoire of all of Postville’s children offering Spanish and American Sign Language in addition to the English as Second Language services. The principal of the elementary and middle school even required staff to tour the meat-packing facility to better understand the working conditions that a majority of the migrant families endured. And the fact that a majority of the school staff were committed to creating a welcoming space to all children was one reason why many Spanish-speaking migrant families would return to Postville even after exploring work opportunities in other parts of the Midwest. Only Piedad’s daughter, Cassandra, decided to drop out of school and move in with her Mexican boyfriend’s family. The love between those two teens drew the families together in spite of prejudices that also divided Mexican from Guatemalan migrant populations in town. When they shared meals together, I witnessed affines compare experiences and tactics of how to contend with racial microaggressions at businesses in nearby towns. My fieldnotes also included many observations of these microaggressions of race. The one that vividly stands out to me was when my family and I were waiting to checkout at the Walmart in Decorah, Iowa where all the Postville migrants went to the grocery shop on Saturdays. One White Iowan shopper, disgruntled by the fact that the Guatemalan patrons in front of her had spoken Spanish, complained to us about “people” not learning to speak English. My Bulgarian husband retorted asking why she had not learned Spanish as his White Iowan wife had. State-level English-only policies were often invoked by Whites in other parts of the rural Midwest and Southeastern United States to render Spanish-speakers and speakers of indigenous languages hyper audible and subject to racialized censure in public settings (Maldonado 2014; Reynolds 2019). Cross-ethnoracial network ties were then vital for sharing personal observations, as local news, about how to navigate different institutions, crossing county lines in the region. Horacio Pop in 2008 was the one sibling who no longer worked at the plant. He was a cook at a popular local business. He too had earned enough money to complete construction on his home in Guatemala, though his wife and son preferred to live in Guatemala. Horacio was close to his boss, Jerónimo Santana, who was one of the first migrants to settle in Postville. Jerónimo served as a cultural broker and activist on behalf of Guatemalan residents and employees at the plant. When Jerónimo learned that I was a university professor, he asked me to read some of his fictional short stories to see if they were of publishable quality. One of the stories was uncannily familiar, though it was a nostalgic portrait of small-town highland life and young love. The protagonist was an indigenous youth whose dreams of marrying his childhood sweetheart are cut short when he is mistaken for a thief and shot dead by his own father from the cathedral’s steeple. It was a version of Horacio Pop’s crime story reframed as a romantic tragedy. The events depicted still retained elements of social critique, but what was more palpable was an ambivalent male migrant structure of feeling of loss and yearning for a homeplace to

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which there was no return and this more accurately reflected Jerónimo’s generational perspective and mobility project than Horacio’s. When I interviewed Jerónimo about the challenges facing Guatemalan migrants in Postville, he told me that there were many. Almost all could be attributed to the plant owners’ ability to exploit its deportable labor force while also benefiting from forms of corruption and abuse perpetrated by middle-management. Most troubling of all was the number of under-aged minors working inside the plant. He quipped using dueling poetic forms that for these youth instead of progreso (progress) there was only retroceso (backsliding) into neocolonial forms of patronage akin to the clientelist relations back in Guatemala. This was a tragedy, he said, given that youth came here to forge new lives. Another bilingual cultural broker and self-identified native-born Iowan corroborated his perspective. She pointed to evidence of corruption within the plant that was in plain view; many of the cars that new immigrant families drove around town were the product of extortion. A departmental supervisor required employees to buy automobiles from him in exchange for keeping their posts and/or for securing work for newcomer relatives. When I asked Piedad and Serapio about their thoughts pertaining to corruption within the plant and the proliferation of under-age migrant workers, they dismissed my concerns even though they were directly impacted, having paid a hardhat extortionist upward of $10,000. Instead, they admonished me for forgetting about how these were common practices in Guatemala, where child labor was even more widespread and underpaid employees openly leveraged positions of authority, bribing, extorting, and selling ill-gotten goods to supplement their income. They said what he was doing could be viewed as a favor since it would be impossible for them to purchase cars and obtain jobs otherwise. Being coerced into buying two cars in exchange for securing or retaining a better position on the kill-line was low on the list of more pressing concerns and fears. Topping that list was fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) in the form of a raid at the plant, door-to-door dragnet searches or cooperation between ICE and Iowa state troopers in periodic checkpoint roadblocks to verify proof of registration and a driver’s license. Several workplace raids had taken place in 2006 at other meat-packing plants across Iowa. Migrants were especially vigilant about discerning where and when checkpoints would take place. I witnessed how they were anxiety producing and costly given the hefty fines one had to pay when I went to fetch Horacio when he was detained ten miles out of town. I was the only person from within his kin network with a driver’s license. Police in Postville were not participating in the 287(g) program, a provision within The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) which deputized officers to engage in internal border patrolling as an extension of their duties (Colman and Stuesse 2016). Families nonetheless were appraised by Spanish-language news stories which reported cases occurring in other states across the United States and they speculated that it could happen in this region too. Line managers also parasitically exploited Mexican and Guatemalan social networks, spreading rumors that ICE agents were in town, which curiously coincided with the presence of United Food and Commercial Workers Union organizers, to encourage migrant laborers to obtain Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITIN) and file federal and state tax returns. Between 2007 and 2008, I witnessed several instances of these when my interviews within Guatemalan migrant homes were interrupted by phone calls from roommates working a shift at the plant. They were calling to share an announcement at work to beware ICE and not answer a knock at the door. The UFCW organizer I

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interviewed also disclosed several personal experiences dealing with management’s spread of misinformation about who he was and what he was doing in town. These and other transmigrants’ reactions were revealing and compelling. The amount of debt one shouldered as well as parents’ responsibility to care for young American-born children were conditioning how each family reacted to a perpetual state of deportability. When indigenous youth decided to work at the plant, they were heralded within Guatemalan networks as moral agents, taking initiative and upholding filial obligations to family. There were also problematic silences surrounding the kinds of sexual abuse and harassment that also were being perpetuated by some line-managers at the plant. Fear of social stigma, spread through chisme, intensified Guatemalan indigenous women’s experience of precarity. Extortion, corruption, verbal and physical abuse, along with sexual harassment within the enclosed spheres of private production and public service had to be tolerated so long as people could secure a job. Bribes and fines exacted on roadways, however, were directly critiqued and acknowledged to be traumatizing. Stories retold in migrant networks about fraught encounters while being detained in transit, including those between national borders heading northbound, haunted many and played out in their fears of potential encounters at county/municipal checkpoints. These were the forms of impunity that conditioned Guatemalan migrant imaginaries of mobility and precarity. After I wrapped up fieldwork winter of 2008, hell broke loose within the community when ICE raided the plant on May 12, 2008. The large-scale workplace operation was traumatizing, and it conjured past traumas for Guatemalans as well. News media images displaying military-grade machinery and uniforms were reminiscent of Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency tactics during the Civil War—with helicopters sweeping rural areas in search of people fleeing capture. ICE agents shackled all detained workers. About 389 people, a majority of which were indigenous Guatemalans, were whisked away on busses to Waterloo, Iowa and coerced into accepting plea deals during the expedited criminal proceedings that immediately followed the raid. They later served a sentence of five months in jail before being “removed” from the United States and “returned” to Guatemala. Manuel Pop was captured along with his wife. He was deported after months in jail and his wife, like many other detained mothers, remained under house arrest monitored by GPS devices. Horacio, Piedad and her family, and their youngest sibling, fifteen-year-old Pedro Pop, a new arrival were not caught. All scrambled to find ways to support themselves as well as their traumatized sister-in-law, niece and nephew. News media footage of the raid circulated regionally and nationally and effectively drew some immigrant advocates to Postville to lend their support. These same images were appropriated by Guatemalan youth directly impacted by the raid, like graduating senior, William Toj, who sketched the broadcast footage in a pencil and paper mosaic composition. William and other Guatemalan and Mexican teens and children were met with a wellspring of community support led by an interfaith coalition. Copies of William’s drawing were sold at the Postville Response Coalition’s Response Center operated by AmeriCorp Vista Volunteers as well as at local banks to raise money toward tuition and fees for his attendance at a regional community college. Despite the federal government’s crafting of a political message to highlight allegations of criminal activity by the labor force, many print media outlets did not adopt that framing in subsequent coverage. Hamann and Reeves (2012) analysis of cultural scripts within regional news media coverage of ICE raid activities spanning 2006–2008 found that regional news outlets printed more pro-immigrant storylines which framed the

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ICE enforcement tactics during worksite raids as violent and unnecessary incursions, destructive of family and community life. Guatemalan residents shared their testimonies as survivors of the raid in public forums, like the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Delegation which assembled at St. Bridget’s Church on July 26, 2008, to decry the treatment they received. Both Piedad and Serapio and many others in town, assisted law enforcement to document the workplace crimes committed against them as part of federal and state efforts to hold the plant management to account. They also prepared their own oral histories for an edited book compiled by Luther College faculty Virginia Gibbs and Luz María Hernández, and published as Shattered Dreams: The story of a historic ICE raid in the words of the detainees with Floricanto Press (2014). The CEO of the plant was arrested and charged with breaking federal and state laws. State prosecutors initially charged both the CEO and his father who was the official owner of the plant with 9,311 counts of child labor violations when they were able to identify thirty-two youths who had been working at the plant within the one-year statute of limitations. The attorney general’s office worked with independent filmmaker and volunteer within the humanitarian coalition, Luis Argueta, to help convince seven of the deported Guatemalan youth to return as witnesses for the prosecution in the Iowa state child labor trial. Members of the interfaith coalition and faculty at Luther College also provided moral support to youth who delivered graphic testimony of workplace abuses. But the prosecutors failed to make its case and the CEO was eventually acquitted of these charges, though he did receive a severe sentence after being found guilty on eighty-six counts of financial fraud in the federal case. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Iowa State Attorney General’s strategy to exploit the cultural politics of childhood by playing up images of migrant youth as children and reenactments of the types of labor they undertook, all failed to convince a jury that the CEO had direct knowledge that minors were working at the plant. Instead, the racializing politics of immigration held sway because youth testimony was not deemed credible (Reynolds 2013b). While the families did not see justice prevail in the state case, the legal team of immigration lawyer Sonia Parras-Konrad out of Des Moines, Iowa helped secure nonimmigrant U-Visas for seven youths along with another 172 U-Visas for Postville’s Guatemalan and Mexican workers and close relatives. Two branches of the Pop extended family were among them. I returned time and again to Postville, including the ten-year commemoration of the raid. I learned that while a majority of highland Guatemalan families were no longer in residence, there were recent arrivals of K’iche’-speakers from Santa Cruz del Quiché and other indigenous people from Oaxaca, Mexico. The Pop family was still firmly rooted there and they were again thriving. Some of the teens, now adults, were working at the same kosher plant, although under different ownership. Others lived in Postville and commuted to work at different industrial plants and construction sites in the region. A few others became first-generation college students. One of them Ludvin Sarazúa, a Kaqchikel youth who survived the raid and was featured in an activist documentary film, America First, produced by Univision released for streaming on its website in time for the tenth year commemoration of the Postville raid. The film was aimed at a mixed Latinx audience and critiqued the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics and the return to large-scale ICE raids. In one of the film’s closing scenes, sequences of long shots cut through with extreme close-ups strive to create an intimate connection between the audiences and the young Mexican, Somali, and Guatemalan dancers showcasing an event held at the Postville School in celebration of its multicultural diversity. In voiceover, Ludvin directly addresses and challenges the audience to account for the presumption that

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it occupies a morally higher ground, able to dictate to his mother or his community where they should be. “I just want you to do everything my mom has done. And then tell me if we shouldn’t be here or tell her that she shouldn’t be here.” This defiant stance provides a model for viewers to reanimate and aggregate voices within their own social networks (including social media networks) to contest the bellicose voices of White supremacy that are figured by Trump’s speech reproduced in the film’s title and that of his supporters.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I utilized an APLS framework to figure out how Guatemalan indigenous children and youth are unequal actors negotiating the multiple sociohistorical conditions that have produced what in some cases are abject and illegible subject positions in their pursuit of mobility projects. I also engaged in some temporal telescoping that this framework enables, taking a look back at my longitudinal fieldwork with indigenous kin networks across lifespan transitions and transborder migrations encompassing Central America and the United States. This longer time frame enabled me to critique the conditions children and youth navigated, even as they never entirely produced totalizing forms of inclusion or exclusion. Identifications could at times be destabilized and not just rescaled across activities, social domains, and the lifespan. I also featured how Guatemalan indigenous youth’s transborder mobile-ties were made possible by others within their kin and communities’ networks. Lynette Arnold (2019, 2020; Dick and Arnold 2018), relatedly highlights the communicative labor engendered in the transnational provision of care among Salvadoran families, as well as the reflexive meanings of care navigating tensions manifest across North-South divides. We also must grapple with how some network dynamics can lead to the intensification of precarity within circuits of communication, aggregating effects even if we analytically feel drawn to ethnographically privilege singularities in our studies of situated acts of chained semiosis. One of the reasons why Guatemalans in my study were extremely resistant to decrying abusive labor practices was due to aggregating economic effects. A majority of workers in the region, long-term residents and new arrivals, were dependent upon the monopolistic fortunes of a single company for sustaining their kin networks. These central highlanders were not the only ones in this predicament. Also in the mid-2000s, other colleagues documented how among Ixil, Mam and K’iche’ populations, as increasing numbers of kin headed North, some who stayed behind redeployed humanitarian aid and micro-credit in the form of interest-bearing loans within their redes toward financing the cost of smuggler’s fees to secure passage for young indigenous youth headed North (Stoll 2013; Heidbrink 2019). The 2008 financial crises directly undercut migrants’ ability to send home remittances, compounding their debt. In towns like Nebaj, social networks imploded just like pyramid schemes (Stoll 2013). Additionally, Guatemalan families on both sides of the North-South divide got into multi-level marketing of health and beauty products to supplement income to sustain themselves (Nelson 2015). In Postville, Piedad Pop, after working a long shift disassembling poultry, would turn around and spend many more hours preparing Guatemalan and Mexican food for sale in addition to distributing Jafra fragrances to Latinx meatpackers from her rental home. Like other MLM (multi-level marketing) schemes, timing and multiplex ties matter, though most rarely make any profit. All are singular economic tactics of survival predicated on aggregate effects of networks. They serve to exploit and deeply embed neoliberal logics

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within the social networks of indigenous families and can lead to their unraveling. Adding insult to injury is also the fact that because the chain migration literature acknowledges the importance of kin as human infrastructure in sustaining migration, policy-makers have an easier time taking a hardline stance and blaming migrants for daring to navigate the conjuncture of historically and regionally specific forms of precarity that shape their transborder pathways (Paret and Gleeson 2016). The coalitions of support in Iowa were closely forged out of managing a humanitarian crisis, which was likened to a man-made earthquake, powered by the securitized US deportation regime. This was different from the kinds of activism and coalition building that others have witnessed during earlier periods of migration to gateway cities in the Mayan Diaspora. Youth who came of age in Los Angeles, for example, have developed a critical reflexivity vis-à-vis the simultaneous interpellations that they have experienced and are forging different transborder connections and new organizational partnerships within ancestral and adoptive homelands (Batz 2014; Loucky and LeBaron 2012). Pan-Mayan activism has also now spread to the North. Diasporic Mayan-led organizations, like the International Mayan League based in Washington DC formed to connect indigenous migrants to legal aid and provide interpreting services in Mayan languages. This became urgent when the Trump administration’s border enforcement tactics included separating kin who were traveling together. They were the lead national organization to release advocacy statements denouncing the shooting-death of Claudia Patricia Gómez González (twenty-year-old Maya Mam) at the hands of a Customs and Border Patrol Agent as well as the untreated illnesses leading to the deaths of Jakelin Caal (seven-year-old Maya Q’eqchi’) and Felipe Gomez Alonzo (eight-year-old Maya Chuj), Juan de León Gutiérrez (sixteen-year-old Maya Ch’orti’) while in CBP custody at detention centers. None of their efforts as of yet are directed at transforming the regional political-economic policies and trade policies that will be necessary if we are to reduce economic precarity in networked rural communities in Guatemalan and the United States. This will entail a reckoning with the forms of racism that powered settler colonialism and are still deeply entrenched in our laws as well as those in Guatemala, which still presume state sovereignty as its prime directive over all else. The International Mayan League leaders however are calling academics to do their part, by listening to their priorities which include decolonizing representations of Mayas and their languages in the Diaspora as first nations people of the Americas with specific needs (Hiller, Linstroth, Vela 2009; LeBaron 2012), not to be confused or conflated with other Latin American or Caribbean migrant populations while also trying to build upon stretched infrastructural nodes to provide support on the fault lines in anticipation of new aftershocks. My current binational project working across networked school districts in the western highlands and southeastern United States is doing just that (Reynolds 2019). Other colleagues also agree to be drawn into advocacy directly. As long as we are not naïve about how we too are interpellated to play predictable communicative roles as Briggs (2007) reminds, we can consciously craft our meta-communicative messages for uptake especially in reshaping immigration and education policies where we might be called in as experts. Colleagues, ready your redes and be prepared to create some noise in the system.

NOTES 1. In Guatemala City this was a pejorative, racial, and class coded identity category, and part of youth-slang to denote gradations of lower-class rank and poor taste (González Ponciano

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2013). In Mexico at the time of my study, it was another word for gang member. To the indigenous youth in my study, it was a socially valued countercultural style. All associations suggest an identity category that is disruptive of the ethnoracial and class order. 2. All names, including nicknames, are pseudonyms.

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Chapter 14

Regimes of Organization in Danish Legal Interpreting MARTHA SIF KARREBÆK AND MARTA KIRILOVA

INTRODUCTION 1 In Denmark, the Administration of Justice Act §149,1 states that “(t)he language of the court is Danish.” The standard procedure is to call an interpreter when there is a linguistic mismatch between the language of the institutional domain and that of the defendants or the witnesses, and access to reliable and skilled interpreters is essential for the wellfunctioning legal system and for the rule of law. At the same time, interpreters are selfemployed freelancers, not public employees, contrary to other important institutional participants such as judges and prosecutors. Thus, defendants in need of translation rely on the expertise of freelancers with little job security. Furthermore, the vast majority of legal interpreters in Denmark have little or no formal education. The theme of (social and legal) justice is entangled in the professional affiliation of the legal interpreters, and in their lack of certified expertise, as we will show. In this chapter, we discuss what happened to the area of legal interpreting in Denmark after it was outsourced to a private company in 2018/19. Until 2019 the National Police had been in charge of administering legal interpreting. This basically consisted in keeping a list of approximately 1,200 freelance interpreters who were booked on an individual basis through a telephone call, by the legal institution in need of their assistance. However, several reports—for example, from Rigsrevisionen (The National Audit Office 2018)—concluded that there were severe (perceived) problems in the domain of legal interpreting. Particularly the professional expertise of the interpreters in terms of the quality of interpreting (translation accuracy) and so-called interpreter ethics were problematized. In response, the National Police aggregated legal interpreting into a single legal tender. This enabled them to avoid direct engagement with the problems, although it was not an officially stated reason. Six bids were received, and the tender was won by the private company EasyTranslate©, which had been on market for several years, providing interpreting and translation services for both private and public customers. The contract represented a huge expansion for EasyTranslate. They were to deliver 98 percent of legal interpreting, that is, interpreting services for police and courts, in the entire country. EasyTranslate emphasized greatly that they would ensure “quality.” Quality was defined through different measures, including the implementation of modern technology,

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the insistence on efficiency, and a drive for measurability. In addition, EasyTranslate informed that they would reduce the interpreters’ rates. In response, almost seven hundred legal interpreters announced that they would not accept any opportunity to work for the company. The interpreters disagreed with EasyTranslate, as well as with the National Police, on several issues. These include a new logic of governance, a new logic of quality, and a new moral economy. The interpreters did not want an intermediary between themselves and the legal institutions, nor did they believe EasyTranslate was the right company to manage interpreting; they found it unfair that they should receive less money for their work, and that interpreters with long-term experience should pass a test; they also pointed out a number of possible negative consequences of the new organization. The court interpreters’ strong resentment resulted in chaos in the courtrooms when EasyTranslate took over. Court cases were cancelled because no interpreters were available; assigned interpreters failed to turn up at the appointed time or at all; interpreters came across the country or even from abroad to interpret in court which caused a tremendous increase in the expenses. When no interpreters could be found for preliminary (statutory) hearings, non-Danish-speaking defendants had to be released, and non-Danish-speaking defendants in custody had to wait for extended periods of time in order to get to talk to a lawyer. This points to a third side of this case of interpreting and social justice, as the fight of the interpreters created a difficult situation for those seeking legal justice. Some activist interpreters who did not sign up with EasyTranslate started doing observations in court and wrote notes on what they encountered. In these notes, they documented perceived irregularities and flaws in the professionalism by the (often new and inexperienced) interpreters hired by EasyTranslate. Although the notes aligned with prior critical reports on legal interpreting, the activist interpreters managed to create the impression that this was a new, or a seriously aggravated, situation that had come about with EasyTranslate. As a result, what was originally presented as a way to increase and ensure quality in legal interpreting, that is, the engagement of a company with an enhanced focus on quality, ended up as a massive failure, not the least in terms of the public image of the National Police. In December 2019, after almost a year of struggle, the situation was (temporarily) solved. The contract with EasyTranslate was cancelled with the (for the authorities convenient) motivation that EasyTranslate had breached GDPR regulations. In the following, we combine an interest in the political economy of language and language ideologies with considerations of consequences for the rule of law as well as for social justice. By providing an analysis of the outsourcing of legal interpreting in Denmark, its uptake among different actors (interpreters, journalists, politicians, private entrepreneurs) and in different spaces (court, media, the private company), we focus on two fundamentally different, but not mutually exclusive understandings of the best organizational basis of the area, namely one based on ideas of neoliberal governance and one based on expertise. In terms of social justice, we discuss issues such as (1) the legal system’s legal and moral obligation to provide interpreting so that justice can be meted out and (2) the state’s role in creating a fair work environment for those equipped to provide interpretation in order to fulfill the first obligation. We believe that the case illustrates how actions that promote justice for some may seem different for others. Also, we show (3) how the state’s concessions to neoliberalism, and the corporate processes installed, failed to take into account—or perhaps take seriously—the importance of expertise, experience, and language.

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LEGAL INTERPRETING UNDER NEOLIBERALISM, THE EXPERT AUTHORITY, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Social justice concerns struggle over social inequality, equitable distribution of resources and power, and access to being heard or being able to express oneself (Heller 2010, 102). It also has to do with (economic) value, values, and respect (Duchêne 2019), and sometimes it is entangled in difficult ways with issues of authority and expertise (Mehan 1996). Although often analyzed in relation to dominant versus subordinate groups, where fairness and its opposite seem obvious, what is socially just, or how social justice should obtain, depends on the perspective taken, on (local) situatedness, and on the scaling and contextualization of a situation. We are concerned with issues such as the state’s moral obligation to provide justice for marginalized groups, and also how a commercial concern compromises this obligation. At the same time, the language workers in our case found that they were treated unjustly, and therefore created a counter position deploying the notion of expertise to create power. However, and somewhat ironically, this degraded the legal system’s ability to uphold the rule of law. In this section we introduce (1) the intersection of language as a commercial object, including notions of globalization and neoliberalism; (2) a social constructivist view on expert authority; and (3) Fraser’s approach to social justice.

Neoliberal Governance and Interpreting Along with, for example, the work of griots (Irvine 1989), call centers (e.g., Cameron 2000; Duchêne 2009), and commercial language teaching (Park and Wee 2013), professional interpreting is paid language work, and language is treated as an economic object (Heller and Duchêne 2011 and many others). Issues of how this object is valued and priced are central to the chapter. In our study, two well-known issues in the field of language commodification come into play. One concerns mobile people, and the other concerns the contemporary political economy. These are often referred to as “globalization” and “neoliberalism.” Recent decades have been marked by increased mobility of people. More mobility has created an increasing demand of interpreting in the public sector in many countries, yet this only happens under certain conditions: if there is no universal lingua franca; if there exist regulations of language choice so that a particular language needs to be used; and if there is an obligation to make the defendants participate, understand, and be understood. In the Danish court, all three conditions hold. Danish is the legally stipulated preferred language, and English is the only generally known (and thus in reality, only potential) lingua franca. Virtually everybody who has been through compulsory education in Denmark has a relatively high English competence, but in contrast to the institutional representatives, many non-Danish-speaking defendants do not. Globalization has also played a role in the spread of the ideology of “human rights.” One effect of this is that states commit each other to ensure the rights and possibilities of (their own and other states’) citizens to participate in court cases in which they are charged. Access to an interpreter is generally considered a human right, and perhaps one of particular significance, given that many of those people in need of an interpreter are subject to various forms of discrimination and structural violence (e.g., Blommaert 2009; Haviland 2003; Jacquemet 2015; Maryns 2005). Given the rationality of global capitalism, current practices and preferences hold that it is the role of the state to maximize the potential for the market to operate and

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to minimize its own intervention in social and economic life (Pujolar 2018, 488). In these years, many states privatize public services, and there is a preoccupation with ideas of measurement, standardization, efficiency, and technology. This is often understood as driven by a neoliberal agenda but can also be seen as part of general changes in a dominant understanding of a capitalist political economy. We will look at the discursive preoccupation with such key notions, how they were presupposed and used to create new understandings of quality—and thereby the interpreters’ position in relation to the court (cf. Urcioli and LaDousa 2013, 176; Rojo and Del Percio 2019). We will also discuss how neoliberalism, more generally, rather than leveling the playing field, made it seem less equal for those whose labor was rationalized and commodified. Although neoliberalism is often applied perhaps too eagerly as an analytical framework, we find it appropriate here. In general, a neoliberal agenda accounts for important political-economic rationalities characterizing the last twenty years in Denmark (which is otherwise known for its welfare model) resulting in intensified privatization and gradual minimizing of the state. What we observe in this specific case cannot be understood without this history in mind despite some apparent differences. For instance, although creating a tender of legal interpreting in Denmark is akin to other types of privatization, legal interpreting was never organized in a state-owned company; and even after the tender was effectuated, the state continued to pay for legal interpreting, now just through an intermediary. Furthermore, as the interpreters were not on permanent contracts, and as they were private entrepreneurs, we are not analyzing a case of transformation from a nonmarket to a market-based, capitalist structure. Thus, we are looking at two different ways of organizing an economic exchange between the state and the private sector; nonetheless, similar neoliberal imperatives are at work in ways that undermine the status and bargaining position of a whole class of interpreters as well as the people they are hired to serve. In other words, “formal justice” (Avineri et al. 2019)—a.k.a. “the rule of law”—becomes threatened when legal interpreting is made a commercial product contingent on decisions about whether a particular service, or the quality of the service, is profitable rather than legally required. Questions of what are fair, just, or just acceptable, work conditions for those delivering service to the court, and thus enabling the court to work, may be ignored or suppressed in the interaction between the different economic agents.

Expert Authority In our case, a group of interpreters claimed a position as expert authorities in their struggle against the private interpreting company and the National Police. Experts are assumed to possess a particular knowledge vis-à-vis other (lay) people, although this distinction does not map neatly onto the boundaries of social institutions (Evans and Collins 2007, 609)— one can be a lay expert. Regarding something as expertise depends on context in terms of what we can call local ideologies of value (Carr 2010, 17; also Duchêne 2020), what is regarded as “special” and “restricted” knowledge and legitimate ways of knowing as “expert.” All in all, we see the expert authority as a socially constructed, articulated, and legitimized position. An example of this is English skills in the UK—where it is assumed that everybody is fluent in English—versus in France—where this cannot be taken for granted and is a skill that can be capitalized on. However, even English skills in the UK may have high value—for instance, if they are certified with a diploma in British literature from a recognized university. Depending on the regime of “specific knowledge implies

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high value,” those seen as knowledgeable (experts) gain value by knowing (cf. Silverstein 2003), and ways of knowing and of expressing important knowledge are ways of defining and controlling the world (Foucault 1969). Expertise depends on recognition. Sometimes it comes from outside of formal institutions; sometimes from within as it is acquired through formal education, training/ apprenticeship, and certification. Thereby expertise can be regarded as relations— between people, institutions, and knowledge—and in order to become socially relevant, expertise needs to be articulated. In many areas, verbal performance is also a core element of expertise, that is, knowing how to talk about knowledge and presenting it as expertise. Such presentations simultaneously demonstrate—or create—a differential status between “experts” and “lay persons” which is often policed by the expert community. Such boundary work is in itself an important part of expertise (Evans and Collins 2007, 610). In such a relational approach, expertise therefore becomes “something people do rather than something people have or hold” (Carr 2010, 18). Also, it is important for the construction of expertise that the would-be expert is able to establish an “interpretive frame” through which a given object can be contemplated, that is, described in expert terms (Carr 2010, 23). Ways of creating and gaining expert knowledge about subject matters, about ways of speaking, and about assessments, and other things, develop over time and through a process of socialization into a community, which gives access to “social fluency within a form-of-life” (Evans and Collins 2007, 610). For our purpose, authority is relevant when it is legitimated by assumed and posited expertise. As Carr (2010, 19) writes: “people become experts not simply by forming familiar—if asymmetrical—relationships with people and things, but rather by learning to communicate that familiarity from an authoritative angle.” In that perspective, expertise and authority are closely related as authority refers to ways to express expertise. And authority is also inherently relational. Some people are granted legitimacy to become leaders, institutional representatives, or experts, while other people are made and accept to follow, accept, or listen (Pace and Hemmings 2007, 7). This shows that authority exists within a moral order according to which a particular authority relation is legitimate (Metz 1978). As with expertise, authority needs to be accepted and (somehow) adhered to in order to be realized. Students do not always follow their teacher and so the institutional role of teacher may be associated with institutional authority, but this does not necessarily play out in practice. Failure to follow a legitimate authority and thus a moral order leads to, or is a sign of, conflict (Pace and Hemmings 2007, 6). In our case, we will show that the authority posited by the interpreting agency was not accepted by the interpreters, and the authority posited by the interpreters was not readily accepted by the National Police. Like expertise, authority also needs material signs, authority claims, or expressions (Wilson and Stapleton 2010, 49). Another type of authority also becomes relevant in our study, namely the “evidential authority” which emerges from having had direct access to something that becomes important. Access gives a particular weight to claims (Wilson and Stapleton 2010, 52), in especially when it intersects with the expertise needed to interpret and articulate one’s observations in expert ways. We will analyze extracts from a report based on observations in court. Here evidential authority, combined with claimed expertise, is part of what gives weight to the report. In our case, the language skills and legal expertise of the legal interpreters primarily build on experience. “Interpreter” is not a protected title. In 2018, the National Audit Office estimated that 77 percent of the practicing interpreters had no diplomas in language, nor any kind of formal interpreter training. There is no reason to believe that the situation

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is any better now. Almost all degree programs in interpreting have been closed, and the protection of the title “state authorized translator” (or “sworn translator”) based on an MA degree in a foreign language and translation studies from the Copenhagen Business School was abandoned in 2016. This was facilitated by the same liberal-conservative government who agreed that legal interpreting should be put out to tender. As it is, the interpreter is conceptualized as in charge of his/her own enskillment (expertise), and (what is regarded as) insufficient linguistic skills for the job are blamed uniquely on the interpreter. The institutional side to this—that is, the responsibility of authorities to make interpreter training available—is hardly in focus. Regardless of contestations of the skills of the vast majority of interpreters, “expertise” and “expert authority” are relevant terms here in that they are central to the struggle of the former legal interpreters—they argued to have insight that others, nonexperts, did not.

Social Justice Social justice is central to much critical sociolinguistic research (Avineri et al. 2019; Heller 2014; Piller 2016). It is often applied to discuss regimes of evaluation that draw on language to create or legitimize unfavorable conditions and possibilities in society for linguistic minorities and immigrants. Much of this work has focused on minority rights and identity politics, symbolic value and recognition, and multilingual practices and ideologies themselves (Duchêne 2020). Yet, social justice has both a cultural and a material side (Block 2018; Duchêne 2020), and the socioeconomic perspective involves more than “recognition.” In our case, we find it less obvious what is and what is not socially just (or fair), and we have drawn on Nancy Fraser’s framework in our analysis. Fraser (2005, 2008, 2012, 2016) looks at three aspects of social justice: “what” social justice corresponds to (e.g., employment of medical doctors on the basis of medical skills rather than language profiles [Roberts 2009] or more inclusive language pedagogies in classrooms [García and Wei 2014]); to “whom” social justice applies (e.g., linguistic minority students or born-abroad job applicants); and “how” social justice is understood to obtain (e.g., by provision of more inclusive [teacher] education or affirmative action job programs for migrant background applicants). The “what” is further divided into three orientations:

1. Socioeconomic justice, rooted in the political-economic structure of society, where solutions to conditions or situations seen as unjust are associated with redistribution and restructuring.



2. Sociocultural justice, rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication, where solutions to conditions seen as unjust are associated with (recognition of) group identity and the creation of cultural equality.



3. Political justice, which concerns possibilities of participating and being listened to.

Fraser acknowledges that a clear distinction between economic and cultural injustice is not reflected in experience, and that neither socioeconomic justice (redistribution) nor sociocultural justice (recognition) can be reduced to the other type (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 3). “Even the most material economic institutions have a constitutive, irreducible cultural dimension; they are shot through with significations and norms. Conversely, even the most discursive cultural practices have a constitutive, irreducible political-economic dimension; they are underpinned by material supports” (Fraser 2005, 380). This is the case

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in relation to Danish legal interpreting, too. Yet, Fraser argues that the political orientation should be kept separate as its relevance has changed with globalization. “Justice” used to concern only fellow citizens, but now we think of it in relation to non-co-citizens as well (Fraser 2005). In extension of this, the political orientation accounts for whether particular social actors are or should be included in considerations of social justice at all. (Social) justice is a relevant perspective here in relation to questions of fair payment for work and the availability of skilled interpreters to enable the rule of law (“what”). It concerns interpreters, the Danish population and state, and suspects and defendants (“who”). And it is about prioritizing ease of booking over securing knowledge and expertise (“how”). At the same time, it relates to questions of what organizational regime, and fundamental conceptualization, should be drawn upon for legal interpreting. Should it be regarded primarily as an economic exchange, a technological solution, or a communicative encounter? All of this concerns the institutionalized, currently popular and contested nature of certain scalar perspectives, such as the tiered relations between “local” or “national” versus “translocal” or “global,” “micro” versus “macro,” “face-to-face-encounters” versus “institutions,” “individual” versus “political economy.”

ANALYZING DANISH COURTROOM INTERPRETER DISCOURSES This study of the conflict is part of a larger project on interpreting in the public sector in Denmark, financed by the Danish Independent Research Council (2019–22).2 For this chapter we draw on newspaper articles; individual interviews with interpreters with long-term experience in legal interpreting; and informal conversations with various stakeholders, social media excerpts, and field notes from encounters and courtroom recordings and observations.3 We also discuss a report produced by interpreters, based on courtroom observations, accessed from the website of the Danish Parliament. We made the acquaintance of the interpreters we interviewed in court or as part of our network; furthermore, Kirilova has been a freelance interpreter (Bulgarian) for more than a decade. All quotes and data have been translated from Danish to English by the authors. We will now demonstrate the way the conflict in legal interpreting was discursively mediated, and we analyze the articulation of and struggles between the different organizational regimes of expertise versus governance. We do not suggest that one is inherently better than the other. Nor do we suggest that what we call “regimes” may be compared via the same parameters and values. Part of our main point is that there are fundamental incompatibilities between the perspectives promoted by the different participants in the struggle. The section is organized according to two themes which have arisen from our analyses: (1) the neoliberal reconceptualization of legal interpreting; (2) legal interpreting as expertise. Language is the medium of labor, a significant element in the economic exchange, as well as an object under evaluation. The question is: Can language competence and the language work in legal interpreting be seen as a simple service or should it be regarded differently—as expertise comprising a variety of skills and with a different type of exchange value? Social justice relates to and crosscuts this struggle in various ways, which we analyze at length in the conclusion.

A Neoliberal Reconceptualization of Legal Interpreting Neoliberal rationality and organizational and epistemological changes based on this were central to the conflict in Danish legal interpreting. As mentioned, the organizational system

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did not change from a restricted market, with the state as the main economic agent, to a free market. The National Police used to buy services from a number of select interpreters, all private entrepreneurs. With the tender, the competition merely moved to a higher organizational level as it involved bids received by the National Police. After the National Police had made a choice, and EasyTranslate took over, legal interpreting became more of a monopoly. The legal system—the buyer—and the legal interpreters—whose services were sold—had to engage with EasyTranslate which functioned as an obligatory intermediary between the two parties. In the beginning, some interpreters compared EasyTranslate to a competitor, but a competitor who had taken over the market. One of them used this to mobilize general resentment: “We are not interested in cooperating with EasyTranslate as we all run our private businesses. . . . We would get to work in a company who is in direct competition with our own” (Radio 24/7; April 25, 2019). This quote is from a radio program, and we documented similar understandings in our interviews. However, the two parties were never in actual competition, and the relation between interpreters and EasyTranslate needs to be conceptualized differently. EasyTranslate did not offer the same product as the freelance interpreters. Rather, it created a marketable product of “legal interpreting” as a service in accordance with a specific organizational commercial regime. According to the website (February 2020), EasyTranslate offers løsninger (solutions) to organizations in need of translation and interpreting services. The term solution suggests that the provider will take care of a specific problem of a client or customer. As a commercial term, a solution points to the problem as complex and involving a number of steps or requirements, which the provider will attend to and thereby make the life of the client easier—cf. the “Easy” in the company’s brand name. Accordingly, with EasyTranslate legal interpreting became more than a one-off social encounter, where interpreting could take place. It included actions prior to the interpreter-mediated encounter (such as EasyTranslate’s assessment and training of its legal interpreting workforce) as well as the actions following the encounter (such as the evaluation of the interpreter’s services by the interpreter users). To enable the conceptualization of legal interpreting as a process, EasyTranslate used an online platform, a well-known contemporary commercial format (Srnicec 2016). The reconceptualization of legal interpreting was reflected through the term kvalitet (quality). In the formulation of the tender, quality was defined as the most important selection criterion; price counted for much less. Overall, quality may be used in relation to a variety of things across different fields and with many different aims, and thereby works as a “strategically deployable shifter” (Urcioli 2003). It is rarely contested whether or not it makes sense to apply “quality” as a measure or assessment of a service or good, and quality is generally used to claim that something is of high value. In EasyTranslate’s approach, quality involved quality of delivery, quality of implementation, and quality of interpreting. Quality of delivery concerned the ease of booking interpreting services, the timeliness of the interpreter, and a subsequent possibility for the interpreter user to evaluate the experience online through a star point system. Quality of implementation included how the new procedures were put in place—that is, the new processes of booking interpreters online, the payment system, the evaluation system, the onboarding system, and so on. Interpreting quality addressed translation accuracy and interpreter ethics. This was supposed to be operationalized through a series of tests, of which several were multiple choice that interpreters needed to pass within one year of affiliation to the company in order to stay in the catalog. Overall, quality was used in a way that concerned the needs and wishes of the so-called interpreter user, here the legal institution, rather than the interpreter.

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The interpreters were taken for granted as willing participants and workers, regardless of the fact that their work conditions would change dramatically within the new organization. For instance, their expertise was now subjected to critical scrutiny through initial tests and on-the-spot assessments. Furthermore, quality was defined in relation to the solution offered and a standardized scheme. A standardized procedure—of booking, testing, and evaluation—was presented as “quality” in itself, and standardized tests of satisfaction and performance added to the understanding of standardization as quality. The legal interpreters found themselves to be sidetracked and argued that the new approach was an impediment to good interpreting. Unsurprisingly they were contradicted by EasyTranslate—here is one of the CEOs in an interview in a large newspaper: “We have no intention of complicating the lives of interpreters and translators. On the contrary, we will run all administration, all auto-coordination of tasks, calendar management, mileage reimbursement, thus securing even more efficient work with as many meetings as possible” (Berlingske; December 13, 2018). The CEO articulates a new conceptualization of legal interpreting as a product: legal interpreting is now a “process,” with “technology” as an essential part, and the technology is meant to serve the interpreters, too. Technology is particularly important for the interpreters to obtain “efficiency”—through the “auto-coordination of tasks, calendar management,” all of this in order to be able to perform more interpreting sessions (and increasing the income of the company). However, the CEO addressed a demand that did not exist. We heard no interpreter expressing concerns with management and administration, and it was only when EasyTranslate took over that management was mentioned at all (ironically, this happened when the promised efficiency failed to materialize, not the least as both the court and the interpreters reported a lack of flexibility within EasyTranslate’s administrative system). The situation is obviously very different for the interpreter users, here the National Police and the court, for whom the number of collaborators was reduced from more than a thousand to one. Accordingly, the CEO seems to identify with interpreter users, both in terms of what is conceptualized as essential for them to take into account and whether the new solution was wanted and needed at all. The new organization included lower payment to the interpreters. The CEO formulated this as an inevitable result: As a natural process at a public tender the prices have been subject to competition which arguably has resulted in a salary reduction in relation to earlier prices. . . . We certainly do not expect that the salary reduction will affect the quality as we first and foremost have a recruitment process which is meant to secure the quality. (Information; March 13, 2019) The CEO does not accept that there is a straightforward relation between quality and price (which here means the price that the interpreters can charge). Yet, in his (costbenefit driven) logic, competition will necessarily lead to lower payment, this is part of “a natural process.” He claims that the recruitment process secures the quality regardless of the price. This only makes sense if he relies on a model of supply and demand where the interpreters have no choice but to work for him. Remember that the interpreters found themselves in a situation of monopoly, and the CEO seems to believe that this suffices to guarantee their participation. Today we know that he was wrong. The processual focus on legal interpreting as a “solution,” the introduction of technology, a focus on efficiency, and the reconceptualization of the interpreters’ position

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FIGURE 14.1:  Screenshot of flow chart. EasyTranslate©.Flow chart text translation: 1. Join the mailing list; 2. Fill in your profile on the platform; 3. E-learning: Areas of Responsibility + Intro to authorities; 4. E-learning: Interpreting ethics and methods; 5. Recruitment interview; 6. Written test in general language skills; 7. Oral test: 2 Languages and Prima Vista; 8. Screening and security clearance; 9. Intro to platform and digital tools; 10. You are now ready to interpret and translate.

came forward in different materials produced by EasyTranslate. A flow chart (Figure 14.1) depicts the process of onboarding for interpreters. This was sent to prospective applicants, that is, the interpreters on the National Police’s list. To become part of EasyTranslate’s permanent team of interpreters, an applicant needed to go through a ten-step employment procedure. It included brief e-learning modules on the legal system and on interpreting techniques, strategies, and methods. There were two written tests, both focused on Danish, one in “general language proficiency” and one multiple-choice test on “words and terminology.” Following this came two oral tests which (as far as we have been able to clarify) comprised a prima vista test (i.e., a test “at first sight” without preparation) where documents in Danish were to be rendered in the interpreting language, and then from the interpreting language to Danish, and a test where a text was to be read and translated sentence by sentence, from Danish to the interpreting language, and vice versa. All was done online through the platform. Other elements included a job interview, also mediated by the platform; a security clearance for the police; and as the last element (ironically since the platform was used all through the test), an introduction to the online platform and digital tools. The flow chart is iconic of a smoothly operating, well-organized company, where one would be led effortlessly through each step. A solution-oriented company in other

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FIGURE 14.2:  Screenshot of “Professional Interpretation Services” video. EasyTranslate©.

words—and as mentioned above, indexed by the name EasyTranslate. The chart aligns with the general presentation of EasyTranslate on their website.4 Here the (potential) customer (an interpreter user in need of service) meets a color scheme dominated by blue and white where well-dressed young professionals are working with headsets in front of large screens or walking through corridors in modern (glass, wood, steel) offices. There is a choice between eleven languages, and logos of several well-known global companies, supposedly customers of EasyTranslate, are displayed. The website includes small texts, such as “Immediate access to our global network of more than 10.000 expert linguists,” and a small chat box carries the label “we are here to help you” and presents a personalized contact: a named person called “Language advisor.” When choosing “Interpreting” on the top menu, a loop video with two women (mid-twenties?) chatting over computers (Figure 14.2) forms the background of the text: “Experience the most efficient interpreting solutions to your public or private organization.” One is offered: “Instant interpreting by means of EasyTalq.” Just like the company name, the compound EasyTalq draws on English. The company has a global ambition, which may motivate the widespread use of English (see the text material in Figure 14.2). In Denmark, English language is also generally associated with a global and future-oriented mind-set (Lønsmann 2011). Furthermore, “easy” suggests that the task taken care of is (made) simple so that the costumer can relax. “Talk” points to an essential part of the product, and the unconventional spelling (“talq”) is (perhaps) used to signal creativity and ingenious solutions. Together with keywords such as “efficiency” and “solutions”; service orientation; innovative orthography; contemporary, simple aesthetics, and so on, it gives the impression that EasyTranslate provides easy and smooth services, and the company is therefore a safe and obvious choice in a new era of legal interpreting.

Interpreter Perspectives on Expertise and Authority Issues of Pride and Profit In this section, we focus on those interpreters on the original list of the National Police who decided not to join EasyTranslate. We discuss the line taken by them

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with respect to expertise and authority. As mentioned in “Expert Authority” section, expertise and authority suggest that the interpreters possess particular legitimated, institutionalized, restricted, valuable knowledge, which they know how to apply, they know how to talk about such knowledge in the right way, and their expertise grants them a particular authority within a certain moral order. Importantly, although some of the interpreters are certified and have been through formal training, this is certainly not the case for all of them, as discussed previously. Also, the concepts receive additional meaning when compared to the neoliberal regime promoted by EasyTranslate, as we will show. To the interpreters, the new organization was alienating. Linguistic interpreting and legal expertise were important to the interpreters’ professional identity, and they wanted recognition for this. To EasyTranslate this was less recognized, and one sign of it was the reduction of the rates. In line with Fraser’s approach to social justice, the interpreters’ resistance was not only about professional identity but also about socioeconomic justice. In the first phases of the conflict (from November 2018) this came up as an important theme in numerous news stories, for example: Example 1 But the agreement is met with criticism in the Danish interpreter community, because EasyTranslate lowers the interpreters’ payment. . . . According to the critics, it will make many of the well-educated interpreters search for greener pastures. (Berlingske; December 12, 2018) Example 2 The value of the contract is estimated to approximately 520 million D.kr. but the interpreters are unsatisfied with the fact that the charges for their support have been lowered, and therefore they do not want to work with EasyTranslate. (Finans​.dk​; March 7, 2019) Example 3 “It is not about the specific company, but the whole culture of creating tenders, which we think will cause to deteriorate the interpreting quality because the most competent interpreters will flee,” says Farida Christensen, who is part of the initiative The Interpreters’ Platform, which has been in charge of collecting more than 600 signatures.5 One of the primary causes for the defection is the decrease in payment. (Information; March 15, 2019) As the media excerpts show, the reduced payment was formulated as a direct consequence of the tender. It was compared to the high contract value of legal interpreting, implying that in comparison it was unfair that the interpreters should be paid less. The interpreters did not want to “cooperate” with EasyTranslate under these conditions. This was partly because of everyday concerns of how to make a living, and in addition, such reductions had a symbolic dimension. Less money meant less respect (as is made most explicit in Examples 5 and 6); we return to this below. Furthermore, the quotes suggest that most well-educated interpreters will go elsewhere. This suggests a relation between payment and quality, as well as between level of expertise and attitude toward EasyTranslate. The interpreter in Example 3 addresses the contemporary political tendency to create tenders out of former state-owned institutions as the real source of the misery. EasyTranslate was

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just a piece in a much larger game. However, many interpreters also blamed EasyTranslate directly, while others saw the National Police as principally responsible. Another early reaction to the reduced payment was the petition against EasyTranslate (mentioned in the quote from above) where interpreters expressed their dissatisfaction: Example 4 For many years we have been developing our competences and experiences within translation and interpreting while working for the police, the court, and behind the desk. Unfortunately, experience shows that delegating translation and interpreting tasks to a third party contributes to deterioration in quality and to dissatisfied clients because lower rates and impaired conditions are incompatible with high quality and professionalism. (Online petition;6 December 1, 2019) The interpreters’ argumentation is based on experience, that is, social realities and social understanding. This contrasts with the line of argumentation used by the CEO of EasyTranslate who naturalizes the lowering of the payment (see section 3a. “A Neoliberal Reconceptualization of Legal Interpreting”) which points to an understanding of supply and demand, as well as production, distribution, and circulation of values and resources. It demonstrates two opposing ideas of the optimal organization of legal interpreting: one based on interpreting expertise and experience, and one based on an administrative and standardized neoliberal regime. Furthermore, the CEO argued that lower payment was a result of the tender, whereas the interpreters claimed that a lower interpreting quality would result from the introduction of an intermediary (“delegating . . . tasks to a third party”). Again, two perspectives on (what is represented as) an endpoint of a chain of causation (lower payment; lower quality) are juxtaposed. Furthermore, in the interpreters’ representation, the lower payment is gradually downplayed, sometimes even erased as a significant element, in the chain of causation leading to a lower quality. When they mention it at all, it is as a problem “for some of my colleagues” (Example 5), who will lose their “only income” (Example 5), thereby implying a moral responsibility of EasyTranslate and a personal solidarity with these colleagues. But instead of focusing on this, they often identify other victims of the “deterioration in quality” (Examples 3 and 4), namely EasyTranslate’s customers, the court and police, who will become “dissatisfied.” EasyTranslate denies that the quality will fall, and the interpreters are represented as beneficiaries rather than victims regardless of a lower income. Notice that quality is emphasized by both parties, but quality is understood in different ways. We shall see in the next section that to the interpreters, “quality” concerns language skills, knowledge of legal vocabulary, courtroom experience, and interpreter ethics. In addition to the lower payment, and whatever effects this could have, some interpreters emphasized that in the new organization they were denied direct contact with the interpreter users and the legal institutions, that is, police and court, as evidenced by Example 5. We heard how interpreters preferred working in courts to other social domains where they felt that there was no respect for their expertise. In contrast, in court they did not have to fight to get their money and they felt recognized (Duchêne 2019). They saw police and court as both clients and close collaborators, and to deny them direct contact was regarded as another sign that the interpreters no longer had the respect that they deserved. Rather than experts and professionals, they were now becoming mere loose contractors. In the interview excerpt in Example 5,7 a certified, state-authorized translator and experienced court interpreter, originally educated in Law

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Studies, responds to our question about the problem with why he did not want to work for EasyTranslate: Example 5 RES = Researcher, INT = Interpreter 1. RES: men hvad tænker du er det reelle problem RES: but what do you think is the real problem 2.

ved at tolkning bliver uddelegeret der

3.

ud over at ja



about interpreting now being outsourced



there besides yeah

4. INT: det reelle problem er at det reelle problem er INT: the real problem is that the real problem is 5.

[nej

7. INT: det kan det godt være for nogle af mine 8.



ikke tak[ster

6. RES:

[ja det forstår jeg mhm mhm

[no

INT: it could be for some of my

koll[eger

9. RES:

not the [fees

RES

collea[gues

RES:

[yes I understand that mhm mhm

10. INT: det kan det (.) der er nogle af mine kolleger INT: it could be (.) some of my colleagues 11. RES: mm mm

RES: mm mm

12. INT: der har miste[t det eneste ind[tægt

INT: have los[t their only income

13. RES:

RES:

[ja

[yes

14. INT: nej noget af det vigtigste det vigtigste af det

INT: no some of the most important (.) the most

15.



16.

vigtigste (.) det er en følelse af hvem ens herre er (.)



of the most important (.) it’s a feeling of who one’s master is (.)

17. RES: mhm mhm 18. INT: jeg er stolt at arbejde for domstolene

RES: mhm mhm INT: I am proud of working for the court

19. RES: mhm

RES: mhm

20. INT: jeg er stolt at arbejde for politiet og

INT: I am proud of working for the police

21.



22. 23.

hvad du nu kunne du finde på (.) jeg gider (.) ikke (.) arbejde for et privat firma på det område



and other things around that (.) I do (.) not (.) want to work for a private company in that area

24. RES: mhm

RES: mhm

25. INT: jeg er (3.2) officer of the court [eng]

INT: I am (3.2) officer of the court

26. RES: okay

RES: okay

27. INT: og ikke (.) EasyTranslate lad os nu sige at

INT: and not (.) EasyTranslate let’s say that

28. dobbelt

det er et fantastisk firma der betaler



it’s a great company that pays twice as

29.

så meget (.)



much (.)

30. RES: ja

RES: yeah

31. INT: det er en anden følelse

INT: it’s another feeling

The interpreter acknowledges the lower payment as a problem but emphasizes the importance of working for the right “master.” He describes himself as “an officer of the court,” underlining the point by a dramatic code-switch to English and a long pause. He demonstrates alignment with the interpreter user, and he reveals an understanding of the interpreter as a vital participant for the institution. Whether this is because he actually cares about issues of language and social justice, or because he is a precarious worker who feels that working for the legal system at least gives him some tiny bit of acknowledgment, we cannot say. Yet, he is proud of what he does, and he wants recognition. The new organization certainly does not live up to this ideal.

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The account reflects ethical issues as well. The interpreter does not want to work for a private company—regardless of what they pay—“in that area,” that is, the legal area. He hints at a paradox between performing tasks which are essential to the legal system and making a private company responsible for this. This theme is central to a question of how the state guarantees justice for citizens as well as noncitizens, how they give non-Danish speakers a possibility of participating in their cases. Whereas this was a point often made by judges and lawyers, he was one of the few interpreters mentioning it. Yet, he shared the line of argumentation with several of his colleagues that the lower payment may have been a reason for resentment, but that this was less important than moral issues which merged with concerns regarding professional identity and belonging. One addressed it as “humiliating” to work for EasyTranslate: “I do not want to work for the company which I do not trust and which I do not respect. (. . .) I do not want someone to make money off me” (research interview with interpreter). The fact that this was a commercial company for whom she was supposed to create value and profit was introduced as negative. This point reappears in Example 6 where an experienced interpreter with more than thirty years of practice explained how the company’s lack of insight into the professional area of interpreting and search for profit provoked her: Example 6 1. INT: mit min største aver⌈sion

INT: my my greatest anti[pathy

2. RES:

RES:

⌊mm ja

3. INT: øh (.) bygger på at at det e:r at det her 4.

firma styres af to personer som

5.

in-tet



company is led by two people who have



6. RES: hmm

[mm yeah

INT: ah (.) builds on that that it i:s that this no-thing

RES: hmm

7. INT: har øh at gøre med tolk[ning

INT: ah to do with inter[preting

8. RES:

RES:

[mm

9. INT: de har ingen begreb (.) om hvordan

    interpreting is con[ducted

10.    tolkning foreg⌈år 11. RES:

[mm

INT: they have no notion (.) of how RES:

[mm

[mm

12. INT: de he:r mm den her dynamik er er for

INT: that thi:s dynamics is is too

13.

for højt for dem men



14.

men de har ingen begreb om

15.

hvad det betyder

too high for them but



they have no notion of



what it means

16. RES: mm

RES: mm

17. INT: og og (.) og og og det den måde de tager

INT: and and (.) and and and the way they deal





de har taget opgaven [på

18. RES:

[mm

they have dealt with the [task

RES:

[mm

19. INT: generer mig 20. RES: ja

INT: bothers me RES: yeah

21. INT: i ganske høj grad fordi for mig ser det ud

INT: to a very high extent because to me it looks

22.

som om øhh for dem er det kun et firma

as if ahh to them it is only a company

23.

som skal tjene penge

that earns money



24. RES: hmm

RES: hmm

25. INT: og de har ikke øhm også i lyset af de

INT: and they have not ahm also in the light of the

26.

seneste hæ- afsløringer så så så ser du ud

27.

som de ikke har haft nogen øhm (.)

28.

moralske forpligtelser



latest he- disclosures then then then it looks

like as if they don’t have any ahm (.) moral obligations8

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LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

29. RES: mmm

RES: mmm

30. INT: og en eller anden øh højere øh moral

INT: and some kind of ah higher ah well ethics

31.

altså erhvervsmoral på



work ethics to

32. RES: ja

RES: yeah

33. INT: hæ og det kan jeg ikke altså jeg kan ikke

INT: ha and well I cannot well I cannot

34.

have (.) øh nogen som helst sympati for



have (.) ah any sympathy whatsoever to

35. RES: nej nej

RES: no no

36. INT: selvfølgelig og de:t er det kommer

INT: of course and thi:s is this comes

37.



virkelige på andenplads

really in second place

38. RES: ja

RES: yeah

39. INT: øh så så er det de forringede vilkår

INT: ah then then it is the impaired conditions

The interpreter insists that EasyTranslate is led by “two people” who have “nothing to do with interpreting,” “have no notion of how interpreting is conducted,” and “have no notion of what it means.” It is her “greatest antipathy” that they are outsiders and only interested in profit-making. It is hard to find a clearer illustration of the value that the interpreters put on professional expertise as an organizational basis, and it returns in various ways in our material. For instance, in social forums for interpreters, spelling mistakes on EasyTranslate’s website, and job adds saying that EasyTranslate needed interpreters in, for example, “Pakistani” or “Iranian” (instead of Urdu or Farsi), were quoted as examples of their lack of linguistic expertise. Such lack of professional and linguistic expertise also became linked to a critical issue of their new test. This did not fare well with those who had been working for the court for many years: Example 7 But for interpreters who—just like me—have worked for many years for the police and the court, it is a humiliating requirement. This year I’ve been asked to show up 73 times at all kinds of interrogations, hearings and various investigations. What is the idea behind making me or others with the same experience take a test? (polennu​.dk​; sourced on November 11, 2018; the seventy-three times the interpreter was booked were before EasyTranslate took over) The test questioned the expertise of those interpreters who had worked in the court for years and it was interpreted as a personal attack on them. It was a multiple-choice test and could be taken as many times as one liked. To many this in itself was a way to ridicule them. In addition, the prima vista test was administered by people who many interpreters did not respect professionally. It cannot have been an easy task to find language experts in all the languages offered by EasyTranslate—and to our knowledge they did not consult with any outsiders. More so than the test itself, the interpreters disapproved of the fact that they were tested by businesspeople whose level of insight into language was so poor that they would apply for interpreters in a supposed language by the name of “Pakistani.” A test could in fact be a good idea—“the more you test, the more you can improve”—as the interpreter in Example 6 said to us. A good test, however, should not be constructed, administered, and used by a private company. The interpreter in Example 6 further connects EasyTranslate’s lack of professional expertise to a lack of “work ethics.” The “latest disclosures” refer to a recent news story that the police had made a considerable number of complaints about interpreters failing

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to show up, but this had been denied or kept secret until then. This alleged moral flaw is a much more important reason for her resentment than “the impaired conditions,” by which she means the reduction in payment; they are “really in the second place.” Although she agrees with the interpreter in Example 5, by presenting it through this discursive move, she manages to position herself as morally superior to EasyTranslate. An obvious inference is that in contrast to this company she is not preoccupied with money but concerned with the essentials of legal interpreting. Ethics and morality were associated with other issues as well. Some interpreters mentioned the company’s previous ill-managed interpreting contracts, several of which had been cancelled prematurely. Many others introduced the father of one of the managers as a moral problem. This man was a well-known entrepreneur and a convicted tax cheater who had recently done prison time and was associated with trouble, deceitful and even “deeply frivolous” behavior. This family relation made the company vulnerable to distrust by interpreters—as well as to the general public and the legal system. Of course, the interpreters’ concerns with work ethics and morality also parallel an interest in their own pride and profit motives—the good work ethics and expertise deserve just rewards. Boundary Work In the last part of this section, we introduce a report, created by some of the interpreters who refused to work for EasyTranslate. The report came about in several steps. When EasyTranslate took over, a number of activist interpreters started doing observations and taking notes in court, in particular in Copenhagen. They called themselves “peace guards,” recalling situations of labor conflicts where there is a formal strike, while at the same time insisting that they were not employed by EasyTranslate and therefore this was not a labor conflict. Their notes were published daily on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Several journalists and lawyers followed the developments through the closed fora, and some were emailed the notes.9 By June 2019, an edited, compiled version—without the most controversial comments—was published online on the website of the Danish Parliament. The publisher was the newly established Tolkesamfundet (The Interpreter Society), and the editors were key members of the organization. The new version, a sixty-page long document, was entitled: Dokumentation af tolkeydelser i Dommervagten i København under “Rammeaftale om fremmedsprogstolkning” med ikrafttræden den 1. april 2019 (Documentation of interpreting services in the Court of Preliminary Hearings in Copenhagen under the “Framework agreement on foreign language interpreting services” effectuated from 1st of April 2019.) The title uses a format known from legal texts which suggests its objective neutrality and that the authors had insider expertise. Regardless of this, the report is far from being an objective document. It aims to question the linguistic expertise and professional ethics of EasyTranslate and their hired interpreters. This is done through examples of language use and behavior represented as deviant, wrong, and inadequate. Overall, the report is a strong metapragmatic statement about appropriate ways to use language in the courtroom context, and it is a heavy indication of the position that the former legal interpreters wanted to assume, namely as (the most qualified, most professional) experts on courtroom interpreting. This document is a beautiful example of what we can call “boundary work.” The authors position themselves as experts on interpreting, on courtroom jargon, and on ways to talk about such knowledge. At the same time, the authors invite readers to draw their own conclusions by suggesting, rather than imposing, an understanding and

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by not stating their opinion explicitly. But they demonstrate evidential authority as they witnessed the events, making it thereby hard to dismiss their report. The observing interpreters did not always speak the languages used during the court hearings, so they often had to focus on the general performance and behavior of the EasyTranslate interpreter. This included pointing out that the EasyTranslate interpreters were unaware of courtroom formalities, for example, that there is a designated seat for the interpreter: “The interpreter asked: ‘Where should I sit?’” (p. 36) and “The interpreter had to be shown to the right chair after he sat at the chair shackled to the floor, which was where the foreigner was supposed to sit” (p. 11). Judges and lawyers often refer to defendants with non-Danish background as udlændingen (the foreigner). By using this term, note-taking interpreters demonstrate alignment with courtroom practices and thus professional expertise due to their socialization into the court routines. As a contrast to this familiarity with the social context, they showed how EasyTranslate interpreters were often unsure of themselves, asking the judge: “What if I don’t understand?” or “Do I have to interpret concurrently?” (p. 36). The implied rather than explicitly mentioned certainty with which this document is written shows the discrepancy between the authors and the quoted interpreters who are represented as lacking both expertise and professional authority. They indicated that some interpreters had other types of unprofessional attitude in terms of demeanor, rather than language, for example, not maintaining the appropriate physical distance from the defendant, causing unease, and blaming the defendant when things went wrong: “(The interpreter) sits very close to the foreigner who tries to move a bit away and create some distance but the interpreter moves along. The communication goes awry but the interpreter blames it on the foreigner’s English” (p. 6). Again, a tacit understanding acquired through socialization into the trade is used to suggest that the EasyTranslate interpreter lacks expert authority. The authors erased themselves in the text by using (more or less) direct quotations from the court officials, often the judge, as in the next examples where different judges explain to the interpreters when, how, and what to interpret: “You need to interpret everything” (p. 36) “You need to interpret continuously . . . come on you need to interpret” (p. 14), “You have to interpret now” (p. 13). These examples are used to indicate both the interpreter’s lack of competence and the frustration of the institution, and the authors use the personal experience combined with expertise as the convincing evidence. In terms of language skills, the authors point out inappropriate, omitted or simplified (legal) terminology, and incomprehensible or accented Danish: “The interpreter made a lot of mistakes concerning birth dates and numbers. In addition, ‘entrance nr 9’ was translated as ‘building number 9,’ ‘expulsion’ was translated as ‘travel out of the country.’ The interpreter asked the prosecutor to explain the meaning of ‘delaying effect’” (p. 38). In other examples an interpreter is quoted referring to the Copenhagen area Vesterbro as “that area” and to “passers-by” as “different people.” With regard to this specific case, the authors describe how “during the whole session the defense lawyer looks at the ceiling and makes gestures indicating despair” (p. 6). The EasyTranslate interpreters are repeatedly criticized for using third prs​.s​g. rather than first prs​.sg​., when the first prs​.s​g. is used by the speakers they interpret for, as a strong, internationally well-documented, and academically criticized, norm for interpreters dictates (Angermeyer 2015; Berk-Seligson 1990; Wadensjö 1998). It is also documented that some produce noticeably shorter utterances in one of the languages: “When the interpreter interprets, it is done consecutively and consistently in 3rd person. The length of the Arabic part is somewhat shorter than the Danish [part]” (p. 32). These examples deviate from the norm of denotational equivalence and

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transparency (Haviland 2003), according to which turns in each language ought to be direct translations, semantic equivalents, and of similar length. This is a huge element in what is often referred to as interpreting quality, and although it is far from trivial whether or not semantic equivalence is accomplished, appropriate, or even feasible, it remains a strong professional ideology of expertise. Another theme in the report relates to the institutional frustration over EasyTranslate. Reported conversations concern errors in EasyTranslate’s booking system which result in interpreters not showing up or showing up too late for a case. Here a judge’s (probably ironic) comment from a case where an interpreter fails to turn up: “Isn’t it the new system where the interpreter will simply be here on time?” (p. 3). In general, the booking system is treated as inflexible, and the promise of efficiency fails to materialize in practice. Furthermore, EasyTranslate summons interpreters from across the country (and even occasionally from abroad). This leads to expensive and time-consuming trips to Copenhagen. It is suggested that EasyTranslate abuses this to increase profit, and it is attributed to several judges that they find the situation “not tenable in the long run” (p. 13). In sum, through this report the observing interpreters positioned themselves as professional expert authorities, while the interpreters working for EasyTranslate were constructed as amateurs with no knowledge of (even rudimentary) court procedures and poor language skills. Readers of the report were invited to question EasyTranslate’s morality, in several respects, many of which concerned (what was represented as) the company’s profit-seeking motivation and lack of concern with human beings (both the interpreters and those seeking justice) and the judicial system. As a metapragmatic statement, the document demonstrated how the interpreters who refused to work for EasyTranslate claimed a superior knowledge and moral positioning in relation to the National Police, the company, and perhaps even the legal system. They claimed to be expert authorities who were able to evaluate what they saw and heard, and who argued that their insight needed to be taken seriously. The report is a testimony that negates the neoliberal rationality as superior and recommends professional language expertise in its place.

CONCLUDING REMARKS This chapter has told the story of a case where the state outsourced central responsibilities and assignments to a commercial enterprise, a well-known phenomenon globally. The company commodified a skill-set in which language was a central element, namely (legal) interpreting. The area is interesting because of its intimate connection to legal (“formal”) justice, but also because of a more local state of affairs: In Denmark it is acknowledged that legal interpreting requires special skills (or expertise) but the area still remains relatively unregulated and without any requirements of formal enskillment or certification. We have drawn forward what we see as two regimes in the reorganization of legal interpreting in Denmark: one of neoliberal governance and one of professional expert authority. The regime of neoliberal governance, articulated in the public primarily through the company EasyTranslate, targeted interpreting as a process and a technology, proposing a business solution where prices were estimated accordingly. This logic was well represented in our data through the recurrent use of entrepreneurial keywords such as “quality,” “efficiency,” “innovation,” and “flexibility” (Rojo and Del Percio 2019, 13). The regime of expertise construed interpreting as a professional practice, involving socialization, cultural processes

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of evaluation, institutionalization of domain-specific knowledge, including language skills (Carr 2010, 18). The two regimes were used to argue for different ways of organizing and maintaining the field of legal interpreting, in particular in terms of how to evaluate and valorize what was delivered in the courtroom, as well as how to evaluate, understand, and valorize the people who carried out this work. The two regimes do not necessarily contrast in all respects, and they only gradually emerged as coherent oppositional responses, the regimes of expertise more so than the commercially oriented regime. However, they differed significantly in their understandings of governance, quality, and morality, which resulted in open conflict; when expert legitimacy is contested, it in fact often leads to conflict. The case demonstrated clearly that neoliberal rationality is just one form of rationality (Rojo and Del Percio 2019, 9) and that it can—still—be contested, even forced out. We also learned how expertise can be claimed with great success, even without any formal institutionalization (education, certification). The two discursive regimes concerning the buying and selling of language work in the Danish legal context are related to social justice and fairness in a number of ways. The interpreters’ struggle for economic and professional recognition concerned Fraser’s socioeconomic justice. To them, the reduced influence and economic profit came with no acceptable motivation. They were freelancers with no job security and no long-term engagement, and from their perspective an intermediary would only take money out of the chain without adding value. Interpreters had little societal recognition, as language skills were being devalued in general (we return to this in a moment). Yet, they found that they had an important role in the legal system, and that they received some recognition for their professional work here. This was mentioned to us by several interpreters. With the new organization, this direct contact would disappear. The interpreters did not feel that they had been included or heard during the outsourcing process, and they did not get an equally central position in the new organization. As a result, they could only see this as an unfair degradation—both in terms of socioeconomic redistribution and of professional recognition—that is, sociocultural justice. The changes would just corrupt the system. If an intermediary were to be introduced, socioeconomic justice could be achieved through improved payment and work conditions, and if professional experts—people with language and interpreting expertise—were put in charge of the legal interpreting system that could possibly lead to sociocultural justice. So, in short, the interpreters were not as such upset over the commodification of language skills—they had certainly been doing that themselves for a long time. Rather, they were concerned with how these skills were not being valued and marketed. Their expertise seemed almost erased as a significant element in the choice of EasyTranslate, they were taken for granted, and yet devalued, and new key terms were suggested as focal—that is, efficiency, technology, flexibility, and so on. Another range of issues should also be considered. Legal interpreting is a cornerstone in the judicial system. It gives the legal system access to essential information which is needed both in order for the system to make the correct decisions (verdicts) and for a defendant to have a possibility of being heard and of understanding what others say in court cases in which they are involved. Obviously, good interpreting is essential for the rule of law as well as for what Fraser termed “political participation.” Yet, in Denmark, this element faces several obstacles. Some of these came about, or were severely aggravated, during the conflict between the National Police and the interpreters; some were just made more visible.

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Those that came about concerned the difficulties in getting interpreters. As more than half of the interpreters on the original list used by the National Police refused to work for EasyTranslate, the company found itself short on people. They had promised to deliver 98 percent of the required interpreters—but that became very hard to live up to. As a result, court cases were delayed, defendants were waiting in prisons for extended periods of time, and some defendants were even let loose. This happened because of a legal requirement that any detained person is to be presented before a judge within 24 hours, and if no interpreter was to be found, there was no other option than to let people go. Such developments created a societal uproar (we discuss this in Karrebæk and Kirilova [2022]). But what we also want to point out here, perhaps a bit polemically, is that the untenable situation, initiated by the tender, was accentuated by the decision of so many interpreters not to work for the private company. We do not write this in order to put the blame on the interpreters for what happened. However, we do want to point out that their decision had a very negative impact in terms of fairness and justice on detained persons, and even on the general public. Whereas the reluctant interpreters were certainly weak participants relative to the National Police, and to EasyTranslate, they were strong and powerful in relation to those detained by the authorities. Strong and weak, justice and fairness, is often relative to particular situations and to a particular scale. For the individual interpreter, or detained person, the situation was very different from how it looked from a more general perspective where standardization, measurability, and efficient administration seemed to have more currency than education and expert knowledge. The other issue we want to bring forward concerns the general devaluation of interpreting as a profession. This tragic situation concerns language expertise in general, and it is reflected by an overall decline in language studies in higher education and particularly by the current lack of availability of training, education, and certification for professional interpreters (Verstraete and Øhrgaard 2017). We believe that this societal failure to provide training and certification, and thereby secure the possibilities for people with no or little Danish skills to get good interpreting, is also a vital question of social justice. And for a brief period of time, the chaos that emerged after hiring EasyTranslate seemed to make both politicians and the general public aware of the serious problems in the interpreting domain. One should not employ whoever claims to speak a particular language as a professional interpreter. Yet, now (August 2022) this insight seems to have disappeared from the collective memory again. Legal interpreting has returned to the status quo before the tender: The National Police administers all legal interpreting by maintaining a list of interpreters, the skills, education, and experience of whom are almost completely opaque. So, the language experts may have won a battle against the institutional and contemporary preference for large corporations, but they have not won the war. So, to conclude, we have focused on professional language workers and the court, including the general valuation of professional multilingualism and the ways in which non-Danish speakers charged with a criminal offense are offered possibilities for active participation in their case. We believe this has added some new perspectives to recent discussions on the political economy and commodification of language. And we end by suggesting that social justice, for interpreters, defendants, and the court in general, can only be achieved through a social change in which language skills are societally recognized, where interpreting becomes a certified profession, and where interpreter (and language) training is available and valorized.

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NOTES 1. The research for this paper was enabled by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark, grant number 8091-00018B. We are grateful for this. We also thank the editors of the volume for their helpful comments and Alexandre Duchêne for fruitful comments on the case. And most of all we thank the interpreters who agreed to talk to us as well as EasyTranslate who let us use this as a case for analysis. 2. Interpreting in institutional interaction: Sociolinguistic challenges in Denmark as a globalized society, grant number 8091-00018B. In addition to Karrebæk and Kirilova, the researchers and student assistants include Paulina Bala, Solvej Helleshøj Sørensen, Line Højland, Lara Iversen, and Narges Ghandchi as well as a number of language consultants who have helped with transcriptions (more information about the project can be accessed at www​.interpreting​ .ku​.dk​/english). 3. Our corpus consists of audio-recordings of thirty-two preliminary statutory hearings from a court in Denmark. We got permission to record from the Court President, and we collected informed consent from all participants in the courtroom (judge, defendant, interpreter, defense lawyer) at every single recording session (see more in Karrebæk and Sørensen [2021]). 4. https://www​.easytranslate​.com​/en​/interpretation/, accessed February 21, 2021. 5. These signatures were used in an online petition against the reorganization of legal interpreting after the tender, see also Example 4. 6. https://www​.skrivunder​.net​/forenede​_tolkes​_erklaring​?fbclid​=IwAR2Hvhg​-jQS​a9Ii​pmOf​ AOjL​5Xim​5oVt​rsQq​jO1yiF​_ic6NrH84agHeXltrY 7. Transcription conventions [

overlap

Bold

Emphasis

:

prolonged vowel

(.)

pause less than 0.5 seconds

(3.7)

pause of 3.7 seconds

officer of the court [[eng]] Code-switch to English 8. In Danish, “moral” is parallel to English and refers to codes of right and wrong conduct. In some collocations and compounds (e.g., arbejdsmoral), “moral” corresponds to the English “ethics” (work ethics). The way the interpreter puts it, work ethics is perhaps more related to the poor work conditions offered by the company. Moral (as in “moral obligations”) concerns the values the company stands for and the unjust treatment of the interpreters. 9. We followed these fora, but as they were closed, we cannot cite from the original material.

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Block, D. (2018), “The Political Economy of Language Education Research (or the Lack thereof): Nancy Fraser and the Case of Translanguaging.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 15 (4): 237–57. Blommaert, J. (2009), “Language, Asylum, and the National Order.” Current Anthropology, 50 (4): 415–25. Cameron, D. (2000), “Styling the Worker: Gender and the Commodification of Language in the Globalized Service Economy.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4 (3): 323–347. Carr, E. S. (2010), “Enactments of Expertise.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 39: 17–32. Duchêne, A. (2009), “Marketing, Management and Performance: Multilingualism as Commodity in a Tourism Call Centre.” Language Policy, 8: 27–50. Duchêne, A. (2019), “Unequal Language Work (ers) in the Business of Words.” In C. Thurlow (ed.), The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, Linguists, and Other Language Workers, 23–35, London and New York: Routledge. Duchêne, A. (2020), “Multilingualism: An Insufficient Answer to Sociolinguistic Inequalities.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 263: 91–97. Evans, R. and H. Collins (2007), “Expertise: From Attribute to Attribution and Back Again?” In W. E. Bijker (ed.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 609–30, Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, M. (1969), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. S. Smith (1972), London: Routledge. Fraser, N. (2005), “Reframing Global Justice.” New Left Review, 36: 69–89. Fraser, N. (2008), Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalising World, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fraser, N. (2012), “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.” In W. Fluck, D. E. Pease, and J. C. Rowe (eds.), Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, 374–390. University Press of New England. Fraser, N. (2016), “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” New Left Review, 100: 99–117. Fraser, N., and A. Honneth (2003), “Introduction.” In N. Fraser and A. Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political Philosophical Exchange, 1–6, London: Verso. García, O., and L. Wei, eds. (2014), Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haviland, J. (2003), “Ideologies of Language: Some Reflections on Language and U.S. Law.” American Anthropologist, 105 (4): 764–774. Heller, M. (2010), “The Commodification of Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 39: 101–114. Heller, M. (2014), “Gumperz and Social Justice.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23 (3): 192–198. Heller, M., and A. Duchêne (2011), Pride and Profit: Language in Late Capitalism, Oxford: Routledge. Irvine, J. T. (1989), “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist, 16 (2): 248–267. Jacquemet, M. (2015), “Asylum and Superdiversity.” Language and Communication, 44: 72–81. Karrebæk, M., and M. Kirilova (2022), “Chaos in Court: Mediatized Expressions of Upset in Relation to Danish Courtroom Interpreting.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2022 (275): 21–41. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/ijsl​-2021​-0045. Karrebæk, M. S., and S. H. Sørensen (2021), “Interpreting as Creating a Potential for Understanding: Insights from a Danish Courtroom.” International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 28 (1): 59–97.

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Lønsmann, D. (2011), English as a Corporate Language: Language Choice and Language Ideologies in an International Company in Denmark, PhD Dissertation, Roskilde University, Roskilde. Maryns, K. (2005), The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Mehan, H. (1996), “The Construction of an LD Student: A Case Study in the Politics of Representation.” In M. Silverstein and G. Urban (eds.), Natural Histories of Discourse, 253–276, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metz, M. H. (1978), Classrooms and Corridors: The Crisis of Authority in Desegregated Secondary Schools, Berkeley: University of California Press. Pace, J. L., and A. Hemmings (2007), “Understanding Authority in Classrooms: A Review of Theory, Ideology, and Research.” Review of Educational Research, 77 (1): 4–27. Park, J. S. Y., and L. Wee (2013), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World, London and New York: Routledge. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, New York: Oxford University Press. Pujolar, J. (2018), “Post-Nationalism and Language Commodification.” In J. W. Tollefson and M. Pérez-Milans (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning, 485–504, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retsplejeloven (Administration of Justice Act) §149. Roberts, C. (2009), “‘Mince’ or ‘Mice’? Clinical Miscommunications and Patient Safety in a Linguistically Diverse Community.” In B. Hurwitz and A. Sheikh (eds.), Health Care Errors and Patient Safety, 112–128, London: Blackwell Publishing. Rojo, L. M., and A. Del Percio (2019), Language and Neoliberal Governmentality, London and New York: Routledge. Silverstein, M. (2003), “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication, 23 (3–4): 193–229. Srnicec, N. (2016), Platform Capitalism, Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Urciuoli, B. (2003), “Excellence, Leadership, Skills, Diversity: Marketing Liberal Arts Education.” Language & Communication, 23 (3–4): 385–408. Urciuoli, B., and C. LaDousa (2013), “Language Management/Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 175–190. Verstraete-Hansen, L., and P. Øhrgaard (2017), Sprogløse verdensborgere – Om en uddannelsespolitik der forsvandt, København: Jurist-og Økonomforbundets Forlag. Wilson, J., and K. Stapleton (2010), “Authority.” In J. Jaspers et al. (eds.), Society and Language Use, 49–70, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Online edition. Wadensjö, C. (1998), Interpreting as Interaction, London and New York: Longman.

Chapter 15

Keywords Decolonized? The Social Lives of Wenhua/ Culture and the Specter of Symbolic Violence in Chinese–English Dialogues LOUISA SCHEIN AND FAN YANG

On a Spring day in 2019, Schein sat with a colleague in his university office in the interior province of Guizhou, a region of China often regarded as remote and unworldly. A member of the Miao minority, a prominent Chinese intellectual, and holder of a PhD in History from Tokyo, he described (in Chinese, for he had not trained in English) the key concept he had developed, a spatial framing that cut across provincial boundaries to examine historical zoulang (走廊), or corridors,1 of population movements that had enabled the country’s eventual integration as a nation-state. The notion was gaining recognition, both among academics and in terms of funding, as the state saw the zoulang regions as potential avenues for development of tourism in which Chinese citizens could consume historical mobilities by traversing the actual routes. Dense deliberations were taking place in Chinese universities and state bureaus, off the radar of international attention that focused instead on China’s overseas “One Belt One Road” (一带一路, yidaiyilu) initiative launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013 to proliferate financial and material infrastructure projects in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The conversation turned to the visits of foreign scholars, the rituals of their lecturing to Chinese audiences who sought to attain some kind of global membership by importing and imbibing the concepts conveyed by these putatively international experts. To the contrary, he quipped with a chuckle, Western academics’ expertise was not the point; he didn’t see why he needed to work within the terms of Western or English-dominant framings. “I call it wenti zhiminzhuyi” （问题殖民主义） he smiled, wryly. This coinage—wenti zhiminzhuyi—could be glossed as “concept colonialism” or “problem colonialism,” with zhiminzhuyi being a generic translation for “colonialism” in Chinese-language scholarship. It bespoke a growing trend, in both Chinese academia and official discourse, toward reconsidering the prestige of Western thought and Western

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statements and privileging instead what China was developing internally. This turn, most recently and pointedly seen in China’s triumphant discourses about its swift handling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, inverts an earlier Chinese stance of something like humble apprenticeship. An approach of importing Western, especially American, ideas with the aim of improving a China maligned as backward, underdeveloped, and intolerably poor had, since the post-Mao inauguration of the “Reform and Opening” era in the 1980s, and indeed across many moments of the twentieth century, prevailed in most sectors. For overseas scholars and advisers invited to lecture, teach, and guide, this status disparity had perdured as a foregone conclusion. But with China’s rise in the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of Chinese players were growing intolerant of this subordinate stance. A few years earlier Schein had been talking with the same colleague as he articulated what she would have called a “counter-orientalist” position on how the world should view China. To Schein’s query about what he thought of Edward Said, he made it clear he considered Said to be Western and snapped, “I know who he is, of course. But I don’t see why I should have to get my ideas from him. There’s nothing wrong with us coming up with our own theories.” He did not elaborate (see Zhang 2009). These assertions were uttered in a Chinese moment saturated with indignation about lack of recognition on the global stage; they register the growing discomfort, indeed, refusal of an asymmetrical order in which the West ranked as somehow more advanced, and therefore entitled to set terms and bestow wisdom. Such asymmetry no longer resonates with many, especially elites, who see China’s economic rise as legitimating a Chinese-led resetting of terms. It is in this atmosphere of potential and actual realignments that we come together as founder (Schein) and member (Yang) of the Chinese–English Keywords Project (中英关键词项目，zhongying guanjianci xiangmu), discussed further below. Our aim here is to consider what a decolonizing approach might look like in the enduring spaces between these two languages following upon a history of asymmetrical translational practice, and taking the concept of wenhua (文化，culture) as case example.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF VOICE A confluence of recent historical events arguably precipitated China’s burgeoning insistence on having a greater “say”; these include China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001; its hosting of the 2018 Olympics in Beijing and the 2020 World Expo in Shanghai, both grandiose mediated events for domestic and global audiences; its spectacularized outpacing of the United States in the development of artificial intelligence technologies, such as facial recognition, drones, and robotics; its international distribution of aid and development, especially in the Global South; its vanguard role in combating the global environmental crisis, from the determined curbing of CO2 emissions to innovations in the alternative energy sector; and its putatively effective management of Covid-19. The Education Ministry’s establishment of Confucius Institutes (孔子学院，kongzi xueyuan) to propagate visibility and encourage tolerance regarding all things Chinese also revealed this quest to loom large (Hubbert 2019). A nationwide circulation of the notion of huayuquan (话语权) likewise bespoke this striving. Huayuquan, according to David Murphy, was the right to speak and be heard, or to speak with authority. It is also the power to lead and guide debate, or to set the parameters of acceptable discourse. In the past few years, prominent Chinese intellectuals have adopted this second understanding

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of huayuquan to explain, with mounting urgency, how the country’s lack of influence in international financial, trade, security and media institutions translates to unfair treatment in China’s interactions with the world. (2014, 53) Amsterdam-based sinologist Pal Nyiri asserts that beginning in the 2000s, the term, originating in academia, has migrated into pronouncements by Party-State and industry leaders as well as into Chinese media where it has appeared in discussions of China’s international standing and aspirational soft power (软实力 ruan shili). As he recounts: a senior foreign correspondent for the Chinese Communist Party’s central newspaper, People’s Daily, told me: “In the past, People’s Daily followed the New York Times and other Western media too much: whatever they thought was important we wrote about too. On many issues, we had no stand of our own; we unconsciously reported the Western position. This is why people didn’t take us seriously, why People’s Daily had little credibility, and Chinese media have little huayuquan.” (Nyiri 2019, 2) Significantly, the character quan 权 can mean either “right” or “power.” Huayuquan can be translated as “discursive power” or “the right to speak,” with huayu glossed as “discourse” or “speech.” A more idiomatic translation might be “voice,” in the sense of both speaking and having one’s speech receive consideration. Such issues of recognition have become increasingly shrill in China in recent decades. The widely used notion of xuanchuan (宣传)—combining xuan and chuan, translatable as “proclaim” and “transmit,” respectively—for instance, shifted in many mainland usages from “propaganda” during the Cold War toward market-oriented “publicity” in tandem with the expansion of mass media, promotional culture, and advertising. This shift has been underrecognized in the English-dominant world, much of which persists in using “propaganda” for all occurrences of xuanchuan. Even into the era of “fake news” and the growing politicization of pandemic messaging in the United States, this translational practice continues to intensify the contrastive Cold War perception that only Chinese lives are irrevocably, almost absolutely, controlled by ideological speech. Meanwhile, popular coinages such as fanqiang (翻墙), literally “scaling the wall,” are common among Chinese activists who train themselves to get past or over the Great Firewall (i.e., internet censorship) to access blocked information and websites and increase transnational political engagement (Yang 2012). Media sociologist Guobin Yang also notes “translation activism” (2017) in which English language materials are translated and disseminated digitally to counter their official omissions. Uneven levels of audibility have also played out dramatically in Western histrionics about China’s purported character as violator of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). While China’s official rhetoric has affirmed IPR as a global standard and embraced its lexicon as part of the nation’s integration into the WTO, there have also been Chinese discursive moves on the part of the state and tech entrepreneurs alike to resignify so-called counterfeit products (sometimes dubbed shanzhai, 山寨) so as to situate China less as a producer of fakes and copies and instead as a kind of alternative innovator (Lindtner 2020, 74–117). Vectors of instantaneous communication, not least of which is Twitter, may also be implicated in fomenting resentment about lack of voice. The war of reciprocal blame over the coronavirus manifested China’s urgency in gaining global huayuquan. In what it calls the battle “to dominate the global narrative,” a June 2020 New York Times article charted the use of Twitter by Chinese Communist Party members and unidentified provocateurs to counter myriad American denunciations of China’s handling of the viral emergency.2

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The head of the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, Hua Chunying, made being heard a major priority in statements, presumably for Chinese citizens’ consumption, asserting that “China had to find a voice in international affairs that was commensurate with its economic strength. ‘We have walked closer to the center of the world stage than ever before, but we still do not grasp the microphone completely in our hands’” (June 9, 2020, A5). The Times headlined this competition for voice as a “war of words,” but it is also crucial to underscore that it is a war of volume, reach, and audibility. In this era in which China is increasingly championing its self-determination, in which nationalist passions tug at respective self-perceptions of China and the West from vantage points on either side of the Pacific, we ask what must shift for English speakers to effect mutually respectful exchange with Chinese interlocutors, especially in light of thundering, pandemic-enhanced geopolitical vitriol. Might greater attunement to semantic and conceptual incommensurabilities constitute a social justice stance in this vexed standoff? Might a deprivileging of English amount to a kind of decolonizing practice?

KEYWORDS DECOLONIZED OR DETRANSLATED? SOCIAL LISTENING AND THE POLITICS OF METHOD These seismic shifts realigning the plates that comprise English- and Chinese-language hegemonic domains have spawned and continue to shape the Chinese–English Keywords Project, an international network of scholars, all of whom work in both Chinese and English. We intentionally situate ourselves on the fault lines between the two—those places where semantic gaps have the potential to become incommensurabilities of earthquake proportions. Mindful of the geopolitical agonisms above, we explore here what process might effect a social justice-inflected engagement with words. In the decades since Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1976) text first appeared, the world has been awash in keywords. In myriad forms, the global population could be described as thinking in keywords. Powerful search engines have made them central to publishing and online activity. Scholarly and more applied fields have proliferated collections and handbooks (e.g., Bennett et al. 2005; Chen 2009; Feng et al. 2015; Fritsch et al. 2016; Chiang and Wong 2020). In China, the 2017 national college entrance examination included an essay prompt in which students were asked to write on one of that year’s ten nationally salient keywords to help youths from abroad better understand China. On the outward-facing front, keywords were presented as a way to “get to know” China (China International 2017); an early 2021 “Trends” page of the official ChinaCulture.org website listed seven “hot words” (热词 reci), with “Confucianism” sitting awkwardly alongside “animation.”3 These last decades have also seen intense cross-pollination between Chinese scholarship and Western concepts and literatures. Much vocabulary has entered the Chinese theoretical lexicon, while Western academia has strained to grasp idioms in Chinese scholarship and policy. In tandem, China’s cultural and economic “open door” since the 1980s has allowed for Western popular and media terms to spill into daily usage.4 Meanwhile Chinese neologisms and new inflections have emerged out of the histories of Chinese socialism and postsocialism percolating through Chinese society, wending their way from academia to officialese, from popular coinages to mainstream media, from political discourse to irreverent dissent. The Chinese–English Keywords Project attends to such vicissitudes. These are terms that embody stories—of recent history and of global

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engagements. We evoke below the methods and ethos of the CEKP so as to consider their viability in reconfiguring interlingual dialogue. Inspired by what Gluck and Tsing call using “the travel of words to respond to scholarly questions about the state of the world” (2009, 11), CEKP members position themselves as participant observers in the linguistic traffic between global China and English-speaking realms. Through talking, reading, listening, and paying attention, we immerse ourselves in the social lives of selected keywords that stand to reveal much about societal dynamics. The project has assembled collaborators in fields such as anthropology, sociology, literature, politics, geography, history, communications, and media studies based in China, the United States, Europe, Australia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. As social science and humanities scholars, all of whom work across Chinese and English languages, we delve into the heterogeneity of usages and connotations not as problems to be solved but as windows onto distinct domains, histories, and social relations. Hence our approach diverges from the foundational monolingual keywords investigations modeled by Raymond Williams that concern themselves with origins and genealogies (e.g., Ashcroft et al. 2013; Bennett et al. 2005; Burgett and Hendler 2007). We foreground instead contingent, shifting, and malleable instances that reflect the multifarious embeddedness of words.5 A generative starting point for tracing transnational circuits of meaning involving Chinese has been what Columbia University humanities scholar Lydia Liu has dubbed “translingual practice”: the process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy with the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter’s contact/collision with the guest language. Meanings, therefore, are not so much “transformed” when concepts pass from the guest language to the host language as invented within the local environment of the latter. (1995, 26) An intriguing recent example of this has been documented by anthropologist Li Zhang in a study of the rise of psychotherapeutic practices in China; she notes “Chinese therapists . . . modify Western-originated diagnostic categories and therapeutic models and align them with local notions of selfhood, sociality, and efficacy” (2020, 13). Local invention, then, or what Zhang and her informants refer to as bentuhua (本土化 localization) is an ongoing process that has been a helpful heuristic, in some degree isomorphic with historical change. Yet whereas Liu’s “local invention” concerned chiefly intellectual history focusing on key terms found in print, the CEKP also seeks out the marginal uses, the pop-ups, the appropriations and poachings that abound when the creativity of vernacular speech is in the mix. Intentionally assuming a less authoritative positionality, the CEKP is fascinated with anecdotes, frustrations, resolutions, and conversations from disparate perspectives and locations. This includes the so-called reci (hot words) that proliferate across the mainland internet—artifacts of the merger of youth irreverence with furtive evasion of censors. Social media users continuously churn out a steady flow of invented words, phrases, and character recombinations so as to continue their dense communication through a lexicon “not yet on you-know-who’s lists” (Allen 2018). Disaggregating words’ actual usages into official, scholarly, popular media, and vernacular versions, and cognizant of interdiscursive dynamisms, we ask questions about their idiosyncratic meanings within each of these domains. We probe the differing connotations triggered when people use key terms in one language or the other and ask what historical and semantic baggage carried by specific words confounds seamless

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communication and joint thinking? Assuming seamlessness is beyond reach, we have developed a politics of method based on leaving scholarly baggage at the door so as to focus on the immediacy of our experiences in each language. In Shanghai in 2018, for example, Fan Yang, a cultural studies scholar born in China and based in the United States since 2000, co-organized a workshop on keywords for media, communications, and popular culture with Schein and Shanghai University anthropologist Zhang Yinong. About twenty participants from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States, and the UK convened around a long conference table leaving no audience off to the side. We started off with a few widely used words, delving, for instance, into the changing translations of xuanchuan from (official) propaganda to commercial promotion, marking its varied uses by a range of state and non-state actors, including ethnic minority groups such as Miao. We then prompted participants to build a collection of related words by writing Chinese characters and their possible English glosses on index cards with Sharpie pens. The cards were arrayed on the table as they accumulated—a tactile method consonant with CEKP’s collective mode of knowledge production. Through dialogue and disagreement we clustered, rearranged, and classified the cards into domains by bringing in our respective experiences and avoiding the pursuit of authoritative answers. Embracing multiplicity, we entertained various glosses and connotations, discussing their socially and historically situated meanings. As all members relayed their animated encounters with these words, the prevailing language shifted from English to Yang’s (and many others’) native Mandarin, occasionally with Cantonese mixed in. This was, for Yang, an extremely rare and illuminating opportunity to lead and engage in scholarly discussion about Chinese media phenomena in Chinese not English, in China. Yang’s observation is by no means unique among the CEKP workshop participants over the past years. More often than not, native Chinese speakers now based in the English-speaking world have told us the CEKP workshop renewed their relationship with their native tongue. For Yang in particular, she was inspired to rethink the critical possibilities of speaking in Chinese about China and how different the knowledge production was compared to discussions conducted only in English; the Chinese phrases seemed to have taken on a distinctive liveliness when they were resituated in the fast-shifting social environment that produced them. Such firsthand experiences with CEKP workshops vividly capture the project’s aim to extend beyond terminology so as to engage problems and possibilities of theoretical, political, and instrumental distance. Our project has been to hear words in context, in all their specificities; ultimately striving to grasp the contexts themselves, and the societal impacts of Chinese and Western semantic interplay within them, our pursuits have not been as linguists per se, nor as philologists, nor are we translators or etymologists. Instead, we have attempted to proactively unlearn Western-inflected training so as to sit in the gap between what counts as native tongue for many of the participants—that is, Chinese—and what conditions the keywords’ cosmopolitan circulation and comprehensibility—that is, English as the globally hegemonic lingua franca. Accordingly, we are quite distinct from, say, projects such as Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies which privileges concepts particular to Euro-American theory as analytical lenses on Chinese case studies, mostly in literature and film. Firmly grounded in academic discourse, the contributors “engage with such keywords as Transpacific, viscerality, liminality, ethnicity, fandom, adaptation, intermediality, postcoloniality, and activism while rethinking these keywords’ intellectual debt to fields as diverse as critical

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legal studies, history, film studies, theory of Relation, critical ethnic studies, queer of color critique, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and more” (Chiang and Wong 2020, 9). English key concepts here operate as refractory mechanisms deployed to rethink Asian materials which, by virtue of being film or literary text, tend to be relatively static or fixed. Whether the highly analytical refraction process effectively serves to diminish the alterity of that material—or functions to reinforce it—remains unclear. By contrast, mindful of asymmetry in the flows of vocabulary, the CEKP has charted how it shapes translation. What happens, for instance, to translingual communication when non-English speakers encounter imported concepts solely through their Chinese glosses? For example, when Western anthropology’s central tenet “ethnography” is rendered as “minzuzhi,” this gloss in turn could be more literally translated back as “writing minorities.” Is an assumption that ethnography is by definition—or by semantic content— necessarily centered around ethnic others being smuggled in? The methodological freight of the English term—as entailing deep immersion fieldwork and thickly descriptive writing—falls away. Conversely, can English speakers enrich their interlingual grasp by reckoning with the appropriation of the communist word tongzhi (同志 comrade) for “homosexual” in recent decades (Chou 2000)? What does it tell us about social process and language politics that this official term emerging out of socialism-speak and embraced in popular usage was later repurposed to describe sexual minorities? Or that this usage started in Hong Kong, then migrated to Taiwan, and later became widespread in the mainland, eclipsing the socialist valence of “comrade” for some younger urbanites? While examples thus far have foregrounded mainland and its socialist and postsocialist trajectories, we have strived also to spill out to what Shu-mei Shih calls the “Sinophone” world beyond the orthodoxies of standardized speech in mainland and Taiwan to recognize “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries” (Shih 2007, 4). Place-specific usages and flows between the sites of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other parts of greater China also tell dynamic stories as do the idiosyncrasies of uptake of Chinese terms in non-Mandarin Chinese dialects and minority languages. A relevant project in the academic realm, Keywords in Taiwan Theory, queries: “How do we define theory? Is the theory imported from the West the only one that counts as ‘theory’? Does Taiwan have theory? If it has, what is its contents, boundary and genealogy?” (Shih et al. 2019, 3). The authors, editors of a volume devoted to keywords in “Taiwan theory,” position themselves as agents provocateurs, publishing in Chinese and discussing keywords extracted from the specificity of Taiwanese academia. In related work, Howard Chiang advocates a framing that honors the above questions, “eschews the binary of ‘China and the West’ and problematizes the dichotomy of ‘Western theory and Asian reality’” (2014, 36). Attending to the queer, or the Sinophone at the margins of dominant Chinese, the plurality of usages CEKP uncovers allows us to see such cultural productions as “constructions that are more mutually generative than different, as open processes that are more historically co-produced than additive” (Chiang 2014, 36). CEKP participants, then, take the fluid “social lives” of keywords as openings to China, querying how power, authority, dissent, even humor and parody, proliferate meanings rather than standardize them. Methodologically, listening becomes key. Employing a wide-ranging and inclusive ethnographic ear, we try to hear without pre-filtering, to hear in the frisson between the original and its translations. This could be thought of as a dialogic listening, a practice so embodied that it could be described as “feeding on or

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breathing in the sound, texture and meaning of the original, literally ingesting the words into oneself” to the point of “developing a new self-understanding through this process and ultimately expressing the rhythm of the new self in the final translation” (Pritzker 2014, 7). Whether in an academic conference, on a crowded street, chatting with friends, or surfing the internet, we maintain attunement to the variegated occurrence of words. Capaciously constructed, our listening has also entailed what might be called the social semiotics of noticing a billboard, consuming social media, or keeping one ear on TV. We propose to craft our material into vibrant accounts designed to capture heterogeneity among different regions and social sectors. Our “curation” method is designed to eschew expert voice in favor of wide sampling among the folk: listening and talking to a range of people, including our CEKP collaborators, to collect usages, vernacular and otherwise, and portray them evocatively in keyword entries. A curator, when paired with a word, through our collaborative workshops, would gather and juxtapose a heteroglot set of sources and vignettes to illuminate, with storytelling verve, discrepant contexts and usages that approximate the scope of that word’s significations. Constructing our keyword entries with collective participation allows us to hew to heterogeneity, polysemy, multiplicity. Our writing practice likewise deprivileges generalization. We aspire to displace authority by avoiding subjectless constructions such as “is understood as” or “[this word] means” or the collective “we” whose actual membership is inchoate and stands to smuggle in unexamined hegemonies; instead, curators identify for whom and where specific meanings and usages appear. Attentive to the politics of method, the CEKP challenges: Can we actualize a more evenhanded approach to vocabularies in both Chinese and English, evading the linguistic domination that might develop when scholars in mainland import and disseminate Western terms such as “subaltern” or “ethnography”? We remain motivated by a stance of “decolonizing” praxis as shorthand for taking situated keywords on their own terms and for resisting a form of linguistic imperialism that would compel Chinese language to strive to better mimic usages already stabilized in English. South African philosopher Pascah Mungwini has called for an “epistemic liberation” that could give parity to African oral and intellectual traditions without forcing them “through the mold of Western patterns” (2019, 71). Without individuals who can function across European and other languages, he maintains, non-European ideas “remain locked away in ‘linguistic prisons,’ militating against dialogue and cross-fertilization of ideas” (2019, 75). For the CEKP, unlocking the linguistic prison that epistemically incarcerates Chinese terms has meant resisting quests for translational equivalence by inhabiting the gaps, the dissonances, that separate Chinese and English ostensible counterparts. Mindful of R. Bin Wong’s injunction to create “strategies of comparison that avoid privileging European categories of analysis” we instead have sought to “embrace Western and non-Western experiences on an analytically more equal basis” (1997, 2). However, any ethos of postimperial translation immediately faces the conundrum that “de/post-colonial” are terms rarely employed to characterize Chinese discursive fields. The reality that China has never been fully colonized has led certain scholars like Wang Ning, a Beijing-based professor of English, to suggest that “the problem of ‘decolonization’ of Chinese culture and literary discourse is non-existent” (Wang 1997, 13, Yang’s translation). Moreover, the debates about postcolonial theory conducted in the 1980s–90s were vexed by the problem that while the content might be empowering in thinking about the East vis-à-vis the West, as in Said’s Orientalism, the fact of postcolonial theories having originated in the West made their epistemic coloniality a constant threat (Zhang 2009).

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Meanwhile, resonating with huayuquan, some scholars have advocated “establishing the consciousness of discursive right of translation theory” (Sheng 2007, 135) or lamented the “aphasia”—the lost ability for expression—of literary criticism in China, referring to the wholesale adoption of Western literary theories from the Soviet Union after 1949 and the influx of “post” and other theories from the West since the 1980s (Cao 1996, Yang’s translation). Sonya Pritzker, an ethnographer who immersed herself in worlds of translation of traditional Chinese medicine into English, evokes the incommensurability encountered by translators who assess their work as “imperfect rendition, a deceitful performance” in “the act of ‘smuggling’ or otherwise carrying across” (2014, 6). “Images of betrayal, confusion, imitation, and treason are central to any discussion of translation” she notes, wherein “translation is envisaged as an ethical act of representation in which one degrades the original message by polluting it with traces of the self. Translation in this view is violent, disruptive, and perfunctory” (2014, 6). As if to answer these concerns, Lydia Liu unblinkingly offers: To bring the eventfulness of translation into critical view, one must stop thinking about translation as a volitional act of matching words or building equivalences of meanings between languages; rather we should start by taking it as a precarious wager that enables the discursive mobility of a text or a symbol, for better or for worse. The wager releases the multiplicity of the text and opens it up to an uncertain future, more often than not to an uncertain political future. (2014, 153) At geopolitical scale, Wang Ning holds that “confrontation,” driven by nationalists’ attempt to stand up to the West, is less desirable than an East–West “dialogue,” which would allow Western scholars to see the East in a new light (Wang 1997, 13, Yang’s translation). Singapore-based Tibetan scholar Jinba Tenzin goes a step further, noting two potentials. First, postcolonial studies makes better sense for China if internal orientalism in the othering treatment of China’s minorities is recognized rather than effaced by mainstream scholars. Second, postcolonial studies can move beyond East–West binaries if, following Wang Hui, Chinese scholars both insist on a global dialogue which incorporates revolutionary and postrevolutionary experiences and avoid “labeling the call for social justice and the cultivation of sensibility towards cultural and other differences merely as a Western-orchestrated discourse about human rights” (2022, 91–3). At several scales, then, we confront violences and “precarious wagers” that vex translingual efforts. There is the putative degradation noted by Pritzker. There is the global history of English dominance that has put pressure on Chinese to grasp for fitting linguistic equivalents on an unlevel field (the term “social justice” itself is a candidate for this conundrum, as it appears to have little practical uptake in Chinese circles despite having been given an official translation as “shehui zhengyi” (社会正义) by entities such as the United Nations). The specter of symbolic violence, accordingly, haunts well-intentioned efforts to stay true to the politics of decolonization—especially when it entails imposing “decolonization” terminology on sites where that frame may not be welcome. As anthropologist Yang Zhan asserts acerbically: “We can never decolonize if we must subscribe to the dominant language to be counted as participants in decolonizing efforts” (2022, 14). Anthropologist Anna Tsing underscores that “words in motion . . . are constantly tugged by the power of contrast and exclusion”; they can function “like swords, sometimes becoming so rigid that the words and practices of power can hardly be separated” (2009, 13). Against rigidity, what linguistic counterpart of “decolonizing” would be more semantically legible in the contemporary Chinese context? Might the notion of

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huayuquan, the dignified exercise of voice, be more apt for Chinese current realities? And what would that mean for English discussions of this concept? A scenario that has achieved some traction among scholars concerned with linguistic parity for China would be for idiosyncratic and historically freighted Chinese terms such as huayuquan to be “detranslated.” This approach has been adopted, for instance, for the English name of the minorities college in Beijing which has settled on calling itself “Minzu University” after decades of wrestling with the inaccessibility in Western languages of the notion of minzu—variously glossed with politically loaded alternates such as “minority,” “ethnic group,” or “nationality” (Zhang 2019). What might be the futures for so-called detranslating—in which pinyin Chinese terms could be retained in other languages? Arguably, a power shift might be achieved through this symbolic and practical refusal of the violence of imposed English (or other languages), one that echoes, or perhaps performs, the geopolitical power shift underway as China’s global standing is recalibrated.

THE VICISSITUDES OF WENHUA As an instance of encountering key terms on their terms, we offer the multivalent concept of wenhua (文化) which has been consistently glossed in academic and popular discourses with the English “culture.” Here we instrumentally invert relations of origin: although the two-character word wenhua was historically derived from English via Japanese, our treatment aims to retain the alterity of wenhua by keeping it “detranslated” and offering an exposition in English of what it has variously come to mean in Chinese speech and life. We drill down, then, on how wenhua has been multiply deployed in Chinese contexts, and specifically how it has functioned to instantiate social inequalities within Chinese societies, not least through designating the modernity and propriety of certain groups and practices. Disaggregating official, mass media, academic, and vernacular domains, we then query the work done, and the symbolic violence risked, in the popular uptake of wenhua in recent decades, its shift toward valences of heritage and tradition, and the significance of the Chinese state championing such notions as wenhua chanye (文化产业, cultural industries), wenhua fazhan (文化发展, cultural development), wenhua fuxing ( 文化复兴, cultural revitalization), and wenhua zixin (文化自信, cultural self-confidence). Our practice of resolutely sidelining translingual genealogies and indisputable resonances with “C/culture” dovetails with our “decolonizing” approach. Wenhua, perhaps unsurprisingly, reveals a multivalent emergence, including most crucially its yoking, over the course of the last century, to a modernizing future of development and civility versus the apparently contradictory demonizing of jiu wenhua (旧 文化, old culture) during moments of revolutionary zeal. Wenhua, between the 1920s and the 1970s, seemed to signify both the high levels of attainment in education, science, and arts that could usher in a bright and transformed future, and at the same time the reviled shackles of time-honored ways that prevented just this attainment. These contradictions, we will argue, are not as sharp as they may appear once one begins to grasp a less static sense of wenhua. This supple concept has encompassed both the old and the new and has connoted a manipulable entity that can shift with the ideological demands it serves. In the recent era, it is being championed by China’s leaders as intrinsic to China’s dramatic and ongoing rise on the global stage. In what follows, several vignettes illuminate wenhua both as a quantitative measure of quality or achievement and as a marker of differentially

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valorized identities, underscoring the term’s potential for perpetrating the violence of hierarchizing.

Wenhua as Measure In the early 1980s, when post-Mao China was reforming its economic policy and turning toward the market, Schein began doing fieldwork in rural Guizhou province as a PhD student in cultural anthropology. The province was isolated from much of the mainstream transformation and economic development of the time. It had long been known for its concentration of ethnic minorities, especially the Miao people Schein was researching. Neither officials nor local villagers had much idea about her discipline of anthropology; its translation, renleixue (人类学), simply meant “studies of humankind” or more literally of “human types.” For her field year in 1988, she had been officially granted permission to live in a village and document fengsu xiguan (风俗习惯) which meant the “customs and habits” of the Miao residents. This meant she was free to participate in daily life, and to learn all she could about something she might have called “culture” while staying away from economics and politics. As Schein went about this fieldwork, the term wenhua kept popping up when she wasn’t expecting it. To her surprise, she was commonly told by elites, officials, and locals, both Han and Miao: “Miaozu meiyou wenhua” (苗族没有文化). Literally this meant that Miao people were without culture, or, implicitly, Miao people lacked culture. How could a people, a recognized ethnic group with its own language, cosmology, dress, ritual, and so on, be referred to as lacking culture? Schein’s initial reaction, that this was a violent form of denigration, a hostile, biased judgment based on the perceived cultural superiority of the Han majority, gave her some consternation. There was a complex set of connotations here, depending on the context. Sometimes meiyou wenhua referred to the relatively low level of formal schooling of Miao peasants. Sometimes it focused on capability in Chinese language, and there were fine gradations of capability: proficiency in local Chinese dialect or in putonghua (普通话, Mandarin) and literacy in Chinese were measures of “having culture.” Literacy in a non-Chinese language such as the Miao writing system could be a gauge of wenhua. There was a strong intellectual tinge to this kind of assessment, a privileging of language and writing skills as desirable improvements for any human being. Other times, meiyou wenhua would be used for behavior that was impolite, uncouth, or perhaps bu wenming (不文明, uncivilized). As Schein traversed the village, for instance, the children that would stop in their tracks to stare, mouths agape, at her every move or hover around the outhouse when she was using it, were occasionally dismissed by adults as meiyou wenhua. In the 1980s, the country was mounting a campaign against spitting in public. Those who confined their expectorating to the bathroom or to a handkerchief were deemed to have more wenhua. These meanings invoked a single continuum of culture that people possessed in greater or lesser quantities. It could be gained or earned, but access was not uniformly available. There was also a temporal connotation: wenhua was something that had increased over human history and could be claimed by some societies more than others. Here wenhua and an idea of the progress of civilization were very much intertwined. Historical progress was in part marked by an overall societal increase in wenhua. The concept was deeply implicated in ranking people—whether individuals, social groups, or whole societies—as inferior or superior. Meiyou wenhua was also applied to class-like social groups, such as

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migrant laborers, peasants, people from poorer or less developed regions. The idea of multiple distinct cultures—proverbial billiard balls of equivalent size knocking against each other on a level surface—was inconceivable in this model. With Schein’s training in anthropological cultural relativism and immersion in the multicultural zeitgeist of the late twentieth century, this sounded objectionable to her—like saying that some people were lesser. More recently, Yang had comparable encounters with this hierarchical valence of wenhua. In the early 2000s, an anthropologist from Shanghai described his anthropological training in the United States as a process of “unlearning”—a way to self-reflexively shed one’s intellectual status and appreciate practices among those members of Chinese society deemed meiyou wenhua (without culture) by urban elites. In 2020, a friend in a WeChat group of US-based Chinese scholars self-mockingly joked about her failure to recognize the name of a famous Russian film director: “Mei wenhua, zhen kepa!” (没文化，真可怕 “I have no culture, how horrifying!”). An otherwise well-read communications scholar, the speaker was clearly not mei wenhua (with “mei” being an abbreviation of meiyou). And yet, perhaps because her lack of knowledge about the director surprised another group member, it may have seemed to her that the self-effacing zhen kepa was a way to field the embarrassment. Both instances bespoke a distinction of “low versus high” level based on acquired knowledge.

Wenhua as Group Attribute However, by the 2000s a counterposed connotation of wenhua, more closely comparable with Western multiculturalism, was becoming audible in some Chinese social sectors. Wenhua was now something the Miao could own just by virtue of being Miao. Indeed, minority ethnic groups were portrayed as particularly abounding in wenhua, increasingly of an ethnically particular sort. In Guizhou, people Schein met, especially local officials and those who knew her background of research on the Miao, might now refer to her as a Miaozu wenhua zhuanjia (苗族文化专家)—a “Miao culture expert.” Miao intellectuals and elites had no hesitation about designating Schein this way, as being knowledgeable about Miao wenhua without possessing it. This usage, then, was necessarily plural— possessed in different versions by different peoples, constitutive of identity, and also an object of external knowledge. The connotation was double-edged: having ample wenhua might be a praiseworthy distinction consistent with an exoticizing ethic of multicultural recognition, but it also harbored that stigmatized sense of a deficit in modern urbanity seen above. Something had shifted in two decades. Discursive entanglements with Western anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s were implicated. Through the academic vectors of Chinese studying abroad and Western experts entering China, what might have formerly been called fengsu xiguan (风俗习惯 customs and habits) came to be renamed wenhua in an attempt to better match global discourse. And this newer sense was spilling into China on the tongues of myriad foreigners, not only academics. A global move to designate and preserve cultural heritage began to have a far-reaching impact (Rees 2012). In 2004, China became the sixth of 163 countries to ratify the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Systems of valuing were intermeshed with economics here. If something old, exotic, beautiful, or unusual was deemed worth preserving, that worth also stood to convert into economic support from the global community. The heritage sort of culture was gradually reconfigured

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as more non-elite, more minsu (民俗), that is, a property of the “folk,” especially hinterland peasants and minorities (Wu 2015). Global movements to value Indigenous knowledges were likely in the mix here as well, even though the concept of Indigeneity has continued to have limited currency within mainland’s borders (Luo 2018; Zhang 2021). Gradually, there developed a prizing of that which was primordial, pure, and untainted by modernity, often referred to as yuanshengtai (原生态). What might have been formerly dismissed or denigrated as luohou (落后 backward) was increasingly reassessed as a form of human diversity that should not be permitted to fade down the path of extinction.

Wenhua as Resource Even as wenhua became a more plural concept, incorporating the idea that there were as many cultures as there were peoples, measures of cultural quantity persisted. Following upon the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the gradual introduction of more liberal cultural policies in the 1980s had sparked myriad forms of cultural revival in rural and minority areas. With the elevation—intensifying in the 1990s—of minority, folk, regional, and other cultures, the notion of lack or deficit had reversed. As wenhua became more attached to minority ethnic groups, the question of whether metropolitan Han still “had culture” after Westernization and modernization became a matter of some urgency. Urban space was expanding, the urban population was increasing, and there was a pervasive sense of loss. City-dwellers concerned with the homogenization underway as cities came to merge with a global monoculture began to turn to the countryside and to the non-Han to locate cultural traditions unique to China (Luo et al. 2019, 278). Cities were now constructed as in peril of becoming wenhua shamo (文化沙漠 cultural deserts) (Wang and Oakes 2016). As this recalibrated quantification of wenhua emerged, meanings multiplied. Notably what was measured could now include not only level of education, but also valued minority practices alongside imported high culture from the West. Relativistic notions of plural cultures did not displace systems of value. In the next two decades the valorization of ethnic wenhua came to be gradually converted into economic resource. Beyond preserving heritage, the rejuvenation (复兴 fuxing) of colorful forms of wenhua—whether dancing, food preparation, architecture, or the like—had another rationale. Rejuvenation became a policy directly linked to poverty alleviation (扶贫 fupin) through the profitability of wenhua as commodity. Ethnic and folk wenhua had become a form of capital to be tapped for raising revenue, especially in rural areas with little other prospect for enterprise. By the 2000s, for instance, the Buyi people of Guizhou found themselves gravely concerned about having not enough culture, in the sense of entertaining and exotic distinctions that could become marketable artifacts or performances. Framing the problem as one of progress, one township-level, would-be tourism-promoter fretted that “the publicizing and development (kaifa 开发) of the Buyi culture is already falling behind (落后 luohou)” (Luo 2018, 122). “Falling behind” here referred less to the timing by which the Buyi joined the wave of tourism and cultural promotion, and more to the extent to which Buyi culture and identity had accomplished ethnic branding in an increasingly competitive field. Even in a village that had been designated by media as “an exemplar of Buyi culture” one elder lamented to ethnographer Luo: “We used to slander [Miao] for not being clean. But now they are xianjin (先进 advanced); the Miao are broadcast on TV so much more. It’s like us Buyi are not as good as them” (Luo 2018, 119).

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As geographer Tim Oakes explains, wenhua was now to be fashioned or even developed for marketability: The discourse of “cultural development” (发展 wenhua fazhan) exemplifies the shifting narratives of modernity in Guizhou. From socialist modernization to rural commercialism, minority groups continue to be the symbolic target of campaigns aiming at changing the “traditional thinking” of the rural sector. . . . What is significant about wenhua fazhan is not simply that it represents (inter)national integration, but that it is celebrated by locals as the means to become modern while retaining traditional customs. (1998, 124–40) Paradoxically, the promotion of local heritage as cultural capital in turn came to be valued as a vehicle for modernizing, as well as the key to poverty alleviation. In this light, the Buyi concern about having “too little wenhua” was forward-looking. However, this treasured wenhua was not static, archaic, or pristine, no matter how aggressively it was packaged that way. Rather, it was proactively repurposed so as to gratify consumption desires of urbanites. And repurposing was not cynically condemned as a betrayal of authenticity, but rather was cast as innovating new authentic forms in a practice consistent with national values. As the trajectory of economic reform after Maoism increasingly framed desirable directions of change for Chinese society in terms of xiandaihua (现代化) or modernization and jinbu (进步) or advancement and progress, gradually possessing wenhua came to include more and more kinds of knowledge and literacy. These reflected not only academic learning, but a burgeoning variety of worldly skills and competencies. In the course of developing ethnic tourism (民族旅游 minzu lüyou) in Fenghuang, Hunan, the notion of lacking wenhua gained new inflections imbricated with the market economy and new technologies (Feng 2017). As with tourism development in many parts of the country, outsiders who arrived in localities to launch profitable tourist ventures were characterized as more knowledgeable in relevant skills. A Miao villager who sought to start up and market a river rafting company for tourists described the difficulties for locals in competitive terms: “For us who don’t have wenhua, this is extremely difficult. Am I right? We don’t know how to say a lot of things in Mandarin, as we are Miao. We don’t know computers either” (Feng 2017, 103). Comparisons were made to town factory workers by the same peasant: “[They are] different from us. We are peasants, and they are from danwei (单位 work units). They have better networks, stronger relations with the government, plus their money, their brains, and their wenhua” (Feng 2017, 102). Meanwhile, the language of meiyou wenhua was used by non-Miao to refer to locals’ resistance or stubbornness to embrace tourism and development (Feng 2017, 56). Miao villagers’ “lack of wenhua” might connote, in elite eyes, their being too short-sighted, too egalitarian, too backward, and too unwelcoming of roads (Feng 2017, 137). Far from the folk practices that were to be marketed through tourism, here it was market savvy and strong connections beyond the locality that had become benchmarks for measuring wenhua. These examples highlight the Chinese meaning of wenhua as something potentially acquired. The acquisition could be through formal or informal learning, or even through experience and worldly exposure, but what is important is that persons and groups were considered transformed by gaining wenhua. At the same time, in Chinese perceptions, society could be mapped in terms of who occupied the social and economic positioning for attaining higher quantities of wenhua, even when it was in the form of cultural heritage

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elements. Certain groups, particularly some peasants and minorities, saw themselves as excluded, unable to access the benefits of wenhua. This then came to be coded as lower wenhua which in turn was routinely framed in the hierarchical language of shortfalls in quality (素质 suzhi).

Retrofitting Wenhua for Revolution A formulation of wenhua as fluid, dynamic, and subject to revamping turns out to have also had a long social life in official discourses that indeed may have underpinned the above examples. It is perhaps due to the concept having been taken up in revolutionary thought and practice that the validity of actively reworking wenhua seems to have become more constant in the last few decades. As early as the 1940s, Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks on Arts and Literature (1967/42) had set the agenda for wenhua to be a tool of social change, even a weapon. Revolution should be pursued on two fronts, Mao famously asserted; both the military and the cultural armies were necessary to unite and educate the people while defeating the enemy. New culture (新文化 xin wenhua), because of its superior quality, was to be valued. What was then usually referred to as wenyi (文艺 literature and arts) was to be collected from the folk and put in the service of socialist transformation. This approach extended an older movement called “Going to the People” (到民间去 dao minjian qu) developed by Chinese intellectuals as early as the 1910s to gather literary forms from the “folk” (Hung 1985). “Folk” indicated rural agriculturalists and ethnic minorities whose traditions might formerly have been devalued as less civilized. Now, with these movements, they could be valued, but not for their ancientness per se, for in a revolutionary context, the old had to be revamped. As Mao put it in 1942, setting the cultural policy for many ensuing decades: “As for those art and literature forms from old times, we should not refuse to use them, but in our hands these old forms will be retrofitted, have new content added, and become revolutionary things that serve the people” (Schein’s translation).6 In 2015, President Xi Jinping, at a Forum on Arts and Literature, echoed this notion of directed revamping, saying of foreign imports of cultural products: “we should only adopt them if the masses approve of them, while also endowing them with healthy, progressive content” (健康向上的内容 jiankang xiangshang de neirong).7 Meanwhile, shifts in the meaning of culture were also part of nationalist movements and state policies to strengthen pride in Chinese culture against the rising amoral materialism of economic reform. Around the early 2010s an officially promulgated notion of wenhua zijue (自觉)—or “cultural self-awareness”—had been circulating— perhaps a sense of cultivating appreciation of what was worthy in Chinese culture. But what was propelling this slogan, and what meaning of wenhua was it based on? By 2018, the term had become wenhua zixin (自信)—a form of “self-confidence” about one’s signature wenhua attributes. This confidence could apply at several scales— originally applied to Chinese culture as a whole, it could also be deployed to elevate regional and ethnic cultures as well as difang (localities, places) within China. It was also highly relevant to the intensifying notion of ruan shili (软实力 soft power) in which Chinese culture and values were to be disseminated to the world. One junior scholar pronounced to Schein in English: “The real cultural development of China is inseparable from the deep understanding and effective protection of each nation’s core of its own culture.”

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As of 2017, the political utility of wenhua seems to have become much more geared to shoring up a Chinese place—an avowedly socialist place—in a more global arena. In a discussion of upholding the system of socialist core values, President Xi invoked wenhua self-confidence when describing that cultural identity worthy of pride as comprised of socialist values. Asserting that cultural confidence is the “most basic, deep and lasting force of a country and a nation (民族 minzu),” he emphasized the need to “adhere to Marxism, to firm up the lofty ideals of communism and the common ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics, to nurture and practice core socialist values, and to continue and strengthen leadership and having a say in the realm of ideology.” Following on this, traditional (传统 chuantong) wenhua would be neither static nor associated with the past, but rather subject to creative transformation (创造性转化 chuangzaoxing zhuanhua) and creative development (创造性发展 chuangzaoxing fazhan). This process would be alongside the maintenance of revolutionary culture (革命文化 geming wenhua) and the development of an “advanced” socialist culture (先进社会主义文化 xianjin shehuizhuyi wenhua). In this key passage on wenhua, the only time that “traditional” wenhua appears is in the context of creative transformation. The strong sense is that what yields self-confidence for China is the integrity of its socialist values in contrast to much of the rest of the world. In other words, whether referring to Confucianism or socialism, or inventively fusing the two, wenhua becomes that which gives China its distinction and identity, its contrast with other nations and peoples. While continuing to champion a socialist signature, an impetus to proactively pursue Chinese wenhua flourishing has been fostered at the highest levels. Importantly, this includes both reviving the “traditional” wenhua that had been demonized in so many campaigns of the Maoist period and a multipronged effort to generate vibrant and emerging forms of wenhua. Recently, the Ministry of Culture has described itself as dedicated to cultural promotion as much as to regulation, control, or censorship. According to its English language website, the Department of Policies and Regulations presented its “tasks” in 2015 as some of both: “to research and make cultural development strategies, long-term development plan and annual implementation plan; research and make policies for cultural and artistic work; stipulate and organize to carry out cultural legislative plan and draft comprehensive cultural laws and regulations; draft significant documents and reports for the ministry; and deliver news to the press.”8 Accordingly, the central state has been intimately involved in cultural policy that seeks to expand the so-called cultural industries (文化产业 wenhua chanye) and to make China ever more consumable by outsiders. Notably, Xi Jinping gestured to the soft power (ruan shili) advantages of wenhua when he declared in 2015: the international community has paid more and more attention to China. They want to understand China, want to know the Chinese worldview, outlook on life, and values, and want to know Chinese people’s views on nature, the world, history, and the future. Want to know the joys and sorrows of the Chinese people and want to know China’s historical inheritance, customs, national characteristics, and so on.9 Wenhua has emerged, then, not only as an economic resource for myriad commodifications, but also as an ever-renewable discursive resource to be deployed in nation-building moves to shore up China’s evolving prestige on the global stage. Significantly, the moves to retrofit wenhua, to develop and innovate cultural forms, dovetail almost seamlessly with the discourses that have emerged around intellectual property, Chinese “making,” and the country’s supple and advanced innovative strengths. It is worth considering

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whether China’s proactive global showcasing of invention and technological prowess may be considered a form of voice, the huayuquan that China has so craved in a hostile environment in which it is being denounced as thieves and cheaters.

FROM INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS TO “IP” IRREVERENCE The highly fraught and contentious notion of intellectual property brings issues of China’s audibility or other recognition into high relief. So hegemonic has been the Western dissemination of the notion of intellectual property as right that what comes to constitute this property has not been subject to sufficient scrutiny. It is in large part the global slotting of China as nothing more than copycat/manufacturer, and hence as chronic violator of intellectual property rights (IPR) that has in turn served to naturalize a fixed and putatively universal definition of such property. This has simultaneously reinforced the invisibility of China as creator of ideas and cultural artifacts. How, then, has the concept of intellectual property played in Chinese contexts as ideology, regulation, or aspiration? The Chinese for “intellectual property rights” was stabilized as zhishi chanquan 知识 产权, with zhishi, chan, and quan translatable as “knowledge,” “property,” and “rights,” respectively. While huayuquan, as mentioned, shares the same character quan to denote the rights to speak and be heard, chanquan arguably evokes the IPR term’s Western origin, if not the West’s authority in assigning “rights” to those with “property.” After all, chan, short for shengchan (生产，to produce）, is also present in wuchan jieji (无产 阶级), a standard translation for “the proletariat.” Directly referencing Marxian theory, wuchan jieji literally refers to “the property-less class,” or “the class without the means of production,” and has been a fixture in official and vernacular exchange since the socialist era. Only in more recent decades has chan increasingly appeared as part of the word zhongchan jieji (中产阶级, the middle-property class). In legal terms, zhishi chanquan has come to encompass ideas, images, designs, products, and all sorts of tangible or intangible artifacts that can be “protected” as “property.” This stabilization seemingly reflects the ways in which China has embraced the value-generative aspect of wenhua in promulgating its “innovator” image. But it also disguises the historical imposition of globalized IPR framings onto the marketizing Chinese context. Further obscuring this imposition is the fast-changing development of new media technologies in contemporary China, which has now propelled the nation to cutting-edge status in the global information age. In this vein, it is illuminating to return to a moment when something called shanzhai wenhua (山寨文化 shanzhai culture) took shape in the years following the Chinese state’s capitulation to intellectual property “rights” enforcement as a condition of membership in the WTO. Translating literally as “mountain stronghold,” shanzhai became a catchall phrase to label counterfeits that audaciously evaded IPR enforcement. As explained by mainland essayist Yu Hua, shanzhai was “a name once given to the lairs of outlaws and bandits, and the word has continued to have connotations of freedom from official control” (Yu 2011, 181). In part because of its semiotic richness, the term is often kept untranslated in English reportage on Chinese fakes. A project started by a group of transnational artists and scholars known as The Shanzhai Lyric, which collects and transforms strange English words printed on garments evoking China-made brand-name

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fashion reworked into poetry, likewise showcases the lack of English equivalents (Lin and Tatarsky 2015). Interestingly, during the early years of China’s WTO era, the designation “shanzhaiji,” or “shanzhai phones,” emerged to describe the knockoffs of brand-name mobile phones favored by working-class migrants from rural China who labored in factories producing for global electronics firms in places like Shenzhen, the site of subcontracted global supply chains relocated from Hong Kong and elsewhere. These were imitations with a difference. While appropriating branded Western designs, they also introduced novel tweaks—extra-long battery life and dual sim cards, as well as flashy aesthetics and sonic features like subwoofers—that catered to working-class migrant lives. The formula of copies with added novelties effectively blurred the binary of faking versus innovating. Coinciding with the rise of broadband internet and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of Web 2.0, shanzhai quickly came to be discussed as a form of wenhua in print and online media. This wenhua eventually encompassed imitations of all kinds, from the impersonation of pop cultural icons to online parodies of state-sponsored media productions. As shanzhai wenhua took on multiple valences, its different connotations also began to contest one another. Chinese journalists and (micro)bloggers likened the success of shanzhai phones to other bottom-up insurgencies such as the peasant uprisings depicted in classics like the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) novel Shui Hu Zhuan (水浒传，Water Margin) and the Maoist guerilla warfare that allowed “the countryside to surround cities.” Some observers celebrated the Chinese “fakes” winning segments of the market and taking profits away from powerful global brands, actions which for them resonated with the wealth-redistributing legend of Robin Hood in the English-speaking world, but now at global scale. For many tech commentators, the production of shanzhaiji defied the sanctified notion of singular authorship that shores up the global IPR regime. Meanwhile, for some media scholars, the online making of DIY contents that reference or parody the originals, from impersonation of celebrities to shanzhai TV shows, bespoke collective production of a ya wenhua (亚文化 subculture) that departed from the state vision of a unified national wenhua. Echoing this are efforts among (male) tech entrepreneurs in Shenzhen to rework shanzhai as an embodiment of “the early open source ideals” of software development so as to democratize “the right to ‘hack’” (Lindtner 2020, 96). The state project of “wenhua development” (fazhan) aimed to transform shanzhai, among other kinds of wenhua, into economic resources—or brands—more consistent with the IPR notion of original cultural production. What was in turn suppressed was an alternative understanding of wenhua captured in the new media phenomenon of shanzhai as a form of collective meaning-making (Yang 2016, 77). Chuangxin (创新), often glossed as “innovation,” as the core value for driving China forward into the future, upwards toward world prominence, and outwards in impact on other parts of the world, dovetails with the notion of an “alternative model” that refuses China being held to a predetermined standard of development set by the West. Nonetheless, this coupling of innovation and alternative model branding still rests on the commercialization of culture that the IPR regime prescribes. More recently, China has seen increasing use of the acronym “IP,” a detranslated English abbreviation retained in the midst of characters, to designate wenhua that stands to generate further profits if franchised across different media. Those working in and commenting on the media sector, for example, might discuss the value-producing potential of a novel if converted into films, TV shows, comics, and video games. This would necessitate using “IP,” not neirong (内容 contents), for the latter has no immediate

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connotation of profit potential. Meanwhile, Chinese film scholars Yin Hong and Liang Junjian point out that in contemporary dianying wenhua (电影文化, film culture), IP also “incorporates the notion of ‘IP dizhi’” (2016, 6, Yang’s translation). IP 地址 dizhi (address) has come to denote creative contents that have already garnered significant user or fan bases keyed to internet addresses, including literature, games, and videos, among others, before appearing in cinematic forms. For media scholar Jinying Li, the rise of IP films (IP 电影, IP dianying) signals the increased role played by Chinese IT giants like Alibaba and Tencent in shaping the nation’s film wenhua. What Li calls the “platformization of cinema” effectively works to “incorporate cinema into an overarching ecosystem” bound up with “digital platforms” such as WeChat to create a new wenhua of film production that draws on the collective labor of users and fans (2020, 205–15). Notably, the above usages of IP weaken the connection with “rights,” gesturing more to the generative conversion of wenhua, including film wenhua, into economic capital, or what Yin and Liang call “brand resources (品牌资源, pinpai ziyuan) for Chinese cinema” (2016, 7). This industry understanding of “wenhua IP” aligns with the state’s promotion of a “Created in China” campaign (中国创造, zhongguo chuangzao) in its striving to upgrade China’s status to a nation boasting its own brandable property. This more emergent detranslating of IP provocatively calls out the Western-specific origins of IPR; it could be seen as a Chinese attempt to preemptively appropriate the concept and effect semantic shift. Operative through the dynamics of global capitalism, the IPR regime has strained to disseminate a culturally particular lexical set, and ethical code, from “property” and “(copy)right” to “brands” and “copycats,” so as to perpetuate the reified status of these categories on which the regime itself depends. By refusing any direct equivalent in the Chinese language, indigenization of global IPR norms is effectively blocked, making room for resignification of the original English. What this detranslation stands to disrupt, then, is the naturalized sanctity of IPR as a regime with a fixed definition and set of rules reified by the West. As seen through the IP film example, at times China seemingly aspires to push back against the ubiquitous accusations of being a transgressor of intellectual property norms. Yet multiple state and non-state actors have also been ready to disregard the alternative means of making wenhua as they seek to conform to a globally defined IPR-friendly culture of innovation more closely connected to economic growth. One may argue that China’s contested encounters with IPR, as seen through the shanzhai phenomenon and the growing trend of IP films, are reflective of the tensions between wenhua—a malleable, processual, and generative concept in the Chinese context—and “culture” as it has come to be understood under the conditions of neoliberal economization.

CONCLUSION The story of the keyword wenhua in China’s recent decades must reckon with the centrality of creativity and innovation (chuangxin) that has been increasingly championed alongside revivified ideas of chuantong wenhua (traditional culture) and wenhua fuxing (cultural rejuvenation). In 2014, for example, the Ministry of Culture “launched new measures to boost creativity and original content across the country.” The focus on innovation incorporates elements so diverse as to challenge any demarcation of what wenhua has become. With a “focus on creative design, anime game, entertainment, artwork, craftwork and other related fields,” the policy also sought to “push the concrete measures [that] design services and originality play in manufacturing, construction, information technology,

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tourism, agriculture and sports industry.”10 In a sense, the fostering of wenhua has come to connote a sweeping promotion of design and creativity toward all manner of development. We can also chart the multiplication of the meanings of wenhua as played out in state media representations of shanzhai. The China Central Television News, a long-standing staple in post-Mao China, in 2008 condemned shanzhai phones’ IPR violations but simultaneously endorsed, even sought to rechannel, the collective energy conveyed by shanzhai wenhua (Yang 2016). Again, such a reframing foreshadowed the broader state-led efforts to fuse culture and economics in the twenty-first century, as seen in the booming of wenhua qiye (文化企业, cultural enterprises) and wenhua chanye (cultural industries) in official and professional parlance. Twentieth-century history, in which China strove to define itself in relation to the world, and to redefine itself as socialist, had long put wenhua in the service of several nation-building goals. It is not so surprising, then, that the wenhua that Xi Jinping advocates being proud of amounts to a syncretic mesh combining revamped fragments of the “four olds”—that would have been targets for smashing during the Cultural Revolution and that have since been rehabilitated as precious heritage—with socialist values and the increasingly prevalent notion of innovation. As we’ve seen, around the turn of the twenty-first century, the goals of business and the market came more heavily into play. That change that had been exulted in the celebration of revolution now came to be retrofitted as that change that helps to energize the economy. A decolonizing approach to wenhua, then, entails an unblinking and diachronic attention to the keyword’s vicissitudes, its localizations, its instrumental resignifications independent of the normativizing valences that might be exercised if English “culture” is upheld as standard and inserted as semantic filter. Far from being an inert concept that names entities or identities, the ever morphing and contentiously reproduced “culture” was, in English, already somewhat fluid. Yet, we suggest that the discursive forces seeking to render it constant, solid, and suprahuman may be more dominant in the West. Such forces may also be complicit in designating it as neutral, as a relative set of distinctions that demarcate human populations. To the contrary, as Edward Said remarked early on: “cultures are humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote” (1994, 15). Schein’s colleague in Guizhou who alleged “concept colonialism” was perhaps thinking along similar lines as he sought to problematize the hierarchy between those who authorize and those who merely participate. Ironically, he bespoke China’s ongoing struggle for status by flagging none other than Said as one of those Westerners with the power to authorize. Our task going forward, in the spirit of the Chinese–English Keywords Project, is to embrace often-politicized incommensurabilities so as to continue to pursue the ever-morphing fullness of wenhua and other such key terms unrefracted through the orthodoxies of English. This calls us to seriously entertain words as windows onto idiosyncratic social lives, welcoming detranslation as one way to circumvent the exclusions and demotions that menace interlingual exchanges.

NOTES 1. Please note that we represent Chinese phrases using both the standard simplified characters used for writing in Mainland China and pinyin (an orthographic system that has been standardized for the phonemic transliteration of Mandarin such that each character correlates with one pinyin syllable), thus allowing for readers of roman scripts

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to approximately pronounce the phrases. However, when it comes to translating these characters, words, and phrases into English, we have in some places avoided offering oversimplified and inaccurate “glosses” because, as will become clear, this chapter is explicitly focused on the politics of translation. 2. See also the externally facing website Chinaculture​.o​rg which published an article in which foreigners in Wuhan championed its containment success: http://en​.chinaculture​.org​/a​ /202101​/06​/WS5​ff52​814a​3102​4ad0​baa0d0c​.html (accessed November 4, 2022) 3. See http://en​.chinaculture​.org​/trends (accessed November 4, 2022) 4. Importantly, such neologisms and loan words were heavily imported into Chinese throughout the earlier Republican and Maoist periods of the twentieth century and included not only English but also Japanese and Russian sources. However, because our approach leans ethnographic rather than philological, we foreground the postsocialist decades since 1978 of which we have firsthand experience. 5. Rather than examining a fixed corpus of linguistic data collected within a particular spatiotemporal framework, the working group of scholars in the “Keywords/guanjianci Project” employ the term to examine a wide range of lived spoken and sometimes written usages, miscommunications, and incommensurabilities revealed by terms and phrases in Chinese–English interlingual contexts. These juxtaposed contexts include everyday conversations, political discourses, media, and scholarship in which group members have been personally and professionally engaged over the last decades. Recognizing that the term “keyword” is already multivalent in English, we put pressure on the not-sotransparent concept by interlingually inflecting it with some of the dissonant valences offered by the Chinese gloss “guanjianci.” 6. Yan’an Talks on Arts and Literature: https://www​.marxists​.org​/chinese​/maozedong​/marxist​.org​ -chinese​-mao​-194205​.htm (accessed November 4, 2022). The original Chinese reads: “对于过 去​时代的文艺​形式，我们​也并不拒绝​利用，但这​些旧形式到​了我们手里​，给了改造​， 加进了新​内容，也就​变成革命的​为人民服务​的东西了.​” 7. Xinhua Net (2015), “Xi Jingping: Talks at the Symposium on Literature and Art Work” (习 近平：在文艺工作座谈会上的讲话) (accessed November 4, 2022). An English translation of key passages can be found at China File (2015) “Xi Jinping on What’s Wrong with Contemporary Chinese Culture.” http://www​.chinafile​.com​/reporting​-opinion​/culture​/xi​ -jinping​-whats​-wrong​-contemporary​-chinese​-culture (accessed November 4, 2022) 8. ChinaCulture (2015), “Ministry of Culture: Department of Policies and Regulations.” http://en​.chinaculture​.org​/2015​-02​/02​/content​_595546​.htm (accessed November 4, 2022) 9. Xinhua Net (2015), “Xi Jingping: Talks at the Symposium on Literature and Art Work” (习近平：在文艺工作座谈会上的讲话) http://www​.xinhuanet​.com​/politics​/2015​-10​ /14​/c​_1116825558​.html (accessed November 4, 2022) Xi’s words in original Chinese characters were: “国际社会​对中国的关​注度越来越​高，他们想​了解中国，​想知道中国​人的 世界观​、人生观、​价值观，想​知道中国人​对自然、对​世界、对历​史、对未来​的看法，想​知 道中国人​的喜怒哀乐​，想知道中​国历史传承​、风俗习惯​、民族特性​，等等.”​ 10. ChinaCulture (2018), “Ministry of Culture Launches New Steps to Promote Creativity.” http:// en​.chinaculture​.org​/info​/2014​-03​/23​/content​_516582​.htm (accessed November 4, 2022)

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Commentary to Part III MIYAKO INOUE

Language is both the medium and the product of the human’s sensuous and embodied engagement with the nature materials, and it is always-already “social” by virtue of cooperation. As Marx and Engels (1960, 50–1) long ago noted, language is “practical consciousness” that must arise from the necessity of “cooperation” with other individuals, which itself is a “productive force.”1 In linguistic anthropology, the theorization of such a co-constituting relationship between language and labor—language as labor and labor as language—has been an essential part of the tradition of the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1974), which called for the study of how language is used in the actually existing material world. In the more contemporary context, the premise of the inseparability of language and labor undergird the paradigmatic rubric of “language and political economy” (Gal 1989, 2016; Graan 2016; Irvine 1989), which simultaneously undoes the equally unproductive duality of culture and economy, mind and body, and the symbolic and material. The renewed inquiry on the interlocking relationship between language and labor therefore holds open the fundamental question of how linguistic anthropological analysis can contribute to understanding and critiquing the actually existing world that is prominently shaped by the unfettered and unlimited expansion of capitalism and the devastation of community and environment as its consequence. Recent studies on language and political economy (Cavanaugh and Shankar 2017; Del Percio, Flubacher, and Duchêne 2017; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Heller and McElhinny 2017; Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013) urge us to recognize that the role of language in (re)producing social inequality and injustice along the structured axes of gender, sexuality, race, and class is no longer simply one of a specialized “topic,” but is that which must underpin the kernel of linguistic anthropological theory and its ability to address the most pressing issues of our day. Questions remain, however, as to what exactly “social justice” is and could mean and how we can theorize it. It spawned a vigorous debate in the late 1990s in feminist scholarship between normative philosophy and post-structuralism over the relative weight of redistribution and recognition, that is, economic justice and cultural visibility. In the now famous debate between Nancy Fraser (1995, 1997) and Judith Butler (1997) over the relationship between capitalism and sexuality, which is about who is the subject of social justice, the working class or the sexual minority, the former, in a relative sense, prioritized redistributive justice over recognition, whereas the latter critiqued the former dismissing queer politics as “merely cultural” for the reason that gays and lesbians are not necessarily oppressed economically in the same way as the working class. Butler

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(1997) also took issue with Fraser’s “false” distinction between economy and culture, and between distribution and recognition. Fraser, on the other hand, built her theoretical model of injustice by positing distribution and recognition as mutually autonomous categories, whose tension could vary depending on a particular empirical case. Fraser (1998) thus elaborates on her model by problematizing the “decoupling of the cultural politics of difference from the social politics of equality” and suggests that “justice” must encompass three interlocking fronts, namely, recognition, redistribution, and participation, none of which can be dismissed (see also Menna and Codó’s and Karrebæk and Kirilova’s citation of Fraser’s discussion on justice). While the theoretical question of exactly how they are interlocked is still open to further debate, Fraser’s (1998) formulation provides us with a working vocabulary to account for empirical realities of multifaceted injustice in the contemporary global political economy of capitalism and neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism” conventionally refers to a general theory of political-economic practices that emerged worldwide since the 1970s, which pivots around how to harness individual private economic freedom—entrepreneurship and property rights—to eliminate the state and market regulation that supposedly stall such individual aspirations (Harvey 2005).2 As Foucault (2008) and his associates magnify it, however, neoliberalism has transformed the nature of “the social.” In the welfare state, the domain of the social was actively created and protected by state intervention in the market (Donzelot 2008), whereas the neoliberal state let the market seize upon its own “political sovereignty” (Foucault 2008, 84), resulting in diminishing “the social” at its core of solidarity and collectivity. As Brown (2015, 18) puts it, this means the “economization of political life and of other heretofore noneconomic spheres and activities.” Neoliberalism has thus transformed not only the economy and the market, but more importantly, it has colonized and reorganized the social into a political program that operates on a particular political rationality, or governmentality, whose technologies turn individuals into “free” self-governing, self-enterprising and competing actors (Gershon 2011). Such a fundamental revisioning of the relationship between political liberalism and economic liberalism inevitably complicates strategies for social justice. In her essay, “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – and How to Reclaim It,” Fraser (2013) points out how the feminist politics for freedom and equity has been inadvertently complicit with the neoliberal celebration of individual autonomy, choice, entrepreneurship, and meritocracy, and how neoliberalism has thus warped the location of women’s liberation from the social and political realm to the level of the individual, which has stalled feminism as an organized social movement toward solidarity, the common, and democracy. Can concepts such as agency and resistance, and the liberal democratic sphere of the civil society, survive the virality of neoliberal discourse that mimics them? This is indeed a theoretical and political challenge (Inoue 2007; Urla 2019). The chapters in this section represent diverse dimensions of actually existing neoliberal realities, in which ideological, legal, and management regimes of neoliberalism and globalization are combined together and manifested differently to shape people’s social, political, and economic lives and the relationship between language and labor. Neoliberalism is a global assemblage (Ong and Collier 2005) that has neither totalizing discipline nor universal direction, but rather is deployed in specific concrete contexts to diverse ends, and that is in turn assembled with other “local” assemblages (including language use) in unpredictable ways. As such, the chapters illustrate present situated forms of social justice at the intersection between language and labor and seek to develop

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modes of critical analysis and interventions for social justice that are unique to linguistic anthropology. Markkula and Das’s “Seafarers’ talk about (in)justice on the ‘good ship’” zeroes in on the labor involved in supply chain capitalism (Tsing 2009), which links autonomous enterprises into a global linkage through subcontracting and outsourcing. It is what Burch and Sekula (2010) aptly called “Forgotten Space,” for the global maritime logistical system that transfers commodities and makes possible the global assembly line. Interestingly, this has come into widespread public consciousness as it has experienced disconnections during the global pandemic. The cargo ship itself is a neoliberal enterprise as “Flags of Convenience” transcends national sovereignty and freely selects its “national origin,” depending on how much it can evade the most stringent regulations. As Tsing (2009) argues, supply chain capitalism capitalizes not so much on standardization but on local and global diversity in terms of race, gender, and class. This is dramatically demonstrated in Markkula and Das’ analyses on the social relations and sociality produced on and off the cargo ship among the multinational workers, where “difference” along the axes of cultural, linguistic, racial and national is mobilized to organize the complexity involved. Markkula and Das pay attention to the vernacular sense of social justice that emerges in worker’s everyday social interactions onboard, which can be distinguished from that of activists and scholars. We can learn how talk of what is and isn’t “just” and “fair,” and what is a “good ship,” constitute a situated sense of justice and how it is inescapably embedded in the social order onboard characterized by racial, national, and labor hierarchies. They thus propose a promising linguistic anthropological approach to social justice by identifying and analyzing locally available forms and genres of talk. Just as the technologies of the container have successfully homogenized the surface of the globe from the sea to the land and from the cargo ship to trucking, workers’ labor conditions are increasingly standardized with those on land (although the racialized and local forms of labor segmentation Tsing described have hardly disappeared). It remains to be seen as to how such talk might facilitate a fertile ground on which workers could organize themselves. Menna and Codó’s “Barcelona Street Vendors’ Voice and the Crossing of Narrative (B)orders” focuses on Senegalese immigrants in Barcelona, Spain, who engage in the “informal economy” as street vendors. They demand justice on several grounds. Racialized and subjected to discrimination as African, criminalized for unlicensed street vending, and delegitimized as foreign migrants, they demand recognition (respect), redistribution (economy), and participation (or representative justice). First, they resort to the traditional strategy of organizing themselves as a labor union and protest against being racialized, criminalized, and silenced. In their brilliant discourse analysis, Menna and Codó show the competing framing of the migrants’ experience. While the SVU representatives frame their experience as it is structurally and historically shaped by colonialism and racism, the audience of the progressive elite (re)frames it as biographical and personal accounts, which remarkably depoliticizes the nature of this public meeting and exonerates the white audience of being implicated in the oppression that the SVU representatives talk about. Menna and Codó’s account of how the migrant vendors reorganized themselves from a union into an autonomous worker cooperative allows us to understand the paradigmatic consequence of neoliberal governmentality. On the one hand, the co-op members have gained autonomy as self-employed workers, as well as legal and political legitimacy, and thus have inched toward justice in redistribution, recognition, and participation. On the other hand, this move gets uncomfortably close to the figure of the neoliberal

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entrepreneurial, competitive, and self-responsibilizing subject. The shift from unionism to co-op could anticipate the transformation of the Senegalese immigrants from workers into (neoliberal) entrepreneurs. Their political message is now stylized as part of fashion design for clothing and accessories and is communicated to people not so much as organized political citizens but as individual consumers capable of decoding politics into aesthetics (Benjamin 1968). Platform capitalism that makes crowdfunding possible has thus created a new (affective) communication channel, whose “win-win” formula that satisfies both economy (capital) and politics (labor) is made vulnerable by the potential depoliticization of what would otherwise be a powerful emancipatory project. As Menna and Codó’s chapter rightly points out, on multiple levels, they have indeed “entered new political processes.” Reynolds’s ethnographic chapter, “Interdiscursive Dimensions of Mobility and Precarity for Guatemalan Indigenous Youth,” describes the aspirations and struggles of Guatemalan indigenous youth invested in labor migration in pursuit of better lives whose extreme precarity is shaped by the friction between global capitalism and national sovereignty. Based on her longitudinal fieldwork, she chronicles their everyday survival, the transformation of their social world especially around their kin communities, and the reproduction of domination and inequality on multiple scales from the domain of the interpersonal to the workplace, all of which are represented by her interlocutors through their reflexive accounts as well as their local speech genres such as teasing, gossiping, and nicknames. An approach framed as “Anthropolitical Approach to Language Socialization” (Paugh and Riley 2019) guides her committed research orientation toward politically and economically challenged and vulnerable subjects and their production of situated linguistic and cultural knowledge; thus, her analysis aims to foreground how the political-economic system is centrally linked to the language socialization of her interlocutors. She seeks to forge a linguistic anthropological intervention to disclose ideologies and systems that normalize the reproduction of social injustice among such subjects, and, ultimately, returns home to decolonize the discipline itself. Reynolds’s approach to subject formation as socialization, which takes place across large swathes of time and space, marks a productive contrast to the aforementioned paper by Menna and Codó, whose critical strategy is, instead, to find how the unassimilable and counter voices of their stigmatized informants emerge in the face-to-face interactions at meetings. In Karrebæk and Kirilova’s chapter, “Regimes of Organization in Danish Legal Interpreting,” we find yet another dimension of neoliberal realities, that is, an essential public service translated into the language as “quality” and “quality assurance” and turned into numerically standardized and quantified labor for the promise of efficiency, cost reduction, and accountability. Since 2019 Danish courts have involved the private sector in streamlining the administration of legal interpreting and enabling accounting to become part of its administration of law. Karrebæk and Kirilova consider the neoliberal infringement of social justice on two fronts. One concerns the newly privatized working condition for court interpreters, and the other the rights of those who testify in court to receive adequate interpretive services. Instead of a one-time demonstration of a prospective interpreter’s skills, the neoliberal regime of management subjects court interpreters to the perpetual cycles of benchmarking or what Deleuze (1992) rightly called “permanent training” to stay competitive. The other is the recipient of interpreting service, whose rights to a fair trial and the guarantee of full representation before the law hinge not only on the legal institution, but additionally on the private intermediary. The notion of “quality” here is a magic word to turn language labor into numerical, quantifiable, and

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measurable assessments so as to make transparent the relationship between labor and its monetary value. Karrebæk and Kirilova forcefully demonstrate how the new system discredits the traditional symbolic values attached to interpreting labor such as expertise and authority as they would resist quantification and standardization. In modern language, the labor of linguistic reproduction, as in interpreting and court reporting, subscribes to the language ideology of mechanical interchangeability and commensurability between languages and/ or between speech and writing. Karrebæk’s and Kirilova’s chapter seems to suggest that neoliberalism all the more intensifies such a conception of language and the labor of linguistic reproduction. It also reminds us how basic evaluative concepts such as accuracy and fidelity for linguistic reproduction are never absolute but are malleably defined on economic terms. Schein and Yang’s chapter, “Keywords Decolonized? The Social Lives of Wenhua/ Culture and the Specter of Symbolic Violence in Chinese–English Dialogues,” sheds light on the geopolitical struggle over knowledge production, political recognition, and cultural and linguistic commensurability. Taking up the Chinese–English Keywords Project, the authors focus on one of the keywords, wenhua (culture), and take us into diverse contexts, from an academic conference to state media, in which the meaning of wenhua historically and culturally proliferates as China undergoes political and economic change. Wenhua is not just a common Chinese word, but a keyword in China’s modern national consciousness and sovereign identity. An uneven geopolitical relation reflects the politics of linguistic commensurability, and translation could be construed as epistemic violence as it entails interpretation. Historically, non-Western languages are often subjected to the standard set by Euro-American languages in the sense that the former lose the contextually and historically rich meanings of their words in order for them to be commensurable with and symbolically “equal” to that of the West. Through the Chinese– English Keywords Project and other projects in state media and vernacular domains, the authors analyze how, in multiple domains, wenhua, for example, resists losing its own original semantic plentitude that is often lost in translation into English, and this both metaphorically and figuratively. In the constant disputes with the West over intellectual property rights, where China is framed as the agent of imitations and copies both in terms of copyright infringement and simply time-lagging modernity, wenhua aspires to be a shibboleth for authentic, innovative, and original China and its products. The semantics of wenhua is thus closely linked to China’s global ambition and international recognition. For the truly “just” commensurability between China and the West not only semantically but also political-economically, the authors point to a compelling theory and practice called “detranslation.” One source of the concept can be found in psychoanalysis (Laplanche 1989). Detranslation is the psychoanalytic interpretive work that recognizes that which is left untranslated in the context of transference and resists the foreclosure of meaning, which would simply naturalize repression and concealment. In reframing transference as translation, psychoanalytic work attempts to retrieve loss and absence in messages that are excluded by inverting the translation process. Detranslation, which is the process of unpacking, thus leads to “retranslation,” while resisting complete “symbolization,” that is, being completely absorbed by, and subjected to, the symbolic order. In the current context, as Schein and Yang cogently suggest, detranslation is a critical strategy for recognition in resisting the symbolic order of the West by rendering excess to, and noise around, translation visible. Schein and Yang’s discussion on the

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theory and practice of detranslation could speak to the other chapters as a strategy for social justice, one that could be uniquely linguistic anthropological. All the chapters show us diverse locations where the heterogeneous realities of globalization and neoliberalism produce struggles for social justice, and collectively provide us with the empirical ground on which we can further think about linguistic anthropological interventions with respect to the global political economy and the human conditions that it creates.

NOTES 1. Marx and Engels (1960, 50–1) thus famously argue, “From the start the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language [. . .] is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into ‘relations’ with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.” 2. David Harvey’s (2005, 2) oft-quoted definition of neoliberalism thus states that it is “in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”

REFERENCES Benjamin, W. (1968), “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 117–251, New York: Schocken Books. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, 1st edn, Near futures, New York: MIT Press. Burch, N., and A. Sekula (2010), The Forgotten Space, Brooklyn: Icarus Films. Butler, J. (1997), “Merely Cultural.” Social Text, 52/53: 265–77. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /466744. Cavanaugh, J. R., and S. Shankar (2017), Language and Materiality: Ethnographic and Theoretical Explorations, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1992), “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, 59: 3–7. Del Percio, A., M.-C. Flubacher, and A. Duchêne (2017), “Language and Political Economy.” In O. García, N. Flores and M. Spotti (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, 55–76, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donzelot, Jacques. (2008), “Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence.” Economy and Society, 37 (1): 115–34. Duchêne, A., and M. Heller (2012), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism, New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. M. Senellart, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fraser, N. (1995), “From Redistribution to Recognition - Dilemmas of Justice in a Post-Socialist Age.” New Left Review, 212: 68–93. Fraser, N. (1997), “Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response Judith Butler.” Social Text, 52–53: 279–89. Fraser, N. (2013), “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden – and How to Reclaim It.” The Guardian, October 14. Available online: http://www​.theguardian​.com​/commentisfree​ /2013​/oct​/14​/feminism​-capitalist​-handmaiden​-neoliberal (accessed September 6, 2023). Fraser, N. (1998), “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, Participation.” Discussion Papers / Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Arbeitsmarkt und Beschäftigung, Abteilung Organisation und Beschäftigung). Forschungsschwerpunkt Arbeitsmarkt und Beschäftigung, Abteilung Organisation und Beschäftigung, Berlin. Gal, S. (1989), “Language and Political Economy.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 18 (1): 345–67. Gal, S. (2016), “Language and Political Economy: An Afterword.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (3): 331–5. Gershon, I. (2011), “‘Neoliberal Agency’.” Current Anthropology, 52 (4): 537–55. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1086​/660866. Graan, A. (2016), “Introduction: Language and Political Economy, Revisited.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (3): 139–49. Harvey, D. (2005), A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Heller, M., and B. S. McElhinny (2017), Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hymes, D. H. (1974), Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach, Conduct & Communication, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Inoue, M. (2007), “Language and Gender in an Age of Neoliberalism.” Gender & Language, 1 (1): 79–91. Irvine, J. T. (1989), “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy.” American Ethnologist, 16 (2): 248–67. Laplanche, J. (1989), “Temporality and Translation: For a Return to the Question of the Philosophy of Time.” Stanford Literature Review, 6 (2): 241–59. Marx, K., and F. Engels (1960), The German Ideology: Parts I & III, New York: International Publishers. Ong, A., and S. J. Collier (2005), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Malden: Blackwell Pub. Paugh, A. L., and K. C. Riley (2019), “Poverty and Children’s Language in Anthropolitical Perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 48 (1): 297–315. https://doi​.org​/10​.1146​/ annurev​-anthro​-102218​-011224. Tsing, A. (2009), “Supply Chains and the Human Condition.” Rethinking Marxism-a Journal of Economics Culture & Society, 21 (2): 148–76. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /08935690902743088. Urciuoli, B., and C. LaDousa. (2013), “Language Management/Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42: 175–90. Urla, J. (2019), “Governmentality and Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 48: 261–78. https://doi​.org​/10​.1146​/annurev​-anthro​-102317​-050258.

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Negotiating Resources in the Anthropocene

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Chapter 16

Global Languages and Communicative Inequality in the “Last Place” on Earth JAMES SLOTTA AND COURTNEY HANDMAN

For readers of this volume, it is likely a commonplace that indigenous languages play a vital role in their speakers’ lives. As decades of linguistic and anthropological scholarship have shown, languages form an integral part of people’s identities, they are a repository of a community’s culture and knowledge, and they are an essential medium for particular forms of life. Such a view has long been asserted by language activists and members of minority and endangered language communities as well. As a United Nations communiqué on the occasion of the International Year of Indigenous Languages states: Languages play a crucial role in our daily lives. They are not only our first medium for communication, education and social integration, but are also at the heart of each person’s unique identity, cultural history and memory. The ongoing loss of indigenous languages is particularly devastating, as the complex knowledges and cultures they foster are increasingly being recognized as strategic resources for good governance, peacebuilding, reconciliation, and sustainable development. More importantly, such losses have huge negative impacts [on] indigenous peoples’ most basic human rights. (United Nations 2019) And yet, speakers of marginalized and endangered languages do not always view their languages in these terms. In Brazil, Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza (2017, 192) notes that “many indigenous communities, given their constitutional and legal right to make their own decisions vis-à-vis their schools, chose mainstream knowledge and the Portuguese language as preferred content rather than indigenous languages and knowledges.” In Guatemala, Joyce Bennett (2020) finds that none of the forty Kaqchikel-dominant women she interviewed support speaking colloquial Kaqchikel with their children and grandchildren, favoring instead either monolingualism in Spanish or bilingualism in Spanish and standardized Kaqchikel. Peter Ladefoged (1992) points to the smile on the face of a speaker of the endangered Dahalo language as he announces approvingly that his son does not speak Dahalo, only Swahili. Such attitudes are echoed in many parts of the world; they have certainly been a recurring theme in our conversations with people in the Pacific Island nation of Papua New Guinea. In the Yopno Valley, community members requested that we run English

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courses (which we did) in return for their help in documenting their language. In the Waria Valley, we worked with language consultants who themselves were busy learning English, Hebrew, and even Ancient Greek in order to become better translators of the Bible. We have heard countless speeches in these rural regions extolling a future in which their children will live in towns and speak English all the time. One of the most linguistically diverse places on earth—home to over 850 languages in a country of roughly 8 million people—language is a conspicuous part of the social landscape in Papua New Guinea. Historically, language appears to have played an important part in fashioning distinct local identities. Contact with speakers of other languages—an inevitable fact of life in a region where the median language has 1,200 speakers (Kik, Adamec, Aikhenvald, et al. 2021)—often did not lead to a leveling of linguistic differences but, as Gillian Sankoff notes, “to heightened consciousness of and pride in difference” (1980, 10). The use of language as a marker of identity appears to have been an important factor keeping the relatively small-scale languages found in the region in use. It has even been argued that it served as a motive for linguistic differentiation. In an oft repeated story, the linguist Ken McElhanon observed people in the Selepet-speaking village of Indu deliberately create a new word meaning “no” to distinguish themselves from other Selepet speakers (see Kulick 1992, 2–3; on the relationship of language diversification and social differentiation in the region, see Salisbury 1962; Laycock 1982; Thurston 1987). But by the time of our research around the turn of the century, it was common to find people less concerned with the maintenance of their distinctive local languages than with acquiring knowledge of one of the most widely spoken languages in the world: English. Under British and Australian colonial rule (beginning in 1884 in Papua and 1914 in New Guinea), English was made the language of instruction in government schools and was widely sought after as a means of gaining employment and trying to reach greater equality with the white, English-speaking colonists (Swatridge 1985; Romaine 1992; Oladejo 1996).1 After Papua New Guinea became an independent nation-state in 1975, the value placed on English language education persisted. When the national government rolled out a new education policy in the 1990s that made local languages the medium of instruction for the first three years of schooling, the policy was widely criticized by teachers, parents, and students alike. Among those surveyed in a school in West New Britain province, for instance, Kilala Devette-Chee (2012) found that 97 percent of teachers and 96 percent of parents said they would opt for English-only education for their students/children if they could. Ninety percent of students said that English was more important to them than their vernacular, Tolai (Kuanua).2 (The term “indigenous language” is not used as often as “vernacular language” is in the Papua New Guinean context. Especially when talking about education policies, we use “vernacular language.”) In some places, parents took matters into their own hands. Craig Volker (2015) reports that in the community of Madina in New Ireland, more than half the parents enrolled their children in a Bible school operated by a fundamentalist church that offered instruction entirely in English, even though the school was not accredited by the government. A majority of the community went on to urge the head teacher of the public elementary school to flout the vernacular language education policy and teach their children in English, which she eventually did. Asked why they support English language education, one parent explained to Volker, “modern knowledge comes from the outside world ‘wrapped in English’” (2015, 216). In 2013, the government ended the vernacular language policy and English once again became the language of instruction in public schools.

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None of this is meant to suggest that people in Papua New Guinea no longer value their indigenous languages. Some parents certainly did support the vernacular education policy; and for those who did not, the importance they place on English language schooling should not be taken as an indication that they do not also value vernacular language use outside of the school context.3 But the controversy that erupted over the language of instruction in Papua New Guinean schools does provide some indication of the value placed on English in the country today. In a sense there is nothing terribly surprising about this, given the preceding decades of colonization which saw indigenous languages disparaged and suppressed, and English—along with the white colonizers who spoke it—elevated. As in many parts of the postcolonial world today, one of the ongoing legacies of colonialism is the enduring status of the colonizer’s language as a “power code”—a language associated with authority, high status, and material and immaterial benefits. But there is more to the appeal of English than this might suggest. As we hope to show here, English—along with several other national and international languages—serves as a vehicle of something like social justice for many in Papua New Guinea today (though that is not an expression most there would use). Attuned to the inequalities that are such a conspicuous characteristic of the contemporary transnational economy, people there often note their place at the bottom of a global hierarchy of wealth and power. In many parts of the country, one hears the same lament: the people of Papua New Guinea, or some region of it, live in the las ples (last place) to undergo development, to receive government services, to learn the word of God, to gain access to education (Kulick 1992; Englund and Leach 2000; Foster 2002; Dobrin 2008; Hoenigman 2012; Jebens 2012; Malbrancke 2019). This phrase, las ples—an expression in the English-based creole spoken in much of the country, Tok Pisin—encapsulates a widespread feeling of living on the spatial and temporal margins of a world of wealth and power that is concentrated elsewhere, whether that is in wealthier parts of the globe or in wealthier parts of Papua New Guinea itself. At the same time, it also suggests the possibility of a future that looks different, one in which it is finally the las ples’s turn to share in these goods as equals.4 As we detail in the sections to come, English and other languages of wider communication play an important part in people’s efforts to bring this future into being for themselves and their communities. They are valued as a means of communicating with people outside of the las ples, establishing connections that will enable access to the wealth and power that are found there (e.g., Errington and Gewertz 1985; Dobrin 2008). In that respect, these languages play a vital part in what looks very much like the pursuit of social justice: they are part of an effort to create a more equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and esteem, both nationally and internationally.

LINGUISTIC EQUITY VERSUS COMMUNICATIVE EQUITY IN THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE The languages that many in Papua New Guinea turn to in order to produce a more equitable future—English and Tok Pisin foremost among them—do not fit the profile of the kinds of languages that are typically promoted in discussions of language and social justice. Avineri and her coauthors put the prevailing view of the matter succinctly: “Essentially any instance of advocating for languages and dialects that have been historically marginalized and remain socially subordinated is an act of social justice” (Avineri et al. 2019, 9). English quite clearly is not a historically marginalized or socially

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subordinated language in Papua New Guinea. Indeed, the value placed on English and other national languages is leading some communities to devalue and shift away from their indigenous languages (Kulick 1992; Nekitel 1998; Dobrin 2014), the very sort of endangered and marginalized languages that are typically promoted in the name of social justice. It is these languages—not English and Tok Pisin—that have attracted the concern and support of overseas scholars and missionaries. But the role that national and international languages play in the pursuit of social justice in Papua New Guinea—and in other parts of the postcolonial world (e.g., Adejunmobi 2004; Rafael 2005)—bespeaks a sensibility about language and social justice quite different from the one that motivates the efforts of scholars and missionaries to support the use of indigenous languages. This is a sensibility in which advocacy for marginalized and subordinated languages is not in and of itself an act of social justice. Indeed, advocating for marginalized languages in Papua New Guinea can come across as the very opposite: as several parents in the village of Medina told Craig Volker, it was as if Australia’s support for the vernacular language education reform was part of an effort to keep Papua New Guineans in their place by giving them “a second-rate educational system” (2015, 216). The notion that people are kept from learning English to keep them in their place is hardly new. Here is how one man described his experience of colonial-era mission schools: Some of our men have been to school with the mission. We were looking for a road and we thought we had found it. But the road was not straight. They taught us only tokboi [a name for the variety of Tok Pisin that colonizers used for communicating with laborers—JS/CH]. The road turned and brought us back to ourselves, our own tokboi. They did not show us the straight road that would lead us on to your knowledge, your ideas, your language. They showed us a picture of God in a book. They did not show us God. (Rowley 1966 quoted in Romaine 1992, 85) We have heard similar comments about mission schools ourselves. While some have dismissed local demands for English in the immediate postindependence context as “brainwashing” (Oladejo 1996, 596), the continued calls for more English education almost fifty years after independence ought to be considered more than just the parroted speech of colonizers. At issue here, we want to suggest, are not only different sensibilities about the kinds of languages that figure in the pursuit of social justice; at issue are different sensibilities about the way language figures in the pursuit of social justice. In considerations of equity—a cornerstone of social justice— language figures in at least two distinct ways. On the one hand, languages themselves may be subject to considerations of equity. How are resources, opportunities, and esteem distributed among different languages and their users? What role do various institutions play in shaping these distributions, and how might these institutions be reconstructed to create a more equitable distribution? Where equity among languages and their speakers— that is, linguistic equity—is a paramount consideration, advocacy for marginalized and subordinated languages is, as Avineri and her coauthors put it, by definition an act of social justice. But language figures in a second way in the pursuit of equity and social justice: as a means of communication essential for accessing a host of other (nonlinguistic) goods. Education, legal services and protections, political participation, health care, employment—all depend on people’s ability to communicate effectively using language. Depending on the context, some languages—like English—may provide better communicative access to these goods.

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Limiting people’s ability to learn these languages leads in turn to unequal access to these nonlinguistic resources and opportunities. Here, considerations of equity pertain not to languages themselves—linguistic equity—but to the communicative access to resources and opportunities that different languages afford—what might be termed, communicative equity. As we discuss more in the sections to come, it is concerns about communicative equity of this sort that help to drive interest in national and international languages in Papua New Guinea—as means of accessing not only education and employment, but the services of NGOs, Christian salvation, community funding, power-giving esoteric knowledge, and other resources and opportunities of interest to people there. Tensions between communicative and linguistic equity are a running theme in the literature on language, language rights, and social justice. Political theorists and legal scholars emphasizing the importance of language as a tool of communication point up the benefits of national and even international languages that enable their speakers to gain greater access to a host of (nonlinguistic) resources and opportunities (e.g., de Swaan 2001; Archibugi 2005). Linguists, language activists, and scholars of education highlighting the importance of languages themselves, by contrast, tend to stress the value of marginalized and endangered languages as vital sources of identity and community for their speakers (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; May 2003). As a result, the pursuit of communicative equity and the pursuit of linguistic equity often appear to be in conflict. This tension is mirrored in the distinction often drawn in the literature on language rights and linguistic justice between “instrumental” and “expressive” interests in language (which itself reflects a long-standing divide between “rationalist” and “romantic” views of language; see Geeraerts 2008; Woolard 2016). The former typically concern the use of language as a tool of communication, essential for “meaningful participation in public institutions and democratic process” as well as “enjoyment of social and economic opportunities that involve linguistic skills” (Rubio-Marín 2003, 56). The latter concern the role of languages as “a marker of identity, a cultural inheritance and a concrete expression of community” (Green 1987, 659 quoted in Rubio-Marín 2003). Often, as a number of political theorists and legal scholars point out, these two interests in languages are at odds with one another: the need for efficient communication often favors the use of national languages and global lingua francas while expressive interests often favor the use of local and marginalized languages. Van Parijs (2011), for instance, discusses the trade-offs between “efficient communication” and “symbolic considerations”; Kymlicka and Patten (2003), the conflict between “nation-building” and “diversity-preserving” views of language policy. The trade-offs that these authors point to indicate some of the challenges of reconciling an ideal of communicative equity with an ideal of linguistic equity. But as Stephen May (2003) among others has pointed out (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), linguistic and communicative equity are not inherently incompatible ideals. If resources are provided to enable translation and interpretation in legal and political spheres, if schooling is offered in multiple languages, if multilingualism is promoted as a society-wide ideal—such efforts make possible a greater equality among languages while also ensuring communicative access to a host of nonlinguistic goods as well.5 Take the example of the European Parliament, which adopted a “principle of complete multilingualism” for its operations in 1990 to ensure that all citizens of the European Union had access to government proceedings and documents in their national languages. The effort involved has been enormous: with twenty-four official languages at present there are 552 directions of translation in the European Parliament.

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But such an effort raises the question: How widely reproducible is such “complete multilingualism” when it is necessary to have “over 1,000 staff employed in translation and over 500 in interpretation to care for the translation and interpretation needs of the 751 Members of the European Parliament” (Katsarova 2019)? The translation and interpretation work of the European Parliament came at a cost of 325 million Euros in 1999 and has only grown since then (de Swaan 2001; Anonymous 2014). To put that number in perspective, that was roughly the amount of all government expenditures on education for the 1.1 million students enrolled in Papua New Guinea’s schools in 2007.6 In many countries, hopes for a neat resolution of the tensions between communicative and linguistic equity require resources that simply are not available. Papua New Guinea offers a case worth considering in this regard. As a nation where something like 850 different languages are spoken and where the state struggles to provide basic services beyond the major cities, it is hard to imagine how education, justice, health care, economic development, and elections could be offered in a way that substantially promotes linguistic equity. As a point of comparison, in 2013, governments in the United States spent $11,774 per student on elementary, secondary, and postsecondary non-tertiary public education. Mexico spent $2,707 and Indonesia $1,377. Papua New Guinea spent K1,179 per student—roughly US $335.7 Under such conditions, it appears that trade-offs must be made. Should scarce resources be devoted to supporting government services and language programs in the 850 languages of the country? Or, would they be better spent on other goods? As in many rural parts of the country, neither of the regions where we have done our research are accessible by road, nor do they have access to Papua New Guinea’s electrical grids. Based on our experience, people there would much rather have the government spend its limited resources on a vehicular road or electrification project than translation services or a local language program (Handman 2017). In a context like this, linguistic equity may prove a less pressing or practicable aim than securing other resources and opportunities. And to that end, communicative access and knowledge of languages of wider communication may prove more needful. This, we want to emphasize, makes the language situation in Papua New Guinea worth closer consideration: it is a perhaps extreme version of situations found in many parts of the postcolonial world, where communicative equity—rather than linguistic equity—is the more pressing and practicable social justice concern of the people living there. Unfortunately, as we noted above, the scholarship most attuned to the benefits provided by languages of wider communication is produced by political theorists, often on the basis of vague and stereotype-filled assumptions about people’s communicative interests and desires. As an example of what we’re talking about, consider Abram de Swaan’s (2001) rational choice model of how people decide which languages to learn. The key factor he presents is the “communication value” (Q-value) of different languages in different regions of the world, a measure which tries to capture the number of people one can communicate with by learning different languages. The presumption here, in effect, is that rational individuals will seek to maximize their ability to communicate with as many others as possible. But such quantitative measures of a language’s communicative potential are at best a rough and ready stand-in for understanding the communicative interests and desires that motivate people to learn different languages. de Swaan’s Q-value offers no traction in understanding why our consultants in Papua New Guinea were learning Ancient Greek. And it offers little more when it comes to the varied reasons they were trying

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to learn English, which go well beyond maximizing their ability to communicate with others. What we need is close ethnographic and historical attention to the communicative imaginaries and infrastructures, ideals and experiences that shape people’s interest in various languages—whether English, Tok Pisin, Hebrew, Ancient Greek, or indeed, their indigenous language. The sections that follow set out to do just that, focusing on a few of the prominent features of the social, political, economic, and religious environments that shape people’s pursuit of communicative equity in Papua New Guinea.

LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY, SOCIAL INTERCOURSE, AND THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE Scholars now attribute Papua New Guinea’s remarkable linguistic diversity in part to the important role that language plays as a marker of group identity there. In the words of Don Kulick, “New Guinea villagers have traditionally seized upon the boundarymarking dimension of language, and they have cultivated linguistic differences as a way of ‘exaggerating’ themselves . . . in relation to their neighbors and trading partners” (1992, 2). At the same time, Papua New Guinea’s linguistic diversity has served to highlight another dimension of language as well: its use as a vehicle of communication. The small language communities of Papua New Guinea were not the remote, isolated communities they are sometimes depicted as being in popular media (e.g., The Economist 2017). They generally had intensive relations of exchange and intermarriage with neighboring communities where different languages were often spoken. People in the Yopno Valley, for instance, regularly intermarried and exchanged goods with people in the neighboring Nankina, Som, and Wantoat valleys, part of trade networks that stretched hundreds of miles north to the islands off the coast of New Guinea and south to the Markham Valley (Harding 1967; Sarvasy 2013). This was just one of the many expansive trading networks that traversed the region and the small language communities found there (the kula ring described by Malinowski [1922] being perhaps the most well known). Such intensive and widespread social intercourse required shared languages for communication. But unlike in Indonesia, India, or Nigeria, which are some of Papua New Guinea’s closest contenders in terms of linguistic diversity, there were no large-scale kingdoms that had their own languages of state uniting diverse segments of the population. Nor were there religious languages to produce the kinds of scriptural cosmopolitanism associated with Sanskrit, Arabic, or Latin (Anderson 1991; Pollock 1998; Ricci 2011). In some areas of Papua New Guinea, local lingua francas enabled communication between neighboring groups who spoke different languages (Williams 1993). In larger trading networks a lingua franca might be shared by hundreds or even thousands of people (Lawton 1977; Sankoff 1980). But in many contexts, it appears that people sought out knowledge of their neighbors’ languages as a way to expand their social networks (Sankoff 1980; Kulick 1992; Aikhenvald 2014; see Jourdan and Angeli 2014 on the similar situation in neighboring Solomon Islands). In the village of Gapun, for instance, where most of the roughly hundred people who speak the Taiap language live, research in the 1980s found that all people over ten years of age were bilingual, and those over fifty were actively or passively multilingual in between five and six languages on average, reflecting the kind of multilingualism common before Tok Pisin became the lingua franca

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in the region (Kulick 1992). While the example of Gapun is likely extreme, it is hardly unheard of elsewhere in the region. In this context of prolific linguistic diversity, the ability to communicate across sociolinguistic boundaries was a valued asset. For men, multilingual knowledge of trade lingua francas or neighboring languages was a prerequisite for gaining status (Sankoff 1980). Knowledge of these other languages enabled men to cultivate exchange relationships that gave them access to material and immaterial goods—livestock, shell money, rituals, magic, and myths (Harrison 1993)—that enhanced their fame and influence. Knowledge of other languages also allowed leading men to communicate with neighboring groups to find spouses for others, stave off conflict, make alliances for warfare, and the like. Women too were often multilingual.8 Intermarriage across language boundaries was common and spouses would typically learn each other’s languages. That was especially true for women who lived with their husband’s family. Children of these marriages grew up multilingual as well, linking their parents’ communities and bridging their linguistic differences (Slotta 2012; Vries 2012). As the prevalence of multilingualism attests, the role of language as a marker of identity was complemented by a recognition that language serves a vital role as a tool of communication among linguistically distinct but regularly interacting groups. The ability to bridge communicative boundaries takes on value as part of efforts to extend political, social, and economic networks; to achieve fame and influence; and to sustain peaceful and productive relationships with others (Foley 2005; Dobrin 2014; Kulick and Dobrin, to appear). Today, gift exchange, intermarriage, and other forms of social intercourse across linguistic boundaries remain significant parts of most Papua New Guineans’ lives. In the Massim region, the kula trade persists despite people’s increasing involvement in the market economy (Schram 2018; Haug 2020). In some cases, the cash economy has even made exchange networks wider and more robust. Bridewealth exchanges in the Central Highlands have, if anything, expanded due to the inflation brought on by access to the cash economy (see Wardlow 2006; Eves 2019). That is not to say that there have not been significant economic changes over the past century (see Martin 2013). But even as the economy of Papua New Guinea has shifted further toward markets and wage labor, the assumption that one’s own political and economic power might require exchange networks and multilingual knowledge has remained relatively consistent. Except that now, instead of learning the language of a neighboring community or a regional lingua franca, network-expanding multilingualism more often requires knowledge of English, Tok Pisin, and other languages of much wider communication.

COLONIAL MULTILINGUALISM AND COMMUNICATIVE INEQUALITY Though the language situation shifted quite dramatically during the colonial era in Papua New Guinea, multilingualism continued to play an important part in people’s efforts to expand their social, economic, and political networks. Indeed, from the perspective of Papua New Guineans, colonialism happened through a variety of different languages: English, Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, and several different church lingua francas. In contrast to monolingual settler colonialisms, which significantly disrupted the transmission of indigenous languages in other regions of the world, none of these colonial languages

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in Papua New Guinea initially had a major impact on the indigenous languages spoken there. If anything, Papua New Guineans have often complained about their lack of access to the main language of the colonial state, English. In that respect, the story of colonial English in Papua New Guinea is in many ways a story of failure. Various colonial administrations hoped that English would become the universal lingua franca of both colonizer and colonized. But what was taught in most cases was any number of other colonial languages, coupled with a sense of the importance of English. As a result, Papua New Guineans with an interest in developing more expansive social, political, and economic networks were left feeling like they had not been given the communicative ability to do so in English. In contrast to the intensive social intercourse among communities that actually characterized precolonial life in much of Papua New Guinea, colonial authorities tended to characterize Papua New Guinea as a space of geographic isolation, mountainous remoteness, and linguistic incommunicability (Handman 2019). These are circulation-based versions of the tropes of primitivism that did and still do continue to dominate discussions about the country. The large number of languages spoken there together with the large number of rugged mountains that form a spine along the center of New Guinea island have, over the past 150 years, acted as the emblems of division and disunity for colonizers and politicians despairing of ever being able to create a national identity. This despair over national or territorial unity or even the possibility of basic information circulation—what was known as “the language problem”—was one of the most consistent concerns of the many and varied colonial administrations that governed the two colonies of Papua and New Guinea. Ironically, fragmentation is more of a central feature in the complex colonial history of administrations of Papua New Guinea than in the history of indigenous exchange networks (see Denoon 2012). In 1884, the island of New Guinea was divided between several different colonial empires. The colonizers of Papua, as the southwest quarter of the island of New Guinea has been known, were first Britain and later Australia. The colonizers of the Territory of New Guinea, as the northwest quarter of the island of New Guinea has been known, were first Germany and later Australia. Even though both Papua and the Territory of New Guinea were administered by Australia after 1914, they had different legal statuses, and sometimes separate administrations that favored different policies. (The western half of the island is now called West Papua. It was colonized by the Dutch, and it is currently part of Indonesia. We do not address West Papua, nor Dutch/ Indonesian control of it, in this chapter.) Germany did not make many efforts to teach its language to local people in the Territory of New Guinea during its thirty years in power (nor did Japan, during its brief period of occupation of the northern coast in the Second World War). German-language instruction had only just begun in a very limited capacity in the 1910s before Australia took over the territory in 1914 at the start of the First World War. This meant that the dominant language of colonial administrators in both Papua and New Guinea was mostly English, at least in terms of the aspirations of the colonial state. As one colonial officer famously put it, “Teach them [Papua New Guineans] English, English, and more English” (quoted in Oladejo 1996, 595). Unity, autonomy, national identity, and inclusion in the global family of nations have primarily been hitched to the question of whether Papua New Guineans could learn standard (Australian) English (Romaine 1992). Nor was this only the opinion of Australian colonizers. When the Australian linguist Thomas Dutton suggested in a speech in 1976 that Papua New Guinea make Tok Pisin, rather than English, the primary

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language of education and national identity, it caused such a controversy among certain Papua New Guineans (almost all of whom were pro-English) that it was a major point of discussion in newspapers and even the national television network for weeks afterward (texts related to this controversy are collected in McDonald [1976]). However, one of the stranger aspects of the colonial experience in Papua and New Guinea was that while it was long the official policy to teach English to colonial subjects, little English language education ended up happening until much closer to Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975. In Papua, English-language instruction by administration-run and missionary-run schools was never particularly successful; yet compared to New Guinea, it looked robust. It helped that in Papua the missionaries, who played the most significant role in education in both colonies, were mostly English-speaking Australians. On the New Guinea side, most of the missionaries until the post–Second World War era were German speakers who opted for languages other than English in developing their ecclesiastical structures and educational systems. It was not until the late 1950s that the administration for the more populous New Guinea side started to focus on education and not until 1959 that the administration demanded that missions teach English as a core subject in village-level primary schools (see Handman 2015 for discussion of the 1959 policy change as it affected Lutheran education systems). In 1960, when the decolonization writing was on the imperial wall, Australia finally started its concerted push for mass literacy in English, only fifteen years prior to independence. English became the official language of independent Papua New Guinea, but it was a language that only the tiniest fraction of the population could speak. Rather than English, the two languages through which most Papua New Guinean people experienced everyday administration and wage labor were Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. Tok Pisin is one of several Melanesian pidgin Englishes that originated on sailing ships in the Pacific and later stabilized on plantations worked by indentured laborers (Mühlhäusler 1977, 1978). Hiri Motu is a pidginized version of the indigenous Motu language that Motuans used on their coastal trading voyages known as hiri (Dutton 1982). It appears to have been the most widespread precolonial lingua franca, but even it was highly circumscribed by the traditional boundaries of the hiri voyages along a portion of the south coast of Papua. This pidginized variety of Motu was learned by and adapted for the administration, and became so associated with the local men who accompanied colonial administrators on patrols that its colonial era name was Police Motu (Dutton 1985). In New Guinea and Papua, respectively, then, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu were the languages of colonial labor, administration, and the penal system. But even these contexts of use were relatively limited. Men would speak Tok Pisin and Motu intensively and non-optionally for a few years during prison or labor terms, but for those remaining in rural villages Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu might only be used when patrol officers came on yearly or semiannual visits. In fact, in these more rural areas, both languages had some of the prestige accorded to rare objects or knowledge. According to some accounts from laborers, knowledge of Tok Pisin or Hiri Motu was considered a valuable good in itself associated with colonial mobility even as it came at the sometimes very high cost of forced labor and corporal punishments (Kulick 1992). Tok Pisin was also a language of missionization, at least for some churches. Others adopted indigenous languages as lingua francas for use in churches and church-run primary schools (Ross 1996; Paris 2012). For the Lutheran mission, this was a changing set of indigenous languages (most often Kâte and Yabem) that they tried to

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promulgate as regional lingua francas. At least eight other indigenous languages were used by missions in different regions of Papua New Guinea (see Wurm 1977). These church lingua francas did not replace local languages. The Lutheran lingua francas, for example, each of which may have originally been spoken by only two thousand people, came to be understood by a hundred thousand or more. Yet Lutheran education systems in which indigenous church lingua francas were used produced primarily passive knowledge of these languages, as even missionaries admitted in the 1950s (see Handman 2015). That is, even though the missions ran most of the schools, and actively promoted their church lingua francas through their school curricula, language learning was limited. Although colonial administrations may have dreamed of an English-dominant colony, in fact a variety of languages were used in circumscribed domains of social life (school, church, labor, administration, penal system); none dominated all linguistic contexts. In that sense, these colonial languages became added parts of Papua New Guineans’ (although more often men’s) multilingual repertoires, additional resources within a model of language that stresses its communicative role in expanding one’s political, economic, and social networks. Indeed, knowledge of these languages provided routes to expanded power, prestige, and wealth as Papua New Guineans took on the roles of pastors and priests, teachers and government officers, politicians and small business owners. But this multilingual colonial inheritance has narrowed in recent years. The church lingua francas, like the mainline denominational churches that initially promulgated them, have lost much of their cachet. The Lutherans still use Kâte and Yabem in some synodal events and they continue to publish hymnals in these languages, but most Lutheran activities now happen in either Tok Pisin or English. In the original areas of Lutheran influence, like the Yopno Valley, Kâte lives on in a number of words that have become part of everyday speech, and in the occasional Bible reading or hymn. But no young people are learning the language now and some even express deep resentment toward the Lutheran mission for operating in Kâte. As someone there explained to James, Kâte was a huge diversion. The Lutheran church, they said, used it to keep people from gaining access to English and becoming independent. The language was used to imprison Yopno, by limiting their connections with others. In the Waria Valley, Kâte is regarded as a funny anachronism, pointing to a network of connections stitched together by the Lutheran mission that is largely dormant. Motu, in the former Papuan region, has also lost speakers as more and more younger Papuans learn Tok Pisin and as Papua as a region with its own autonomous identity has lost strength compared to its status in the 1960s and 1970s. In the years leading up to Papua New Guinea’s independence, there was a Papuan separatist movement, Papua Besena, that feared that Papua and Papuans would be politically swamped by New Guineans in a united postcolonial country. In this struggle, Papuans would pit Hiri Motu against Tok Pisin as the language of Papuan identity. However, Papua Besena is largely moribund and a sense of Papua as distinct from New Guinea is now talked about more in broader cultural terms that are not necessarily connected to Hiri Motu in particular. Out of what was originally a highly multilingual colonial experience, then, English and Tok Pisin are the two remaining dominant languages. Even Tok Pisin seems to have lost some of its position in recent years. The growing availability of social media and the internet through mobile phones, as well as changing forms of Christian influence discussed in the next section, have meant that the influence of English has only grown, even as access to English education can still be frustratingly difficult to come by.

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In the colonial and postcolonial eras, consistent but unfulfilled top-down promises of English language education have converged with a long-standing bottom-up valuation of multilingualism as a means of expanding social networks. This has meant that, more often than not, local people demand more access to English rather than less (for instance, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor voicing support of English-only education; e.g., Galatau 2021; Gerega 2021). Many now feel like their decades of paying school fees for children who come out with minimal English skills is just another example of the failures of their postcolonial government. The most obvious example of this is the diverse attitudes toward vernacular education, discussed in the introduction to this chapter. In the 1990s, Papua New Guinea started to shift to vernacular language elementary school, with students bridging to English in Grade 3 after basic literacy and numeracy skills had already been introduced. By 2012, politicians and many parents were complaining that English language skills were falling (Dobrin 2008; Volker 2015; and letters to the editor like Ykandale [2010] and Kep JksnWpu [2015]). In 2013, a new language policy was put in place “to address the concerns raised by the society including parents, members of the community, teachers, former students under the reformed curriculum, academics, and political leaders” (Taita 2013). That policy made English the language of instruction in all schools. In the end, the failure of the colonial administration to provide access to English has given rise to a widespread sense of communicative inequity. In contrast to other contexts where colonial legacies have led to local language obsolescence and political demands for the recognition of indigenous languages, people in Papua New Guinea often demand that they be given the chance to incorporate English into their multilingual repertoires as part of an effort to expand their social and political networks, to gain access to the English-speaking world where wealth and power are so abundant. The colonial experience in Papua New Guinea has sedimented in many communities a concern with communicative equality that centers on learning and using languages like English and to a lesser extent Tok Pisin—languages that will enable people to escape the condition of being the las ples.

LINGUISTIC EQUITY, TRANSLATION, AND CHRISTIAN MISSIONS We have been arguing that communicative access is something akin to a social justice issue for many Papua New Guineans, evident particularly in demands for greater access to English education. Yet we do not want to ignore or downplay the significant number of social justice projects focused on linguistic equity (i.e., the promotion of indigenous languages) in Papua New Guinea. Local communities are now partnering with linguists and anthropologists from institutions based overseas to develop language materials like dictionaries (e.g., Schieffelin and Feld 1998), orthographies (e.g., Schreyer and Wagner 2013), and various kinds of online resources and repositories (e.g., Lise Dobrin’s work with Arapesh speakers at http://www​.arapesh​.org/). One of the most significant supports of language documentation work, the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, has funded dozens of projects in Papua New Guinea (a list of current projects is available at https://www​.eldp​.net​/en​/our​+projects​/map/). However, the group that most specifically focuses on linguistic equity as a kind of social justice project in Papua New Guinea is the Christian translation group, SIL International. Using the language of “development” and “capacity-building” easily recognized from

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other international NGOs, SIL presents itself as a partner in promoting linguistic justice: “In today’s globalized world, communities who speak lesser-known languages face many challenges. SIL partners with ethnolinguistic minority communities as they build their capacity for the sustainable development of their own languages” (SIL n.d.). SIL argues that having an orthography and literature in one’s own language produces a sense of pride and investment in one’s community. Yet while their work in local communities can cover a broad range of projects, almost all SIL projects are meant to culminate in a translation of the Christian New Testament (or at least portions of it) as well as literacy materials to promote local language reading skills. While not directly engaged in evangelism as such, SIL provides the linguistic materials that its members consider necessary for speakers of local languages to engage with Christianity. The religious goal of this work, which is more clearly described in literature stemming from SIL’s partner organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, is to create new Christians. Yet SIL folds this project into a broader, more secular one of creating communicative access through greater linguistic equity. As Lise Dobrin (2009) has discussed, this means that SIL has become one of the most prominent institutions in global efforts to combat language obsolescence while also being centered on projects of fundamental cultural and linguistic transformation through Christian conversion. The operating ethos of SIL International is one that brings together what we have been calling linguistic equity and communicative equity. SIL literature promotes the idea that the best way that one can access new, meaningful information (epitomized for most of its members by the New Testament) is in a speaker’s native language, what at one point was referred to in SIL material as a speaker’s “heart language” (see Handman 2007). One of the most common dimensions of linguistic equity projects in Papua New Guinea, then, is translation, and specifically Christian forms of translation. Because of the linguistic diversity of Papua New Guinea, one would expect that translation into and out of indigenous languages would have been a crucial component of colonial and postcolonial governance. But the state has rarely been involved in any kind of structured processes of translation that might bridge the gaps between government workers speaking English and local people. Throughout the 1950s, a standing topic for discussion during conferences between missionary groups and the colonial administration was when the government would produce a brief pamphlet with translations of the basic laws of the territory into simplified English, Tok Pisin, or Hiri Motu; that is, when the laws governing Papua New Guineans would be translated into a form that at least some of them might understand. Even the nation’s constitution was only translated into Tok Pisin because Francis Mihalic, a Catholic priest and author of one of the most widely used dictionaries of the language, translated it while he was in the hospital recovering from an illness (Mihalic to Handman, p.c.). When the colonial administration did attempt to produce translated educational reading material in local languages, their efforts were so slow and poorly funded that they may as well have been nonexistent. During the 1950s, for example, the Department of Education was only able to produce nine mimeographed language primers, a pace that would have had introductory primers for all Papua New Guinea languages sometime around the year AD 2800 (Department of Education n.d.). Yet even SIL, which has a staff of many hundreds and is fully dedicated to translating (Christian) literature into local languages, has only been able to complete New Testament translations or portions thereof in about two hundred languages since 1955.

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At present, then, the most prominent and powerful institution in Papua New Guinea advocating for indigenous languages as a matter of social justice is a Christian NGO that supports missionary conversions. Yet this should not be particularly surprising. Missionaries, anthropologists, translation studies critics, and advocates for endangered languages often share a Herderian view of languages and speech practices as expressions of local categories of thought and culture (on missionaries and translation, see Schieffelin 2002, 2007). From this perspective, each language is a uniquely valuable resource for its speakers. And communication between speakers of different languages requires careful translation, closely comparing one linguistic and cultural system with another to identify points of (rough) equivalence between them. Yet Papua New Guineans themselves do not necessarily talk about translation issues in the sort of comparative, Herderian vein that anthropologists and missionaries so often do. As often as not, Papua New Guineans talk about their contemporary Christian experiences and histories of translation in terms of communicative access and circulation. In the Waria Valley, Guhu-Samane speakers, who have close experience with Bible translators associated with SIL International, focus on the long path the Bible took to reach them in their rural corner of Morobe Province. Although there were some leaders who criticized specific translation choices made by the SIL translators and their local interlocutors, one of the most significant parts of the local memorialization of the Bible translation project is specifically the way it reached them: from God to the SIL translator to them and then, in their own evangelistic projects, on to other nearby communities. The New Testament translation was important specifically because it enabled a sense of their existence in a network of Christian agents (Handman 2015). They feel that they were “late” getting the Bible, yet now that they have it, local people are concerned with engaging in further evangelistic work of their own, extending the social network of circulation that brings them into relationship with God and powerful mission organizations. That is, translation may be valuable for people because of the networks of exchanges it creates as much as for the ethnolinguistic identity it solidifies. Current changes in Christian affiliation in Papua New Guinea are transforming people’s interest in indigenous language translation. Christianity is shifting from a domain that has enabled projects promoting local languages and linguistic equity (as organized by groups like SIL International) into a domain that places the English language front and center in evangelistic materials. In the post–Second World War era, many Christians in the colonial and newly postcolonial worlds moved away from mainline missions—with their vast, hierarchical global networks organized around colonial empires—in favor of Pentecostal missions and churches with looser, more lateral connections to Bible Colleges or churches across the globe (on this shift, see Jenkins 2011). Importantly, the horizontal structures associated with Pentecostalism have tended to push more Papua New Guineans toward English. The colonial mainline missions that have been in the country in some cases since before the turn of the twentieth century could support overseas missionaries for thirty-year or forty-year terms and had the organizational capacities to create expert knowledge in indigenous languages. But as Pentecostalism has become more popular, Papua New Guineans rely more and more on internet-based media for training and inspiration in founding their own independent churches. These media forms—recorded sermons from past and present internationally known pastors like Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, or Joel Osteen—are exclusively in English. Even if Papua New Guinea Pentecostal leaders themselves preach in indigenous languages, they often study and learn this material in English only. In contrast to the Herderian model of self and subjectivity

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that SIL uses and that assumes that Christian immediacy happens best in one’s first, native language, much of Papua New Guinean Pentecostalism is circulated in English. Spiritual autonomy as developed through local, non-missionary Pentecostal churches is an important element of Papua New Guinean experiences of postcolonialism. Yet these projects of Pentecostal spiritual autonomy have become more and more dependent upon knowledge of English, a quest for communicative equality in making connections to the Christian divine.

CONCLUSION: GLOBAL LANGUAGES AS TOOLS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE One of the valuable features of social justice as a framework for reflecting on the role of language in society is its capaciousness. As Ingrid Pillar notes, there is room to appreciate different kinds of languages: marginalized and endangered languages, of course, but also national and global ones too. From an idealistic position of moral justice, universal English language teaching is obviously a public good. Access to English can be considered a form of instrumental language right: everyone has a right to learn the global power code. However, in the same way that students have a right to learn the global power code, they also have an expressive language right to the full development of their mother tongue, and they also have the right to acquire other kinds of useful knowledge. The moral justice argument for English is thus limited to the degree that learning English does not interfere with learning the mother tongue or other subject knowledge. (2016, 177) As Pillar notes here, there are trade-offs to be considered between different kinds of languages and the functions—instrumental, expressive, and so on—they serve. Unfortunately, her book does little more than pay lip service to the part global languages play in the pursuit of social justice. Throughout, advocacy for marginalized and subordinated languages is, effectively, equated with social justice, an equation common in the writings of linguists and many others concerned with the fate of marginalized and endangered languages. Conversely, discussions that do emphasize the benefits of global languages have largely been limited to political theorists, and to ahistorical and universalizing models that envision language only in terms of how it can be used by individuals maximizing their utility. In this chapter, we have sought to consider more carefully the cultural and historical conditions that render national and global languages part of people’s efforts to create a more just and equitable future. This effort has been inspired by the views of many of our interlocutors and others in Papua New Guinea, who consider learning and using English (and other languages of wider communication) essential to achieving greater equality with others in Papua New Guinea and in other parts of the world. There is a long history of considering language in these terms in the region. The expansion of social, political, and economic networks was historically effected through a cosmopolitan multilingualism that enabled social intercourse with members of other social groups. Language was at once an emblem of identity and also a tool of communication in this area dense with linguistic diversity—a means of orchestrating exchange, forming alliances, cultivating peace, and achieving fame and influence using lingua francas and the languages of others.

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Colonial languages have been treated in much the same way. People do not necessarily feel as though it diminishes an indigenous language to learn and use a national or global one. In fact, many are fighting to gain greater access to English, Tok Pisin, and the institutions that they have become associated with: education, government, Christianity, NGOs, and the wider global economy. Papua New Guineans continue to cultivate multilingualism as part of efforts to expand their social, economic, and political networks. In both of the regions of the country where we conduct our research, as in many parts of Papua New Guinea, indigenous languages continue to be widely used, and Tok Pisin is now part of virtually everyone’s linguistic repertoire as well. The language that feels most out of reach—and yet most needful—is English. Surveying his Iatmul interlocutors, Gerd Jendraschek (2012) found the same: English was considered the most important language in the community, though few speak it. He suggests that “English has such high prestige because it is so difficult to acquire and so little present in the daily lives of most people” (484; our thanks to Don Kulick and Lise M. Dobrin for directing us to this source). Ingrid Piller remarks in the quotation above that there is a moral justice argument for learning English so long as it does not interfere with learning the mother tongue. Might we also say the inverse: That there is a moral justice argument for learning the mother tongue so long as it does not interfere with learning English? That would seem to be the view of many of the teachers, parents, and students who pushed back against Papua New Guinea’s vernacular language education policy. (Of course, education in indigenous languages has been shown to help in learning other languages. But that view of the matter is often not shared by parents, teachers, or students in Papua New Guinea [Malone and Paraide 2011].) Taking this perspective seriously, we have suggested, pushes us to adopt a more capacious view of the kinds of languages involved in the pursuit of social justice. And it pushes us to wrestle with concerns about communicative equity as well as linguistic equity, which in some contexts may mean looking beyond advocacy for marginalized and endangered languages in our pursuit of social justice.

NOTES 1 Because most of the evidence of language attitudes during the colonial period is anecdotal, it is hard to say how widespread the views reported in these sources are. Small community surveys reported in Wilson (1974, 1976) and some of the surveys in Weeks (1978) also suggest that learning English was regarded by students in different parts of the country as one of the most important benefits of schooling during the colonial era. 2 The numbers were only slightly more favorable for the use of Tok Pisin, the Englishbased creole spoken in much of the country. In the Tok Pisin/English bilingual programs, 80 percent of teachers and 75 percent of parents said they would opt for English-only education, rather than Tok Pisin/English bilingual education. Ninety-one percent of students said that English was more important to them than Tok Pisin. But see Merlan and Rumsey (2015) for a situation in which parents started to teach their preschool-aged children Tok Pisin in order to help them transition into English-medium schooling. 3 For more favorable views of the vernacular language policy, see Klaus (2003), Nagai (2004), Malone and Paraide (2011), and the views of some members of the community of Madina

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reported in Volker (2015). The policy was, by all accounts, poorly implemented, with few resources made available to teachers and schools (Paraide 2014). Part of the dissatisfaction with the vernacular language policy also had to do with other changes in education policy that occurred at the same time and became associated with it. McDougall and Zobule (2021) describe a remarkable vernacular language education movement in the neighboring Solomon Islands that has proved much more successful. 4 Appeals of this sort are common in Papua New Guinean societies, where, as Schieffelin (1990, 112) notes for Bosavi, “one attempts to get something by making others ‘feel sorry for’ . . . him or her. A person making a request based on appeal is seen as being helpless; this state in turn is responded to by compassion and assistance.” Stasch (2015) provides a particularly rich discussion of the cultural sensibilities that render self-lowering a form of appeal in interactions between the Korowai and wealthy, powerful others. 5 Concerns about communicative equity and linguistic equity are not as independent of one another as our presentation here might suggest. In some contexts they are inextricably linked. For instance, as Ruth Rubio-Marin points out, “If one does not understand the language in which education takes place, education itself becomes meaningless” (RubioMarín 2003, 65). Access to education—a matter of communicative equity—may hinge on the use of students’ mother tongue in school, a matter of linguistic equity. Tensions arise between these ideals, as we point out below, because resources are scarce and services cannot be provided equally in all languages—a situation that appears inevitable in a profusely multilingual nation-state like Papua New Guinea. We should also note that communicative equity concerns much else besides the languages used by people (Briggs 2017), though that is not an issue we address in this chapter. 6 Total expenditures for education in 2007 are drawn from Packer et al. (2009). For enrollment figures for 2007, see Department of Education (2016). Expenditures have increased significantly since 2007, due to growing enrollments and the Tuition Fee Free policy introduced in 2012. 7 Figures for the United States, Mexico, and Indonesia come from OECD (2020), indicator C1 for primary, secondary, and postsecondary non-tertiary education (ISCED2011 levels 1–4). See Education at a Glance Database (http://stats​.oecd​.org/) for more information. For Papua New Guinea figures, see Department of Education (2016, 23). 8 See Strathern (1988), Josephides (1985), and Weiner (1992), for nuanced discussions of the role of women and women’s labor in exchange networks.

REFERENCES Adejunmobi, M. 2004. Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Aikhenvald, A. 2014. “Living in Many Languages: Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism in Papua New Guinea.” Language and Linguistics in Melanesia, 32 (2): 1–17. Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anonymous. 2014. “Elected, yet Strangely Unaccountable; The European Parliament.” The Economist, May 17. Archibugi, D. 2005. “The Language of Democracy: Vernacular or Esperanto? A Comparison between the Multiculturalist and Cosmopolitan Perspectives.” Political Studies, 53 (3): 537–55.

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Chapter 17

Pursuit of Health/ Communicative Justice through an Intercultural Health Model in Gulumapu (Chile) JENNIFER R. GUZMÁN

Among the most pressing social justice problems in Latin America are widespread health disparities that disproportionately impact Indigenous people. Indigenous communities across the region suffer higher rates of disease and receive poorer quality medical care than their nonnative peers. The linguistic anthropological lens of health/communicative justice (Briggs 2017) serves to shed light on how these health inequities stem in part from health policies that are shaped by language ideologies, linguistic and medical profiling, and the reproduction of racializing discourses. Some examples of health/communicative inequities in Latin America include the nearly exclusive use of colonial languages in healthcare services, while Indigenous languages are viewed as substandard codes incapable of transmitting medical information (Flood et al. 2019). Widely circulated discourses blame the beliefs and cultural practices of native/Indigenous people for epidemics and public health failures (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003). And Indigenous communities’ concerns, knowledge, and accounts about illness are often dismissed as uninformed or unimportant (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2016). As happens elsewhere, a “top down model of medical communication” predominates, casting Indigenous or local people primarily as objects rather than agents of medical care and public health efforts (Black 2019). And policy decisions are frequently made in economically powerful core countries and urban centers by experts who may be dismissive of knowledge and concerns emerging from practitioners, patients, and communities from less powerful peripheral and semiperipheral areas (Black 2019; see also Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003, 2016). Starting in the late twentieth century, the idea of “intercultural health” emerged as a global health model promising to ameliorate health inequities in Indigenous communities. One of the earliest settings where the intercultural health model was adopted and developed in Latin America was Gulumapu, the traditional territory of the Mapuche

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nation that lies west of the Andes Mountains in the nation-state of Chile. In this chapter I present a case study of Chilean state-subsidized intercultural health with a focus on its origins and its expansion in and beyond Gulumapu. This case study explores both the achievements and the limitations of the intercultural health model, emphasizing in particular the observations and critiques that have come from directly involved Mapuche practitioners and intellectuals. Data are drawn from published research and from my own fieldwork in the region (2008–9). Evidence from these sources shows that a particular imagined problem of cross-cultural miscommunication is foundational in definitions of the intercultural health approach and in the range of programming that has been developed under the model. In fact, three of the cornerstone interventions that characterize intercultural health programming are putatively in place to facilitate better communication between Indigenous patients and non-Indigenous healthcare professionals. In this chapter I provide an analysis of these policies and initiatives, highlighting the ways that they simultaneously promote and undermine health equity and health/communicative justice for Mapuche people and communities. I conclude that state-sponsored intercultural health initiatives are valuable, but they also serve as a cover for state agencies—a cloak of multicultural discourse and programming that undermines Mapuche efforts to build health sovereignty and undercuts Mapuche demands concerning policies that harm Indigenous communities.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The intercultural health model is rooted in ideas about language that align with the cross-cultural (mis)communication school of thought. Originally developed in his seminal article “Interethnic Communication” (1982), John Gumperz made the case that communication between individuals of differing ethnolinguistic backgrounds can be thwarted due to differing assumptions about the goals of the interaction or about the interactional and social responsibilities of the parties involved, or by seemingly small paralinguistic contextualization cues that are not shared. Around roughly the same time that cross-cultural communication theory was emerging in linguistic anthropology, medical anthropologists and biomedical clinicians were grappling with analogous challenges in medicine, where problems of nonadherence (i.e., noncompliance with doctors’ orders), inequities in access to care, and patient dissatisfaction were attributed in part to differences in “explanatory models” of illness, especially between clinicians and patients who did not share the same ethnic or class background. In their article “Culture, illness, and care: Clinical lessons from anthropologic and cross-cultural research,” Arthur Kleinman, Leon Eisenberg, and Byron Good recommend a conversational intervention as a solution. Their suggestion is that clinicians use a series of questions to solicit a patient’s explanatory model about the health problem they are experiencing. Armed with this knowledge about the patient’s beliefs and values, the doctor can explain how the health problem works according to the medical model and, working with the patient as a “therapeutic ally” (1978, 157), “enter into a negotiation toward shared models, especially as these relate to expectations and therapeutic goals” (1978, 256). The explanatory models approach, with its proffered conversational fix for bridging imagined conceptual differences between doctors’ and patients’ medical beliefs, illustrates a more general pattern in biomedicine wherein language and health beliefs are viewed as ontologically separate phenomena that, respectively, constitute the “code” and “content”

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of clinical interaction. According to this dichotomy, problems in clinical communication are attributable either to language differences (matters of code) or to disparities between doctors’ and patients’ respective explanatory models (matters of cultural content). And problems that patients and clinicians face in trying to reach understandings about diagnoses and decisions about treatment plans are seen as requiring either code solutions, which involve interpretation or translation, or content solutions, which require learning about the medical models of the cultural Other. This narrow view of language as the code with which ideas are entextualized or information is exchanged reflects what Byron Good (1994) has referred to as the “empiricist theory of medical language” and linguistic anthropologists describe as a “referentialist language ideology.” This conception about medical language is characterized by a privileging of the way that talk and medical terms describe (i.e., refer to) health phenomena in the empirical world. One thing that this empiricist theory of medical language misses is that the primary function of speaking is not information exchange but practical action. And even routine speech activities in medical visits, for example, describing an illness, are not simple stretches of text that encode information but forms of practical action that are shaped by cultural expectations about the activity and the social roles of the participants (Guzmán 2014). Ultimately, cross-cultural communication theory in sociolinguistics and the explanatory model theory in medicine (with its referentialist language ideologies) share two additional assumptions that represent flaws in their respective models of the social world. First, both approaches presume that cultural misunderstandings can be resolved if the relevant parties can compare notes and hash out their differences in conversation. Or, absent a straightforward conversation, one party can become better apprised about the beliefs and assumptions of the other and subsequently be able to adjust their own behavior and interaction accordingly. Second, these approaches ignore or underestimate consequential matters of social power, prestige, and unequal footing, presuming that interactional partners such as guidance counselors/students or doctors/patients can engage with one another unproblematically in an egalitarian exchange of ideas. The theoretical framework of “health/communicative justice” (Briggs 2017) provides a valuable alternative to cross-cultural communication and explanatory model perspectives. Instead of ignoring or flattening the sociopolitical context in which interaction occurs, this linguistic anthropologically informed framework calls for a focus on the sources and mechanisms of (in)equity. This approach trains attention not on ways to optimize some euphemistically imagined exchange of information in healthcare but instead on ways that “health/communicative inequities are coproduced with illnesses, diagnoses, treatments, acts of caregiving, and epidemiological inquiries, not simply representing them but shaping how they unfold—or sometimes if they emerge at all” (Briggs 2017, 296). In so doing, this approach can reveal the complex structural factors—both within and beyond clinical spaces—that shape the socially differentiated experience of health and disease, factors that make up the context in which clinical care is delivered and that operate in domains including public health, epidemiology, and public policy. The term “health/communicative justice” was originally coined to describe an effort led by Warao community leaders, healthcare providers, and parents to document knowledge about—and to demand assistance with—a rabies epidemic in Delta Amacuro, Venezuela (Briggs 2017). In his writing about the epidemic, linguistic and medical anthropologist Charles Briggs argues that family members and healers engaged in extensive “health/ communicative labor,” a constellation of intensive care-taking and communication on

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behalf of the children who were dying from undiagnosed rabies. Tragically, several long-standing and insidious “health/communicative inequities” undermined their efforts and contributed to critical institutional failures that allowed the epidemic to proceed unchecked. One of these inequities was public health and medical officials’ erasure of the health/communicative labor of racialized Warao communities and families who were directly affected by the disease. In generalizing from the case, Briggs theorizes that health/ communicative inequities include [1] inequities in the ability to shape what counts as knowledge about health, disease, and health care; [2] who gets to demand health/communicative labor of others and to structure the forms that it will take; [3] whose health/communicative labor becomes visible and valued and whose is rendered invisible or pathologized; and [4] ways that some forms of knowledge become mobile and others immobilized. (Briggs 2017, 296; numbering is mine) In this chapter I adopt the health/communicative framework as a tool for thinking about both the accomplishments and the problems with the intercultural health model as it has been implemented in Gulumapu/Chile.

ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT Chile provides a valuable site for examining how problems of health inequities, Indigeneity, and social justice play out. Among the most economically prosperous and politically stable nation-states in Latin America, Chile is also characterized by persistent wealth and income gaps, among the widest of the OECD nations. Poverty is disproportionately acute for Indigenous people. Fully 13 percent of Chileans self-identify as Indigenous (78 percent of whom identify as Mapuche), making the Mapuche community the most numerous Indigenous nation in Chile and all of Southern Cone South America. Wallmapu, the historic Mapuche territory, includes Puelmapu, east of the Andes Mountains in Argentina, and Gulumapu, west of the Andes in Chile. According to recent census data, nearly one in ten people in Chile self-identify as Mapuche (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2018), the majority of whom reside in Chile’s major cities, though the southern regions are viewed as the heart of the Mapuche homeland. During the 1990s, the political system in Chile made a peaceful return to democracy following seventeen years of military dictatorship. Throughout this decade, and in response to demands from Indigenous organizations that were critical actors in the struggle to end the Pinochet dictatorship, the center-left political coalition that won the presidency ushered in a Nueva Política Indígena (new [era of] Indigenous policy), which has remained largely in effect throughout the subsequent administrations of the early twenty-first century. The parameters of this new Indigenous policy were heavily influenced by the global zeitgeist of neoliberal multiculturalism, which frames Indigenous people as ethnic minorities whose cultures contribute to the diversity and character of the nation-state. This framing is evident in the wording of Chile’s Indigenous Law 19.253, which acknowledges that “the various ethnic groups are an essential part of the roots of the Chilean nation, [and] recognizes that they have existed in the national territory since pre-Columbian times.” The effects of this official acknowledgment are limited, however; various proposals to recognize pueblos originarios (original peoples) in the Chilean Constitution have all failed. As a result, Indigenous nations in Chile are bereft of the

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legal status that would allow them to formally petition on behalf of their communities or otherwise negotiate with the state. Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, is spoken by an estimated 250,000 people, the vast majority of whom are bilingual in Spanish. A threatened language (6b on the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale), Mapudungun, “is used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but it is losing users” and “it is no longer the norm that children learn and use” the language (Ethnologue). The language has been recognized since passage of the 1993 Indigenous Peoples Law (No. 19.253), but it is not an official state language; it is neither standardized nor used for state documents or in other institutional capacities. And while there have been some efforts to provide bilingual intercultural educational programming in certain rural areas, in general the state has done little to support Mapuche-led initiatives of language maintenance and revitalization. Critics of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile point out that nominal recognition of Indigenous peoples and of their languages in the 1993 Indigenous Law coincided with the expansion of liberal economic programs of fiscal austerity, deregulation, and privatization. Thus while multicultural inclusion and intercultural programming were being heralded with great fanfare, neoliberal policies were simultaneously impacting the social safety net and exposing Indigenous communities to new waves of exploitation, deterritorialization, displacement, deforestation, water theft, and pollution that continue to be perpetrated by the hydroelectric, forestry, agribusiness, and mining industries, which have been granted concessions across Gulumapu without consultation or the consent of the Indigenous communities who live there (Boccara 2007; Boccara and Bolados 2010; Bolados 2012; Richards 2013).

INTERCULTURAL HEALTH PROGRAMMING IN GULUMAPU Using the descriptor “intercultural,” the new Indigenous policy in Chile called for the creation of multiple development programs specifically targeting Indigenous communities. These programs somewhat awkwardly straddled aims of addressing widespread poverty and extolling cultural diversity. They also led to backlash from non-Indigenous Chileans over perceptions of preferential treatment and “reverse racism” (Boccara 2007). In the domain of healthcare, the new Indigenous policy built a framework for the provision of salud intercultural (intercultural health), drawing on and contributing to models that were being promoted by international public health organizations at the time (O’Neill et al. 2006; Pan American Health Organization 2008; Mignone et al. 2007). These organizations lauded intercultural health programming as a means for providing culturally appropriate medical care to Indigenous populations. And the provision of culturally appropriate care was promoted as a means for addressing long-standing health inequities, especially the lower rates of healthcare access and medical adherence and the higher rates of morbidity and mortality that characterize Indigenous populations across Latin America. In Chile, intercultural health programming was initially implemented in the Araucanía, the nation’s most economically impoverished and most Indigenous region. It was in the rural Araucanía where the earliest intercultural health programs were developed, including a seminal program at Makewe Hospital—one of the sites where I conducted fieldwork and about which much has been written (e.g., Ibacache et al. 2001; Mignone et al. 2007; O’Neill et al. 2006; Torri 2012).

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In Gulumapu, the creation of intercultural health projects, and the funding that materialized with them, was heralded as a new era that would better serve Mapuche individuals and communities. With loan funding from the Inter-American Development Bank, the early goals of intercultural health programming included “strengthening Indigenous medicine” and “promoting the construction of models for intercultural [health]care” (Bolados 2012, 137). Today, the Special Health Program for Indigenous Peoples (PESPI) has been implemented in twenty-four of twenty-six public health districts across the country and has three guiding principles: “1. equity (diminishing gaps in access), 2. intercultural health focus (in the actions of professionals and technicians), and 3. Indigenous social participation (in the design, execution, evaluation, and monitoring of local plans)” (Manríquez-Hizaut et al. 2018, 760–1). An important feature of the intercultural health model was an explicit acknowledgment of Indigenous traditions of healing as legitimate medical systems. This recognition, in and of itself, was groundbreaking. Within the intercultural health model, Indigenous medical systems are understood to consist of a theoretical explanatory framework of health and illness (i.e., ideas) and a corresponding set of therapeutic interventions (i.e., practices) that are enacted by specialists whose expertise ranges from bone-setting to herbal remedies to shamanism. Among the most significant innovations of intercultural health was the establishment of several programs, first in the Araucanía and later in other regions and the capital city of Santiago, that allotted space within or alongside public or publicly subsidized healthcare centers for the practice of Mapuche medicine or, where Mapuche healers elected not to practice on-site, that established mechanisms for patient referral to Mapuche healers in the local area. In some clinical settings, patients are able to consult with a machi (shaman) or lawentuchefe (herbal healer) and purchase the remedies these practitioners prescribe (Anigstein 2006; Manriquez Hizaut 2018; Rebolledo Sanhueza et al. 2020).1 Programs of this sort have materialized discursive acknowledgments of medical plurality with commitments of space and resources. In these ways, they go some way toward the legitimation of Indigenous medicine and have been touted internationally as a gold standard for intercultural health (Mignone et al. 2007; O’Neill et al. 2006; PAHO 2008). The other major component of intercultural health initiatives was a suite of programming designed to make conventional medical care more culturally amenable to Indigenous patient populations.2 This programming was reflective of—and emerged from—the ways that clinical interaction, communication, and culture were imagined. This is evident in the range of definitions that are given for intercultural health, which invoke cross-cultural communication ideologies, presume cultural differences, and identify respect as a central value. Early scholarship on the model defines intercultural health as “an approach to create a better communication between patients and providers. In the short term, this approach incorporates patient’s culture [sic] background in health care, improving intercultural communication strategies to generate, in the long term, a health system adapted to the medical culture of patients” (Alarcón et al. 2003, 1061, italics mine). Along similar lines, Sáez (2007) defines interculturality as “not only a contact between cultures, but an exchange based on respect. It is a dynamic and permanent process of communication and learning between cultures, under conditions of mutual legitimacy and equality, which is built between people and groups, and between culturally different knowledge and practices” (163, italics mine). Echoes of the same themes of communication and cultural plurality continue to be used in the most recent studies of intercultural health programs, which define interculturality as “a process of

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communication and interaction that supposes a respectful relationship between cultures” (Lincovil et al. 2018, 50). As is characteristic in cross-cultural communication framings, interactions and exchanges are idealized as occurring in a depoliticized and egalitarian context of mutuality. From these conceptual ideals about intercultural health, three key communication-focused initiatives emerged: the provision of bilingual signage in clinical spaces, the employment of bilingual intercultural facilitators to assist in clinical settings, and the creation of cultural competency training for healthcare personnel. Each of these initiatives aimed, ostensibly, to promote effective, informed, and respectful clinical communication, which was viewed as the cornerstone of culturally appropriate healthcare. The following sections address each of these initiatives in turn, revealing how health/communicative challenges are conceptualized within the intercultural health model and how solutions to perceived cross-cultural communication problems were imagined and operationalized in the design and implementation of this programming. In each case, I consider both positive outcomes and problematic issues associated with the intervention.

Bilingual Signage in Clinical Spaces One of the first things that struck me when I began doing fieldwork in clinical spaces in the Araucanía was the conspicuous use of bilingual signage. In both the urban hospital in Temuco and the rural primary care center at Makewe Hospital, the door of each office and department was labeled with a professionally printed door sign that featured the name of the office in Spanish and, below that, in smaller font and with a contrasting color scheme, the name in Mapudungun (see, for example, Figure 17.1). This linguistic accommodation and key feature of intercultural health programming raises several

FIGURE 17.1:  “Milk dispensary” bilingual door sign in Spanish and Mapudungun. Photo credit: J. Guzmán.

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questions: What purpose do bilingual signs serve? What readers do they presume or interpellate? And whom do they benefit? While Chile boasts high literacy rates, very few people read Mapudungun. Literacy is taught, without exception, in Spanish. And even in areas where intercultural bilingual education programs are in place, Mapuche kimche (wise person) instructors often prefer to draw on the rich oral tradition of Mapudungun in their lessons and interactions with school children, emphasizing the transmission of cultural practices and knowledge through verbal rather than written language (Ortiz 2009). One college Mapudungun instructor explained to me that extremely few Mapudungun speakers read or write in Mapudungun; written Mapudungun is taught only in a handful of Mapudungun courses at a small number of universities. These circumstances suggest that the use of bilingual signage in clinical spaces was not primarily informational in intent. As one Mapuche intellectual has observed about the signs, “I’ve never met a papay or peñi that could read them”3 (Cuyul 2008). Awareness that Mapudungun signage is not needed for informational purposes seems built into the health/communicative economy of the state healthcare system. Spanish is used as the exclusive medium of print and written communication for virtually all documents in the medical system. The use of Mapudungun on clinic signs was limited mostly to the labeling of offices, while other print media in clinical spaces was provided exclusively in Spanish. This included forms that patients were asked to fill out, documents that were provided to patients by clinic staff containing information about diagnoses and treatments, and public health posters that hung prominently in waiting rooms with details about available clinic services or recommendations concerning preventive health measures (see, for example, Figure 17.2). Absent an informational need for signage in Mapudungun, the linguistic accommodation of bilingual door signs appears to be largely symbolic. This prominent

FIGURE 17.2:  Monolingual poster in Spanish advocating hand-washing as a preventive measure against disease; printed by the Chilean Ministry of Health. Photo credit: J. Guzmán.

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though limited use of an Indigenous language in public space performed an important social function. By indexing the existence of a potential readership, the visibility of the language elevated the visibility of the speech community. The use of Mapudungun in clinical space, in this way, served as an acknowledgment of the presence and continued existence of Mapudungun speakers and, therefore, of Mapuche people. Given the history of erasure, deterritorialization, forced assimilation, and language loss that Mapuche and other Indigenous people have historically experienced under settler colonialism, such acknowledgment and accommodation by the state was a nontrivial symbolic achievement (cf. Graham 2019 and Perley’s chapter in this volume). In addition, having Mapudungun printed prominently on official signs may also help to undermine denigrating language ideologies that characterize the Mapuche language as unsystematic, unable to be written, and less than a full-fledged language and debunk racial stereotypes of Mapuche people as ignorant, uncivilized, and primitive (Merino et al. 2004; Richards 2010). It is important to note, however, that this cosmetic linguistic accommodation was an anemic substitute for a fully functional language access program. By contrast, my observations at Makewe Hospital (where Chile’s first intercultural health program was developed by an enterprising local Mapuche organization) pose an exception to the general rule that informational materials were printed only in Spanish. This particular site, which included both a primary care center and a basic hospital, was managed by an all-Mapuche board that was committed to promoting Mapuche medicine and health sovereignty (Ibacache et al. 2001). However, funding for conventional healthcare services that were rendered at Makewe Hospital were subsidized (and thus overseen) by the regional health authority, an arrangement that posed constraints on how the aspirations of the Mapuche leadership could be implemented (Torri 2012). At Makewe Hospital it was not uncommon to hear conversations in Mapudungun among staff and among patients. And, in addition to bilingual door signs, Mapudungun was used on a number of informational flyers and posters that were displayed in waiting rooms and consultation offices (see, for example, Figure 17.3). Unlike the professionally designed Spanish-language posters that had been provided for display by the Chilean regional health ministry, these bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun posters were created by the Mapudungun speaking staff and printed on-site using a simple office printer. Unlike the multicultural symbolism of the state-provided bilingual door signs, these artisanally created bilingual information sheets were conceptualized with the aspiration of a local Mapudungun-reading public in mind, perhaps with an awareness that health-related materials of this sort can contribute to language revitalization work (Flood et al. 2019). Created and posted by Mapuche staff, these clinical information signs thus had multiple valences. They provided valuable medical information using a side-by-side translation format that could help readers with literacy in one or both languages to access practical medical information. In addition, their creation and posting was an act of linguistic sovereignty, a way of using Mapudungun to do medicine and to expand the scope of use for the language. In this way, these bilingual signs constituted part of the larger struggle for health/communicative justice in which Makewe Hospital and the Mapuche community of Makewe were grounded.

Intercultural Facilitators One of the earliest and perhaps the most controversial initiatives that emerged from intercultural health policy was the hiring and training of bilingual Mapuche staff to

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FIGURE 17.3:  A bilingual Spanish–Mapudungun sign that lists symptoms for recognizing pneumonia and bronchopneumonia. Photo credit: J. Guzmán.

serve as “intercultural facilitators” in selected public hospitals and primary care centers that served Indigenous patient populations. The creation of this new staff role and of the new Amuldungun Patient Orientation Offices4 to which they were assigned was intended to improve the quality of care for Indigenous patients and to ensure that their healthcare and hospitalization experiences were “less traumatic . . . in terms of shock and cultural distance” (Jelves and Ñanco 2004, 788). Although bilingualism was one of the hiring criteria for intercultural facilitators, they were not tasked explicitly as Spanish– Mapudungun interpreters. Instead, their primary responsibilities were to: 1. inform, guide, and support Mapuche patients and their relatives 2. support hospitalized Mapuche patients and hospital healthcare teams in resolving cases where culture [was] relevant to recovery 3. participate in training and research activities about Mapuche culture and medicine, and 4. facilitate [patient] understanding of medical instructions and hospital care while making the interaction of the Mapuche patient easier. (Jelves and Ñanco 2004, 788)

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The conspicuousness of Amuldungun offices and the focus of their services on Mapuche patients and families unfortunately made them a target for complaints by non-Indigenous Chileans, and by non-Indigenous healthcare personnel in particular. These complaints, which voiced discriminatory ideas about Mapuche undeservingness and the government’s unwarranted “special treatment” of Indigenous people, simultaneously drew on and reproduced long-standing racial prejudices about Indigenous people as unmodern and dependent (Boccara 2007; see also Richards 2010). A program assessment of the Amuldungun offices and intercultural facilitation programs found that in many cases, the goals of the program were not being fulfilled (Jelves and Ñanco 2004). Intercultural facilitators reported experiencing discrimination at work from hospital personnel who misunderstood their role or disagreed with funding being earmarked for intercultural health programming. Amuldungun office space in some hospitals and clinics was usurped or repurposed to suit unrelated administrative needs. And intercultural facilitators were regularly tasked by supervisors with bureaucratic work that was unconnected to their role. The study also found that administrators at the participating clinics held unrealistically ambitious and divergent ideas about what the (low-paid) intercultural facilitator staff could accomplish. Among the administrators’ hopes were that facilitators would not only facilitate, mediate, and translate during clinical consultations but also that they would train healthcare teams, schedule appointments for people who lived far from the hospital, advise management, make rounds of the hospital to detect problems, and mediate in talks with the Mapuche community. These findings demonstrate some of the main flaws of interculturality as a state project. The programming interpellates Mapuche people and patients into the role of Other within the Chilean nation and, importantly, an Other who lacks self-sufficiency and requires exceptional assistance. At the same time, the confluence of underfunding and unfeasible expectations sets up intercultural facilitators for failures that subsequently can be viewed as evidence of the same denigrating stereotypes that Mapuche people are incapable of helping themselves. Remarkably, even in the face of these multiple challenges and programmatic shortcomings, researchers have found that intercultural facilitators’ services are a meaningful support for Mapuche patients and their families (cf. Muñoz 2007). Mapuche respondents in the study by Jelves and Ñanco (2004) reported that they appreciated the services rendered by intercultural facilitators, including some who felt it was a relief to be able to speak in Mapudungun with an empathetic member of the hospital staff. Thus, although the intercultural facilitation program is beset by problems stemming from deeply rooted racial animosity and structural inequities in the Chilean healthcare system, the work of intercultural facilitators does appear to provide a critical service to Mapuche patients and families as they access services in Chile’s underfunded public healthcare system (Bruce 2000).

Cultural Competency Training for Healthcare Personnel The third area of intercultural health programming that directly addresses matters of language and communication was the creation and implementation of cultural competency training programs for healthcare personnel. These sorts of programs, sometimes but not always designed and taught by Mapuche individuals or teams, generally focus on teaching participants about Mapuche cosmology and cultural models of illness, Mapuche healing practices, and key terms in Mapudungun. The aim is better preparation of healthcare staff for treating Mapuche patients. Notably, the trainings are grounded in the idea that medical

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systems are cultural systems (Citarella et al. 2000), and the assumption that increasing clinicians’ awareness about Mapuche health knowledge and practices and instructing them how to engage in politeness routines in Mapudungun will promote better clinical care, ideas that align with explanatory model approaches to medical communication. Evidence from studies conducted with Chilean clinicians suggests that they viewed the training as valuable and as a crucial component of intercultural health. In one study, healthcare personnel ranked cultural competency training as the highest priority for the success of intercultural health policy (Alarcón et al. 2004). Speaking to the value of the training, one doctor stated, Taking part in specific trainings and becoming familiar with a number of concepts from the Mapuche culture is very important for us as doctors. This can help us in our daily work. We need to incorporate this knowledge to make them feeling better. The Mapuche are very sensitive and they are easily hurt . . . they are like the children or the elderly . . . you have to handle them carefully. . . . Greeting in Mapudungun, saying goodbye in Mapudungun, make the patients feel a bit better. (Torri 2012, 44) The condescension and paternalism that are apparent in this physician’s comments suggest one reason why these sorts of medicine-as-cultural-system trainings may fail to improve clinical care. While they ostensibly teach clinicians about Mapuche culture, clinicians can walk away from them without having critically examined their own culturally shaped beliefs about health or their assumptions about the patient populations for whom they are charged with caring. Studies conducted in both urban and rural settings indicate that some of the problems with these professional development programs were consistent across sites. Research at an urban intercultural health center in Santiago, for example, found that despite primary care workers having participated in intercultural health training, “neither the Mapuche culture in general nor its worldview in health was valued at the same level as the huinca [(non-Indigenous) system]” (Lincovil et al. 2018, 67). Respondents in the study noted that the training focused on “Mapuche medicine but not on intercultural medicine” (46), pointing out that while Mapuche medicine was objectified in the program, conventional medicine was treated as a given and not critically explored as a cultural system itself. Notably, in the same study where healthcare personnel rated cultural competency training as the highest priority for intercultural health policy (Alarcón et al. 2004), Mapuche patient respondents reported that the greatest failure of intercultural health policy was in addressing the “lack of will, indifference, and discrimination” (1113) of healthcare personnel, problems that were unlikely to be solved by teaching clinicians about Mapuche culture. Findings from studies conducted in Chilean healthcare centers that did not have intercultural programming in place reveal additional stereotypes that compromise the quality of medical care that Mapuche patients receive in the Chilean healthcare system. Clinician respondents in these studies reported feeling that their work was made difficult by the behaviors, attitudes, and interactional style of Mapuche patients. For example, in a needs assessment for pediatric care in Southern Chile, nurse-anthropologist Ana María Alarcón found that “health professionals think that rural [Mapuche] patients are quiet, passive, and uneducated” (2004, 149). And medical anthropologist Carolina Izquierdo describes similar sentiments among clinicians working in an urban clinic in Santiago: “All doctors agreed that Mapuche patients behave differently from the non-Mapuche. Mapuche patients appeared to be extremely quiet, rarely asking any questions regarding

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the particular illness, diagnosis and prognosis. Physicians generally described the Mapuche as passive, submissive and uncommunicative” (1995, 53). Izquierdo provides evidence of this pattern with a quote from one doctor who told her that “the Mapuche patient is more trouble and takes more of your time and effort. . . . They volunteer nothing as far as information. It’s as if they were scared. . . . Their passivity is scary and sad to me” (1995, 53). These findings suggest a common perception by non-Indigenous clinicians that Mapuche people are uncooperative partners in clinical interaction, either unwilling or unable to convey information that doctors need in order to do their job. The physicians’ comments also reveal harmful underlying assumptions that serve to rationalize their observations. As Izquierdo noted, “passivity is interpreted by some doctors as the result of stubbornness, pride, lack of education, innate slowness and shyness” (1995, 53). Notably, Mapuche patient respondents in Izquierdo’s study also perceived communicative failings on the part of their doctors. One patient observed that, “Doctors never tell you what you have.” And another man who elaborated on this communicative failure explained, “[T] hey just take one look at you, quickly. One has to tell them what is wrong or they don’t know . . . it’s a dumb question . . . they are supposed to know. They just take notes, give you medicines and that’s it” (Izquierdo 1995, 50). Notably, these reported frustrations with clinical communication are less straightforward than intercultural health notions about language-as-code and culture-as-content would allow; they are decoupled from language itself and conveyed in an idiom of complaints about cultural others who are failing in their respective health/communicative responsibilities. When doctors complain about taciturn patients and patients complain about inept diagnosticians who have to ask patients what is wrong “or they don’t know,” these comments reveal meaningful disappointments in their respective health/ communicative expectations for one another. These problems in clinical interactions are also not attributable to incompatible explanatory models of illness. It is clear that intercultural health training, with its focus on Mapuche culture, language, and explanatory models, is not designed to counteract clinicians’ pejorative views about Mapuche people or to convince doctors to modify their clinical practice in ways that would align with the expectations of their Mapuche patients. Medical anthropologists working elsewhere have noted that cultural competency training programs that are based on “lists of traits” about a given ethnic/racialized patient population run the risk of essentializing cultural differences and reinforcing, rather than dismantling, cultural stereotypes (Jenks 2011; see also DelVecchio-Good and Hannah 2015). This appears to be the case in Chile. In light of these sorts of problems, critics of list-based cultural competency models sometimes call for cultural humility training as an alternative (Jenks 2011). Such alternative programs reject a language-as-code/culture-as-content approach and are predicated on a model of clinical cultural competency as a process that involves reducing ethnocentrism and raising clinicians’ awareness of the cultural qualities of their own medical beliefs and practices. These calls for cultural humility training align with Mapuche critiques that conceptualize the problem in conventional healthcare as one of prejudice, arrogance, and paternalism, rather than a lack of information about Indigenous medical models.

THE LIMITATIONS OF A FOCUS ON CLINICAL COMMUNICATION One final way to consider how intercultural health programming may both serve and detract from social justice is to consider the parameters of debate on intercultural health

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and to ask: Apart from what is included in the frame of the model, what is excluded? In this section, I argue that publication patterns in Chilean academic fora reinforce a particular health/communicative inequity whereby the scope of intercultural health is confined to matters of healthcare access and clinical interaction, a definition that effectively excludes from debate all of the determinants of health that operate in the wider sociopolitical reality of Chilean society, outside and beyond the settings of clinic and hospital. As discussed earlier, publications about intercultural health that appear in Chilean medical and public health outlets and in publications sponsored by state organizations consistently define intercultural health in terms of communication, cultural differences, and respect in clinical settings (Alarcón et al. 2003; Lincovil et al. 2018; Sáez 2007). Official statements about intercultural health objectives, such as those outlined by PESPI, the Special Health Plan for Indigenous People, focus on matters of equitable access, intercultural training for clinicians, and Indigenous participation (Manríquez-Hizaut et al. 2018). These definitions and priorities for goal-setting align with ideas about intercultural health that have provenance in global health discourses that circulate internationally (O’Neill et al. 2006; PAHO 2008). Finally, in alignment with these goals and definitions, published assessments of intercultural health programming that appear in Chilean medical and public health publications tend to focus their scope on evaluating the success of discrete program initiatives in particular clinical settings (e.g., Alarcón et al. 2004). By contrast, discussions of intercultural health that occur in fora outside of Chilean medical/public health journals convey far more critical interpretations of the programming and identify a much wider scope of health-impacting factors. Anthropologists working in collaboration with Mapuche collaborators have critiqued the intercultural health model as a form of ethnobureaucracy that reifies ethnic differentiation in an exercise of biopower (Boccara 2004, 2007). Others have argued that the “new deal” style intercultural programming of the post-dictatorship government has undermined the Mapuche political movement, perhaps intentionally (Castro Lucic 2005). Elaborating on this critique, sociologist Patricia Richards (2010) has suggested that the intercultural state program Origenes is “recognised among Indigenous leaders as a strategy to pacify the [Mapuche-state] conflicts by throwing money at the communities” (70). Others have called for a reconsideration of how the intercultural health model is implemented, calling for a redirection of funding and resources away from state-created and state-implemented programming and toward capacity-building for Mapuche organizations (Álvarez Díaz 2007). This critique suggests that a shift in conceptualization from interculturality to complementarity and a refocusing of funding priorities could support greater self-determination and health sovereignty in Mapuche communities and allow practitioners of Mapuche medicine to provide complementary healthcare without requiring that healers submit to oversight by Chilean authorities. Among the most critical evaluations of intercultural health have come from Andrés Cuyul, a Mapuche intellectual who was involved in one of the early intercultural health programs and who has focused his research for years on intercultural health and health injustices that are suffered by Mapuche people and communities. Cuyul (2008) points out that the carefully delineated boundaries of intercultural health interventions align with standard biomedical approaches to health, which individualize health problems and simultaneously downplay or ignore considerations of structural determinants of health that lie outside the domain of medicine. He points out that the medicalization of the negative health outcomes that Indigenous people disproportionately suffer has the practical effect of circumscribing intercultural health programming firmly within

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the bounds of bureaucratized clinical medicine (cf. Cuyul Soto 2014). This precludes consideration of the political economy in which disease and illness are produced in Chile, essentially exonerating state agencies from responsibility to address the root causes of health disparities in the Mapuche community, many of which stem from state violence (cf. Moloney 2010), the legacy of deterritorialization, and the ongoing investment of the state in a range of development projects that have deleterious health effects on people and the environments where they live. These projects include the placement of landfills and waste treatment centers in and near Mapuche communities, the leasing of public lands to monoculture agroforestry enterprises that degrade soil quality and pollute waterways, and the construction of hydroelectric dams that displace communities and destroy ecosystems on which people depend for subsistence (cf. Torri 2012). In contrast, Cuyul points out that Mapuche knowledge about küme mongen (health and well-being) encompasses a much broader conceptualization of the forces that cause disease, including the aforementioned environmental, social, and economic factors that are compromising the health of Mapuche people and communities across Gulumapu today.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have presented evidence highlighting both the achievements and the limitations of the intercultural health model as it has been implemented by Chilean public health authorities in programs across Gulumapu. The intercultural health model, in its conceptualization, was designed in part to address health disparities. The predominant imagination of intercultural health as a supposed cultural encounter involving respectful communication across differences, however, has limited the scope of programming that has been implemented under intercultural health policy. The focus in the model on ostensible problems of language, communication, and culture in clinical care has contributed to a set of interventions that center on making clinical care more culturally appropriate for Mapuche patients. Key interventions have included bilingual signage, hiring intercultural facilitators, and offering cultural competence training for healthcare personnel. Each of these initiatives has proved useful, though only partially. The positive effects of these initiatives seem most robust where programmatic changes have been undertaken and implemented in good faith, and especially when they have been led by Mapuche leaders and healthcare staff themselves, as in the case of bilingual informational signs at Makewe Hospital. However, intercultural health policy and the clinical interventions that are associated with the model rely on reductive ideas about language-as-code and culture-as-content. Both of these ideas, in turn, are rooted in assumptions about language and medicine that come from cross-cultural communication and explanatory models theories, respectively. These ideologies and theoretical approaches fail to account for health/communicative inequities and, as a result, obfuscate important ways that the practice of intercultural health is shaped by language ideologies, racializing stereotypes, and a limited scope of imagination concerning the causes of disease and other health inequities. Following from the predominant ideas about language and culture that underpin intercultural health, interventions have focused, on the one hand, on symbolic gestures that acknowledge cultural diversity, for example, the minimal but highly conspicuous display of Mapudungun in clinical spaces and cultural competence training programs that teach staff about Mapuche medical culture. On the other hand, one finds the provision of clientelist services, specifically intercultural facilitation and Amuldungun offices in

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public hospitals. These programs provide useful resources but simultaneously minoritize Mapuche patients, marking them as racialized and dependent Others. Finally, the discursive framing of intercultural health as a matter of clinical communication and respect across cultural difference effectively silences Indigenous critiques. This narrow focus obscures Mapuche demands that the state address a range of serious factors impacting Indigenous health (e.g., pollution, extraction, discrimination, and state violence) by treating these matters as outside the scope of the model. This erasure of Indigenous demands and prioritization of state-determined goals constitutes an insidious form of health/communicative injustice. For linguistic anthropologists concerned with documenting matters of social justice in health and medicine, the frame of health/communicative justice can help to expand the discursive framing of public health and communication issues beyond our classically narrow focus on doctor–patient interaction. This case study of health/communicative justice in intercultural health has explored the benefits and shortcomings of a focus on clinical communication and highlighted how broader questions structure health inequities and can reproduce or challenge existing structures: Whose stories and whose accounts about Mapuche/Chilean health and healthcare are treated as authoritative? Whose are dismissed? The answers to these questions matter.

CODA The intercultural health model emerged at a particular historical moment, that of the rise of multiculturalism and ethnodevelopment at the close of the twentieth century. Over the early decades of the twenty-first century, intercultural health programming in Chile has grown and changed. Today, Mapuche medicine is available to Mapuche and non-Mapuche people in many intercultural programs that are located across the country, and the services of Mapuche healers in these contexts are sought out by many people. It is not clear, however, that health outcomes have improved in Mapuche rural communities or urban populations. Chilean views about Indigeneity and about justice have also shifted during recent years, as the Mapuche movement has seen a resurgence. Racializing stereotypes about Mapuche people and narratives about the history between the Mapuche nation and the Chilean state are being challenged and potentially rewritten. In 2021, Chileans elected a political progressive and former student-leader, Gabriel Boric, to the presidency. Boric’s campaign platform emphasized social justice priorities and specifically identified Indigenous recognition and legal participation as a goal. Notably, Boric was chosen over his political rival, José Antonio Kast, a German-heritage politician from the Araucanía whose rise to political prominence was directly tied to his condemnation of the Mapuche movement and his promise to prosecute Mapuche activists under the state’s antiterrorism laws. In 2022, as the direct result of a popular uprising that began in 2019, a national effort was launched to replace the existing Chilean national constitution. By the end of 2022, a national plebiscite had rejected a drafted alternative. The constitutional convention that wrote the rejected draft was remarkable in many ways, including the inclusion of seventeen seats that were reserved for Indigenous delegates (seven representing the Mapuche nation) and a mechanism to ensure gender parity. The delegates also elected Elisa Loncon Antileo, a Mapuche woman, linguist, and intercultural education scholar as president of the convention. In her address accepting the position, Loncon Antileo spoke about a collective desire to transform Chile into “a plurinational Chile, an intercultural

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Chile, a Chile that does not go against the rights of women, the rights of citizens, a Chile that looks after Mother Earth, and a Chile that safeguards water against being dominated.”5 The work to imagine and enact these changes is ongoing.

NOTES 1. Apart from state-subsidized intercultural health programs, there have been a number of highly ambitious projects undertaken by entrepreneurial Mapuche groups to create venues that provide Mapuche medicine services and treatments to the general public. These projects, which operate on a private business model and include Mapuche pharmacies and stand-alone Mapuche medicine offices, are sometimes included in discussions of intercultural health but significantly differ from the state-funded initiatives discussed in this chapter. 2. In this chapter, I use the term “conventional medicine” as a descriptor for allopathic biomedical care, what is often referred to colloquially as Western medicine. The descriptor “conventional” indexes the hegemonic status of this medical system within contemporary milieux of medical plurality that include a range of non-allopathic medical systems. 3. Papay (woman) and peñi (brother) are solidary Mapudungun terms of address or reference. 4. The Mapudungun word amuldungun can be translated as “carry the word.” 5. https://www​.democracynow​.org​/2021​/7​/6​/headlines​/mapuche​_leader​_elisa​_loncon​_to​_lead​ _rewrite​_of​_chiles​_pinochet​_era​_constitution

REFERENCES Alarcón, A. M. (2004), “Childhood Primary Health Care in the Araucanía Region: Mothers’ and Providers’ Concerns.” PhD diss., University of Connecticut. Alarcón, A. M., P. D. Astudillo, C. S. Barrios, and R. E. Rivas (2004), “Política de Salud Intercultural: Perspectiva de Usuarios Mapuches y Equipos de Salud en la IX Región, Chile.” Revista Médica Chilena, 132: 1109–14. Alarcón, A. M., A. Vidal, and J. N. Rozas (2003), “Salud Intercultural: Elementos para la Construcción de sus Bases Conceptuales.” Revista Médica Chilena, 131: 1061–5. Álvarez Díaz, A. (2007) ‘Práctica Complementaria en Salud y Recuperación del Conocimiento Tradicional Mapuche.” Anales de Antropología, 41 (1): 143–72. Anigstein, M. Sol, and V. Á. López (2006), “Medicina Mapuche en la Ciudad: Resignificaciones de la Práctica Médica Mapuche en el Siglo XXI.” Gazeta de Antropología, 22: Artículo 26. Black, S. P. (2019), “Ethics, Expertise, and Inequities in Global Health Discourses: The Case of Non-Profit HIV/AIDS Research in South Africa.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 119–27, New York: Routledge. Boccara, G. (2004), “Del Buen Gobierno en Territorio Mapuche. Notas acerca de una Experiencia en Salud Complementaria.” Cuadernos de Antropología Social, 20: 113–29. Boccara, G. (2007), “Etnogubernamentalidad: La Formación del Campo de la Salud Intercultural en Chile.” Chungara, Revista de Antropología Chilena, 39 (2): 185–207. Boccara, G., and P. Bolados (2010), “¿Qué Es el Multiculturalismo? La Nueva Cuestión Étnica en el Chile Neoliberal.” Revista de Indias, LXX (250): 651–90.

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Bolados García, P. (2012), “Neoliberalismo Multicultural en el Chile Postdictadura: La Política Indígena en Salud y sus Efectos en Comunidades Mapuches y Atacameñas.” Chungara, Revista de Antropología Chilena, 44 (1): 135–44. Briggs, C. (2017), “Towards Communicative Justice in Health.” Medical Anthropology, 36 (4): 287–304. Briggs, C., and C. Mantini-Briggs (2003), Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare, Berkeley: University of California Press. Briggs, C., and C. Mantini-Briggs (2016), Tell My Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, Durham: Duke University Press. Bruce, N. (2000), “Chilean Health Care Reforms: Model or Myth?” Journal of Public and International Affairs, 11: 69–86. Castro Lucic, M. (2005), “Challenges in Chilean Intercultural Health Policies: Indigenous Rights and Economic Development.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 28 (1): 112–32. Citarella, L., A. M. Conejeros, B. Espinossa, I. Jelves, A. M. Oyarce, and A. Vidal (2000), Medicinas y Culturas en la Araucanía, Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana. Cuyul Soto, A. (2008), “La Burocratización de la Salud Intercultural en Chile: Del NeoAsistencialismo al Autogobierno Mapuche en Salud.” Documento para la Discusión entre Organizaciones Mapuche, Puelmapu, Rimü 2008, Laboratório de Pesquisas em Etnicidade, Cultura e Desenvolvimento. Available online: http://laced​.etc​.br​/indigenismo​/arquivos​/La​ _Burocratizaci​%C3​%B3n​_de​_la​_Salud​_intercultural​_en​_Chile.​_A.​_Kuyul​_5​-08​.pdf. Cuyul Soto, A. (2014), “La Política de Salud Chilena y El Pueblo Mapuche. Entre el Multiculturalismo y La Autonomía Mapuche en Salud.” Salud Problema, Segunda Epoca 14: 21–33. DelVecchio-Good, M. J., and S. D. Hannah (2015) “‘Shattering Culture’: Perspectives on Cultural Competence and Evidence-Based Practice in Mental Health Services.” Transcultural Psychiatry, 52 (2): 198–221. Ethnologue. Mapudungun. Available online: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/arn/. Flood, D., A. Chary, P. Rohloff, and B. Henderson (2019), “Language as Health: Healing in Indigenous Communities in Guatemala through the Revitalization of Mayan Languages.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 136–44, New York: Routledge. Good, B. J. (1994), Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graham, L. (2019), “A’uwẽ-Xavante Represent: Rights and Resistance in Native Language Signage on Brazil’s Federal Highways.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 195–207, New York: Routledge. Guzmán, J. (2014), “The Epistemics of Symptom Experience and Symptom Accounts in Mapuche Healing and Pediatric Primary Care in Southern Chile.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 24 (3): 249–76. Ibacache Burgos, J., F. Chureo, S. McFall, and J. Q. Lincoleo, eds. (2001), Promoción de la Medicina y Terapias Indígenas en la Atención Primaria de Salud: El Caso de los Mapuche de Makewe-Pelale de Chile, Washington, DC: Division de Desarrollo de Sistemas y Servicios de Salud. Organización Panamericana de la Salud. Organización Mundial de la Salud.

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Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (2018), Síntesis de Resultados: Censo 2017, Chile: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas. Available online: http://www.censo2017.cl/sintesis-de-resultadoscenso2017.pdf. Izquierdo, C. (1995), “The Illness Experience: Health Care Choices Among Mapuche Living in Santiago.” MA thesis, University of California, Los Angeles. Jelves, I., and J. Ñanco (2004), “Experiencia Oficinas Amuldungun y Rol del Facilitador Intercultural.” V Congreso Chileno de Antropología. Colegio de Antropólogos de Chile A. G, San Felipe. Jenks, A. (2011), “From ‘Lists of Traits’ to ‘Open-Mindedness’: Emerging Issues in Cultural Competence Education.” Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 35: 209–35. Kleinman, A., L. Eisenberg, and B. Good (1978), “Culture, Illness, and Care: Clinical Lessons from Anthropologic and Cross-Cultural Research.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 88: 251–8. Marcela, L. H., Z. S. Melinao, M. Lincovil, V. Cayuqueo, M. Nahuelhuen, F. C. Lagos, H. M. Manríquez, S. J. Rebolledo, H. V. Figueroa, S. R. Klett, I. D. Yáñez, S. Iribarra, and L. J. Miguel Gómez (2018), Sistematización de Experiencia de Salud Intercultural en Centro de Referencia de Salud y Medicina Mapuche (CRSM) ‘La Ruka’. Fondo Chile de Todas y Todos, Ministerio de Desarrollo Social. Manríquez-Hizaut, M. N., C. Lagos-Fernández, J. Rebolledo-Sanhuesa, and V. FigueroaHuencho (2018), “Salud Intercultural en Chile: Desarrollo Histórico y Desafíos Actuales.” Revista de Salud Pública, 20 (6): 759–63. Merino, M. E., R. Millaman, D. Quilaqueo, and M. Pilleux (2004), “Perspectiva Interpretativa del Conflicto entre Mapuches y No Mapuches sobre la Base del Prejuicio y Discriminación Étnica.” Persona y Sociedad, 18 (1): 111–27. Mignone, J., J. Bartlett, J. O’Neill, and T. Orchard (2007), “Best Practices In Intercultural Health: Five Case Studies In Latin America.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 3: 31. https://doi​.org​/10​.1186​/1746​-4269​-3​-31. Moloney, A. (2010), “Protests Highlight Plight of Chile’s Mapuche Indians.” The Lancet, 375: 449–50. Muñoz Panes, G. (2007), “Instalación de un Modelo de Salud Intercultural en la Comuna de Alto Bío Bío, VIII Región, Chile.” In F. Lolas, D. K. Martin, and Á. Quezada (eds), Prioridades en Salud y Salud Intercultural, 171–3, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Bioética, Universidad de Chile. O’Neill, J., J. Bartlett, and J. Mignone (2006), Best Practices in Intercultural Health, Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Ortiz, P. R. (2009), “Indigenous Knowledge and Language: Decolonizing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Mapuche Intercultural Bilingual Education Program in Chile.” Canadian Journal of Native Education, 32 (1): 93–114. Pan American Health Organization (2008), Una Vision de Salud Intercultural para los Pueblos Indígenas de las Américas, Washington, DC: Pan American Helath Organization, World Health Organization. Rebolledo Sanhueza, J., M. M. Hizaut, C. L. Fernández, V. F. Huencho, and J. M. Gómez López (2020), “Ethnicity and Health: Experience with an Urban Mapuche Health Program from the Perspective of Key Actors.” Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 7: 355–64. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s40615​-019​-00664​-y. Richards, P. (2013), Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Richards, P. (2010), “Of Indians and Terrorists: How the State and Local Elites Construct the Mapuche in Neoliberal Multicultural Chile.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 42: 59–90.

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Sáez Salgado, M. (2007), “Interculturalidad en Salud en Chile: De la Teoría a la Práctica.” In F. Lolas, D. K. Martin, and Á. Quezada (eds), Prioridades en Salud y Salud Intercultural, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios in Bioética, Universidad de Chile. Torri, M. C. (2012), “Intercultural Health Practices: Towards an Equal Recognition Between Indigenous Medicine and Biomedicine? A Case Study from Chile.” Health Care Analysis, 20: 31–49.

Chapter 18

Inscribing Social Justice through Indigenous Place-Names BERNARD C. PERLEY

Ktacowi nikani ponnanok skicinowok (We have to put First Peoples1 first). I typed these words in my Maliseet language while a guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀-speaking (Coast Salish) xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The greater area is also the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of neighboring Coast Salish peoples—Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.2 Before I moved here, I knew this place as Vancouver, British Columbia. The colonial inscription “Vancouver” is the name most people associate with the lands, waters, and forests of these Coast Salish ancestral lands. Centuries of colonial inscriptions have erased the Indigenous peoples from their own traditional lands. The echoes of ancestral voices have been silenced by cartographies of discovery, conquest, and erasure (Perley in press). These erasures, though partial (Irvine and Gal 2000, 38), were brutally effective in suppressing the Indigenous peoples from exercising their just and sovereign claims for self-determination. I am a member of the faculty at the University of British Columbia which is situated on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm ancestral lands: a campus on which you will see bilingual street signs in həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀ and English. Although the long centuries of erasure continue, the long project of remediation of colonial cartographies of erasure has begun. But remediation is only part of the social justice task set before settler and Indigenous communities.3 Another critical task is to determine what forms “justice” will take as well as what configurations of social relations will emerge from looming crises. For example, the existential threats that accompany climate change will require all inhabitants of this planet to prepare for survival in a transforming world. In the near future, we may face a global condition I describe as “forced translocality” (Perley 2020). Translocality is often framed in migration studies as migration from one place to another whereby local practices and customs are transferred from the place of origin to the new locale.4 Climate migration is a variation of the common understanding of translocality, and it is already a condition that is becoming a commonplace occurrence with each climate-related disaster. Displaced populations are migrating to new places and taking their traditions and customs with them. I offer another interpretation that goes unacknowledged by colonial histories and discourses of nation-building; namely, forced translocality. Forced translocality is the condition whereby an in situ population has their

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ancestral territories transformed without their consent and are then compelled to maintain their traditions and customs in an alien landscape; it is a slow violence (Nixon 2011) perpetrated by settler/colonial regimes against Indigenous peoples. Today, with increasing frequency, this slow violence against Indigenous peoples is becoming a self-inflicting wound to settler/colonial regimes of dominance and suppression. Extreme weather events are destroying or displacing communities across the globe. These displacements underscore the need to learn the lessons Indigenous peoples have to offer if we are to survive the next wave of climate disasters and mass extinctions. My use of “translocality” goes beyond the determinate condition of transnational and migration contexts and related studies.5 As an Indigenous person whose ancestral home has been transformed by colonial forms of erasure, I recognize the erasure inherent in the general use of translocality: namely, researchers ignore the experience of Indigenous peoples. While transnationalism and migration studies may benefit from a limited form of translocality research, Indigenous experience offers insights that will highlight (a) the violence those colonial migrations have brought to bear on Indigenous communities (forced translocality), (b) Indigenous survival strategies adjusting to alienated landscapes (surviving an apocalypse), and (c) offer insights into surviving the globally distributed disasters and upheavals due to colonial regimes of power and resource exploitation (a self-inflicted apocalypse). Forced translocality does not prioritize “nativizing” alien elements into Indigenous systems of knowledge and practice as much as identifying and celebrating continuities in traditional beliefs and practices in altered worlds. Nor does the phenomenon suggest that translocality is determined by movement or migration. The Maliseet are fortunate to live in their ancestral lands yet we’ve had to endure colonial erasure for over three hundred years. Similarly, Indigenous communities have been forced to repatriate their ancestral homelands as those lands were transformed into alien landscapes by colonial occupation. Today, we are witnessing global in situ forced translocality. It is less about moving to a new place due to climate-related disasters as much as our collective sense of stability and security of place have been undermined, and earth is our collective home and we cannot move to a new place to escape the coming calamity. The devastation of landscapes from climate change-induced weather events is alienating all populations, thereby translocalizing all peoples. The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm offer a good example of an Indigenous community maintaining their traditional lifeways while adapting to the transformed metropolitan landscape of settler Vancouver. The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people have survived the first wave of colonialism-induced translocality and are helping guide the University of British Columbia toward remediation and reconciliation. Through these introductory paragraphs I celebrate the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm by including and inscribing həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀ into global discourses and imaginaries but also note here that inscribing social justice is something that is still in its incipient phase and will need our collective action to move it forward. It is a first step toward repatriating traditional territories through the use and dissemination of the həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀ place-names as a small measure of language-related social justice. The next steps require challenging shibboleths of social justice to move beyond rhetoric and toward transformative justice. Transformative justice entails critical reflection on the systemic injustice of settler/ colonial institutions purporting to serve public interests. Which “publics” are served and which “publics” are erased? The centuries-long practices of settler/colonial populations claiming and naming Indigenous lands in colonial languages have erased the presence of Indigenous peoples from their own homelands. The city of Vancouver in the province of British Columbia effectively erases the Indigenous peoples who still live and thrive in these ancestral lands. My own community, the Maliseet, continue to live along the

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banks of the Wolastoq (St. John River) in Wabanakew (the province of New Brunswick); they, too, have been erased from their traditional ancestral and unceded lands. Linguistic erasure works in concert with other forms of erasure such as environmental, political, cultural, and economic erasures. For example, hydroelectric dams along the Wolastoq have submerged geological features whose formations are explained in Maliseet stories. Instead, the stories of progress and nation-building dominate settler discourses. The richness and depth of Maliseet “time immemorial” are erased, further impoverishing setter narratives of progress and civilization. These collateral erasures render Indigenous traditional homelands as alien places to the First Peoples of the Americas. As settler/ colonial peoples translocalized old-world practices and concepts into the “New World,” they disregarded the knowledge systems Indigenous peoples have developed in their respective environments through eons of experience. Today, surviving Indigenous place-names too often serve as specters of invisible native populations. Despite over five hundred years of collateral erasure, Indigenous communities have survived old-world translocalization and colonial cartographic inscription such as naming the Wolastoq River after St. John and renaming Wabanakew as New Brunswick or naming a city “Vancouver” in British Columbia. Though their traditional lands and practices have endured significant changes, many Indigenous communities are engaged in remediation and repatriation projects that re-inscribe their languages, practices, and stories back into their landscapes. This chapter shares some potentially transformative examples of collaborative re-inscription by Indigenous peoples and settler/colonial societies as one concrete example of language and social justice. The chapter is a “think piece” that offers a conceptual stance that these inscriptions of social justice based on mutual respect and understanding may provide strategies for surviving the imminent threats of climate change and the sixth extinction. Why is inscribing Indigenous place-names in ancestral lands an important practice for social justice? Acts of naming are acts of power. The systemic injustices of settler/ colonial regimes of power are breaking settler containment and no longer threaten only Indigenous and/or marginalized peoples; the violence of settler justice is being inflicted on all communities. Justice as a Western philosophical preoccupation carries millennia of bias and concomitant injustice. This chapter explores the prospects of redressing the wrongs of settler justice in order to potentiate transformative justice as a process of remediation and mutual survival. Transformative justice is used here to represent processes that challenge systemic violence against targeted populations to support changes in cultural norms and contexts that support access and equity, thereby dismantling the perpetuation of discrimination against Indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged populations.6 Re-inscribing Indigenous place-names in ancestral territories offers a first step of concrete action that can create significant coalescences of advocacy and redressing past injustices (Avineri and Perley 2019). This critical language work serves two important goals: (1) it promotes a tangible and achievable project (re-inscribing Indigenous place-names in ancestral lands) that can bring Indigenous and settler communities together for mutual healing and understanding, and (2) it promotes engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems and community experience in changing landscapes so that Indigenous survival in apocalyptic conditions (Whyte 2018) may offer insights into how to survive impending climate disasters. The frequency of super storms, extreme wildfires, heat domes, and other climate disasters has highlighted the system failure of the Capitalocene7 and the comfort of the Global North. The worst offenders (the global north) of fossil fuel consumption can no longer ignore the consequences of

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their rapacious extractive system of exploitation. Western conceptions of “justice” are now starting to reveal the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric of “social justice” back home. Following the pandemic, returning to “normal” is willful ignorance of the conditions accelerating the onslaught of the sixth extinction as cautioned by Leakey and Lewin (1996). They warn the sixth extinction is “a crisis of our own making” whereby “we lay a curse of unimaginable magnitude on future generations” (Leakey and Lewin 1996, 244). The resilience of Indigenous peoples surviving the first convulsion of the sixth extinction is a concrete example of survival and adaptation. This chapter does not endorse settler cooptation of Indigenous knowledges and experiences. This chapter is a provocation for settler regimes to move away from extractive systems of control and toward transformative processes that promote collaborative re-inscriptions of Indigenous words and worlds back to ancestral lands. The provocation is intended to have global salience but due to limited space it will draw from largely North American examples with reference to select international examples of Indigenous and settler state re-inscriptions into ancestral lands. The chapter also briefly contextualizes the importance of inscription as a mode of social justice regarding Indigenous language endangerment, followed by three stories of Maliseet enchantment, erasure, and re-inscription. I offer my Maliseet experience, not as a defining example but, as a situated perspective that can guide the reader in understanding the particulars of local Indigenous efforts of ancestral language revitalization and re-inscription. The chapter concludes with a discussion of ontological vulnerability and prospects of life during an apocalypse.

CONTEXTUALIZING “INSCRIPTION” AND “JUSTICE” The first sentence of this chapter—“We have to put First Peoples first”—is written first in Maliseet.8 It is a “severely” endangered language once spoken by all generations of the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy people9 of Wabanakew, the land of the dawn. This diagnosis comes from the UNESCO online interactive atlas of endangered languages. The Maliseet–Passamaquoddy entry states there are only five hundred speakers left among all the Maliseet–Passamaquoddy communities.10 The condition for the “degree of endangerment” for those languages categorized as “severely endangered” is that “language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves.” I confirmed the precarious nature of Maliseet language vitality in my earlier research and publications (Perley 2011 in particular). Since then, the state of vitality has drifted toward “critically endangered” which is described as “the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently.” The next degree of endangerment on the UNESCO scale is “extinct” which corresponds with the dispassionate description, “there are no speakers left.” Sadly, the trajectory toward extinction seems to be irreversible. That is, unless we change the terms of analysis as well as the stance toward intervention. Rather than think in terms of enumeration (Hill 2002) as well as language death and extinction (Crystal 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Harrison 2007) we should think in terms of sleeping languages (Baldwin and Olds 2007; Miami Tribe of Oklahoma 2008; Hinton 2001), of language life and emergent vitality (Perley 2011). Doing so is not an easy task and it requires new terms, discourses, and stories. But Indigenous communities cannot do it alone.

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The Maliseet have encountered colonial and settler peoples for over three hundred years and still they retain some small vitality for their language. Though colonial powers have ceased their overt assault on Maliseet and other Indigenous languages in Canada, covert and unintended, systemic pressures continue to undermine Indigenous language vitality. What is essential moving forward is for both Indigenous and settler societies to engage, promote, and empower language activists/advocates in celebrating new terms, discourses, and stories. For instance, through interdiscursive engagements we are beginning to witness the re-inscription of Indigenous language back onto their landscapes.11 The həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀ signage on the UBC campus is just one example. It took many conversations and much goodwill for the UBC to install the bilingual signs. Those conversations are only beginning to take place back in my ancestral home, Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm example gives me hope that re-inscription may be possible in my ancestral land. As a member of Tobique First Nation and an Indigenous anthropologist, I take the stance of Critical Indigeneity—a “commitment to living an Indigenous Maliseet life dependent upon mutually affirming social relationships between Maliseet community members. This collective Maliseet experience and empowerment will permit the Maliseet community to practice their living traditions on their terms, in their traditional homelands, in their belief systems, in everyday practices” (Perley 2014, 32–3). This commitment is also directed toward empowering Indigenous communities who are working to remediate erasures they’ve endured at the hands of colonial/settler societies (Perley 2014, 53). Facilitating empowerment is also directed toward settler societies.12 To achieve my goal, I offer three stories that reinforce this era of Indigenous inscription in the service of social justice. I use inscription in a broad sense that goes beyond tangible inscriptions such as signage (street signs, highway signs, place-name billboards), monuments/memorials, plaques/historical markers, and built/constructed structures (such as buildings, sculptures, installations). These material inscriptions are the artifacts of ideational inscriptions that emerge from the collective and inclusive conversations between Indigenous and settler society advocates/allies (Robinson and Zaiontz 2015; Huhndorf 2009; Bernadin 2011; Rice 2008; Hopkins and Robinson 2020). Though a step in the right direction, social justice cannot be relegated to material manifestations that dot the landscape. Social justice must be the ongoing emergent alignment (Avineri et al. 2019, 3–5) of mutual respect and empowerment (Sandel 2009) between Indigenous communities re-inscribing themselves back into their traditional homelands and the settler communities who have yet to learn to be good guests in those ancestral lands. But being good guests is also not enough. Remediating the collateral erasures of Indigenous worlds in their ancestral lands due to the disenchantment of the landscape rationalized and optimized by development requires a new story. The stories of colonial discovery and stories of human progress and development have erased Indigenous peoples, and those stories will become the source of the self-inflicted wound of climate change and the sixth extinction. We desperately need a new origin story that is neither additive (such that “we” include Indigenous stories alongside settler stories) nor reconciliatory (whereby past harms are redressed through narratives of trauma). The new origin story will allow settler society to realize that they also need healing from the ever-increasing slow violence of colonial ideologies. Maliseet place-names must be reinscribed in Maliseet ancestral lands. But it must not stop there. We need to hear those words spoken and hear the echo of time immemorial in the river valley of the Wolastoq. The bilingual signage on the UBC campus is a clear indication that we may be in the initial stages of remediating centuries of colonial erasure of Indigenous presence in

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their own traditional and ancestral homelands. I welcome and applaud the discourses of reconciliation and inclusivity from activists/advocates for social justice. This volume with the collected chapters is a significant contribution to imagining and actualizing social justice through language-related entanglements. Yet, I worry the discourses of language and social justice turn into well intended but self-serving localized signage projects that satisfy the will to reconcile contested claims to “justice as equality” and “justice as equity” but, only in a superficially tangible way. My fear lies in the danger these attempts to seek language and social justice privilege language as code over language use as emergent social relations (Perley 2011). Specific to this chapter, the presentation of Indigenous place-names alongside colonial names on signage in the landscape gives the impression that Indigenous languages have equal importance. A cynic may see these signs and other material forms as facile colonial re-enchantment projects designed to humor Indigenous peoples while obscuring yet another form of erasure. Equal representation on signage does not necessarily mean an equity of empowerment nor does it confirm a move toward transformative forms of social justice. These materialities of social justice (signage, buildings, historical markers, etc.) index linguistic equality in artifacts but they do not necessarily index equity in Indigenous linguistic empowerment and sovereignty. To avoid confirmation of the cynical view, what is required is the expectation that all of us will be able to read the Indigenous place-names in their script and know something of the ancestral homelands as ancestral lands. Indigenous peoples have lived too long in an alienated landscape wherein hearing and reading colonial names reminds them their ancestral worlds are muted under a colonial linguistic patina of erasure. As mentioned above, critical first steps toward inscription are starting to appear across Indigenous homelands in the form of signage and other linguistic artifacts (see, for example, Ayers Rock/Uluru [Australia], Denali/Mount McKinley [United States], Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon [Wales]). Transformative forms of social justice must accompany this emerging linguistic landscape of equality. I am encouraged by recent social movements addressing social justice and seeking remediation. It coincides with my efforts to encourage audience coalescences of multiple voices and multiple inscriptions (Avineri and Perley 2019). These social movements and their attendant discourses of social justice are some of the new stories we are telling to redress past injustices. Hopefully, these movements and discourses will be a genuinely transformative project and not a re-inscription of systemic racism under new semantic cloaking. Linguistic cloaking indexes concomitant ideational cloaking of threats from climate change and the sixth extinction. The landscapes of our collective natural and cultural heritages are under constant threat of erasure from numerous development projects and the effects of climate change-induced disasters. Recent efforts to protect these heritage landscapes often cite geological features and archaeological sites as the “tangible” properties of their advocacy. Many world heritage sites are on Indigenous lands and are under threat of erasure. Yet, the focus is usually on the materiality of artifacts rather than the living relations and embodiments of the slow violence of neoliberal impulses. However laudable these protection and preservation attempts may be, they often overlook the “intangible” properties of local Indigenous knowledge and entanglement of human and non-human relations. Indigenous knowledges are inscriptions from having deep cultural roots in deep geological time. These roots are evidenced in languages, bio-cultural adaptations, and oral traditions. The project for protecting the materiality of Indigenous worlds without protecting the local Indigenous cultural heritage would sever ancestral lands from human connections to particular places in “deep time” for all time. In the case of the bilingual signage on

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the UBC campus, we can observe the həǹq̀miǹəm̀ signs and celebrate their presence in the Musqueam traditional landscape but the intangible human relation of speaking the language to read the signs renders the inscription inert, mute. A truly responsible natural and cultural inscription remediation project will not only emplace material properties but will also inscribe ideational Indigenous properties such as language and oral traditions. We have much to protect (as well as learn) from Indigenous peoples’ local knowledge and it cannot wait any longer. That knowledge will become important strategies for all populations if they are to survive the looming disasters of the sixth extinction. An excellent example of protecting “deep time” while ushering social justice would consider the geological features of a particular landscape, the changes to that landscape wrought by development, and the oral traditions of the local Indigenous peoples. Below, I share a moment in Maliseet deep time to illustrate an example of aboriginal intimate knowledge of a landscape. The story presents three geological features in the landscape—a waterfall, the Tobique Rock, and a pool of muddy water. More important, the story also presents the Maliseet oral tradition describing how those features came into being. I argue these are examples of Maliseet intimate knowledge of landscape and furthermore, that knowledge goes back into deep time. Our collective next step is to hear and understand the story in Maliseet. Will speaking and hearing the story in Maliseet actuate justice for the Maliseet? If so, what form of justice is at play? Justice can be invoked as “fairness” and thereby entertain fantasies of distributive justice through social institutions (Rawls 1999). Rawls writes, although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. There is an identity of interests since social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by his own efforts. There is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share. A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages and for underwriting an agreement of the proper distributive shares. These principles are the principles of social justice: they provide a way of assigning rights and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1999, 4) In recognition of the inequities in society some may urge “equality” as a guiding principle for enacting social justice today. I look at the bilingual signs on the UBC campus and I know that as a guest I must not be satisfied with seeing equality of placement and representation. The superficial equality of languages on signs hides the inequity of social injustice that has led to the endangerment of Indigenous languages. Social justice operationalized through commitments of “equity” across disparate histories of disempowerment may guide us toward reconciliation but I worry that may only lead to restorative justice: a situation where guilt is assuaged and some modicum of healing is achieved. The stakes for our collective future are too high to be satisfied with “restoration.” What we need is transformative justice. The implications are that “equity” requires I not only appreciate the visual display of “equal representation,” but I must learn to read the signs out loud and understand them so the həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀ language will echo among the majestic cedars and across the Salish Sea in Musqueam ancestral lands. Doing so will move beyond restorative justice and toward transformative justice. Indigenous communities do not want to “restore” the state of affairs to earlier

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colonial contact conditions. What is required is a transformative form of social justice that will heal both Indigenous and settler communities. Transformative justice through social engagements based on equity offers a path forward. Sandel argues for a politics of moral engagement where “A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker, basis for mutual respect. . . . A politics of moral engagement is not only a more inspiring ideal than a politics of avoidance. It is also a more promising basis for a just society” (Sandel 2009, 268–9). Sandel and Rawls are focused on individuals and their relation to social institutions, but we need to articulate a transformative justice that crosses experiential domains. I also argue that transformative justice must not be applied only in cases where violence and harm has been done; rather, I argue transformative justice must be proactive, not reactive. Place-names are not just inscriptions. They are invitations for transformative justice. When we learn to read Indigenous languages in their ancestral lands that is when material inscriptions will serve as indexes of ideational inscription. Place-names spoken aloud invoke ancestral voices in ancestral lands. These echoes of Indigenous “deep time” offer a strategy for configuring a transformative form of social justice that starts at the beginning, social justice through Indigenous origin stories.

COSMOGONIES OF BELONGING This chapter is grounded in three origin stories. The first story is about belonging to an ancestral land.13 It is a Maliseet story about Indigenous “deep time.” The second story is about erasure. It is a story about social injustice that must be told. The third story is an example of inscribing transformative social justice in three Indigenous languages. Contemporary inscriptions offer a vision for inscribing “deep time” for tomorrow while acknowledging the violence of colonial languages and concepts in the long history of erasure.

STORY #1: BELONGING In the land of the first dawn the world awoke to an ascending sun. Klohskap, the Maliseet creator, transformer, trickster, and storyteller, awoke with the world and was pleased with the beauty of all relations surrounding him. Klohskap surveyed the land and all its relations. He began to nurture and guide harmonious relations among the animals, fish, and birds and their relations with their environments. After some time Klohskap felt the world was not yet complete and developed a growing loneliness. Klohskap realized he needed people of his kind. So, he took an arrow and with his great bow shot the heart of an ash tree. As the bark split and the trunk of the tree cracked open, out stepped the first Maliseet woman and first Maliseet man. Klohskap realized the new people needed to learn their respectful place in this world. He patiently taught them how to live with all of earth’s relations and in doing so, he became the great chief and culture hero for the Maliseet. Once Klohskap was confident the people could care for themselves he wandered in the world to continue the work of world building. Klohskap was a powerful person. He had the powers of transformation and creation. He is largely responsible for the appearance of the northeastern landscape as we know it today. During his cyclical rounds of checking on the welfare of his people he arrived at the Maliseet village of Tobique. When he arrived at the Maliseet village he found the people sick and thirsty. He asked why they were stricken with sickness and thirst. The people led Klohskap to the riverbank and pointed to the dry riverbed. The water of the “St. John River”14 had stopped flowing. Klohskap immediately knew the source of the problem. His

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persistent antagonist, Beaver, had dammed the river again. In those days beavers were as big as today’s houses, and they could easily block the flow of any river. Klohskap went 40 kilometers up the river to find where Beaver had blocked the river’s flow. Having arrived at the place known today as Grand Falls, he told Beaver to take down the dam, but Beaver was not going to give in to Klohskap’s demand. Refusing to take “no” for an answer, Klohskap began to dismantle the dam himself and allowed the water to flow again. Beaver was angered by the destruction of his dam and he engaged Klohskap in a fight of mythic proportions. The two fought back and forth until Beaver realized he would not win the fight. He escaped from Klohskap in the muddy water and quickly swam down the river toward Tobique. Klohskap slapped about the muddy water but couldn’t find Beaver. He realized Beaver had escaped and saw he couldn’t immediately catch Beaver. So, he reached down and scooped from the “St. John River” a huge boulder. Klohskap then tossed the boulder 40 kilometers down river where it came to a splash in the newly released waters of the river. Klohskap missed Beaver with the first boulder and reached down and extracted another very large boulder and in doing so created the waterfall at Grand Falls. He tossed the second boulder farther down river but missed again. The second boulder landed at the confluence of the Tobique River and the “St. John River.” That boulder is now known as “The Tobique Rock.” Having missed his antagonist, Klohskap transformed himself into a giant beaver and swam down river to catch Beaver. When he did catch Beaver, they continued their fight until both were too tired to continue. The place where they ended their fight has been muddy ever since that conflict in deep time. Klohskap and Beaver would continue their mutual antagonisms but those are stories for another occasion.

STORY #2: ERASURE AND SOCIAL INJUSTICE Now I’d like to share a story about erasure and social injustice; about invasive concepts and attendant erasures. The colonial erasure of Indigenous presence is an inscription of progress, development, and attendant colonial disenchantment. Max Weber described disenchantment in a 1918 speech, The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendent realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal relations. (Weber 1946, 155) It seems that Indigenous peoples worldwide have been at the receiving end of such rationalization and intellectualization throughout European colonization. The result is that “ultimate and sublime values have retreated from public life.” A good example is the erasure of Indigenous peoples from their traditional and ancestral landscapes. The story is about two types of erasure I describe as cartographies of erasure. The first form of erasure involves the geological features presented in the above story. Those geological features suffer a similar fate of erasure. As any “developed” self-respecting nation-state would do, Canada implemented development projects to usher their polity along the track of progress. In the 1950s, the construction of dams resulted in the erasure of geological features of the landscape that were once visible evidence of Maliseet oral traditions. For example, the Tobique Rock is submerged (for that matter, the first boulder is also submerged). As a toddler I may have seen the Rock but as an adult I have not seen the rock. I have only heard stories about the Rock and I have had the benefit of an elder15 pointing out

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where the rock would be if it wasn’t submerged in the river of progress. Additionally, in the above story, the pool of muddy water where Klohskap and Beaver battled until both were exhausted is no longer visible. These two geological features have been submerged with the construction of the Beechwood Dam. The second form of erasure is the eradication of the local Indigenous language from the landscape as well as the erasure of Indigenous peoples from the dominant Canadian cultural imagination. In telling the above story I did not use the Maliseet terms for many of the landmarks and characters nor did I use the Maliseet language to tell the story. More concrete examples are highway signs. When you approach the town of Grand Falls on the Trans-Canada highway you will encounter a French/English bilingual sign informing you that you will soon arrive at “Grand Falls” or “Grand Sault.” In Maliseet the name for that area is Kapskw—(the falls). The epic fight between Beaver and Klohskap occurred at Kapskwok—(at the falls). Also, Beaver is called Kwapit, the Maliseet term for beaver. Klohskap’s people live at Tobique but we call it Neqotkuk. The term “Maliseet” is also a misnomer. I’ve heard it suggested that it is a Micmac appellation we’ve had to contend with over the last two centuries. We call ourselves Wolastokwiyik—“people of the Wolastok (the peaceful river).”16 We, therefore, are “the people of the peaceful river.” These are Maliseet names that were used to identify the landscape and peoples occupying that landscape since “time immemorial” or since Indigenous “deep time.” However, only very few members of the Maliseet community use those names now. Maliseet children do not hear the story of the Tobique Rock in Maliseet. In short, Indigenous enchantments with the landscape through our language and our knowledge of deep time have been erased by the colonial inscriptions by immigrant populations. We’ve become linguistically and culturally erased and the land has become disenchanted. On one hand, we have the erasure of geological evidence for Indigenous deep time and, on the other hand, we have the erasure of Indigenous language and cultural knowledge of deep time. The total disenchantment of the landscape will be complete only with the erasure of Indigenous peoples.

STORY #3: INSCRIPTION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE In 2018, my coauthors Daryl Baldwin and Margaret Noodin and I published an essay wherein we asked the question “Is there life after extinction?” Our answer is “yes.” Life after extinction will require some critical rethinking of concepts and actions if we are to survive this “concerto of extinction” in which we are all obliged to participate. We argued that the first stage of the sixth extinction came with the waves of extinctions that accompanied explorers and settlers as pathogens, microbes, animals, plants, and human populations reconfigured Indigenous ancestral lands into (as Historian Colin Calloway described it) new worlds for all (Calloway 2013).17 Among the vectors of extinction Indigenous peoples had to survive were invasive concepts. As we were organizing our thoughts for the essay, Daryl Baldwin, Margaret Noodin, and I tried to find words in Miaamia, Anishinaabemowin, and Maliseet that would translate as “extinction.” We realized that the concept “extinction” as expressed in English had no equivalent in our native languages. Our essay became an opportunity to realign the discourses of extinction toward discourses of survival. To do that we framed our essay around a cartoon I created to highlight the ironies of settler/colonial concepts and Indigenous experiences. The title of the first frame (Figure 18.1) captures our goal for the essay. The Indigenous couple are obviously curious and display some trepidation toward the strangers who just arrived onto their homelands. The Pilgrims respond with expressions

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FIGURE 18.1:  Unpacking colonial baggage (English version of Figure 18.4—frame 1). ©2015, Bernard C. Perley.

FIGURE 18.2:  Colonial baggage (English version of Figure 18.4—frame 2). ©2015, Bernard C. Perley.

of certainty. In this moment, Indigenous ancestral worlds just became a new world. These strangers are not going away. More alarming, though, what baggage did they bring (see Figure 18.2)? We are all familiar with the polysemic aspects of “baggage” and this image puts forward our argument in graphic terms that ideational concepts are invasive vectors that contributed to the eradication of the entire lifeways for Indigenous peoples. The current global linguistic crisis is often framed as language extinction and the projections of loss are staggering. The most conservative estimate is that by the end of this century less than 50 percent of the world’s languages will become extinct (Simmons and Lewis 2013, 17). The more extreme projections state up to 90 percent of the world’s languages will become extinct (Nettle and Romaine 2000). We are approaching the end of the first stage of the sixth extinction. We stand to lose 90 percent of our human capacity to understand

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FIGURE 18.3:  Unpacking extinction (English version of Figure 18.4—frame 3). ©2015, Bernard C. Perley. “Having Reservations: Unpacking Colonial Baggage” (Figures 18.1–3) was first published in Bernard C. Perley. 2018. “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World” in After Extinction, Richard Grusin, ed. Pp. 201–233. University of Minnesota Press. The author retains the copyright but wishes to acknowledge this prior publication.

how we can survive in the second stage of the sixth extinction. What does this mean for our futures (see Figure 18.3)? It means that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and around the world have been dealing with climate change for centuries. The surviving populations, their cultures, their languages are survivors of the first stage of the sixth extinction, and we are condemned to endure the second stage together. Will there be harmonies worked out between Indigenous ancestral worlds and colonial/settler new worlds? Perhaps there is a place that is working out the difficult first steps toward inscribing social justice as a transformative process. The legislative assembly of the Canadian Province of British Columbia on October 24, 2019, had taken the first step to adopting the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People so the government can “bring its laws and policies into harmony with the aims of the declaration” (Penner 2019). Indigenous leader Bob Chamberlin acknowledges the concerns of skeptics, but he is quoted as having said— “People are going to say this is time-consuming and expensive. . . . Well, I think going to court is time-consuming and expensive, and leads to no certainty whatsoever. It doesn’t advance reconciliation, it just hardens the lines, and I think after 150-odd years in Canada we’ve had enough hard lines” (Penner 2019). Are the province of British Columbia and UBC leading the way toward surviving the sixth extinction? The provincial legislation and the signage on campus are good first steps toward social justice for Indigenous peoples but “fairness” is not just an exercise in equality nor is it an exercise in restoration. Transformation must guide processes of language and social justice.

WHY THIS MATTERS: ONTOLOGICAL VULNERABILITY The medical journal The Lancet published a report (2019) outlining the bleak conditions children around the world will face if no action is taken to keep the global climate

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from increasing beyond 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The article argues, “A business as usual trajectory will result in a fundamentally altered world, with the indicators described providing a glimpse of the implications of this pathway. The life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change. Without accelerated intervention, this new era will come to define the health of people at every stage of their lives” (Watts et. al. 2019, 1837). The broad and detailed report outlining the impending threats and the minimal measures being taken by governments, global institutions, and health professions is disheartening: The data published here elucidate the ongoing trends of a warming world with effects that threaten human wellbeing. As the fourth hottest year on record, 2018 saw a recordbreaking 220 million additional exposures to extremes of heat, coupled with corresponding increased vulnerability to heat across every continent. As a result of this and broader climatic changes, vectorial capacity for the transmission of dengue fever was the second highest recorded, with 9 of the past 10 most suitable years occurring since 2000. Progress in mitigation and adaptation remains insufficient, with the carbon intensity of the energy system remaining flat; 2·9 million ambient air pollution deaths; and a reversal of the previous downward trend of coal use. (Watts et. al. 2019, 1873) Despite these alarming conclusions, the authors of the article try to end on a positive note, indicating that there is greater awareness of the impending health crisis and stipulating that “a crucial shift must occur—one which moves from discussion and commitment, to meaningful reductions in emissions” (Watts et. al. 2019, 1873). In response to the The Lancet report, Kendra Pierre-Lewis reports in the New York Times reactions from Dr. Renee N. Salas, the lead author of a US Policy brief that accompanied the The Lancet report: With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and well-being will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world. . . . Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there. (Pierre-Louis 2021) The cacophony arising out of the discourses of climate doom and gloom and the strident reactions from climate deniers all but drown out the voices asking social justice for the most vulnerable populations, communities, and relations. The horrors of the Anthropocene circulate in popular and social media bringing alarming news reports about climate change and increasing climate-related devastation affecting more and more populations. A first draft of this chapter included news stories describing events from the fall of 2019 which included videos of the flooding in Venice while voice-overs attributed the flooding to high tides and rising seas due to climate change. Images, videos, and reports of wildfires in California and Australia also captured the attention of viewers worldwide. In the summer of 2021 we witnessed extreme droughts, heat dome events, wildfires across the globe, extreme storms, and flooding. These horrors are fresh, immediate, and tragic. However, this is just the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of colonialism unabated. Indigenous peoples grappling with shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, extreme flooding, and unrelenting droughts is nothing new. Indigenous trauma is the backdrop for capitalism’s baroque masterpiece: The Sixth Extinction. The opening movement in this “concerto of extinction” began on October 12, 1492. Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World” triggered climate change and the sixth extinction in the Americas in a much greater scale than previously acknowledged. Entire ecosystems were transformed

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as were all Indigenous worlds resulting in the eradication of many languages and peoples, the displacement of many of the surviving languages and peoples, and the transformation of Indigenous survival strategies. The harmonies of Indigenous ancestral worlds became dissonant, alien, apocalyptic. Potawatomi scholar and environmental activist Kyle Whyte argues (2018) that the anticipated apocalypse of the Anthropocene is not a science or speculative fictional future that is to be dreaded; rather, it is an Indigenous reality of colonial conditions. We need not wait for the apocalypse to arrive. We are all living the Indigenous apocalypse.

WORDS TO LIVE BY Indigenous peoples, in the twenty-first century, are drawing from their survival through five hundred years of colonial occupation of their ancestral homes: the apocalypse of coloniality. Many of the Indigenous languages continue to be threatened with imminent extinction but there are some Indigenous language activists/advocates who are changing the terms of endangerment and conceiving of new possibilities. They represent Indigenous “words to live by.” Instead of thinking of language death, they are promoting language life. They are imagining survival in their terms and in their ancestral languages. This chapter identified some of the vectors of extinction that also expose the social injustices that colonialism has perpetrated on Indigenous peoples, thereby endangering their worlds. Despite this long history of collateral extinctions of Indigenous worlds, surviving communities have survival strategies that may offer hope to all populations and usher in a new world of just and fair relations. Perhaps Indigenous languages offer insights to surviving the sixth extinction. I return to the Times article that shared a quote from Gina McCarthy (a former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency): This may be the first time in the history of the United States that there are children wondering whether they are going to have a future, whether they should have children as a result of the potential for climate change to get worse and worse. (Pierre-Louis 2021) If we go back five hundred years and recall the devastation of the Indigenous worlds, I suspect those generations of Indigenous people also asked the heartbreaking questions Gina McCarthy imagines for children today. This is not to diminish the concern McCarthy is expressing because it is a concern for all children across the globe. I return to her quote to highlight the need to learn survival strategies from the Indigenous peoples who survived the first round of mass extinctions. One strategy will be to recognize the harm in invasive concepts. When language “loss” is expressed as “language death” then there is no hope for “resurrection.” If you change the concept from language death to language life, then you have possibilities for vitality. As we discussed in our coauthored essay (Baldwin et al. 2018) on surviving the sixth extinction, metaphors are partial in two ways: they never stand in completely for the referent, and all metaphors entail stances that restrict the actions that can be taken. If a language is extinct, as was stated about the Miaamia language, then, as Daryl Baldwin notes, it is gone forever (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma 2008). He dared to rethink the metaphor used by linguists and imagined Miaamia as sleeping. He reasoned if the language is sleeping, it can be awakened. His work on awakening Miaamia was rewarded with a MacArthur Grant in 2016. Margaret Noodin reconfigures the modes of linguistic sovereignty that will allow Anishinaabemowin to supersede national, state,

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and provincial boundaries creating conditions of survival in Indigenous terms. I took the opportunity to shift discourses of language death away from the trajectory toward extinction and realigned the efforts of language activists and advocates toward language life. I also problematized the temporal certainty of endangerment metaphors and the forgone conclusion of eradication and extinction to imagine possibilities for emergent language domains and relations. My focus on emergent vitality makes all so-called stages of “endangerment” not determinative of language extinction; rather, they are conditions of vitality that create potential for language futures that in turn advocates and activists create as communities of practice. The cartoon for the coauthored sixth extinction essay is one such example of emergent vitality, linguistic sovereignty, and awakening of language. Here, published for the first time (Figure 18.4), is the Maliseet language version of the complete cartoon (with the title for my personal cartoon series down the side).

FIGURE 18.4:  Having reservations: unpacking colonial baggage (Maliseet version). ©2015, Bernard C. Perley.

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While this cartoon was fun to create and use as the outline for the previously published (Baldwin et al. 2018) chapter, the original published cartoon is in English and the expected readership for the essay is English speaking/reading. My coauthors and I did not stop there. We translated the cartoon into Miaamia, Anishinaabemowin, and Maliseet. Unfortunately, the cartoons were not published with the essay but I did send the translations to my coauthors for their use in their own language activities. Recall the quote from Dr. Renee N. Salas, With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and well-being will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world. . . . Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there. (Pierre-Lewis 2021) The slow violence of colonialism has come home to roost. The second stage of the sixth extinction is upon us. Do we perpetuate the vectors of extinction that doom one and all? Or, do we look to rethink invasive concepts and their attendant practices to create harmonies between Indigenous worlds and settle/colonial worlds?

REPATRIATING TRADITIONAL TERRITORIES The waterfall at Grand Falls is still visible despite the dam just above the falls. However, “The Tobique Rock” has been submerged for seventy years due to the construction of a dam farther down the Wolastoq River. Three generations of children have not seen evidence of the Tobique Rock. Equally unfortunate, most of those same children have not heard the story of the Tobique Rock. Nor do they speak the Maliseet language. Not only are we seeing an erasure of deep time through development projects, we are also seeing the erasure of deep time through assimilatory pressures forced upon the residents of Tobique First Nation. I argue that the analysis of processes of erasure and erosion of natural and cultural heritage by development projects must incorporate Indigenous knowledge of deep time because the intimate knowledge of the landscape has also been erased. Indigenous knowledge of local landscapes is intimate knowledge, and it merits protection. However, protecting that knowledge should not be based on “advocacy” sentiments. Instead, it should be based on respecting the integrity of local Indigenous cultural heritages. Any effort to protect the natural and cultural heritage must acknowledge the rich Indigenous cultural heritages that know the natural landscape with the intimacy of “deep time.” The protection of tangible properties is difficult; the protection of intangible properties is even more difficult but necessary. It is a vital component to our collective natural and cultural heritage. The challenge for us, then, is to find ways to protect and preserve Indigenous deep time. There is currently no “official” protection or preservation of Maliseet knowledge regarding the formation of the landscape along the 40-kilometer stretch of the Wolastoq River between Neqotkuk and Kupskw. There is no marker for identifying the location of the Tobique Rock nor is there one for the persistently muddy pool of water. There are no programs to change or add the Maliseet names to maps, signs, brochures, and other forms of landscape markings. The evidence of Indigenous deep time (both geological and cultural) is submerged in the rivers of erasure and progress. It is a challenge for me as an Indigenous person to find ways to preserve Indigenous deep time. But I also

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challenge the nation-state, Canada, and the province of New Brunswick to re-inscribe Indigenous linguistic and cultural enchantments of space and place into Canadian and Provincial public life. Such re-enchantment will reinstate (as Weber aptly put it) “the ultimate and most sublime values” back into public life. The challenge I pose for the world’s population that will face the threats of natural disasters due to global warming is to work in terms of social justice framed in terms of equity and to imagine new origin stories where both worlds, Indigenous and settler, will configure a strategy to adapt to a changing world. What’s at stake? Losing Indigenous linguistic and cultural enchantments of the landscape impoverishes our collective human heritage (Harrison 2007). We need to tell new stories that include Indigenous voices. The failure to do so will deny all of us our human connections to the enchantments of deep time. The lessons to be learned include recognizing continuity in the face of extreme alienation of ancestral landscapes. Translocality will be the prevailing condition for the world’s population as we rush headlong into the second stage of the sixth extinction. The latest IPCC report offers a sobering outlook: we are out of time to turn things around. Our strategy must focus on mitigating the disasters to come. It is no longer just the Indigenous populations that suffer from global warming-induced environmental disasters. The wealthy are also being displaced by wildfires, floods, droughts, and so on. The old stories about progress and development are not going to change the course of the sixth extinction. The original draft of this chapter was sketched out in the fall of 2019. Since then, Covid-19 upended the world and continued to destabilize everyday life across the globe. Meanwhile, the horrors of climate change-related weather events punctuate the daily news with videos, audios, and images of people crying in anguish over displacement and alienation from their homes and lands. Among the tragic news over the past couple of years is the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children attending Canadian residential schools. Invasive concepts have contributed to generations of trauma for Indigenous peoples and they continue today. Can justice anchored in the Western intellectual tradition reconcile the deaths of hundreds/thousands of Indigenous children? Justice as fairness (Rawls 1999) and justice as a common good (Sandel 2009) offer a tapestry of social justice wherein the fine golden threads of Plato and Aristotle weave a deeply Western perspective. John Ralston Saul (2008) offers another option in considering the possibility that a just society cannot be based on Western denial. He argues that Canada is “a Métis civilization” based on an Indigenous conception of a “circle of fairness.” Canada lost its way when it subscribed to the myth of empire. He writes that “Colonialism is a denial of the reality of self in favor of an imaginary special position inside the mythology of someone else’s empire. That special position can never exist because empires have their own purpose” (Saul 2008, 19). Saul argues that Canada is a failed model of a just society based on “peace, order, and good government” because it has erased the lessons learned from its Indigenous populations. He discusses the works of contemporary Indigenous scholars Taiaiake Alfred and Dale Turner to reintroduce Indigenous thought into the conversation for a Canadian formulation of fairness. These two indigenous thinkers have a great deal to say to their communities, but also to Canadians as a whole. And what they are saying is far more relevant to our reality than the endless parsing of, for example, the early work of philosopher John Rawls

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and his liberal contractualism, with which so many of our university departments are obsessed. (Saul 2008, 76) Saul’s mission “to normalize the Aboriginal nature of Canada” requires attention to Indigenous languages. There were hundreds of indigenous languages. We are down to about sixty, coming from a dozen or so linguistic families. And many of these are slipping away . . . when one indigenous language slips away, it is as if heavy doors, once open and giving us access to a particular understanding of this place, have slammed shut, shutting us out forever. Part of our shared understanding is gone. That most of us do not speak these languages is irrelevant. Each of them is a passageway into the meaning of this place. Each one lost is a loss of meaning and possible understanding. (Saul 2008, 106) Similarly, I argue that settlers who refuse to learn Indigenous languages or the terms used by Indigenous peoples to describe their relation to their ancestral lands are doomed to live forever in a fantasy that will inflict immediate and slow violence on all (Perley 2020). Saul invokes the word witaskewin to describe its importance to a transformative justice where Indigenous values are related to ancestral lands. “Witaskewin. Living together on the land. Seeking balance. Seeking a broader harmony. Accepting this can only be multi-dimensional” (Perley 2020, 280). Despite Saul’s argument claiming that Indigenous influences on the Canadian imaginary have been erased to the detriment of all Canadians, his tepid conclusion or caveat “None of what I am suggesting should be seen as a solution or an answer” runs the risk of being just another abstraction similar to Rawls’s thought experiment “the veil of ignorance” (1999).18 These thoughts about justice as fairness should not be relegated to ideational fantasy. They must be operationalized if justice as fairness is to be actualized. One example of inscription linking Maliseet stories, language, and origin stories to landscape would be the inscription of Maliseet words in Maliseet ancestral lands and hearing the echoes of ancestral voices reverberate in the river valleys of the Wolastoq. Erasure need not be permanent but re-inscription requires collective action toward transformative justice. Transformative justice, not as reactive stance, but as proactive stance toward avoiding future harm. The cartoon in Figure 18.5 attempts to open the conversation and illustrate why words matter.​ In this moment of global upheaval and uncertainty, many tragedies have preoccupied our attention from the pandemic to climate disasters, from social justice movements to increased disparities between the wealthy and the poor. The impulse from many is a wish to return to normal, a return to how things were before the pandemic. We must not return to what was normal before the pandemic. That “normal” was what led to the upheavals we are grappling with today. Fortunately, there are indications that what was normal will not return. There are growing conversations in British Columbia arguing it is time to change the colonial name to reflect the land’s deep Indigenous roots (Robinson 2021). This is a potential re-inscription of Indigenous worlds back into ancestral lands. The Wolastoqey Chiefs have petitioned to reclaim the name of the Wolastoq for the river (Fortnum 2021). Both cases are efforts to actualize social justice as a transformative process. Trasformative justice through these collective efforts between Indigenous and settler/colonial communities is a recognition our collective health and well-being is at stake. These are important steps toward repatriating traditional territories through the re-inscription of place-names and their attendant Indigenous worlds.

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FIGURE 18.5:  Having reservations: belonging. © 2019, Bernard C. Perley. Printed by permission of the artist.

NOTES 1. I capitalize First Peoples here to show respect for the Indigenous peoples living in colonized lands. I also capitalize Indigenous to honor and respect those communities that continue to exercise their sovereignty in their traditional, ancestral, and often, unceded territories. For additional information, see Sapiens 2020 (https://www​.sapiens​.org​/language​ /capitalize​-indigenous/) and Indigenous Foundations (https://ind​igen​ousf​ound​ations​.arts​ .ubc​.ca​/terminology/).

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2. The variation in transcribing Indigenous languages and names in the traditional Coast Salish territories can be confusing and appear contradictory at times. I capitalize words and names to reflect local Indigenous practices and use italics to reflect Indigenous preferences as well. While I am compelled to follow publisher guidelines I also agree with Maori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville’s position that the foreign languages that should be italicized in Coast Salish territory and other Indigenous territories should be the colonial languages (Te Punga Somerville 2022). 3. The term “social justice” has a complex history and has been used for addressing disparities between populations. The current focus on language and social justice explores issues of social justice from the perspective of linguistic and semiotic entanglements. The editors of the recent collection of essays in Language and Social Justice in Practice (Avineri et al. 2019) articulate “social justice as a contested potentiality that critical perspectives on language can help us to interrogate and reimagine” (13). This chapter follows their lead in recognizing the value of contested potentiality through the critical lens of Indigenous language ideologies. 4. Grenier and Sakdapolrak write, “translocality (or translocalism) is merely used as a synonym for transnationalism. In most cases, however, it is used to build upon and extend insights from this long-established research tradition. As such, the term usually describes phenomena involving mobility, migration, circulation and spatial interconnectedness not necessarily limited to national boundaries” (Grenier and Sakdapolrak 2013: 373). 5. Specifically, I take “the critical stance of Indigenous emancipatory praxis that lies in emergent cosmogonical embodiments. I emphasize praxis to highlight the autonomy of Indigenous Peoples in their enactments of self-determination” (Perley 2020, 978). 6. I draw this formulation of transformative justice from the UN Women 2015 Global Study Report Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace. At the end of chapter five, under “Recommendations,” the authors state, “Member States, the UN, and civil society should: Adopt a transformative justice approach to programming for women’s access to justice, including by developing interventions that support legal orders to challenge the underlying sociocultural norms and contexts of inequality that perpetuate discrimination against women, and enable conflict-related violations to occur” (Coomaraswamy 2015, 124). 7. For a concise summary of the critique of the “Anthropocene” and the ascription of responsibility, see T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, 2017. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 8. The orthography of the Maliseet words used in this chapter reflects the preferred use and my collaboration with the Maliseet Curriculum Committee of Tobique First Nation. 9. I would also include the Passamaquoddy of Maine because, according to linguists, they speak “a mutually intelligible language” or “common language” (Erickson 1978, 123; LeSourd 2007, viii). 10. UNESCO Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger. Accessed on August 15, 2021 at http:// www​.unesco​.org​/languages​-atlas​/index​.php. 11. There are many international examples of Indigenous renaming of ancestral landscapes to reverse the erasure by colonial powers. Parks Australia notes that what was colonially know as Ayers Rock now shares the Indigenous name Uluru. According to their website, “The rock was called Uluru a long time before Europeans arrived in Australia. The word is a proper noun from the Pitjantjatjara language and doesn’t have an English translation. In 1873, the explorer William Gosse became the first non-Aboriginal person to see Uluru. He named it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, the Chief Secretary of South Australia at the time” (Parks Australia n.d.). Similarly, Welsh county councilor, John Pughe Roberts,

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is seeking to rename the highest mountain in Wales from the English “Snowdon” to the Welsh “Yr Wyddfa” because “If you lose the old names, you lose the heritage, you lose all the things that lie behind that name. If you lose the name, you lose an important part of the history of the area” (Morris 2021). There are many examples that do not enjoy such public attention but are equally important community-based efforts to re-inscribe themselves into their ancestral lands such as the Upper Perené Arawaks of Eastern Peru (Mihas 2014). 12. The term I use for empowering communities across experiences, be they Indigenous or settler, is “audience coalescence.” Coauthor Netta Avineri and I argued that audience coalescence “provides a framework for engaging in social justice issues that is flexible based on the participants involved, values diverse perspectives, and has the potential to counteract oppressive institutional structures” (ibid. 151). The essay in which we proposed this coalition building process was focused on the Native American mascots issue. Since the essay’s publication public pressure had compelled the owner of the Washington football organization to change its name, witnessed the retirement of the Cleveland baseball club’s moniker and mascot, and more schools and universities are changing their mascots and monikers. Our essay may not have had a direct impact on these changes but the coalescence of social action we describe had contributed to redressing the stealth racism against Native Americans. 13. The version of the Maliseet origin story “The Tobique Rock” I share in this chapter is my interpretation of the stories I have heard regarding Maliseet cosmogony. 14. I put the colonial name “St. John River” in quotes in this section to emphasize the colonial erasure of Maliseet names and to index re-inscription of Maliseet names in the rest of the chapter. “Beaver” and “Grand Falls” are also used in this section for the same reason. 15. The elder is also my mother Henrietta Black who has told me the story of the rock while I was growing up. 16. The translation for wolastoq most often shared is “the beautiful, bountiful river” (I am guilty of this as well), and the dictionary entry in the Maliseet–Passamaquoddy dictionary provides one definition: “St. John River” (Francis and Leavitt 2008, 620). However, a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis indicates “peaceful river.” 17. Calloway points out, “Europeans came to America to build farms and towns out of the forests that beckoned them. They meant to create a new world, not leave intact the one they found” (2013, 9–10). 18. Rawls posits a point of view for fair judgment in which the “veil of ignorance” is the stance for such a point of view. “The parties are not allowed to know the social positions or the particular comprehensive doctrines of the person they represent. They also do not know the persons’ race and ethnic group, sex, or various native endowments such as strength and intelligence, all within the normal range. We express these limits on information figuratively by saying the parties are behind a veil of ignorance” (Rawls 2001, 15).

REFERENCES Avineri, N., L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa, eds. (2019), “Introduction: Reimagining Language and Social Justice.” In Language and Social Justice in Practice, 1–16, New York: Routledge. Avineri, N., and B. C. Perley (2019), “Mascots, Name Calling, and Racial Slurs: Seeking Social Justice Through Audience Coalescence.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 147–56, New York: Routledge.

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Baldwin, D., M. Noodin, and B. C. Perley (2018), “Surviving the Sixth Extinction: American Indian Strategies for Life in the New World.” In R. Grusin (ed.), After Extinction, 201–33, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baldwin, D., and J. Olds (2007), “Miami Indian Language and Cultural Research at Miami University.” In D. M. Cobb and L. Fowler (eds.), Red Power: American Indian Politics and Activism Since 1900, 280–90, Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research. Bernardin, S. (2011), “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory: Printup Hope, Rickard, Gansworth.” In D. K. Cummings (ed.), Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, 161–88, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. Calloway, C. G. ([2013] 1997), New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, 2nd edn, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Coomaraswamy, R. (2015), “Preventing Conflict: Transforming Justice, Securing Peace.” UN Women. Available online: https://wps​.unwomen​.org​/pdf​/en​/globalstudy​_en​_web​.pdf (accessed September 3, 2023). Crystal, D. (2000), Language Death, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Demos, T. J. (2017), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Erickson, V. O. (1978), “Maliseet-Passamaquoddy.” In B. Trigger (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15: Northeast, 123–36, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Fortnum, T. (2021), “Wolastoqey Chiefs Formally Seek Name Change for St. John River.” Global News, June 30. Available online: https://globalnews​.ca​/news​/7990490​/wolastoqey​ -chiefs​-saint​-john​-river​-name​-change/ (accessed August 30, 2021). Francis, D. A., and R. M. Leavitt, eds. (2008), Peskotomuhkati Wolastoqewi Latuewakon, A Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Dictionary, Orono: University of Maine Press. Grenier, C., and P. Sakdapolrak (2013), “Translocality: Concepts, Applications, and Emerging Research Perspectives.” Geography Compass, 7/5: 373–84. Harrison, K. D. (2007), When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, J. (2002), “‘Expert Rhetorics’ in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who Is Listening and What Do They Hear?” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 12: 119–33. Hinton, L. (2001), “Sleeping Languages: Can They Be Awakened?” In L. Hinton and K. Hale (eds.), The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, 411–17, San Diego: Academic Press. Hopkins, C., and D. Robinson (2020), “Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.” UBC, Vancouver. September 8 to December 2, 2020. Huhndorf, S. M. (2009), Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irvine, J., and S. Gal (2000), “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, 35–83, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Leakey, R., and R. Lewin (1996), The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. LeSourd, P. S. (2007), Tales From Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl V. Teeter, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miami Tribe of Oklahoma (2008), Myaamiaki Eemamwiciki: Miami Awakening, Miami: Upstream Productions. Mihas, E. (2014), Upper Perené Arawak Narratives of History, Landscape, & Ritual, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Morris, S. (2021), Yr Wyddfa: Push for Snowdon to be known only by Welsh Name. Available online: https://www​.theguardian​.com​/uk​-news​/2021​/apr​/29​/yr​-wyddfa​-calls​-snowdon​-known​ -only​-by​-welsh​-name#:~​:text​=Eryri​%20(pronounced%20Eh%2Druh%2D,Latin%20 oriri%2C%20meaning%20to%20rise (accessed June 13, 2023). Nettle, D., and S. Romaine (2000), Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nixon, R. (2011), Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Parks Australia. Ayers Rock or Uluru? Available online: https://parksaustralia​.gov​.au​/uluru​/about​/ ayers​-rock​-or​-uluru/#:~​:text​=Ayers​%20Rock​%20was​%20the​%20most​,to​%20be​%20given​ %20dual​%20names (accessed June 13, 2023). Penner, D. (2019), “B. C. Makes History with Legislation to Implement UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights.” Vancouver Sun, October 24. Available online: https://vancouversun​ .com​/news​/local​-news​/b​-c​-makes​-history​-with​-legislation​-to​-implement​-un​-declaration​-on​ -indigenous​-rights (accessed November 15, 2019). Perley, B. C. (2020), “Indigenous Translocality: Emergent Cosmogonies in the New World Order.” Theory & Event, 23 (4): 977–1003. Perley, B. C. (2014), “Living Traditions: A Manifesto for Critical Indigeneity.” In L. R. Graham and H. G. Penny (eds.), Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences, 32–54, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perley, B. C. (2011), Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Perley, B. C. (In press), “Introduction: Remediating Cartographies of Erasure.” In B. C. Perley (ed.), Remediating Cartographies of Erasure: Anthropology, Indigenous Epistemologies, and the Global Imaginary, TBD, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pierre-Loius, K. (2021), “Climate Change Poses Threat to Children’s Health Worldwide.” New York Times, November 4. Available online: https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/11​/13​/climate​/ climate​-change​-child​-health​.html​?sea​rchR​esul​tPosition=2 (accessed December 4, 2022). Rawls, J. (2001), Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1999), A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rice, R. (2008), Kwah Ì:ken Tsi Iroquois/Oh So Iroquois/Tellement Iroquois, The Ottawa Art Gallery: Ottawa, the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective: Longford Mills, the Authors, and the Artists. Robinson, M. (2021), “Should British Columbia’s Name Be Changed?: Some Municipalities Think So.” Vancouver Sun, May 18. Available online: https://vancouversun​.com​/news​/local​ -news​/british​-columbia​-name​-flamed​-some​-b​-c​-municipalities​-down​-on​-the​-crown (accessed August 30, 2021). Robinson, D., and K. Zaiontz (2015), “Public Art in Vancouver and the Civic Infrastructure of Redress.” In G. L’Hirondelle Hill and S. McCall (eds.), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, 22–51, Winnipeg: Arp Books. Sandel, M. J. (2009), Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Saul, J. R. (2008), A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, Toronto: Viking. Simmons, G. F., and M. P. Lewis (2013), “The World’s Languages in Crisis: A 20-Year Update.” In E. Mihas, B. Perley, G. Rei-Doval, and K. Wheatley (eds.), Responses to Language Endangerment: In Honor of Mickey Noonan, 3–19, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Te Punga Somerville, A. (2022), Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised, Auckland: Auckland University Press. Watts, N. M., M. Amann, N. Arnell, S. Ayeb-Karlsson, K. Belesova, M. Boykoff, et al. (2019), “The 2019 Report of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Ensuring that the Health of a Child Born Today Is Not Defined by a Changing Climate.” The Lancet, 394: 1836–78. Weber, M. (1946), “Science as a Vocation.” In H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 129–56, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whyte, K. P. (2018), “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crisis.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1 (1–2): 224–42.

Chapter 19

Discursive Resistance, Communicative Refusal, and Food Provisioning in Santiago de Cuba HANNA GARTH

“Everyone says there is no food in Cuba.” As we sat chatting in her kitchen in July 2019, Maria Elizabeth commented to me as she cut pieces of cake and put them on plates for her grandchildren.1 “Who says? Haha. Today we had ice cream for lunch, with rice. And cake for dinner. Haha. If we don’t eat this we won’t have anything, there is food, but no real food to be found.” In a classically Cuban form of humor, known as el choteo (roughly translated as kidding around or joking) Maria Elizabeth laughed off the fact that her family had only eaten ice cream with a large serving of white rice for lunch along with cake for dinner. She was deeply aware of the problem of food availability in Cuban more generally and for her own household during that period. As she served her family cake for dinner, her boyfriend chimed in: “What are the three failures of the Cuban revolution?” In unison, we all responded to the now ubiquitous Cuban refrain, “Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner!” Failures of the revolution safely couched in a joke about food registered as failures at the kitchen table, and roaring laughter ensued. Cuban families draw upon a variety of strategies to communicate and express their frustrations with the faltering Cuban food distribution system. Based on over a decade of ethnographic work with twenty-two households across the city of Santiago de Cuba, this research analyzes the personal, social, and emotional repercussions of the faltering Cuban food system and details the reasons why Cubans continue to insist upon eating in a particular way rather than adjusting their food consumption habits to what is available. While sweeping changes have taken place over the course of this research (2008–19), recent political-economic changes, including the expansion of self-employment opportunities and increased acceptance of market economic mechanisms on the island, have done little to improve household food access; households in Santiago de Cuba still struggle to access basic ingredients and live with sporadic food shortages and economic hardship. Cubans share with others across the globe the experience of living through and responding to ongoing sociopolitical change. The changes in the socialist provisioning system that impact fundamental aspects of everyday life, like food access, leave citizens in a constant state

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of flux, always uncertain about whether or not they will be able to obtain the items they have grown accustomed to having. This feeling of uncertainty, a sense of precariousness, is something that is increasingly experienced in capitalist and neoliberal contexts as well. However, precariousness is not only a condition of neoliberal capitalism but is also experienced in socialist settings and expressed through uniquely socialist discourses, like the forms of el choteo, communicative refusal, and discursive resistance that I illuminate later in this chapter.2 Drawing on Cavanaugh et al. (2014), I analyze the ways Cubans articulate “the ideological (re)evaluation of food(s) [. . .] as ‘good,’ ‘real’ or ‘authentic,’ [and] the production and reproduction of moral order via food-and-language socialization” (95). Cubans assert their own understandings of what an adequate food system would be through diverse communicative practices linked to food, and these do not align with the Cuban state’s form of paternalistic social justice for food provisioning (Garth 2020). The Cuban households that I studied engaged in all four types of food-and-language communication that Riley and Cavanaugh (2017) outline: “language about food” (from jokes to serious statements and large-scale discourses), “language around food” (while shopping, eating, etc.), “language through food” (categorizations of food are communications of identity), and “language as food” (jokes and hidden transcripts have a way of nourishing them). Drawing on my analysis of Cuban food-related communication, I argue that the logics of social justice, deriving from Western philosophical traditions concerned with distributions of wealth to minimize inequality, are not well aligned with local narratives of what it means to have an adequate food system and live a good life because these types of understandings of social justice do not account for historical and cultural meanings attached to food. Instead, following the logic of my research participants, I propose moving away from social justice frameworks toward a more intersectional, grassroots approach to understanding communal well-being, equality, and food provisioning. In this chapter, I analyze the communicative dimensions of how people negotiate precariousness and struggle to live a good life by focusing on three different intersections of food and communication that I observed in my research. I begin with the necessary historical trajectory of Cuba’s current food system and argue that this food system, though an essential entitlement that can be seen as a form of social justice necessary for Cuban survival, also creates a form of precariousness for Cubans struggling to get by within the system. I then draw on ethnographic cases to analyze how Cubans communicate their dissatisfaction with the food system. I also analyze how food presentation and the parts of a meal communicate decency, care, and distinction, as well as the forms of discursive resistance and communicative refusal employed by Cubans. While the Cuban state might interpret the consumption of any kind of meal as successful redistribution and Cuban resilience, the Cuban families that I work with often only view meals that meet their historical, cultural, and aesthetic standards as a sign of success and a symbol of living a good life. That is to say, the state forms of redistribution—state-based social justice programs—aim to keep Cubans alive, which they are successful at doing; however, the Cubans that I work with want more than to merely survive, they want to live a good life. Food, specifically the decent meal, thus becomes a symbol of living the good life (see Garth 2020, 2019).

BACKGROUND AND METHODS This research was designed to address the question of how Cuban families are able to get food on the table, given the reductions in food availability, which have been ongoing

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since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the period of economic hardship in the 1990s known as the Special Period in Time of Peace. During this time, the state implemented policies similar to wartime measures of reductions in services and goods. Food imports and agricultural inputs decreased abruptly. Because Soviet imports had formed the basis of Cuba’s food system and supplied inputs for agriculture since the 1960s, the food system radically changed. In the 1990s many food products became scarce and those that were available off the ration had prohibitively high prices (Garth 2009). The number of rationed products increased in the Special Period, from only nineteen items in the 1980s to most food in the 1990s (Wright 2009). Food acquisition became a daily struggle (Eckstein 2003). To deal with the food shortages, the state attempted to shift consumption practices by introducing new foods into the Cuban diet. For instance, as I will elaborate on later, soy and other vegetable proteins were substituted for meat; soy products were substituted for dairy; and people were encouraged to eat more vegetables, tubers, and legumes. Along with rice, plantains, root crops, and beans have long been central to an ideal Cuban meal (Enríquez 1994), but more easily sourced plantains and root crops were encouraged in the Special Period. This history demonstrates some of how notions of Cuba’s “traditional” food may simultaneously hold multiple meanings depending on which periods of history we look back to. Today every Cuban citizen is still eligible for a ration card, with which they can purchase basic food items. Prices are very heavily subsidized, but households must pay nearly twenty-five national pesos (CUP) per month, the approximate equivalent of one US dollar. As always, the items included in the ration fluctuate with national scarcities and surpluses. The rationed foods are drawn from a mixture of imports, items locally processed from imported raw materials, and entirely locally produced foods (Wright 2009). Still, with heavy reliance on food imports, Cuba’s socialist food system continues to be deeply entrenched in the global industrial food system. Shifts in costs on the global market or local issues with agricultural production can result in food scarcities or price increases, leaving some Cubans with little freedom to choose their ingredients in practice. To study the lived experience of the struggle to acquire food, I chose to use more in-depth, intensive methods with twenty-two households in order to gain an understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of daily life from research participants’ perspectives. Some of the participating households were introduced to me through my sponsoring institution, the Casa del Caribe (Caribbean House),3 which also hosted me and facilitated my educational visa in 2010 and 2011.4 After a few initial invitations, I began to find households on my own, through introductions by friends or the households that had participated earlier. I tried to include households where at least two members were of working age (18–60), and that included at least one other household member.5 My fieldwork involved “deep hanging out.” I spent 12–18 hours per day for three weeks to one month with each of the households in the study.6 All of these interactions took place in Spanish. “Deep hanging out” included participant observation, or actively engaging and participating in the tasks of everyday life with my research participants, but because I was committed to remaining with participants and in their households for so many hours each day, my methods also took on other elements of “deep hanging out” where I would join families in all matter of mundane activities, from the afternoon siesta to watching telenovelas, to sitting in silence while relaxing in living room rocking chairs.

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These kinds of activities took place around food-related routines; relaxing while meat or tubers slowly softened in the pressure cooker, waiting for frozen meat to defrost before cooking, or allowing food to digest before engaging in too much activity. As part of this deep hanging out, I tried to observe all of their ingestive practices and all household food acquisition activities which take place at any moment, some rather quickly, others very slowly.7 I developed observation protocols, collected time allocation data, photographed household kitchens and meals, had household members keep food diaries, conducted a series of interviews with all of the consenting adults, and I tried to ingest all of the food and drinks that they did. I also approximated socioeconomic status with a household asset elicitation technique similar to those used by Weller (1998) and DeWalt and Pelto (1977), where a series of questions determined common household assets and forms of productive capital, and then the households were asked to rank sets of assets and capital from high to low SES. Although I was sure to just sit back and observe at first, toward the end of the time in each household my deep hanging out often became a form of observant participation as I would be enlisted to do things like watch the baby, cut some tomatoes, do the dishes, feed the pigs, or any number of household tasks. I was careful to oblige requests to help out around the house without stepping too far into someone else’s social role and without shifting household food practices too much. Indeed, the main reason I decided to spend three weeks to one month in each household was that I found that it took a week or two for people to stop performing for the researcher and slip back into their normal habits. This ethnographic depth provides critical insight into everyday life in Cuba. During this time, I was able to observe and record a variety of naturalistic interactions among the families that participated in my research. While interviews were planned and involved me asking a series of open-ended questions with a recorder as well as a conversation about IRB, research ethics, and oral consent, naturalistic interactions were spontaneous conversations around food that were not part of my interview questions. Naturalistic interactions were initiated by participants and either directed at others or me. When the conditions permitted, I would ask to record these conversations as part of my research. Many of these naturalistic interactions revolved around food, in part because my presence and the fact that it was my topic of study likely elicited thoughts on food, but also because it is an extremely common topic of conversation and a daily focus of stress and preoccupation. In my data analysis, I found that rumors, gossip, hidden transcripts, and other veiled forms of speech including black humor were used to quietly critique power (Scott 1985). These were forms of narrative expression that my research participants used to discuss and debate their changing social world. In contemporary Cuba, overt expressions of dissonance can have negative consequences, such as sanctions and the loss of certain rights, and many of my research participants feared public forms of resistance. Hidden transcripts allowed them to express their dissatisfaction in a safer form of veiled speech in public contexts (Black 2012). Many spoke in veiled language even with their closest friends and family, likely because they feared that someone might be eavesdropping or spying on their conversations even in their own homes. Hidden transcripts have a long history in Caribbean communication, possibly beginning with the musical and folkloric traditions of slave society, such as refranes (sayings) that were used as a “means of resisting oppression from a more or less safe position” (Barcia 2008, 119). Under a system where overt protest is not possible, cryptic speech and communication via rumor are crucial forms of discursive resistance to the master narrative (see also Gal 1995; Humphrey 1994; Scott 1985). While some topics of conversation required more secrecy, references

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to food and the food system, as in the joke about “Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner” as the failures of the revolution, were more acceptable forms of somewhat veiled critiques of the Cuban government.

THE FOOD PROBLEM In socialist Cuba, food distribution is a form of state-based social justice that is primarily concerned with how wealth and privileges are distributed in society. Food distribution is part of a set of socialist entitlements that are meant to provide all Cuban citizens with free or extremely low-cost basic needs. In addition to food distribution, this includes free education (Blum 2011), free healthcare (Brotherton 2012; Andaya 2014), extremely low-cost housing, and basic utilities such as electricity and water. The socialist food rationing system guarantees Cubans a basic breadbasket of food, which they must augment with their own food purchases. In recent years, the problem with these systems has been that the Cuban state does not have enough resources to adequately supply the population with all of these entitlements at the level of quality that citizens expect. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuban society was both heavily dependent on food imports and characterized by inequality. Cuba’s agricultural system was almost entirely based on sugar production for export, which accounted for over 80 percent of all Cuban exports and one-quarter of the country’s national income. At the national level, Cuba was among the most developed countries in Latin America, with a high standard of living, and high social indicators, such as literacy. However, there were also very high rates of inequality. Those who lived in the countryside and contributed to the labor on sugar plantations lived in deep poverty, had very low rates of literacy, and had little social or economic mobility. These circumstances were part of what gave rise to the revolution of 1959, which would eventually bring a socialist economic system to Cuba. Cuba’s food rationing system was implemented in 1962. Shortages after the revolution and the US embargo in the early 1960s were further exacerbated by speculation and hoarding. To combat these issues, the resale of certain basic goods was made illegal in 1961 (Benjamin et al. 1984). The National Board for the Distribution of Foodstuffs was created in March 1962, which established the rationing of rice, beans, cooking oil, and lard across Cuba. Soap, detergent, and toothpaste were rationed in twenty-six major cities and eventually across the entire island. Beef, chicken, fish, eggs, milk, and sweet potatoes were only rationed in Havana at first and eventually were included in the ration across the country (Benjamin et al. 1984). Initially, the food ration was expected to be a temporary solution to the problems with transitioning to socialism. Although there were production increases the ration was never fully eliminated. The early ration booklet optimistically included ham, cheese, pepperoni, sausage, beef, pork, lamb, goat, fish, seafood, fruits, and vegetables, but due to a lack of state resources, most of these items were never actually available. At the start of my research in 2008, the monthly ration in Santiago included the following items per person: 5 pounds of white rice, 10 ounces of beans, 3 pounds of refined sugar, 1 pound of raw sugar, 1 kilogram of salt, 4 ounces of coffee, 250 milliliters of oil, and a roll of bread per day. Meat products consisted of 6 ounces of chicken, 11 ounces of fish, 10 eggs, and 8 ounces of ground meat mixed with soy. Though not its original purpose, today food rationing serves as the primary means to equitably distribute basic foods and avoid certain consequences of food scarcity.

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The problem for most Cubans is that they have come to expect more from the Cuban government concerning the quantity and quality of food that is distributed at subsidized prices, but the state has not been able to adequately fulfill this supply.

EXPERIENCING FOOD ACQUISITION “Hey, Hanna, did I tell you the joke about the ration? So, there is a sign on the ration station that says ‘Hay Cancoca’ (There’s Cancoca), so you walk in and they say, ‘Hay cancoca, pero no te toca. Te toca escambray, pero no hay.’ (There is cancoca but it is not your turn, it is your turn for escambray, but there isn’t any).” Mickey laughed hysterically, doubling over and clapping his hands, as he moved toward me for a high five. It was not the first time I had heard the joke about these two made-up food items, one in stock but it is not your turn for it and the one for which it is your turn is out of stock. In my observation, the joke was about the typical problems with food acquisition for people in Santiago de Cuba. In his analysis of Western Apache men mocking and joking about “the White Man,” Keith Basso (1979) illuminated the ways in “which humor is put in the management of social relations” (6), serving both a “pragmatic function” to communicate specific messages and an “interpretive function” that discusses how people conceptualize the persons, activities, or in this case things (food) that they are joking about (16). Through the cancoca joke, Mickey communicated various aspects of his experience with food acquisition to me. Although Mickey and Maria Elizabeth turn to humor to express their frustrations with the Cuban food system, accessing food and, in particular, the types of ingredients necessary to make “traditional cuisine” is often very difficult and cumbersome; many characterize the daily task of searching for food as una lucha (a struggle) that is exceedingly difficult for Cuban families. Like the native communities Basso wrote about, it is common for Cubans to “find the humorous side to every problem” (Deloria 1970); they draw upon these forms of humor to analyze discourse and their living conditions. During one of my visits in the summer of 2017, Maria Julia had in mind to make arroz con pollo (chicken and rice), a ubiquitous Cuban dish thought to be central to “traditional” Cuban cuisine. She and her family loved arroz con pollo for its flavor, and as a cook, she loved preparing it for its relative simplicity and the ease of being able to use fewer pots and pans. Although she wanted to make this dish, she did not already have chicken on hand. She and I set out to buy chicken. First, she checked at the carniceria (butcher ration station) where the meat rations are available, but they only had picadillo (ground meat) and no chicken. We continued walking toward the market on Calle Marti where Maria Julia usually bought meat when there was nothing available in the rations. When we arrived at the market all of the meat vendors only had pork. After we walked past all of the meat counters, Maria Julia sighed and grumbled, asking rhetorically “Why is everything a struggle?” She then went on to tell me how difficult it had been to find chicken for the better part of a year. I reminded her that she had told me about chicken shortages in an email back in 2014 as well, implying that the shortages of chicken had been going on for quite some time. She remembered, smiled, and retorted “Viste (You see), there is no food in Cuba,” referring to my own 2017 article with the same title that I had shared with her (Garth 2017). She threw up her hands, rolled her eyes, and said “Ok, we are just going to make spaghetti with picadillo.” And, we headed back to the carniceria to pick up the picadillo ration. Maria Julia’s desire to make a particular dish, as well as the process of going out to find the ingredients for that dish not yielding what is necessary, was a commonly shared

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experience among my research participants. I have written about similar cases elsewhere (Garth 2014). In many cases, people want to make something particular that is a beloved dish for themselves or their loved ones, and they simply cannot make it so they give up entirely and make something else, as in the case of Maria Julia. In other cases, they might search for the particular ingredients for a dish and find enough to make it come together but still be missing ingredients that are viewed as central to the dish. For example, as I have written about elsewhere (Garth 2019), unlike arroz con pollo which absolutely must have chicken, some dishes can still be made without key ingredients, as was the case with Alonzo’s ensalada fria (macaroni salad). Alonzo had scoured the city for all of the ingredients that the dish should have and although he was missing several key components, he still made a version of macaroni salad, but was sure to inform me that it was not “real.” I do not want you to have the impression that this is ensalada fría. It is important that you know that this is a bad version, a substitute for the real thing. But we had to work with whatever appears, and you saw that there was nothing. This is what we have to eat for the party, but it is not real. (As quoted in Garth 2019, 9) Alonzo clearly underscores that there is a “real ensalada fria” and what he has been able to piece together is fake, “a bad version,” or a substitute for the real thing. Beyond this pragmatic level of communication, his reflections also have the interpretive function of communicating with us that the state food distribution system—a state-based form of social justice—is insufficient for meeting the standards for “real” food (Basso 1979). Alonzo’s assertions function as a way of critiquing the state’s form of social justice as inadequate. As I elaborate below, these kinds of reflections are one form of communicative refusal that my research participants engaged in.

COMMUNICATIVE REFUSAL “This is not food” is a statement that Cuban families have often made to me during my research since 2008. Other times they would note that the food that they did have was not the “real” version of the dish or was not as it should be. This was very common with meatbased dishes. In particular, the substitution or mixture of soy-based meat products for or with meat products that had previously been sold without the mixture or substitution. “You know our ground meat isn’t real right?” Yorklanky offered up this question as we sat down to eat two plates of Cuban spaghetti, with a sauce that contained picadillo. I nodded and told him that people had told me this for many years. “Yeah, it’s made of soy, it’s a trick. Not meat at all.” Yorklanky continued as he began shoveling dinner into his mouth. He was one of the dozens of Cubans with whom I have discussed the picadillo issue. One of the most extensive interviews I have had about soy products was with Carolina, a manager at the soy processing plant in Santiago de Cuba. I sat down with Carolina during the summer of 2008, and we discussed Cuba’s changing food system and the role of soy products in those changes. Carolina was thirty-four years old, a fair-skinned, very thin woman, she identified as white and middle class. Carolina lived with her parents and son, in a modest apartment in the city center; she had lived in Santiago de Cuba all of her life. She studied English in college, which landed her her first job in 1999 as a translator for the new soy processing plant that opened in 2001 in Santiago de Cuba as a joint venture with a Canadian

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company. Carolina was the principal translator throughout the years of establishing the plant, and she remained there as a manager by the time I interviewed her in 2008. I asked her: “Can you tell me the logic for creating a soy processing plant, in other words, why did they make a soy plant?” and she responded: Well to me it seems like they decided to create a plant here because in the late 1990s we were beginning to completely change our food system and we [had been] importing a lot of products from other countries, like meat products and dairy and it was very costly. So the soy plant was to substitute those types of imports. We had never had food products with soy in them before, and it was seen as a cheaper way of getting food to the people. So the objective was to make the plant right here so that we could make these products in Cuba and not have to import them, there would be no necessity. I asked if Cuba grows much soy and Carolina interjected: No, the beans are not grown here. The soybeans are imported from Brazil, and the United States, we don’t have the conditions for growing so, so it has been discussed and in the future, we might try to grow it, but for now, it is imported. She elaborated that they processed raw soybeans into several products in the factory. They produced soy yogurt, which was distributed to children between ages seven and fourteen across the island; soy flour, which was distributed to state bakeries across the island; soy cooking oil, which was sold in hard currency stores and sometimes exported; and a soy-based meat substitute known as the picadillo, which was distributed in Cuba’s ration. Although soy also had to be imported, they were able to save costs by importing it as raw material and processing it on the island, and soy-based products were cheaper in general than animal-based dairy and meat. I commented that it seemed like the factory produced a lot, and Carolina made a face and said, “It doesn’t really matter because everyone hates it all.” I asked her if she ate it, and she said: The ground meat—no. There are those who like the soy ground meat, I can eat it, but I have to be careful how I prepare it. I can fry it and eat it like a fritter and my body tolerates it better, but to just sauté it and pretend as if it were meat, no, I can’t do that. Carolina and Yorklanky practice two forms of refusal. Carolina for the most part avoids soy-based meat and dairy products, citing adverse bodily responses to the food. She notes however that she can occasionally tolerate it when it is prepared in certain ways. These practices stand in contrast to Yorklanky (and others like him), who continues eating the soy-based meat, but refuses to categorize it as meat, instead calling it out as “not real” or “a trick.” I call this form of categorization “communicative refusal,” because the product is not completely refused as it is still consumed, but people refuse to categorize it as meat or “real.” To call the food “a trick” also makes an indirect reference to how the state food distribution system is experienced as inadequate. This form of communicative refusal also happens with foods other than meat. For example, the fongo is a type of plantain that until the 1990s was used mainly as animal feed and was not considered to be “real food” for human consumption. However, since at least the early 2000s the fongo has become quite commonplace at the Cuban dinner table. It is common for the fongo to be the only type of plantain available in local markets. I observed that it was extremely common for families in Santiago to consume the fongo when no other plantains were available. However, when it was served the families almost

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always were sure to point out to me that it had never been meant for human consumption, that it was supposed to be animal feed, and that it is not and was never considered “real food.” They would go on to explain that they have come to accept that it is what they eat because, after all, it does not have a bad taste, provides them with so many nutrients, and is much cheaper than other types of plantains. These language practices of categorizing and recategorizing particular food items and meals used here operate as semiotic processes, specifically a form of “iconization” (Irvine and Gal 2000), where those foods that are described as “real” and meals that are “decent” become iconic of the ideological representation of what it means to be Cuban and the boundaries of Cubanidad (Cuban identity). Alternative terms and euphemisms are employed, avoiding direct critique of the state, instead implying insufficiency (Black 2012). Forms of “erasure” (Irvine and Gal 2000) are also at play here, as things like cake and the fongo, regardless of their edibility and the fact that they are readily consumed, are erased as “not food” or “not real.” That is, the practice of communicative refusal and the linguistic categorization of certain foods as “real” or “nor real” regardless of whether they consume those foods or not helps Cubans to draw a line between who they are really and who the state and international trade relations might be pushing them to become. “Real” food is thus a symbol aligned with Cubans’ notions of what an adequate food system that took into account their social and cultural standards for cuisine would look like. In turn, “tricks” and foods that are “not real” are aligned with state distribution systems as symbols of their failures and inadequacy.

DISCURSIVE RESISTANCE The forms of communicative refusal outlined in this chapter are also part of a larger phenomenon that I have called “discursive resistance” (see Garth 2013). For many people from Santiago de Cuba, practices like communicative refusal are part of a broader practice of discursive resistance, which is a sociopolitical commentary: to disparage the available food is a way of rejecting the recent changes in Cuba’s food system. As such, even as people refuse to acknowledge the available food as adequate or ideal, they nevertheless continue to consume it. On one level these forms of resistance and refusal are simply about preferences for certain kinds of foods over others. However, on a deeper level, this resistance and refusal is also a critique of the Cuban government’s socialist entitlement programs and how they have changed in recent years. In addition to the forms of iconization and erasure that I discussed above, these communicative practices can also be a form of “fractal recursivity” (Irvine and Gal 2000), where rejections of particular food items can be seen as rejections of the state. The categorization of food as real or not real, good or bad, is projected onto how Cubans reflect on their government. In her long-term research in Santiago de Cuba, Kristina Wirtz (2017) has also observed how fractal semiotic processes work across spatiotemporal dimensions to impact the “dynamic politics of identity connecting distinct orders or neighborhood city, nation, and diasporic belonging” (59). Wirtz extends the use of fractal to coin the term “fractal belonging,” which “emphasizes the extent to which interactions doubly perform affiliation and difference across place, race, and nation” (61). Here, communication at the dinner table can reflect ideological stances at the level of the state and transnational global relations, either performing affiliation or distance.

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While many Cubans readily participate in these forms of iconicity, fractal recursivity, and erasure, in the following example Gerardo takes a different approach and instead communicates more directly what his stance is. In the middle of a conversational interview on the stoop of his house, Gerardo asserted: The majority of Cubans are going to tell you that the government is ruining our food, that we can’t find the ingredients we need, and that what is out there is too expensive so we can’t buy it. They will say that the government is ruining our way of life. But I view it somewhat differently. I think that what Cubans really want is to be independent, to be able to live life as they please, so even though the government doesn’t provide us with what we need or is raising the prices of goods so high we can’t buy them and doesn’t raise our salaries—what matters is that we persist, we keep surviving, we might be eating crappy bread with mayonnaise for dinner, but we won’t let them kill who we are. We struggle and struggle and we keep on surviving. I asked if he was saying that it was not so important that people were not able to make their “traditional” dishes anymore. He replied: “No, it’s a tragedy that we can’t make our food. But instead of thinking about that, why not focus on what we can do, how we have been able to survive.” Gerardo’s speech is an unveiled critique of the situation; he does not want to participate in the forms of communicative iconicity or erasure that others have, and instead prefers to directly state that the problem is that salaries are too low for Cubans to purchase the foods that they want to eat, that they are instead forced to consume what the government doles out to them, and he feels that what Cubans want is “to be independent” or exercise free will and choice over what they eat and how they live their lives. While the language Gerardo employs may appear to be based on neoliberal capitalist logic, based on his use of collective terminology such as “we” and “our,” I interpret his reflections to be a critique of the form that the social justice food distribution system has taken in Cuba. His desire to shift the conversation to reflections on what “we” can do and how “we” have been able to survive points to a need to reflect on collective action and collective desires for what it means to live a good life. While from some perspectives the Cuban food distribution system is a form of social justice—that is, a form of wealth redistribution—many Cubans experience the food system as a struggle that amplifies the precariousness of their lives as they know it. Within a social justice framework, the Cuban food system lacks an even distribution of liberty and opportunity. The Cuban government’s social justice programming, while it guarantees basic survival, becomes another struggle that Cuban citizens have to overcome and fight against to live the lives they want to live, thus rendering certain aspects of their lives even more precarious. While precarity has been described as “a shorthand for those of us documenting the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails” (Muehlebach 2013, 298), or “life without the promise of stability” (Tsing 2015, 2), a “modality of being marked by indeterminacy that is less the exception than the condition of our times” (Allison 2016, 1), the Cuban families that I have studied experience a different form of ongoing precariousness. Following Judith Butler, precariousness is an existential condition, it is an experience of vulnerability, uncertainty, and fragility that operates at the ontological level, calling into question what it means to live a good life and “what is real?” (Butler 2004, 3). From the perspective of many Cubans, changes in state provisioning and entitlements contribute to growing forms of precariousness or

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exacerbate existing forms of economic vulnerability, which Cubans grapple with, in part, through these forms of discursive resistance and communicative refusal. The changes in the socialist provisioning system that impact fundamental aspects of everyday life, like food access, leave Cubans in a constant state of flux, always uncertain about whether or not they will be able to obtain the items they have grown accustomed to having. This feeling of uncertainty, a sense of precariousness, is something that is increasingly experienced in capitalist and neoliberal contexts as well, but as this data illuminates, precariousness is not only a condition of neoliberal capitalism. Cubans share with others across the globe the experience of living through and responding to ongoing sociopolitical change. Amid mounting uncertainty and precarious existence, individuals and communities grapple with how they will maintain the freedom necessary to build meaningful lives. In the environment of shifting food access within a country with extremely low levels of hunger and malnutrition, the emergent forms of precariousness are less related to extreme forms of violent oppression and more focused on the slow and subtle erosion of long-standing expectations for a good life as the welfare state recedes. Precariousness and adequacy are political, and the forms of vulnerability induced by shifting power relations have deeply affective dimensions. The Cuban case is one among many in the world today where consumption as a global process is embedded in particular historical, political, and social contexts. Household consumption practices lie at the center of tensions between state authority and individual desires. This tension between various forms of precariousness that Cubans face and their own understandings of what an adequate provisioning system would look like is particularly visible in post-Soviet Cuba because it is a context where the population still expects the socialist government to provide many, if not all of life’s necessities, including food. Whereas in other settings precarity can be blamed on individual moral failing, or lack of corporate responsibility, the precariousness of life in Cuba today is more easily blamed on the state, and in many subtle ways, many Cubans do just that. In the context of access to food, the structures of feelings that boil over with the changing practices of everyday life in institutional and intersubjective contexts are also shifting certain forms of subjectivity in Cuba today.8 As the Cuban food system changes, Cubans employ discursive resistance and communicative refusal as a way to articulate their ideological stances toward food itself and to express their reflections on the work of the Cuban government during difficult political-economic shifts. Cubans assert their own understandings of what an adequate food system would be, and these understandings do not align with the Cuban state’s paternalistic understanding of food provisioning, which is its own social justice framework. Here the logics of social justice, deriving from Western philosophical traditions, heavily drawn from Marx in the Cuban case, are not well aligned with local narratives of what it means to have an adequate food system and live a good life. Gerardo’s reflections that Cubans want to be “independent,” and “able to live life as they please,” are different kinds of orientations to the provisioning of basic needs than the top-down social justice approach currently used by the Cuban government, and these are also critical aspects of Cuban socialism as they pertain to being independent from Western hegemony and imperialism. While Gerardo’s reflections may appear to be based on neoliberal logics, instead I interpret Gerardo’s reflections to be more oriented toward an intersectional, grassroots approach to understanding communal well-being, equality, and food provisioning. Gerardo and many of the other participants included here communicate

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opposition to “social justice” that is imposed upon them by officials who are far removed from their everyday struggles.

CONCLUSIONS Cubans employ language about food to assert their stances toward the food system as a way to reject government provisioning systems that do not align with their local understandings of traditional cultural foodways. Their “language about food” can take the form of direct commentary (Riley and Cavanaugh 2017), they draw upon hidden transcripts and euphemisms (Black 2012), or humor that is “deeply ambiguous” and touches on multiple aspects of social life (Besnier 2016) to employ a language of refusal and resistance. These forms of humor and hidden transcripts can also be understood as “language through food,” which functions to communicate the links between food and identity. In addition, they use “language around food” to communicate their (dis) satisfaction with the food system, as they struggle to acquire foods that meet their standards. Through these forms of communication, they discursively undermine government forms of social justice as insufficient for meeting their full needs, thus giving voice to the desires of Cuban citizens. All of the ways in which Cubans communicate about food also have the potential to be “language as food,” a way of communicating and interacting with one another that is “nourishing” and “filling” when the food system itself leaves them feeling unsatisfied. Connections between adequate food and subjectivity derive from particular narratives that individuals and communities have long used to interpret the ways in which their everyday lives are linked to a nexus of national and international people and things. After decades of living with uncertainty and shifting forms of meaning-making in post-Soviet Cuba, Cubans experience a widening gap between their everyday practices of food consumption and idealized narratives linking food and subjectivity. This disconnect can shift how they envision themselves as part of an “imagined community” of Cubans, of socialists, of people struggling to get by. In some cases, this break can manifest as an almost frantic clinging to the traditions that are linked to a particular sense of subjectivity. For some people, it is the presence of those traditions that serves as an indication that some things are still in place and not everything has changed. Beyond the desire to maintain traditions, shifting patterns of food access also illuminate and exacerbate forms of inequality in Cuba. As a central objective of Cuban socialism, equal access to basic needs is an ideological principle that many Cubans buy into. When there are indications that the system can no longer guarantee basic needs for all, many Cubans may feel further unmoored from their sense of what is necessary to live a good life. Since the time of this research, the Covid-19 pandemic and related quarantines have upended the food distribution system in many places across the globe. Food scarcity, difficulties accessing the foods one is used to consuming, and fear over the potential inability to access food became, even if briefly, common in many communities as they adjusted to life during the pandemic. The struggle to access food that many experienced for the first time in their lives in the early months of 2020 has been common in Cuba for the last sixty years (Yates-Doerr 2020). Several factors, including the Covid-19 pandemic, have exacerbated Cuba’s food distribution system and food scarcities worsened in 2020. Although Cuba’s robust public health and medical systems were able to control the spread of the virus, Cubans were left with no other option than to queue in massive lines for food while they were supposed to be quarantined to minimize exposure to the virus (see Bastian and Garth 2020).

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NOTES 1. All proper names used here are pseudonyms to protect the identity of research participants in accordance with the IRB. 2. For more discussion on the notion of precarity within anthropology, see Allison (2012), Biehl (2005), Garcia (2010), Molé (2010), Muehlebach (2013), and Stewart (2007). 3. The Casa del Caribe (Caribbean House), located in Santiago de Cuba, is a small institute for the study of Caribbean culture. While the focus is broadly on culture there is an emphasis on African pantheon religions. Founded in 1982 the Casa del Caribe hosts Santiago’s annual Festival del Fuego (Fire Festival), which invites delegates from another Caribbean country or region to spend four days in Santiago every July exchanging information about cultural traditions. 4. I first traveled to Cuba in 2001. I have conducted Cuba-related research since 2005 and began this specific focus on Cuban food in 2007. Preliminary fieldwork was conducted in 2008 and 2009. Long-term fieldwork was conducted in 2010 and 2011. Later, follow-up trips took place in 2016, 2017, and 2019. 5. Children were not interviewed but their lives and their food consumption needs were an integral part of all other aspects of the research. 6. While I was conducting research in Cuba, I always had an officially licensed Casa Particular (guest house) where I was staying. During fieldwork, I moved to four different guest houses in various parts of the city to facilitate my fieldwork and get to know different areas better. Although I always had an official guest house, in some cases I would stay in the household that I was studying for the duration of the study period; this was the case with the households outside of the city as transportation each morning and evening was not possible. 7. In an effort to include more households, I attempted to train and utilize a research assistant. I approached a young woman who had told me she was interested in “cultural studies” and had her come with me to observe my process of studying the households. I arranged for her to observe in a household that I knew relatively well and had agreed to participate in the study. However, after three days they told me that she stopped showing up. When I approached her about this she explained that she found the work to be too boring and could not bear to continue. After that attempt I did not try to use a research assistant again, and I finished the study of that household myself. 8. Several scholars have noted the importance of understanding the practices of everyday life in institutional and intersubjective encounters (Fischer 2003; Tsing 1993).

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Barcia, M. (2008), Seeds of Insurrection, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Benjamin, M., J. Collins, and M. Scott (1984), No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Besnier, N. (2016), “Humour and Humility: Narratives of Modernity on Nukulaelae Atoll.” University of Amsterdam. Etnofoor, Humour, 28 (1): 75–95. Biehl, J. (2005), Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, Berkeley: University of California Press. Black, S. P. (2012), “Laughing to Death: Joking as Support amid Stigma for Zulu-Speaking South Africans Living with HIV.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22 (1): 87–108. Blum, D. F. (2011), Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Educating the New Socialist Citizen, Austin: University of Texas Press. Brotherton, P. S. (2012), Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in Post-Soviet Cuba, Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Cavanaugh, J. R., K. C. Riley, A. Jaffe, C. Jourdan, M. Karrebaek, and A. Paugh (2014), “What Words Bring to the Table: The Linguistic Anthropological Toolkit as Applied to the Study of Food.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 24 (1): 84–97. Deloria, V. (1970), Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York: Avon Books. DeWalt and Pelto (1977), “Food Use and Household Ecology in a Mexican Community.” In T. Fitzgerald (ed.), Nutrition and Anthropology in Action, 79–93, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Company. Assen. https://www​.vangorcum​.nl/ Eckstein, S. (2003), Back From the Future, New York: Routledge. Enríquez, L. J. (1994), The Question of Food Security in Cuban Socialism, Berkeley: Institute of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Fischer, M. M. J. (2003), Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, Durham: Duke University Press. Gal, S. (1995), “Language and the ‘Arts of Resistance’: Review Essay.” Cultural Anthropology, 10: 407–24. Garcia, A. (2010), The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande, Berkeley: University of California Press. Garth, H. (2009), “Things Became Scarce: Food Availability and Accessibility in Santiago de Cuba Then and Now.” NAPA Bulletin, 32: 178–92. Garth, H. (2013), “Resistance and Household Food Consumption in Santiago de Cuba.” In C. Counihan and V. Siniscalchi (eds.), Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy, 47–60, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Garth, H. (2014), “‘They Started to Make Variants’: The Impact of Nitza Villapol’s Cookbooks and Television Shows on Contemporary Cuban Cooking.” Food, Culture & Society, 17 (3): 359–76. Garth, H. (2017), “‘There Is No Food’: Coping with Food Scarcity in Cuba Today.” Cultural Anthropology, March 23. Available online: https://legacy​.culanth​.org​/fieldsights​/1084​-there​ -is​-no​-food​-coping​-with​-food​-scarcity​-in​-cuba​-today. Garth, H. (2019), “Alimentary Dignity: Defining a Decent Meal in Post‐Soviet Cuban Household Cooking.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1111​/jlca​.12369. Garth, H. (2020), Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Humphrey, C. (1994), “Remembering an ‘Enemy’: The Bogd Khann in Twentieth-Century Mongolia.” In R. S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, 21–44, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

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Irvine, J., and S. Gal (2000), “Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation.” In P. V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, 35–84, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Molé, N. J. (2010), “Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy.” American Anthropologist, 112 (1): 38–53. Muehlebach, A. (2013), “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, 115 (2): 297–311. Riley, K. C., and J. R. Cavanaugh (2017), “Tasty Talk, Expressive Food: An Introduction to The Semiotics of Food-and-Language.” Semiotic Review, [S.l.], n. 5, Jan. Scott, J. C. (1985), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stewart, K. (2007), Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, A. L. (1993), In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Weller, S. C. (1998), “Structured Interviewing and Questionnaire Construction.” In H. R. Bernard (ed.), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 365–409, Walnut Creek: Sage. Wirtz, K. (2017), “Mobilizations of Race, Place, and History in Santiago de Cuba’s Carnivalesque.” American Anthropologist, 119 (1): 58–72. Wright, J. (2009), Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in the Era of Oil Scarcity: Lessons from Cuba, London: Earthscan. Yates-Doerr, E. (2020), “Review: Food in Cuba.” March 14, Accessed December 22, 2020. https://foodanthro​.com​/2020​/03​/14​/review​-food​-in​-cuba/.

Chapter 20

Discursive Constructions of Non-human Beings and the Contingency of Moral Consideration for Local Wildlife PAUL B. GARRETT AND REBECCA MICHELIN

NON-HUMAN BEINGS, MORAL CONSIDERATION, AND CANDIDACY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE The ways in which and degrees to which human beings extend moral consideration to non-human beings vary considerably. As social justice is founded on moral consideration— that is, the matter of who deserves moral consideration and who does not—the extent to which currently prevailing notions of social justice apply to non-human beings likewise varies considerably, both within and across societies and cultures. In recent years, anthropologists and others have substantially (re)theorized the relationship between the human and the non-human, in some cases extending their concerns beyond individual beings and taking into account, for example, forests and ecosystems (Chao 2021a, Kohn 2013). But even the development of “multispecies” ethnography (Chao 2021b, Haraway 2008, Kirksey 2014, Kirksey and Helmreich 2010, Tsing 2015) and of “posthumanism” in anthropology and adjacent fields (Smart and Smart 2017, Wolfe 2010) have yielded relatively little work that considers relations between human and non-human beings in terms of social justice, as distinct from a more broadly conceptualized notion of ecological justice (Kopnina 2017). Meanwhile, linguistically oriented forays into posthumanism (Lamb and Higgins 2020, Pennycook 2018) have given little consideration to matters of social justice, and formulations of “language and social justice” as an area of inquiry (Avineri et al. 2019, Baugh 2018, Heller 2014, Piller 2016, Reagan 2019) have not extended beyond the human. In the United States and other Western societies, some non-human beings, such as mice, rats, and arthropods of virtually all kinds, may be destroyed fairly immediately

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upon detection, ostensibly as a matter of hygiene; indeed, not destroying them may be treated as a kind of moral failing and may become a matter of legal liability (for either a landlord or a tenant, for example). Other non-human beings are systematically confined, mutilated, tortured, and killed on vast scales in order to gratify humans’ dietary and sartorial preferences; this is a matter of social justice for only a tiny minority of humans. Meanwhile, exclusion of some humans from ready access to the products of such treatment of non-human beings (cow milk and other “dairy products,” for example) may be framed matter-of-factly as an issue of social justice. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some non-human beings—a select few dogs, cats, and other “companion animals,” and select members of such “iconic” and “charismatic” groups as elephants, whales, and non-human great apes—are afforded personhood (some kind of quasi-personhood, at least) by humans at both individual and collective (e.g. institutional and governmental) levels. It follows that conventional principles of social justice are considered to be largely or even wholly applicable to them, in theory if not in practice. Roughly midway between these two poles are many kinds of local “wildlife”: the kinds of non-human beings who are generally perceived as living apart from, but in benign proximity to, human beings. In many parts of the United States, prime examples are squirrels and birds (particularly “songbirds”), beings who are commonly seen and heard, and whose presence is generally tolerated, taken for granted, and even appreciated, but with whom humans normally do not come into direct contact. Inevitably, though, direct contact does occasionally occur. In most cases, it results from an inadvertent encounter, sometimes quite literally a collision, between lives that otherwise, despite their proximity, are kept fairly scrupulously separated. In order to gain understanding of how and to what extent moral consideration and notions of social justice figure in humans’ understandings of this particular category of non-human beings, this chapter examines the ways in which humans who seek the help of a wildlife-rehabilitation clinic in Philadelphia discursively constitute “wild animals” as subjects. Also considered are how the humans in question constitute themselves and their fellow humans as subjects (Irvine 2004) and what this reveals about their understandings of relations between humans and local “wildlife.” The study presented here involved taking an overview of a half-year’s worth of patient admissions and interviewing persons who had brought animals to the clinic. The research setting, methods, and data are described below, followed by a consideration of three major themes that emerge from the data. These three themes center on attribution of personhood and the moral imperative that such attribution entails, which may serve as a foundation for social justice—potentially, social justice that extends beyond the species boundary in such a way as to comprise not just “companion animals” and “charismatic megafauna,” but also the ever-present yet largely overlooked denizens of the margins and interstices of human habitation.

RESEARCH SETTING Wildlife rehabilitation is “the treatment and temporary care of injured, diseased, and displaced indigenous animals, and subsequent release of healthy animals to appropriate habitats in the wild” (International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council 2021, 2). Professional wildlife rehabilitators have extensive training (and corresponding licenses and certifications) specific to the field of wildlife rehabilitation, which requires both

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breadth and depth of knowledge about a considerable variety of species: their natural histories, anatomies and physiologies, nutritional requirements, characteristic behaviors, reproductive cycles, migratory patterns, and more. Also crucially important is knowledge of how animals of particular species respond to the stresses of capture, confinement, and handling, and how those stresses can be minimized. Wildlife rehabilitators generally are not veterinarians, so they consult and collaborate with veterinarians when necessary, as when bone-settings, surgeries, and prescription drugs are needed. Such veterinary care is generally provided by one or two local veterinarians on a voluntary and ad hoc basis; the great majority of wildlife-rehabilitation clinics cannot afford to have a veterinarian on staff. Wildlife rehabilitators are the full-time professionals who provide first aid for newly arrived patients as well as, subsequently, the hour-to-hour and day-to-day care that is needed as patients recover: from feeding and medicating to monitoring of vital signs, wound care, and provision of enclosures suited to the patient’s species and stage of recovery. In some cases, they may also provide longer-term treatments, such as physical therapy. The Wildlife Clinic at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (hereafter, “the Clinic”) is located in the outskirts of Philadelphia and serves both urban and suburban areas. The Clinic takes in wild animals, including birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, whom humans have encountered, in most cases unexpectedly, and have judged to be ill, injured, orphaned, or otherwise in need of human intervention and care.1 The Clinic’s foremost goal, guided by conservationist principles, is to restore such animals to health and return them to their natural habitats as soon as possible. The Clinic is situated, both physically and organizationally, within the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, a relatively large urban nature preserve. It is the only wildlife-rehabilitation clinic within the municipal boundaries of Philadelphia. Located near the northwestern border of the city and coterminous county of Philadelphia, it also receives patients fairly regularly from three adjacent counties. Established in 1987, the Clinic closed for a period of several months in 2018 and then re-opened, with a new director, in November 2018. In 2019, the first full year of operations after this re-opening, the Clinic’s telephone hotline received 2,182 calls and a total of 1,912 patients were admitted.2 The admitted patients were as shown in Table 20.1. Patients must be brought to the Clinic by a “rescuer”: usually a member of the general public, but occasionally an on-duty law-enforcement or public-safety officer.3 The Clinic staff are not equipped to capture and transport ill and injured animals; even if they were, this would not be feasible because such a large geographic area is served. Most patients arrive in cardboard boxes, others in plastic buckets, shopping bags, or whatever else the

TABLE 20.1  Patients Admitted to the Clinic in 2019 Birds 3 most admitted species: American robin Mourning dove

998

Mallard duck

35

142 74

Mammals 3 most admitted species: Eastern gray squirrel Eastern cottontail rabbit Virginia opossum

875

400 207 156

Reptiles and amphibians 3 most admitted species: Eastern box turtle Common snapping turtle Eastern garter snake

40

16 7 3

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rescuer had at hand and was able to put to use. Some rescuers show up unannounced, but most call ahead by telephone in order to make sure that the Clinic is open and, in many cases, to seek advice about whether to bring an animal in and how best to do so.4 Upon arrival, the rescuer is met by a staff member in the Clinic’s small reception area. The intake procedure typically consists of a brief conversation in which the rescuer explains the circumstances of finding the animal (or animals, in some cases), what s/he observed or perceived to be the problem, and, in many cases, why and how s/he decided to intervene. The rescuer is asked to fill out a single-page form, the Patient Admission Record, which asks for contact information; basic identifying or descriptive information about the animal; a brief statement of where the animal was found and what the problem was; whether the animal bit or scratched anyone; whether any food or water was provided; and whether any first aid or medical care was provided. The form also asks whether the rescuer would like to be contacted for participation in the animal’s release, should it recover and should circumstances permit; and, finally, it explains that the Clinic relies on donations and asks for a tax-deductible contribution. These brief discursive productions, both oral (the conversation) and written (the form), reveal Clinic visitors’ understandings of how particular kinds of non-human beings normally appear and behave as well as, by contrast, how they manifest distress (in response to illness, pain, or displacement, for example). This, in turn, provides a point of departure for understanding the ways in which, the circumstances in which, and the extent to which humans are, or may become, willing to afford moral consideration to non-humans—thus making them, by extension, candidates for social justice. The intake process is brief, for it is important for the staff member to assess the new patient’s condition as soon as possible. The rescuer is not allowed past the reception area but is usually invited to wait there while the staff member takes the new patient back to the examination room, where s/he opens the container in which the patient arrived, identifies the patient by species (the animal may not be what the rescuer thought, or s/he may not have known), and makes an initial assessment of the animal’s condition. Unless immediate treatment is required (to stop blood loss, for example), the animal is placed into a species-appropriate enclosure, away from bright light, noise, and other disturbances, and given some time to calm down and recover from the stress of capture and transport. At this point, if the rescuer has chosen to wait,5 the staff member returns to the reception area to give an initial report on the animal’s condition. If the rescuer is interested in following up, s/he is given a case number and is invited to call or email for an update after 24 hours. An hour or so later, after the animal has had time to calm down, a professionally trained and credentialed staff member (either the director or assistant director of wildlife rehabilitation) performs a thorough physical examination. In most cases, the animal is sedated by means of a gas anesthesia (isoflurane) in order to make this examination possible and minimally stressful. The examination involves checking for traumatic injuries (broken bones, lacerations, etc.), neurological problems, dehydration, emaciation, disease symptoms, and external parasites, among other problems. Any such problems are addressed immediately, to the extent possible, and veterinary care is arranged if necessary. In some cases, the patient does not survive these intake procedures. In a somewhat larger number of cases, the prognosis is so poor that the only humane option is euthanasia (accomplished in most cases by means of an injection). By the time a wild animal’s condition becomes noticeable and it becomes possible for the typical rescuer to capture the animal and take her/him to the Clinic, the animal may already be close to

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death, and his/her condition may be severely exacerbated by the compounded stresses of capture, containment, transport, and attempted treatment. Most if not all wild animals are susceptible to capture myopathy, an often fatal syndrome characterized by acute stress-induced pathologies, and animals of some species are especially likely to die from it.

METHODS AND DATA As mentioned previously, during the patient-admission process, the rescuer is asked to fill out a one-page form, the Patient Admission Record. If the rescuer declines to do so (for example, because s/he is unable or unwilling to take the time, or is unwilling to provide the requested information), the staff member fills in as much of the information as possible. The back of the same form is used by the staff member who conducts the intake examination to record information about the animal and his/her condition, such as species, sex, life stage, body temperature, rate of respiration, and condition of various body parts and systems. This double-sided form becomes the foundation of the animal’s file, to which various other pieces of information, such as dietary and medication records, are periodically added until the patient’s final disposition: death, euthanasia, transfer to a more specialized facility (such as one dedicated to rehabilitation of raptors), recovery and release back into the wild, or partial recovery and becoming an “education animal” or “ambassador animal.”6 The preliminary data set for the study reported here consisted of the 939 patient files that were created during the six-month period of July through December 2019. This six-month period was chosen because of its recency (the study began in January 2020) and because, in the judgment of the Clinic’s director of wildlife rehabilitation, it would capture both high and low seasons for patient admissions: from mid-summer, when admissions peak, through autumn, when they gradually decline, and into early winter, when admissions are approaching their lowest rate. As the goal was to interview rescuers, the 939 files were considered in terms of two major criteria: whether the rescuer, in filling out the Patient Admission Record, had provided contact information, in particular, an email address; and whether s/he had indicated willingness to be contacted by the Wildlife Clinic.7 This yielded a subset of ninety-one rescuers. An additional seven rescuers who had not provided email addresses, but had provided mailing addresses and telephone numbers and had indicated willingness to be contacted, were added to this subset for reasons of special interest, such as an unusual species or notable rescue circumstances. This allowed for the inclusion, for example, of a rescuer of an eastern garter snake, which thus became the only snake (and one of only seven reptiles) potentially to be represented in the study. The animals whom these rescuers had brought to the Clinic were as shown in Table 20.2.8 The investigator (author PG) wrote an invitation to participate in the study and the Clinic’s director of wildlife rehabilitation (author RM) sent it out to the ninety-eight rescuers who had been identified as described above. It was sent to ninety-one of them by email and to the other seven by mail (i.e. as a paper letter). This invitation, followed ten days later by a reminder, yielded eleven responses. The investigator interviewed all eleven respondents as well as two other persons, each of whom had also been involved in one of the eleven rescues and whose participation in the study was suggested by one of the original eleven respondents. This brought the total number of interviews to thirteen (but the number of admissions involved remained at eleven). The eleven animals whom the rescuers had brought to the Clinic were of seven species, as shown in Table 20.3.

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TABLE 20.2  Animals Brought to the Clinic by the Ninety-Eight Rescuers Who Were Invited to Participate in the Study Birds

34

3 most admitted species: House sparrow Rock pigeon Mallard duck/ American robin/ Downy woodpecker

Mammals

Reptiles and amphibians 3 most admitted species: 27 Eastern box turtle 14 Common snapping turtle 11 Turtle, unspecified 57

3 most admitted species: 9 3

Eastern gray squirrel Eastern cottontail rabbit

2 (of each)

Mouse (mostly house mice; at least one deer mouse)

7

2 2 2

TABLE 20.3  Animals Brought to the Clinic by the Rescuers Who Were Interviewed Birds Downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens) American robin (Turdus migratorius) House sparrow (Passer domesticus)

4 2 1 1

Mammals Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) House mouse (Mus musculus)

6 4

Reptiles and amphibians Eastern garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis)

1 1

1 1

The interviews were conducted by telephone and were audio-recorded. They ranged from 16 to 41 minutes in length, for an average of 29 minutes. The interviews were semi-structured, guided by a written list of twenty-six questions, most relatively open-ended. An informal and conversational approach was taken in order to encourage rescuers to recount their experiences freely, to focus on issues that they considered important, and to raise other issues that they considered relevant. The following sections consider three major recurring themes that emerged from the interviews: being “that kind of person” (the kind who is always willing to help an animal in need); communicating with wild animals (the tendency to attempt it and the extent to which it is thought to be possible); and pronominal reference (use of particular pronouns in talking about non-human animals).

THAT KIND OF PERSON At some point during the interviews, most of the study participants spontaneously identified or characterized themselves as a certain kind of person: “that kind of person,” the kind of person who regards non-human animals as eminently deserving of help and who is always ready and willing to provide it, even (or especially) under trying circumstances. “That kind of person,” clearly in the minority, was often defined or described in contradistinction to most other persons: persons who might not even notice, much less trouble themselves to do anything for, an animal in need, or who might notice the situation and consider it regrettable but would not attempt to do anything about it. When leaving home for work one morning, Clara9 found an apparently ill or injured opossum near her apartment building. Unsure what to do, she went back inside and

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sought help from her boyfriend. He too was getting ready to leave for work and was unwilling to help either the opossum or her: “He was like, ‘That’s really sad,’ you know, he was like... felt really bad, but he was like, ‘I gotta go.’”10 Left to her own devices and realizing that no one else was going to help the opossum, nor help her to help the opossum, she resolved to do it herself. Asked whether her boyfriend’s unwillingness to help influenced her decision-making at the time, she replied, “I was already going to help, and I guess if anything I was like, ‘OK, obviously he’s not gonna do it, somebody else probably isn’t gonna do it either, so I’ll do it.’” Clara mentioned that she was also motivated by concern that someone might intentionally harm the opossum: “There’s just like a lot of people outside of my apartment that are always like hanging out in those alleys and like vandalizing stuff, so I guess I was kind of worried that somebody might hurt him.” Clara did not characterize herself as “that kind of person” as explicitly or as emphatically as some others did in their interviews, but she described herself as having long-standing interest in animals and their well-being. She said that she follows “a bunch of” animal-rescue organizations on social media: It’s just something I like, and I really like animals, and I think, like if I had more free time I’d want to volunteer, like go back to school to do something like that, so I just kind of follow them to like keep it in mind, plus they do usually have like um good advice for that kind of stuff, like if you see an animal or like what to feed the animal and stuff like that, so... I just like it. Clara expressed regret about a few occasions in the past when she had seen wild animals who might have been in need and she had not been able to intervene for practical reasons, such as not being able to ascertain the problem or not having the physical means to capture and contain the animal. Delia, in talking about public awareness of the Wildlife Clinic, made a broad distinction between persons such as herself, who deeply appreciate the services that it provides, and the far more numerous others who are unaware that it exists: “They’re probably not the kind of person who would do anything about it” (i.e. finding an ill or injured wild animal). She implicitly but directly contrasted this “kind of person” to herself and others like her, “the kind of people like me, who would know that” (i.e. know about the Clinic): “I see three baby squirrels in a major intersection, I’m taking care of it. I’m doing it ((laugh)), I’m taking care of it.” Similarly, another rescuer, Candela, in mentioning that she had taken animals to the Clinic on a few occasions prior to the one on which the interview focused, said, “I’m one of those people, yeah, I will like pull over and put an animal in my car ((laugh)) and bring it.” In making assertions such as these, rescuers tended to move from the specific to the general. The interview questions mostly if not entirely focused on the specific animal whom the rescuer had brought to the Clinic recently (at some point in the past few months), but rescuers often answered in terms of what they do whenever they find any animal in need of help. In so doing, they presented themselves as “that kind of person.” Teresa, when asked whether she had been uncertain about whether to try to help the downy woodpecker whom she had found stuck in a glue trap intended to catch and kill spotted lanternflies (Lycorma delicatula, an “invasive” insect species relatively new to the region), replied firmly in the negative, framing her answer in terms of what she habitually does in such a situation: “Not at all. ((laugh)) I don’t- I don’t hesitate, I go right for getting the animal out of trouble.” Cassidy, who also had found a downy woodpecker

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stuck in a glue trap,11 likewise described in general terms what she and her husband do when they find animals in need: “In our household, we are pretty big animal-lovers [...] Usually when we see animals in any type of distress, we figure out what we need to do with them.” Said Lena, in regard to her decision-making concerning a grievously injured snake (whose prospects for survival, she knew, were probably poor), “I can’t sleep at night knowing I’m just walking away from an animal who I know is injured and in pain and nobody’s doing anything.” Some associated being “that kind of person” with other qualities, such as being a mother or being someone who is frequently and irresistibly drawn to animals in need. Marlene, who had rescued a juvenile squirrel who seemed to be in poor health, responded affirmatively when asked whether she had talked to the squirrel while rescuing him/her, adding, “I’m that kind of person.” She was “a little heartbroken” about having to separate the young squirrel from “its little sibling,” who was also in the area, healthier and much too elusive to be captured. “Maybe it’s the mother in me,” she remarked; she was walking with her young son and her dog when she found and rescued the squirrel, and she was pregnant at the time. Carolyn, who had found in her basement a mouse who either was sick or had been injured by her cat, characterized the kind of person, such as herself, who is likely to take an animal to the Clinic as having “a bleeding heart” and being “soft-hearted”: So the kind of um uh precursor factors probably are people that have a bleeding heart, which would be me, uh ((laugh)) those are the- those are gonna be the few folks probably that bring it in [...] I- you know, I- I am... too soft-hearted and I didn’t want to just throw it [the mouse] out the door. Like Marlene, Carolyn invoked motherhood; she recounted an incident involving a fledgling mockingbird that had occurred several years ago, when her children were young: “I actually had t- I helped to rehab a baby bird with its mother. Um, like as a tag team, which was very strange but very cool.” The young bird was on the ground and was being fed and watched over by his/her mother; the problem was that there were cats in the area. The mother bird diligently fended off the cats during the day, actually “attacking” them and driving them away, but Carolyn was afraid that the young bird would fall victim to a cat after dark. So, under the watchful eye of the mother bird, she put the fledgling into a box and took her/him into her house for the night. Carolyn had expected the mother bird to fly at her defensively, as she had at the cats, but she did not, even when Carolyn had to chase the fledgling into a bush. “I’m pretty sure that bird was giving me the once-over and kind of noticed that I had kids,” she said. In the morning, she put the fledgling back outside, whereupon the mother bird resumed feeding and protecting. This avian fellow mother “worked in tandem with me,” Carolyn asserted, attending to the fledgling during the day and then allowing her to take the youngster in at dusk. This went on for some days, until the young bird was fully able to fly. Lynn had found a lone infant squirrel on the ground, clearly too young and helpless to survive. In describing her immediate determination to rescue the tiny animal, she referred to “the pull,” a kind of voice-like moral imperative that she is obliged to “listen to” and cannot “argue with” in situations involving animals in need. Asked whether she was at all unsure or uncertain about whether she should try to help the squirrel, she replied firmly, “No. There’s that pull, you know, that pull [...] There was no- there was no arguing with the pull. [...] I would be furious with myself if I didn’t um listen to that pull... and try to do something.”

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Andrew described a somewhat different kind of moral imperative, something originating outside of himself that seems to cause animals in need, both wild and domestic, to “find” him. After recounting various occasions in the past several years when he had taken wild animals to the Clinic, he commented, I’ve- I tend to- I tell people that animals find me, for some reason, like they- I’ve rescued cats, dogs, just about everything.. um, a raccoon... so yeah, they just seem to ((inaudible)) (I don’t try specifically to find them.) They just sort of ((inaudible)) right time at the right place and... yeah. Andrew also reported having “domesticated” and found homes for feral cats who, people had told him, could not be domesticated. Tania presented herself as a live-and-let-live sort of person, appreciative of wildlife but not at all eager to come into close contact with it. Her house is on the edge of a wooded area and she sees wild animals regularly, which she enjoys, but she prefers that they keep their distance: “Stay out of my kitchen and we’re all happy.” Throughout her interview, though, Tania made clear that she is, in her way, “that kind of person.” She avidly described overcoming her reluctance to deal with an animal whom she had found particularly off-putting, a snake, guided by a conviction that she must always do what she can to alleviate any animal’s suffering. She had accidentally run over a snake while mowing her lawn. The snake retreated into a hole in the ground but then emerged several days later, clearly injured but still alive, and seemed to linger in the general area, turning up at various times in various parts of her yard. Though quite squeamish about snakes, Tania was stricken with guilt about having inadvertently harmed this one. Her husband tried to dissuade her, but she resolved to find help: “We have a lot of hawks and fox and stuff like that, and my husband was like, ‘Nature, circles,’ I was like ‘I::: was party to this, we gotta get him help.’” (In mentioning “circles,” her husband was referring to the notion of the “circle of life,” assuring her that the snake would become a meal for some other animal who might have caught and eaten him anyway.) Tania’s main concern was that the snake was suffering: “An animal in distress you don’t... you don’t play with, you know, you don’t leave him in distress.” Her efforts to find someone or some organization willing to provide help for the snake went on for some days, and mostly met with gentle dissuasion of the kind that her husband had attempted: That’s what most people said, “It’s a garter snake, it’s the circle of life, there’s hawks around, there’s other animals around that.. are looking for him healthy, you know, you saved them a couple steps”... But then I was like, “((inaudible)), we have to give him food, we have to alleviate the suffering,” and that was me—you know? [...] I’m not part of that food chain, so I’d.. rather not participate in it. Other rescuers described persons who clearly were not “that kind of person,” implicitly contrasting them to themselves and others who are willing to do whatever they can for a wild animal in need. Cassidy, the second of the two rescuers mentioned above who had found downy woodpeckers mired in glue traps, had encountered the distressing situation while walking past a house in a suburban neighborhood. Assuming that the homeowners had placed the insect trap on the tree in their yard and would want to know about the harm that it had caused to the woodpecker, she knocked on the door: “The gentleman, it didn’t seem like, really understood that, oh, that was a possibility, um, and he didn’t, unfortunately, seem to care at all.”

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Candela likewise encountered surprisingly callous disregard from other people. She decided to rescue a juvenile robin partly because the bird was on a sidewalk where, she feared, someone might step on her/him. While deciding what to do, she and her husband had to alert people to the bird’s presence and make sure that they walked around her/ him: “We were kind of surprised that nobody really seemed to care. Like, nobody was like interested [...] they all just kept moving on their way.” Carolyn, when she rescued the mouse in her basement, had recently been dealing, as humanely as possible, with both mice and bats who had taken up residence in parts of her house. In addition to humanely trapping and relocating several mice, she had undertaken a fairly complex and costly “bat exclusion,” which had even involved building a bat house in her yard in order to provide the displaced animals an alternative to her attic. She explained her willingness to go to such effort and expense in terms of her mistrust of anyone whose help she might have enlisted—that is, her unwillingness to entrust animals’ well-being to any local agency or organization. Other than the Wildlife Clinic (which does not do removals or exclusions), any of them, she suspected, would end up harming the animals in some way: If we had a really safe alternative where you know if they- if the animal could be saved they would save it, that would be an awesome thing, if they had people who could come out and help. [...] I called the animal control around here when I had the bats in the attic, and they were like, “Yeah, we’ll come out with nets,” I’m like, “Nope, no you won’t” ((laugh)). In discursively presenting themselves as “that kind of person”—in some cases, by distinguishing themselves from the many others who evidently are not that kind of person—these rescuers effectively constructed the wild animals whom they had rescued as fellow beings fully deserving of their concerns and efforts. These animals, along with others such as feral cats and their own companion animals, were spoken of matter-offactly as fellow beings who experience fear, anxiety, pain, and stress; who have capacities for attachment to other beings, and for distress when that attachment is disrupted; and who suffer, in both immediate and longer-term ways. Being “that kind of person” seems to engender in these rescuers a certain wry pride: a sense of being morally better persons than most others (more considerate, caring, empathetic, etc.), but also a sense of being regarded by these others as a bit too soft, a bit eccentric, a bit ridiculous.

COMMUNICATING WITH RESCUED ANIMALS A related theme arose when rescuers discussed the ways in which and extent to which they had communicated or attempted to communicate with rescued animals. More than half of the rescuers answered affirmatively or semi-affirmatively when asked whether they had spoken to, or otherwise attempted to communicate with, the animals whom they had brought to the Clinic. Most could not recall specifics and reported what they probably said, or would have said, in that situation. Andrew, as mentioned above, had brought multiple animals to the Clinic over a period of years. He shifted between the specific (the particular sparrow whom he had rescued most recently, “him”) and the general (what he habitually does when rescuing animals, “them”): I did talk to them- talk to him, I- I- I tend to (try to hold them), and like the whole time I- I’m with them I’m sort of trying to reassure them that like everything’s gonna be OK, you know, “I’m here to help, don’t worry, you’ll be fine... yeah, I’m that crazy guy.”

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Notable here in regard to matters addressed in the previous section is Andrew’s selfcharacterization as “that crazy guy,” which he presents as part of an utterance that he might have addressed to, or typically addresses to, an animal whom he is rescuing. (Andrew’s sustained use of a quotative voice quality here makes clear that “yeah, I’m that crazy guy” is part of the reported utterance ostensibly directed to the rescued animal, as opposed to a comment directed to the interviewer.) Also notable is that this self-characterization involves taking, or at least attempting to take, the non-co-present animal’s perspective in an utterance that, overall, is directed to a co-present human interlocutor (the interviewer). Later, Andrew mentioned that the sparrow seemed attentive to his vocalizations: “It seemed like whenever I talked to him.. he would like stop and, um, just watch me?” Clara recalled that she spoke to the sick or injured opossum whom she encountered in much the same way that she talks to her cat: I probably was talking to it like how I talk to my cat.. um, I think especially at first I was kind of talking to him when.. I::: was trying to figure out if he was alive or not, and then, I think I was probably talking to him like in the car, again like how I would talk to my cat.. if she was hurt. Another rescuer, Lynn, held the box containing an infant squirrel on her lap while her husband drove them both to the Clinic. She reported that she probably spoke, addressing the squirrel, her husband, and herself: “Knowing me, who’s.. talkative ((laugh)), I probably said ‘Hang in there, guy,’ you know, or something, kind of talking- talk- uh talking to myself, my husband, and the squirrel at the same time. ‘Hang in there’ ((laugh)).” Candela reported something quite similar in regard to a juvenile robin. She said that she and her husband mostly avoided talking to the young bird while driving to the Clinic, not wishing to disturb her/him; but she recalled that they probably did speak in “a gentle tone,” “probably more to soothe ourselves”: It was so young, I think we felt kind of bad. We may have been like ((switches to highpitched voice)) “It’s OK,” but, you know ((laugh)), we didn’t try to like- while we were transporting it, we- I thought that might be upsetting to it, so we didn’t try to talk to it too much, but... we were trying to use, you know, a gentle tone, which I don’t know if they even would- you know, sometimes people think birds sound.. like they’re happy and they’re actually frightened ((laugh)) so- so, you know... probably more to soothe ourselves than it was for the bird. Teresa, when asked whether she and her husband tried to communicate in any way with the downy woodpecker whom she had rescued from a glue trap, replied immediately and emphatically, “Yes. We did.” Asked to elaborate, she indicated that her attempts at communication were non-verbal: “Just finger-stroking and um.. I guess nudging around her beak... and uh, I don’t believe she made any sound, she just- she hopped some, on the grass.” Andrew also reported having used tactile means to attempt to soothe the injured sparrow mentioned above: “I do recall, I- I did sort of like.. pet it lightly, like.. from I guess like the base of the head uh.. down towards the neck, just sort of like in like a.. soothing motion.” He had had a pet domestic dove whom he had often petted like this and who had seemed to enjoy and be calmed by it, “so I just- I just brought that over to him, or her, I don’t know what it was, um and I just sort of did that.” Cassidy, who, like Teresa, had rescued a downy woodpecker from a glue trap, also replied affirmatively, saying that she and her husband tried to speak reassuringly and encouragingly to the bird, as they would to their dog:

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We were very much trying to communicate with it, um and that’s probably just from.. you know, we have a dog as well, so just trying to tell it things are gonna be OK [...] We were very much talking to it and um, you know, just giving- like, you know, letting it know it’s going to be OK and trying to encourage it to eat the ants um and take the water when we were providing that. Less common were reports that the rescued animal had seemed to be communicating or attempting to communicate in some way. The juvenile squirrel whom Marlene encountered while walking her dog “came right up to” her and the dog, a pit bull: “It was really willing to be approached and actually sat on my dog’s feet.” (The dog, thoroughly “confused” by this and “quivering” with puzzlement and excitement, did not harm the squirrel.) Several minutes later in the interview, when asked whether she had thought that the squirrel might be communicating or attempting to communicate in any way, Marlene replied: It’s an interesting question. Um.. I mean, insofar as behavior is.. communicative, um... see, I’m a therapist, so now you’re going to get the whole like non-verbal communication.. ((laugh)) side of me. Um, you know, look, no, no, not like it was trying to tell me something, but certainly its behavior communicated that there was something off... um, and certainly it seemed to be seeking out connection and comfort a little bit. Um.. so in that way, yes, but.. not like it was actually trying to tell me something. The downy woodpecker that Cassidy found stuck in a glue trap (after her husband, who had encountered it first, came home and told her about it) was vocalizing piteously: “This bird was screaming, I mean it was, like, crying... um, so yeah, it was a very um intense moment.” When the interviewer expressed surprise that this small woodpecker (of a species much more typically seen than heard) had been making such sounds, she replied, Oh my gosh, yeah, it was um, like, one of the more emotional.. uh.. experiences I’ve had with trying to help um an animal [...] Yeah the bird was.. like crying out for help, which was um.. clear that maybe it hadn’t been stuck there that long... so yeah, it wasn’t personally in my mind a question of do I help this bird or not. Other rescuers attributed voices to animals, and/or to themselves at the time of their encounters with them, as a means of characterizing recalled, perceived, or inferred mental or emotional states. Candela, after taking a juvenile robin to the Clinic, was advised to return the bird to where she had found it; the Clinic staff had determined that s/he was healthy, just too young to fly well, and the hope was that the mother bird was still in the area and would resume caring for the youngster. Sure enough, when Candela released the juvenile bird, s/he immediately began “calling,” and “the mom almost immediately came for it; it was really cute [...] The mom was like, ‘Oh, there you are!’” Delia recounted a past encounter with four juvenile opossums in her back yard. She called the Clinic and was advised to leave them where they were, and to “put out some really smelly food” to attract the mother back. This eventually worked: the mother opossum came and ate the food, and the babies climbed onto her back as she ate. Prior to the mother’s return, Delia had felt obliged to stand outside, watching over the babies and waiting for her: “It was pouring down rain, I’m out there with an umbrella, ‘Come on, Mother Possum, get back here and get them!’” Delia reported that she had not talked to the three infant squirrels whom she and her husband more recently had taken to the

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Clinic, for they had learned from Clinic staff during past visits that this is stress-inducing for wild animals and best avoided. Throughout her recounting of her experience with the snake, Tania attributed voice to herself as a way of expressing what her thoughts had been at the time, and perhaps also as a way of reporting what she may actually have said aloud—ostensibly addressing most of her utterances to the snake, but largely if not entirely in the form of self-talk (Goffman 1978). Upon realizing that she had run over the snake with her lawn mower, she and her husband searched for the animal, unsuccessfully. They did find a hole or burrow in the ground, and they assumed that the snake had retreated into it: “We found a hole.. and.. nothing else. So I was like, ‘All right, Puppy went in the hole. Good luck. I’m really really really sorry.’ Took me a while to get over that one.” Several days later, she came upon a snake, which she assumed was the same one, just outside of the hole: “I was like, ‘Wow, look at you!’ [...] I said, ‘You came back out [...] You must be OK in your little snakey way, because it’s been at least a week or two.’” In following days, she saw the snake regularly, in various different places in the general vicinity of the hole: “I was like, ‘You’re not looking real good, but why are you moving around and not hiding?’ kind of thing.” Tania’s reported self-talk and quasi-self-talk suggests—similarly to, if more vividly than, what others reported—that rescuers immediately experience concern and empathy for animals in need of rescue, and then establish quite rapidly thereafter a more complex kind of bond with them that involves attribution of personhood and the sense of moral imperative that generally goes with it. In Tania’s case, this even involved naming the snake, “but not as a pet,” she assured me; regarding the humorous chosen name, “Fang,” she said, “That was me trying to, like, defuse a little stress.” None of the other rescuers who were interviewed replied affirmatively when asked whether s/he had named a rescued animal, but it is not unusual for rescuers to bestow names in a more serious vein than Tania did, and even to ask earnestly that the Clinic staff keep and use them. Rescuers occasionally do this by writing a note in the margin of the Patient Admission Record, such as “His name is Charlie!” Some of these names are, like Charlie, familiar and affectionate; others, such as Hope, are aspirational in regard to the animal’s prospects for recovery. The retrospective self-reports of attempts to communicate with rescued wild animals that have been considered here are based on recall and can only be approximations, at best, of whatever might actually have been said at the time (or not said, for that matter). They are significant not as documentary records of actual interactions, but for what they reveal about rescuers’ sense of themselves as subjects capable of engaging in communicative and quasi-communicative interactions with others—including a considerable range of non-human others (Kulick 2017), from dogs and cats (Alger and Alger 2002, Haraway 2003, Irvine 2004, Tannen 2004) to unexpectedly encountered and largely unfamiliar wild animals such as opossums and snakes. This is not to suggest that all of these rescuers considered the animals to be able to understand them, on any level; Tania, for example, gave no indication that she thought that the injured snake was even aware of her presence (though she did think that he may have eaten some of the cat food that she put out for him in a small dish, carefully placing it near his head). In contrast, Andrew and others expressed confidence that their utterances and/or tactile actions had had the effect of calming or soothing the rescued animals (as well as themselves, in some cases). Such matters aside, on the whole, what these rescuers were doing was presenting their recalled experiences in narrative form and, in so doing, populating their narratives with figures—most prominently, figures of themselves—who speak and otherwise behave in morally intelligible ways, acknowledging the personhood of their interlocutors. They

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drew on narrative resources such as attribution of voice and direct and indirect quotation, presenting communication with non-human others, limited though it may be, as a quite ordinary aspect of these happenstance interspecies encounters.

PRONOMINAL REFERENCE Patterns of pronoun usage in the interviews are particularly interesting and revealing of the varying degrees to which rescuers attributed personhood to the animals about whom they were speaking. In American English,12 use of the gendered third-person singular forms she and he (and the related forms her, him, her[s], his) is a fundamental means of discursively constituting, acknowledging, and attributing animacy and, in most cases, personhood. Non-use of these forms and use instead of their neuter counterparts (it, its) produces a range of pragmatic effects, from pointed affront (as when the speaker’s intent is to derogate someone whose gender expression is unconventional) to polite inquiry (as when the speaker is congratulatorily inquiring about the gender of a newborn). Use of they/them/their(s) as epicene (i.e. non-gendered or gender-neutral) third-person singular pronouns is another, less pragmatically variable possibility of which some speakers avail themselves. As this suggests, use of the neuter pronominal forms it and its generally involves denying or withholding attribution of personhood (whether this stems from the intent to harm that underlies the first hypothetical example in the paragraph above or from the lack of knowledge that underlies the second), whereas use of the gendered forms generally involves commitment to full attribution of personhood (albeit sometimes in metaphorical ways, as in the case of a hurricane, ship, or automobile). Ambiguities and uncertainties may arise, as when conventional markers such as clothing and hair length do not enable one to ascertain a young child’s (assigned) gender. In such instances, the uncertainty is likely to be a source of discomfort, one that produces an acutely felt need for resolution. In the United States and other anglophone Western societies, one may refer to an infant as “it” when making a quite conventional (even expected) inquiry about gender, largely because of the infant’s not yet having, in various respects, full personhood, of which gender is conventionally regarded as a fundamental and intrinsic part. The window of opportunity for this is a small one, however, generally limited to one’s first encounter with the infant and parent(s), and it does not remain open for long. One who cannot surmise the gender of a baby who is able to sit up, make eye contact, and smile would do well not to ask whether “it” is a boy or a girl. Such an inquiry may be made, if necessary, but it must be made more circumspectly (in a self-deprecatingly jocular way, perhaps, e.g. “She’s adorable! Or he? Sorry, I’m hopeless with babies, I can never even tell whether they’re boys or girls!”), without resort to the face-threatening, because personhood-denying, neuter pronoun. In regard to wildlife, use of gendered third-person pronouns is complicated by the fact that many species are not sexually dimorphic, i.e. males and females look much alike. Even in the case of a species that is sexually dimorphic, the distinguishing characteristics may not be known to most laypersons. Of the seven species represented by the eleven animals that the interviewed rescuers brought to the Clinic, only two, downy woodpeckers and house sparrows, are fairly readily distinguishable by sex, mainly because males and females have somewhat different coloration; but even in these two species, sex is difficult to ascertain if the bird is not fully mature. In mammals, such as squirrels and opossums, sex may be ascertained by examining the genitals and certain other physical features, such

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as the marsupial pouch that identifies a female opossum; but a rescuer may not know what to look for or may not be able to examine these body parts without risk of being bitten and/or exacerbating the animal’s condition. Six of the persons interviewed used gendered pronouns, whereas the other six used the neuter pronouns it and its. None used they/them/their as epicene forms. (Excluded from consideration here is the rescuer who found three infant squirrels; throughout her interview, she referred to the squirrels in the plural as they/them/their, forms that do not oblige the speaker to make a commitment in regard to either gender or attribution of personhood.) Of the six who used gendered pronouns, three used them exclusively; the other three also used it and its, to varying extents. Five of the six used masculine forms; only one used feminine forms (she and her). It is possible if not likely that this rescuer, Teresa, was the only one who was actually able to ascertain the sex of the rescued animal, a female downy woodpecker; she mentioned that she was a birder (birdwatcher). Andrew, one of the five who used masculine forms, mentioned explicitly at one point that he did not actually know the sex of the sparrow whom he had rescued: “I just brought that over to him, or her, I don’t know what it was.” The other four who used masculine pronouns quite likely had not been able to ascertain sex; they revealed in various ways that they had no more than the typical layperson’s knowledge of the animals whom they had rescued, who were of species that are not strongly sexually dimorphic. These rescuers’ use of masculine forms likely was a matter of default, reflecting a general tendency among speakers of American English to use masculine pronouns when the sex of a non-human animal (particularly a not-domesticated animal) is unknown. It is possible that it and its were used by some of the rescuers for the same reason, i.e. because they did not know the sex of the animals about whom they were speaking. Cassidy, one of the six who used it and its throughout the interview, abortively attempted to shift to a gendered pronoun at one point, when describing the downy woodpecker’s fearful or defensive behavior after she had gotten the bird into a box: “It was, you know, he- he or she, I’m not sure if it was a female or um male, but was, yeah, very much like backed into the corner and didn’t really want to move from that at all.” Significantly, the three rescuers who used both gendered and neuter pronouns shifted between them in ways that seemed to track with varying degrees of attribution of personhood in their narrative responses to the interview questions. In speaking of the ill or injured opossum whom she had encountered, Clara mostly used he/him/his. She used it only in narrative contexts in which the opossum’s personhood had not yet been fully established or was attenuated in some other way, as in these excerpts: I think he was a baby, it was like pretty small, I don’t really know how big they normally are, but it was pretty small.. and, so I was like, OK, I have to get him out of the road So my cat is like.. pretty small for a cat, I think she’s like eight or nine pounds, and he was like significantly smaller, like.. and when I picked it up it was like... it felt like a kitten, kind of13 I think I had to ask, like.. is it- you know, like, “Is there anything I should be worried about, like.. touching it or anything,” and then they were just like, um.. you know, “Don’t touch it with your bare hands” [...] I think they maybe said like put it in a box In the first excerpt, Clara is recounting the first moments after she unexpectedly encountered the opossum and was trying to figure out what to do—moments in which

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she had just determined that the opossum was a living being, not a lifeless carcass, as she had initially suspected. In the second excerpt (which did not immediately follow the first), she is responding to a follow-up question about the animal’s size, which perhaps led her to think of the opossum primarily in terms of physical characteristics, namely size and weight. Notably, the point of comparison here is her cat, whose personhood presumably is well established, and to whom she refers as “she.” In the third excerpt, Clara is describing what she was told by the Wildlife Clinic staff member who answered her telephone call. In those moments, the opossum was primarily a problem to be solved in practical ways (something that should not be touched with bare hands and for which a suitable container was needed, for example). Lena, a former veterinary technician and a friend of Tania, from whom the latter sought help with the injured garter snake several days after finding the animal in her yard, switched extensively between gendered (masculine) and neuter pronouns in ways that seemed to track the snake’s change of status from a regrettable casualty of lawn work to a fellow being deserving of empathy, protection, and, ideally, medical care: So I came and I looked at it and it looked like it was in bad shape, at which point I-.. I- I- I started googling places to take it to because it wasn’t anything- you know, he was obviously injured and there wasn’t anything I could do for him but, you know, nobody wanted him to suffer. She had hit a snake with her lawn mower, it had disappeared underground, and then this injured snake had shown up several days later, and so she assumed it was the same one that she had hit. Um.. she- he had an injured face, it looked like he had no eyes, and they confirmed that at Schuylkill, that he was blind. Notable in the second excerpt is the rapid narrative transition from “a snake” (also referred to pronominally as “it”) to “this injured snake” (presumed to be the same one; also referred to as “it” soon afterward) to “he,” the particular snake whose injuries Lena examined and for whom she actively sought help. Teresa was the rescuer mentioned above who was likely the only one able to ascertain the sex of the animal whom she rescued, a female downy woodpecker, by virtue of her birder’s knowledge of birds. Throughout her interview, Teresa used she and her extensively in referring to the woodpecker, but there were also a few instances of it and its. These occurred when she described her initial discovery of the woodpecker and her attempt, moments later, to free the bird from the glue trap. An instance of its, an instance of she, and two non-pronominal references occurred in quick succession: When I peeled the woodpecker off the tape, half of its feathers stayed on the tape. So that was a significant loss to the animal. She couldn’t fly. Teresa also used it a few seconds later in describing what she and another person had done in these first few moments after discovering the trapped bird: The jogger, the- the young woman that was uh.. she had seen it and jogged home to get her phone to come back and take pictures. [...] While I was peeling it off, yeah, she was afraid to- to handle the bird. There was one other narrative context in which Teresa used it. In recounting an incident, years ago, when a bird of prey (she could not recall the species) had struck a window on the back of her house, she described how she and her husband wrapped “it” in a towel

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and took “it” to the Wildlife Clinic. She likewise used “it” in recalling what the Clinic staff member who answered her telephone call advised her to do: to put “it” in a box, to bring “it” as soon as possible, etc. Unlike these three rescuers who shifted between gendered and neuter pronouns, Lynn consistently used gendered pronouns. Even when recounting a fleeting incident when she had found a garter snake ensnared in a piece of mesh in her garden and had freed it, she referred to the snake as “he” and “him.” In speaking at length about the infant squirrel whom she had taken to the Clinic, she likewise used masculine pronouns, except at one point in one particular narrative context: when loosely quoting the Clinic staff member who answered her telephone call. Said Lynn, “A woman answered, and um, you know, asked a few questions, and said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘why don’t you- why don’t you bring it over and I’ll take a look and see what we can do.’” Lynn then reverted to using he and him in describing transporting the squirrel to the Clinic. Notably, she also used these pronouns in reporting, semi-quotatively, what the staff member told her after examining the squirrel: “She said, ‘We’re not gonna be able to save him, that- what you saw on his head was, um, lethal [...] we can’t save him.’” In this recounting, Lynn’s shift in pronoun usage seems to indicate fairly precisely when, in her thinking, personhood was attributed to the squirrel by the Clinic staff member: not during the telephone call (before she had “met” the squirrel, as it were), but after she had received and examined him. The pattern of pronoun usage here is broadly consistent with the patterns in the cases described above: the animal starts out as “it” and then becomes “him” or “her.” The instances of it in these several excerpts refer to wild animals whom the speaker had just encountered unexpectedly (or had just informed someone about in a telephone call), and who presented, in the moments being recounted, urgent practical problems to be solved. In such situations, attribution of personhood seems to be withheld or attenuated, even in descriptions of these situations that are given months later. Just as important, attribution of personhood seems to occur quite rapidly after such immediate practical concerns have been addressed—even partially or provisionally, even when the animal is of a species that is relatively unlikely to inspire empathy and compassion (such as a snake), and even when the animal’s prospects for survival are poor.

BROADENING THE SCOPE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE TO INCLUDE NON-HUMAN NEIGHBORS To the extent that personhood is a prerequisite of candidacy for social justice, non-human animals, particularly “wild” animals, provide interesting test cases that reveal the kinds of circumstances under which humans extend attributions of personhood beyond the boundaries of their own species. Unplanned “rescue” encounters of the kind examined here are particularly revealing. For many people, particularly urban and suburban dwellers, wild animals are rarely if ever directly encountered in real life; they are largely abstractions or exotica, far removed from daily concerns and known mainly through mass media (from cartoons to news to nature documentaries) and perhaps the occasional excursion to a zoo or nature preserve. Even the subcategory of wild animals that has been considered here, “local wildlife,” are beings who normally dwell in the margins, both literally and figuratively, of human affairs. Multiple kinds of material and immaterial barriers serve to ensure this, from the animals’ instinctive wariness of humans to the exclusionary features of human dwellings.

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When those barriers are unexpectedly crossed—as when an animal is injured, ill, orphaned, or otherwise unable to keep to, or to retreat to, the margins of human habitation, or when humans push at those margins in ways that disrupt and damage non-human habitats—the unexpected interspecies encounters that result are fraught. Humans find themselves having to decide what is to be done, by whom, and by what means in order to restore their accustomed sense of order. Options range from killing and disposing of the animal to bringing the animal fully (or as fully as possible) into the human domestic sphere, as when someone decides to keep a young animal as a pet. Clearly this range of options is heavily imbued with ethical and moral, as well as practical, considerations. The Wildlife Clinic and similar facilities exist to provide and advocate an option that otherwise would not be available: the option of protecting such animals, enabling them to recover, and returning them to their habitats. Much like charitable organizations devoted to exclusively human needs, these facilities can only be as effective in their mission as the local human community allows them to be by providing material support and by co-operatively participating in (or, at the very least, not opposing or undermining) the work that they do. As the interviews that have been considered here suggest, there is considerable variation in people’s awareness that the Wildlife Clinic and other such facilities exist, and likewise in their willingness to support them, ranging from unawareness and indifference to major commitment and personal investment. The interviews also suggest that, even for those who are “that kind of person,” wild animals of the “local wildlife” kind have a liminal and labile status—one that may be even more problematic than that of domesticated animals (Kockelman 2011, Smith 2012). An animal who initially is regarded primarily as a practical problem, something that disrupts one’s daily routine, may quickly become someone to whom one relates, empathizing with his or her fear, pain, and suffering— someone whose needs must be addressed as a matter of moral imperative. This liminality and lability present the possibility that the scope of social justice may be broadened to include non-human beings (Nussbaum 2007, Parreñas 2018) and suggest that discursively acknowledging and attributing personhood (Alger and Alger 2002, Irvine 2004) is an important step toward extending moral consideration, a precondition of social justice. Animal-welfare discourses are fairly prevalent in the United States and many other societies, but they focus primarily on “pet” or “companion” animals and secondarily on “farm” animals (the latter generally considered quite distinct from, and a very distant second to, the former). Meanwhile, “charismatic megafauna” (e.g. polar bears) and entire ecosystems (e.g. the Amazon rainforest) are the focus of proliferating conservation discourses, which overlap with “sustainability” discourses and tend to skew toward concerns for human welfare on global or planetary scales. The experiences described by the rescuers who participated in this study suggest that local wildlife are an often overlooked category of beings who deserve attention in their own right as well as for what they can tell us about the discursive means by which personhood is constituted and attributed, and by which the scope of moral consideration and social justice is established, negotiated, and incrementally expanded.

NOTES 1. The Clinic does not accept domesticated animals (e.g. cats, dogs, goats, chickens); neither does it accept “exotics,” non-domesticated or semi-domesticated animals of non-local origin who are trafficked in the pet trade (e.g. parrots, chinchillas, tortoises, tarantulas).

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Persons seeking help with such animals, or seeking to rid themselves of them, are referred to more appropriate organizations. 2. A call to the hotline does not necessarily lead to admission of a patient (often it does not), and admission of a patient is not necessarily preceded by a call to the hotline. 3. “Rescuer” is not a term that is ordinarily or routinely used by the Clinic’s professional staff. It is used here because it succinctly captures the sense of self that was expressed, in varying ways and to varying degrees, by the persons who were interviewed. 4. The telephone hotline is staffed at all times. There is a small outbuilding near the Clinic’s entrance where an animal can be left at night or any other time when no staff member is on site. 5. Occasionally, a rescuer simply drops off an animal and departs abruptly, providing little or no information and declining to talk to a staff member at all. 6. This last is by far the least common outcome. An education animal or ambassador animal is one who has not recovered sufficiently to be released, is not expected to do so, and can survive only if kept under human care. An example would be a hawk who has lost the ability to fly or suffered a partial loss of vision. Such animals cannot be domesticated nor even tamed, but they can, in some cases, become habituated to limited contact with humans, making it possible for them to be used in educational-outreach programs. 7. Two items in the Patient Admission Record were used for this purpose: “▯ Check box if you do not wish to receive email updates from the Wildlife Clinic” and “If circumstances permit, would you like to be contacted for participation in this animal’s release? ▯Yes ▯No.” 8. There were some cases in which a single rescuer brought in two or more animals at the same time (for example, a litter of three infant squirrels); such cases are counted here as single admissions. 9. The names used here are pseudonyms. 10. Quoted utterances in this chapter may contain one or more of the following transcription symbols: • Italics indicate that the speaker stressed the word or syllable. • Two or more consecutive periods indicate a pause, each period representing approximately one syllabic “beat” (in terms of the “tempo” of the utterance overall). • A colon or colons within a word indicate elongation of the sound represented by the preceding letter(s). • Three periods enclosed in brackets indicate that material not germane to the topic under consideration has been removed. • A hyphen at the end of a word or partial word indicates an abrupt cutoff (as in a “false start” of an utterance). • Parentheses indicate that the transcriber is uncertain about what is between them (because of difficulty hearing what was said in that segment of the recording, for example). • Double parentheses and an italicized word or words within them indicate a feature of the utterance that cannot readily be represented in writing (such as a moment of laughter, for example). • Brackets and an italicized word or words within them indicate information provided by the transcriber (to clarify the referent of a potentially ambiguous pronoun, for example). 11. Ironically, these traps intended for spotted lanternflies, which were being promoted, at the time, by local and regional authorities as a means of protecting the ecosystem, turned out

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to be a hazard for downy woodpeckers and some other native animals. (The presence of two downy woodpeckers among the eleven animals represented in this study may be taken as an indication of this.) Public awareness of the hazard has since led to the development of more “eco-friendly” traps. 12. The persons interviewed were not asked whether they were native speakers of American English, but all apparently were. 13. The latter two of these three instances of “it” are ambiguous; either or both of them may refer either to the opossum or to the experience that is being described.

REFERENCES Alger, J. M., and S. F. Alger (2002), Cat Culture: The Social World of a Cat Shelter, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Avineri, N., L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa, eds. (2019), Language and Social Justice in Practice, London: Routledge. Baugh, J. (2018), Linguistics in the Pursuit of Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chao, S. (2021a), “The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plantation.” American Anthropologist, 123 (3): 476–89. Chao, S. (2021b), “Why Multispecies Ethnography Matters for Human Rights and the Climate.” In Earth Cries: A Climate Change Anthology, 97–102, Sydney: Sydney University Press. Goffman, E. (1978), “Response Cries.” Language, 54 (4): 787–815. Haraway, D. J. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. J. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heller, M. (2014), “Gumperz and Social Justice.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23 (3): 192–8. International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council and National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association (2021), Standards for Wildlife Rehabilitation, International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council and National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association. Irvine, L. (2004), “A Model of Animal Selfhood: Expanding Interactionist Possibilities.” Symbolic Interaction, 27 (1): 3–21. Kirksey, E. (2014), The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press. Kirksey, S. E., and S. Helmreich (2010), “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology, 25 (4): 545–76. Kockelman, P. (2011), “A Mayan Ontology of Poultry: Selfhood, Affect, Animals, and Ethnography.” Language in Society, 40 (4): 427–54. Kohn, E. (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kopnina, H. (2017), “Beyond Multispecies Ethnography: Engaging with Violence and Animal Rights in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology, 37 (3): 333–57. Kulick, D. (2017), “Human–Animal Communication.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 46: 357–78. Lamb, G., and C. Higgins (2020), “Posthumanism and Its Implications for Discourse Studies.” In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies, 350–70, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2007), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Parreñas, J. S. (2018), Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation, Durham: Duke University Press. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennycook, A. (2018), Posthumanist Applied Linguistics, New York: Routledge. Reagan, T. (2019), Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smart, A., and J. Smart (2017), Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, B. (2012), “Language and the Frontiers of the Human: Aymara Animal-oriented Interjections and the Mediation of Mind.” American Ethnologist, 39 (2): 313–24. Tannen, D. (2004), “Talking the Dog: Framing Pets as Interactional Resources in Family Discourse.” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 37: 399–420. Tsing, A. L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolfe, C. (2010), What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Commentary to Part IV BARBRA MEEK

SOCIAL JUSTICE A set of values: Respect. Access. Recognition. Rights. Responsibility. Equity. As Patricia Baquedano-López noted (this volume), an abundance of scholarship has emerged across language fields centering social justice as part of a theoretical repositioning and disciplinary transformation, often referred to as decolonization and antiracism. For example, the March issue of Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2022) considers what social justice means in the context of applied work that linguists conduct with underprivileged, underresourced communities of color (and in this issue, frequently their own communities). The authors’ topics range from bilingual classrooms where nonwhite students’ command of more than one linguistic variety is devalued (Cioè-Peña 2022) to historical trauma in Indigenous communities and the quest for language revitalization/reclamation (McKenzie 2022). Punctuating this issue is a commentary by Anne Charity Hudley and Nelson Flores (2022) that reminds readers “that the agendas of linguistics and applied linguistics were set by white and mostly male scholars long before [any of us were professors], yet their ramifications impact us and disproportionately impact the communities that we belong to and do research with” (Charity Hudley and Flores 2022, 145). They call for the implementation of a “social justice mentoring model” that breaks down linguistic barriers and transcends racialized borders in what Smith has labeled a “transraciolinguistic justice” (Smith 2022). The authors in this volume recognize these challenges all too well, though their purview moves beyond interrogating the white colonial and/or imperialist hegemonies within Anthropology (or Linguistics) as an academic field. Through their disruptive vigilance, these authors demonstrate repeatedly that the research that we conduct must be in service to the communities that make our research possible (Graham 2006; see also Deloria 1969; Shah 2022; Baquedano-López this volume). Their work shows that this vigilance isn’t simply a moral imperative (Fluehr-Lobban 2006); their work demands that this condition be articulated as an ethical cornerstone of our discipline(s). To put this another way, it is our responsibility to make our research relevant and do more than (re)produce and (re)contextualize a discourse about rights, equity, and justice (cf. Cowan 2006; see also Shin 2022). But what is social justice, how does it vary, and how can such a goal (or model) accommodate variation within and across different contexts?

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Anthropologist Netta Avineri and colleagues (2018) tackle the thorniness of conceptualizing and defining “social justice,” ultimately arguing that it is variable, context specific, and emergent (2018, 3); “[w]e view social justice as a contested concept and existential problem that remains to be realized” (2018, 2). Their overview of the concept also grounds it in understandings of “humanity” and “rights,” whether economic, educational, linguistic, or otherwise. They point out that early versions of justice articulated by the UN emphasized economic aspects and, separately, human rights, emerging out of early twentieth-century concerns with peace-making. Since then, it has become a goal and a process designed to address long entrenched systemic inequities. As Avineri et al. (2018, 6) highlight, the role of language in social justice offers three avenues for investigation: how language and language practices have changed (or are changing) as an object/diagnostic of injustice (e.g., English-only legislation), how language (as discourse) communicates ideas about and evaluations of (social) change as a tool for justice (e.g., OECD reports and “white” papers), and how language is a human (and non-human) right unto itself as an attribute of justice (e.g., language endangerment work). This last avenue is the one that most informs my perspective. Having been working in the field of language endangerment and revitalization for approximately two decades now, my concept of social justice is intertwined with Indigenous language reclamation; education; and the right to speak, hear, sign, write, practice, and observe Indigenous languages whether as grammatical systems or public signage or ethno-racial signifiers or as an act of self-determination or, last but not least, a mode of communication. Lingual social justice is the right to use our languages in ways that our language communities consider reasonable, responsible and just, and thereby realizing what some have called “linguistic sovereignty” (Meek 2008; Noodin, Warrington, and Perley 2017; McCarty 2013; Winstead et al. 2008). As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, a language-centered social justice involves not only the right to use language(s) in a self-determined fashion, but it’s also the responsibility of those in positions of power (nations, institutions, organizations, individuals) to support those acts of self-determination in a socially informed, culturally sensitive way and toward multiple ends, including healing (Meek 2022).

INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES AND SOCIAL JUSTICE In many ways, the history of Americanist anthropology is grounded in a kind of social justice ethic. Contingent upon the historical events of the time, one could argue that a social justice framework became manifest through Franz Boas’s research with Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada and in alignment with his anti-racist critique of Morgan and social Darwinism (Goodale 2009, 3; see also Silverstein 2018; Baker 1998; for an Indigenous critique of Boas, see Simpson 2018). As many scholars have emphasized, Boas and his students developed and expanded a framework of salvage ethnography with the intended purpose of “saving” Indigenous languages and cultures from imminent demise or at least from complete erasure (Meek 2017; Briggs and Bauman 2003). Yet this social project of Indigenous salvation wasn’t entirely unproblematic. For example, Paul Kroskrity has argued that despite non-Indigenous Boasian-trained anthropologists’ and linguists’ best intentions, a covert racializing form of discrimination can be found in their analyses of Indigenous languages and their scholarship on Indigenous cultural practices, most profoundly racist in their evaluations of Indianness and authenticity (Kroskrity 2013, 2020). However, rather than calling them racists, scholars such as Kroskrity, Anthony

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Webster, Marybeth Nevins, and others have found it more productive to evaluate their discourses and axes of evaluation in terms of the semiotics of their times (Kroskrity 2013; Webster 2011; Nevins 2013), asking what were the signs of differentiation that they relied upon and in what ways do these signs remain entrenched and racist/racializing today? Do the signs of old remain in practice, and if so, what evaluative schemas (or axes of comparison) do they invite/presuppose, how do they work, and are they just as racializing and racist? And, do they (still) inform the standards of differentiation, and if so, how so? If a goal of social justice is ethno-racial equality, then it behooves anthropology to answer these questions. Leading the way are the chapters in this volume, though not in terms of some “salvationist” anthropology but in the terms set out by the communities with which they work.

ACCESSIBILITY Courtney Handman and James Slotta highlight a tension that pervades all Indigenous language pursuits, the balancing of the need to know some widely known dominant or colonial language(s) alongside the perseverance (or reclamation) of the lesser-known Indigenous variety/language. They argue that access to the dominant language, in their case English, can be as relevant a part of some social–linguistic justice initiative as “saving” the Indigenous vernacular is. As their chapter demonstrates, the crux of the matter lies in the political–historical dimensions that set the stage for particular language ecologies (Mühlhäusler 1996) or lingual realities. For PNG, this means access to English rather than the institutionalization of local vernaculars. In North America, this means access to— and the institutionalization of—local vernaculars rather than the further entrenchment of English (or French or Spanish). That is, it is about accessibility; to reframe Handman and Slotta’s statement via Piller’s quote: there is a moral justice argument for accessing English so long as it doesn’t interfere with learning the local vernacular(s), and there’s a moral justice argument for learning local vernacular(s) so long as they don’t interfere with accessing English. Accessibility has become the term of art for imagining the creation of equity and inclusivity, for reimagining institutions as socially just actors. If remote communities in PNG can access the internet, and watch Joel Osteen give sermons in English, then clearly online learning is a way to reach more people. On the other hand, are these enactments of accessibility really about social justice and equity? Or, are they merely ongoing projects of colonization, of imperialism, of racial capitalism, of WEIRD/First World business as usual, though perhaps in a new guise? What does accessibility mean across these different contexts, and accessibility to what? Language, as in this case, or food as in Garth’s chapter? As someone whose linguistic repertoire reflects the choices of her elders—to abandon Comanche and learn English in order to survive colonization— it’s hard to imagine social justice as an either/or formula rather than a more inclusive “and.” If nothing else, the PNG situation suggests that an “and” is possible (given the right circumstances). Furthermore, the abundance of linguists, anthropologists, SIL missionaries, and those who have been working for decades now on vernacular languages in PNG suggests that regardless of the government’s capacity to fund education initiatives in the local languages, these external organizations have a network that can facilitate the institutionalization of both English and local vernaculars, and thus an opportunity for social justice.

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By contrast, for example, Sherina Feliciano-Santos’s chapter explores the various linguistic discriminations that happen in relation to two colonial languages—English and Spanish—the result of two waves of colonization. Unique to this sociopolitical situation, Spanish-dominant Puerto Ricans articulate a disdain for English rather than an enthusiasm for learning it. What is even more interesting is the framing of Spanish as the so-to-speak “Indigenous” language, the language of the island and of the ancestors. To reclaim Indigeneity through a colonial language resonates with both Handman and Slotta’s chapter and Tony Webster’s work with Navajo poets who claim English as just another Navajo language, acknowledging the multilingual repertoires of Navajo citizens. Like Puerto Rican high school students’ views and PNG parents’ desires, these two languages are certainly tools of communicative access for Navajo people, BUT they are also intimate, affective, expressive components of people’s identities and solidarity, and once gone, they are sorely missed. While this situation of loss is not one that applies to Spanish in Puerto Rico, linguistic acts of self-determination in nation-building efforts by Indigenous citizens is one that applies to all three situations. Whether motivated by Herderian proclivities for Indigenous unification (we exclusive) or neoliberal desires to access global networks (we inclusive), the underlying message is the same: social justice entails the right to self-determination. On the other hand, we might argue that these three cases are simply situations requiring “ideological clarification,” that actors don’t fully grasp the consequences of their linguistic attitudes for their Indigenous languages or their claims to Indigeneity. This kind of social justice might stop at discursive intervention.

CLARIFICATION “(Ideological) clarification” though first coined by Joshua Fishman (1990) in relation to language shift was developed and applied by Tlingit linguist Nora Dauenhauer and her husband Richard (1998). They developed this concept in relation to a gap between belief and practice within the Tlingit community. That is, while Tlingit people valued their heritage language, that wasn’t enough to motivate them to restore it as an everyday vernacular. To reveal the disjunctures in the community’s language efforts, Dauenhauers argued that people needed to be made aware of the consequences of linguistic inaction, regardless of how connected and adoring they felt toward the Tlingit language. They needed to disrupt the community’s discourse. In Jennifer Guzmán’s chapter, Indigenous people face a similar task of clarification and of recognizing disjunctures. However, in her chapter the clarification pertains to dominant discourses that enfigure Indigenous peoples and Indigenous languages as backward and incapable, what Laurie Graham has called “linguistic primitivism” (Graham 2020). Guzmán argues that health disparities arise and are maintained in relation to health policies that are shaped by language in three ways: as a primitivist discourse, as language ideology, and as racializing frame. She begins with the three-pronged rationale that justifies the use of colonial languages for medical services, that (1) Indigenous languages aren’t capable of relaying important medical information, (2) Indigenous peoples’ beliefs and cultural practices promote epidemics and poor health, and (3) Indigenous knowledge about and for addressing health concerns is considered inadequate or simply wrong. This last assumption is ironic given that a pervasive Indigenous typification of the WEIRD persona is that of someone desirous of extracting Indigenous communities’ medicinal plants and knowledge (cf. Sierra 2022; Callahan 2011).

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To address the primitivist discourse inflecting top-down policies and the administration of healthcare services to Indigenous communities in Chile, Guzmán discusses the changes that were made to improve “intercultural communication” and inequities: bilingual signage (see also Perley, this volume), bilingual intercultural facilitators, cultural competency training for employees. Despite these seemingly adequate interventions (accompanied by language legislation) as responses to ideological clarification, Guzmán reveals the disjunctures and perduring primitivist discourse that undermine the achievement of more positive outcomes. Evidenced interactionally as paternalistic condescension and materially through the reallocation of funds, overdemanding expectations and heavier workload, such disjunctures persist. As Guzmán’s chapter highlights, techniques of clarification and strategies to raise awareness produced by powerful institutions and governments often mask enduring colonial structures. Furthermore, strategies for disrupting inequities often rely on legislative change and support, while they simultaneously fail to improve circumstances for Indigenous peoples or Cuban citizens, as several of these chapters illustrate. Yet Guzmán offers a glimmer of hope: the hospital located on the traditional territory of the Mapuche people and managed in part by them. In conclusion, Guzmán juxtaposes a more holistic Mapuche health model with the more compartmentalized version of the state’s approach, noting that “[the state’s] silencing of Indigenous demands and focus on state-determined public health priorities constitutes an insidious form of health/communicative injustice.” Enacting legislation, while useful for recognition, ultimately in this case and in the PNG case did not result in the desired outcomes, of better healthcare or better education for Indigenous communities. Forming partnerships, between state governments and Indigenous communities, or governments, universities, and Indigenous Nations—and enacting a kind of distributed control (or “sharing”)—does appear to be one way to address disparities and the silencing of Indigenous voices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT One way in which disparities and silencing are being addressed is through public statements of acknowledgment, specifically land acknowledgment. These statements reference a history of colonial violence and dispossession by recognizing the Indigenous peoples who once stewarded the land on which the speaker or institution now resides. A seemingly straightforward first step toward identifying past and present harms (and opening a path toward some form of reparations1), it has become a controversial performative. Across academic institutions, departments, and organizations in the United States (and Canada), what these acknowledgments fail to accomplish is creating space for Indigenous people to have (a) voice, to have multiple voices. Rather such performatives “give” them a voice in a very constrained, institutionally sanctioned way rather than establishing or creating space for them/us to “have” a voice (Menna and Codó, this volume). As my colleague Scott Ketchum (2021) has stated, “it is time to move beyond asking Indigenous faculty members to write land acknowledgement statements,” to move beyond authoring an institutional voice and instead to become the principal and animator of their/our own voices. While “giving voice to” focuses on what Menna and Codó call “hegemonic narrative (b)orders,” the ways in which social actors manage “voice” in the maintenance of an assumed, taken-for-granted, dominant social order (this volume; see also Kroskrity and Avineri 2014), “having voice” is narrative created by the subaltern subject. Reframed as

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“having voice,” language reclamation becomes more than just speaking an Indigenous language—or giving a voice to it. Language reclamation, and reclamation more generally, is about making our ancestral languages and Indigenous heritage(s) a part of our daily lives, whether as Mapuche hospital signs or həǹq̀miǹəm̀ place-names. Perley’s chapter drives this point home in the narrative triptych that he presents, arguing that Indigenous voices and the lessons they hold are THE way forward in our current, shared stage of extinction. His chapter not only provides an example of what “having” a voice can achieve (countering past and present settler/colonial acts of Indigenous erasure), but his coda outlines an opportunity for what he calls transformative justice, a “proactive stance toward avoiding future harm” (Perley, this volume, p. 429). One such act of transformative justice is re-inscription, or reclaiming Indigenous places by re-titling them with Indigenous words and phrases, and thus invoking and foregrounding Indigenous knowledge. This act would be transformative in at least three instrumental ways: as a linguistic sign of Indigenous language reclamation, as an index of Indigenous histories (even more so than land acknowledgment statements), and as a counterpoint to the erasure of Indigenous knowledges and peoples from settler/colonial narratives and contemporary settler/colonial landscapes. Such actions would not merely be “restorative” (replacing a new moniker with an old one, reviving Indigenous words and phrases), but relationally transformative. However, neither “giving” nor “having” voice is a neutral project (Menna and Codó, this volume). In fact, their work shows how acts of giving voice can be unflinchingly appropriative. By contrast, acts of having a voice, having the opportunity to speak and act, to express and create, all of these acts, as each of these chapters demonstrates, are examples of our rights as beings to self-determine, to repatriate communal spaces (Perley, this volume; Guzmán, this volume; see also Bialostok and Watson 2022), and to (re)insert our voices. The “voicing subject,” much like Inoue’s concept of the “listening subject” (2003), is that privileged social actor who attempts to (faithfully?) reconstruct (and amplify) some subaltern discourse, an attempt at a supposedly authentic reconstruction of some objectified Other’s voice. Thus, social justice with respect to “voice” may be more about inaction, that is, more about quieting the “voicing subject” rather than amplifying the subaltern voice through the social position of those in power, at least in cases of human Others.

RELATEDNESS But not all acts of voicing center human subjects nor are they appropriative. In Paul Garrett and Rebecca Michelin’s chapter, we are asked to consider the extent to which social justice applies to non-human beings as well as human ones. They approach this “incremental extension” through an analysis of the discourses produced by wildlife rescuers at an urban-ish wildlife clinic that rehabilitates injured animals. Three discursive moves suggest an attribution of personhood and thus a moral responsibility to address the injured party (animal): role of addressee, use of third-person gendered pronoun, and subject typification (“that kind of person”). Through their discourse, the wildlife rescuers enregister themselves and the injured wildlife as kinds of social beings within a mutual frame of sociality and relatedness. This enregisterment echoes another type of discourse. At a moment when climate change and environmental degradation remain pressing issues, Indigenous epistemologies, and related ontologies, have become a model for reimagining Western, first-world solutions. In part, as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work attests (Kimmerer

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2013, 2022), one Indigenous solution is to treat all living entities as part of our (human) social world and to acknowledge and live up to our care and responsibility for them, as they do for us (humans). Another tenet, if you will, that guides our treatment of each other is to do no harm by not living to excess—use what you need and no more. It is an ethic of collaboration, respect, and care/conservancy, not of competition, hoarding, and gluttony. Hanna Garth’s chapter on food and language exemplifies this tenet. Arguing that Western social justice frameworks are misaligned with on-the-ground discourses and actions, Garth suggests that anthropologists take “a more intersectional, grassroots approach” (Garth, this volume, p. 437). In many ways, this call resonates with Perley’s “transformative justice” and Kimmerer’s Indigenous approach to environmental justice, both of which rely on local or situated narratives and Indigenous/community-based ways of relating and of relatedness. She reminds us, as do Garrett and Michelin, that these relationships emerge in the most mundane circumstances (see also Guzmán 2022). Whether interacting around a dinner table or talking to an injured bird or chauffeuring people home after meetings (Guzmán 2022), these interactions communicate expectations of what it means to “live a good life.” They also highlight the specific precarities experienced by a community. This theme encompasses all of these chapters, from ancestral and global languages to wild animals and non-soy-based food products. To be able to address social injustices requires an attention to situated, context-dependent vulnerabilities and uncertainties in relation to people’s conceptualizations of adequacy, meaningfulness, and well-being.

CROSSROADS We are at a crossroads, as a field, as scholars, as global citizens. Social justice for Indigenous communities, and for people and beings generally, is the right to self-determine, to be recognized, and to exist (peacefully and respectfully with each other) while also being mindful and aware of the differences and variations that enacting these rights will entail. Whether these acts of social, transformative justice are signified through bilingual signage (Perley; Guzmán) or voicing (Garrett and Michelin) or colonial language classes (Handman and Slotta) or food (Garth), language in and as social justice is clearly part of a much greater whole that linguistic anthropologists can and should speak to—as these authors have been arguing for—because linguistic anthropology has the frameworks, the skills, and the insights to move beyond superficial binaries and a simple calculus that beleaguers NGOs, governments, and other well-intentioned folk. However, as Menna and Codó warn, rather than speaking “for” communities, or “giving a voice to” them, linguistic anthropologists need to find ways to help beings elevate their voices alongside establishing one’s own scholarly voice (see, for example, Kral and Ellis 2021). One seemingly mundane example took shape as Dene Gudeji or Kaska Narratives, a collection of elders’ narratives published by the Yukon government and compiled by linguistic anthropologist and SLA Social Justice awardee, Dr. Patrick Moore. Because of this collaboration, I was able to cite these elders in the same way that I cite any scholar in my publications. But it needn’t require publication; it might simply require a reorienting of citational practice. These chapters also remind us that values vary—not only across communities, but within them and over time. They also emphasize that heterogeneity and multilingualism

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are de facto standards of everyday life, if not de jure ones. While language endangerment, revitalization, and reclamation currently circumscribe understandings of language and social justice to a large extent, ten years ago the same could not have been said. In fact, when I began my professional journey, it was estimated that language revitalization would have its heyday and then disappear in five years or so. The point is that how language and social justice are intertwined requires an ability to recognize variation, and for whom that variation matters. Furthermore, these chapters align with other social justice initiatives, a unity that might prove more effective than our more circumscribed and hyper-local foci. For example, in analyses of systemic forms of injustice at local levels, anthropologists might consider what First Nations scholar Cheryl Suzack has argued for with respect to Indigenous feminisms, that we share an obligation to engage in a wider critical dialogue with other social justice movements in order to construct shared “typologies” that show how social forces interact to generate the systemic conditions of [. . .] oppression. (2016, 149) And yet, Suzack warns that we—scholars, activists—not lose sight of the significance of local struggles. That is, she points out that a human rights approach in its “reach toward universality” has the potential to dismiss or cast aside the specificity of local situations, to render generic these struggles, and thus to obscure some of the harm inflicted on those whose important differences have been erased (2016, 155). Revealing the axes of differentiation that compound experiences of oppression for marginalized groups and magnifying their effects by grounding them in the sociohistorical circumstances that generate them are two areas of investigation in which anthropologists are especially well versed. In her conclusion, Suzack offers three recommendations: “(i) to consult with Indigenous advocates; (ii) to work with all levels of government to develop strategies to improve the participation of those who have been negatively affected; (iii) to support human rights committees that foster ‘different explanatory accounts’” (Suzack 2016, 157), all in the quest for human rights and social justice as they pertain to Indigenous women. Each of these chapters exemplifies the steps, and the roles, that anthropologists can and do take toward realizing two or more of these recommendations. Achieving social justice also requires some cultural competence about how to be a participant and not the lead/principal investigator; the listener and not the teller (cf. Baquedano-López, this volume). These are all aspects of doing ethnography, of participant-observation or as Barbara Tedlock noted, observant participation (Tedlock 1991). It also requires knowing something about how to be a guest, and not the host. I will end with a quote from my colleague, Choctaw scholar Bethany Hughes on her concept of guesting, and what it means to be a good guest (see also Perley, this volume): In contrast to discovering, which reduces the discovered to a kind of possession, and customer-ing, which commodifies and dehumanizes, guesting is focused not on attaining or accreting, but on relationships, humility, and reciprocal nurturance. Guesting is an active and intentional practice of presence with the goal of honoring and supporting the Indigenous people and spaces that always already undergird, surround, and shape your life and work. (2019, E23) Guesting in many ways is already part and parcel of the ethnographic approach that anthropologists assume, and each of these authors reminds us how learning to be a

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good guest varies, involves listening and humility, and must be “active and intentional.” And as these chapters attest, social justice begins with reimagining participant roles and frameworks, and always asking, to invoke Kim Tallbear (2019, 494), how does alterity— one’s (own) otherness (within a discipline or a field site)—shape one’s concept of and approach to social justice?

NOTE 1 In Canada, this project of repair and healing has been articulated in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s report and ninety-four calls to action (some of which include Indigenous languages). The report was in part a federal response to lawsuits filed on behalf of First Nations victims of abuses and crimes committed while students at residential schools.

REFERENCES Avineri, N., L. R. Graham, E. J. Johnson, R. C. Riner, and J. Rosa (2018), “Introduction: Reimagining Language and Social Justice.” In N. Avineri, L. R. Graham, E. J. Riner, and J. Rosa (eds.), Language and Social Justice in Practice, 1–16, New York and London: Routledge. Baker, L. D. (1998), From Savage to Negro Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bialostok, S., and M. D. Watson (2022), “Older Black Men Playing Dominoes: Talking Shit and Creating Black Place.” Transforming Anthropology, 30 (1): 34–47. Briggs, C., and R. Bauman (2003), Voices of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callahan, M. (2011), “Signs of the Time: Kallawaya Medical Expertise and Social Reproduction in 21st Century Bolivia.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Charity Hudley, A. H., and N. Flores (2022), “Social Justice in Applied Linguistics: Not a Conclusion, but a Way Forward.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 144–54. Cioè-Peña, M. (2022), “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s School: Interrogating Settler Colonial Logics in Language Education.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 25–33. Cowan, J. K. (2006), “Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights.” American Anthropologist, 108 (1): 9–24. Dauenhauer, R., and N. Dauenhauer (1998), “Technical, Emotional, and Ideological Issues in Reversing Language Shift: Examples from Southeast Alaska.” In L. A. Grenoble and L. J. Whaley (eds.), Endangered Languages, 57–98, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deloria Jr., V. (1969), Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York: The Macmillan Company. Fishman, J. A. (1990), “What Is Reversing Language Shift (RLS) and How Can it Succeed?” Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development, 11 (1–2): 5–36. Fluehr-Lobban, C. (2006), “Advocacy is a Moral Choice of ‘Doing Some Good’.” Anthropology News, October 5. Goodale, M., ed. (2009), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights, Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Graham, L. (2006), “Anthropology and Human Rights, ‘Do Anthropologists Have a Moral Obligation to Promote Human Rights?’.” In Focus, Anthropology News, 47 (7): 4–5.

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Graham, L. (2020), “From ‘Ugh’ to Babble (or Babel): Linguistic Primitivism, Sound-Blindness, and the Cinematic Representation of Native Amazonians.” Current Anthropology, 61 (6): 732–62. Guzmán, J. (2022), “Raitera, Ally, Accomplice: Giving Rides as Engaged Ethnography.” Anthropology and Humanism, 47 (2): 312–328. Hughes, B. (2019), “Guesting on Indigenous Land: Plimoth Plantations, Land Acknowledgment, and Decolonial Praxis.” Theatre Topics, 29 (1): E23–32. Inoue, M. (2003), “The Listening Subject of Japanese Modernity and his Auditory Double: Citing, Sighting, and Siting the Modern Japanese Woman.” Cultural Anthropology, 18 (2): 156–93. Ketchum, T. (2021), “A Year of Survivance.” Anthropology News, September 2. Available online: https://www​.anthropology​-news​.org​/articles​/a​-year​-of​-survivance/. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013), Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Kimmerer, R. W. (2022), “A Conversation with Robin Kimmerer.” The 6th Annual Robert J. Berkhofer Jr. Lecture on Native American Studies, Ann Arbor. Kral, I., and E. M. Ellis (2021), In the Time of Their Lives, Perth: The University of Western Australia Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (2013), “Discursive Discriminations in the Representation of Western Mono and Yokuts Stories: Confronting Narrative Inequality and Listening to Indigenous Voices in Central California.” Journal of Folklore Research: An International Journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 50 (1–3): 145–74. Kroskrity, P. V. (2020), “Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective.” In H. S. Alim, A. Reyes, and P. V. Kroskrity (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race, 68–89, New York: Oxford University Press. Kroskrity, P. V., and N. Avineri, eds. (2014), “Reconceptualizing Endangered Language Communities: Crossing Borders and Constructing Boundaries.” Language and Communication, 38 (Special Issue): 1–82. McCarty, T. L. (2013), “Education Policy, Citizenship and Linguistic Sovereignty in Native America.” In V. Ramanathan (ed.), Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship: Rights, Access, Pedagogies, 116–42, Bristol and Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters. McKenzie, J. (2022), “Addressing Historical Trauma and Healing in Indigenous Language Cultivation and Revitalization.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 71–7. Meek, B. A. (2008), “Linguistic sovereignty.” Panel: Discursive Entanglements and Linguistic Ruptures: The politics of ethnographies of language, Barbra A. Meek and Diane Riskedahl, organizers. Part of a Special Symposium: The Hidden World Before Our Eyes: The Promise and Perils of an Engaged Anthropology.  Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) Annual Meetings, Ottawa, Ontario, May 8–10, 2008. Meek, B. A. (2017), “Native American Languages and Linguistic Anthropology: From the Legacy of Salvage Anthropology to the Promise of Linguistic Self-Determination.” In P. V. Kroskrity and B. A. Meek (eds.), Engaging Native American Publics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Collaborative Key, 3–24, London and New York: Routledge. Meek, B. A. (2022), “‘At Risk’ Languages and the Road to Recovery: A Case from the Yukon.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 43 (3): 228–42. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996), Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim, London and New York: Routledge. Nevins, E. M. (2013), “‘Grow with That, Walk with That’: Hymes, Dialogicality, and Text Collections.” Journal of Folklore Research, 50 (1–3): 79–116.

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Noodin, M., M. Warrington, and B. Perley (2017), “Giving Voice to Linguistic Sovereignty: Collaboration Across Nations and Generations.” Oral Presentation, Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., November 30, 2017. Shah, S., L. Kometsi, and M. Brenzinger (2022), “Language Activists and Linguists in Pursuit of the siPhuthi Cause.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 93–101. Shin, J. (2022), “Criticality, Identity, and Ethics: Toward the Construction of Ethical Subjectivity in Applied Linguistics Research.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 102–8. Sierra, J. (2022), “From a Distal Insider to a Remote Outsider: On Being Interpellated as a ‘Gringa’ among Shipibo-Konibos’ [Paper Presentation].” Michicagoan Conference in Linguistic Anthropology 2022: (Dis)engagement, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Silverstein, M. (2018), “Of Two Minds About Minding Language in Culture.” In N. Blackhawk and I. L. Wilner (eds.), Indigenous Visions, 147–65, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Simpson, A. (2018), “Why White people love Franz Boas; or, the Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession.” In N. Blackhawk and I. L. Wilner (eds.), Indigenous Visions, 166–82, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, P. (2022), “Black Immigrants in the United States: Transraciolinguistic Justice for Imagined Futures in a Global Metaverse.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42: 1–10. Suzack, C. (2016), “Human Rights and Indigenous Feminisms.” In C. Lennox and D. Short (eds.), Handbook of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, 146–63, London and New York: Routledge. Tallbear, K. (2019), “Feminist, Queer, and Indigenous Thinking as an Antidote to Masculinist Objectivity and Binary Thinking in Biological Anthropology.” American Anthropologist, 121 (2): 494–6. Tedlock, B. (1991), “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography.” Journal of Anthropological Research, 47: 69–94. Webster, A. (2011), “‘Please Read Loose’: Intimate Grammars and Unexpected Languages in Contemporary Navajo Literature.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35 (2): 61–86. Winstead, T., A. Lawrence, E. J. Brantmeier, and C. J. Frey (2008), “Language, Sovereignty, Cultural Contestation, and American Indian Schools: No Child Left Behind and a Navajo Test Case.” Journal of American Indian Education, 47 (1): 46–64.

CONTRIBUTORS

Patricia Baquedano-López is Associate Professor of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Her research focuses on transnational Indigenous sovereignty and migration, and education in the Maya diaspora Yucatan–California. She is affiliated faculty in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics and is core faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. She is a cofounding editor of the journal Language, Culture, and Society and coauthor (with Paul B. Garrett) of the book On Becoming Bilingual: Children’s Experiences Across Homes, Schools, and Communities. Eva Codó is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. Her field of specialization is the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, with a particular focus on language policy and critical institutional ethnography. Her research has been published widely in, among other journals, Linguistics and Education, Language Policy, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. She has recently edited the book Global CLIL: Critical, Ethnographic and Language Policy Perspectives (2023). She is currently cochair of the Association for the Study of Discourse and Society (EDiSo) and coeditor of the journal Multilingua. Keziah Conrad is an affiliate of the Department of Anthropology and a clinical speechlanguage pathologist at the Institute for Human Development at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA. Her research interests include family relationships, disability, and creative responses to violence. She has published on the efforts of people in the former Yugoslavia to claim space for “ordinary” cross-cutting relationships and multidimensional selves despite war and nationalism. Sonia N. Das is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University, USA, and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. A specialist in language, politics, and inequality, she has conducted fieldwork in North America and archival research on colonial French India and French Guiana. She is the author of Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (2016), a study of the migration experiences of Tamils navigating political rivalries in Québec. She also examines language practices and racial hierarchies in commercial seafaring. Currently, she is writing a book on racial and gender biases and inequities in US law enforcement, analyzing narratives and bodycam and dashcam footage of police–civilian interactions. Sherina Feliciano-Santos is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests focus on understanding how people navigate social categories, language, identity, history, and social action. She has published on Indigenous cultural and linguistic reclamation in Puerto Rico, on policing, and on migration, citizenship, race, and ideologies of language and the nation among

484

CONTRIBUTORS

Puerto Ricans. She recently published her first book A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity (2021). Inmaculada M. García-Sánchez is Professor of Social Research Methodology in the School of Education and Information Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of International Migration at University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her research focuses on language and the (im)migrant experience of youth. She is a past postdoctoral fellow of the National Academy of Education, Washington, DC, USA. She is the author of Language and Muslim Immigrant Childhoods: The Politics of Belonging (2014) and of numerous articles on immigrant children and youth, as well as coeditor of Language and Cultural Practices in Communities and School: Bridging Learning for Students from NonDominant Groups (2019). Paul B. Garrett is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. He studies the social, cultural, historical, and linguistic dimensions of language contact. He has done research on language socialization, language shift, and related issues in the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia and is now working on revitalization of the Lenape language. Hanna Garth is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, USA, with affiliations in African American studies and the Program in Latin American Studies. She is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist who studies food access and the global food system. She studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among black and Latinx communities in the United States. She published the book Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal and coedited the volume Black Food Matters: Food Justice in the Wake of Racial Justice with Ashanté Reese. Jennifer R. Guzmán is Associate Professor of Anthropology at State University of New York Geneseo, USA. Her research centers on how people confront health challenges and advocate for themselves within social systems that are harmful to health, including intercultural health efforts in Chile and immigrant rights organizing in the United States. Her research has been featured in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Anthropology and Humanism, among other venues. She is coeditor of Ethnographic Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean, an edited volume designed for teaching the anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean. Courtney Handman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is the author of Critical Christianity: Translation and Denominational Conflict in Papua New Guinea (2015). Sera J. Hernández, PhD, is Associate Professor and Chair of Dual Language and English Learner Education at San Diego State University, USA. Her research bridges the fields of educational linguistics and the anthropology of education to examine the sociocultural, linguistic, and political contexts surrounding educational language policies, bilingual teacher preparation, and bilingualism and biliteracy practices, particularly in border regions around the world. Her scholarship has been featured in journals such as the Review of Research in Education, Language Policy, and the Journal of Latinos and Education. Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway is Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College, USA. Her research focuses on the linguistic anthropology of sign languages in Nepal, Germany,

CONTRIBUTORS

 485

and Malta, with attention to the flexible multimodal nature of communicative practice as well as to the social factors that facilitate or limit that flexibility. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals, including The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, Language and Communication, Signs and Society, Semiotic Review, Pragmatics, American Anthropologist, and Practicing Anthropology. Her most recent book is Signing and Belonging in Nepal (2016). Miyako Inoue is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, USA, where she teaches linguistic anthropology and Japanese studies. She is the author of Vicarious Language: The Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan and is currently working on a book manuscript, titled, The Stenographer’s Invisible Hand: How Did Speech Become Language in Japan? Based on archival and ethnographic research working with shorthand stenographers in the National Diet (Parliament) and court stenographers operating stenographic typewriters, the book examines the techniques, mediation, logistics, and ethics of stenography and considers its role in the production of modern Japanese public institutions. Brittany Johnson is a member of Beaver First Nation and is also Métis. In her doctoral studies, she looks to beadwork and burlesque as sites of reproductive and sexual justice for Indigenous women and girls. She is Assistant Professor in Anthropology/Indigenous Studies at MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada. Johnson is also a published creative writer, most recently appearing in CV2/Prairie Fire’s NDNCountry. Christine Jourdan has taught anthropology and linguistic anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, since 1991. Her work focuses on theories of cultural and social change, on the pidginization and creolization of cultures and languages, on the development of urban cultural worlds in Melanesia, on language ideology and on changing food ideologies and practices in Québec and in the Pacific. She recently coedited a special issue of Journal de la Société des Océanistes on Urbanization in the Pacific and a special issue of Oceania on bridewealth. Her work has appeared in Annual Review of Anthropology, Language and Society, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, English Worldwide, Anthropology et Sociétés and in various edited volumes. Martha Sif Karrebæk is Professor of Multilingualism and Danish as a Second Language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Karrebæk works with language use and language ideologies in Denmark, and during her career she has discussed the tensions between a multilingual population and monolingual institutions in societal areas such as preschool and primary/middle school, mother tongue education, interpreting in health care and courts, and foreign-educated health care professionals. She is also a recognized expert in the field of food and language. Marta Kirilova is Associate Professor of Multilingualism and Danish as a Second Language at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Kirilova has worked with migration and multilingualism in the workplace, language policy, linguistic inequality, and institutional interaction. Most recently, she has been involved in a research project on sociolinguistic perspectives on interpretermediated encounters in the Danish public sector. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is Associate Professor in the PhD Programs in Urban Education and the Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City

486

CONTRIBUTORS

University of New York, USA. She is an educational anthropologist exploring the ways in which the everyday lives of children and adults from mixed-status families are shaped by legal and cultural citizenship. Ariana is a coprincipal investigator of the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education. Her work has appeared in Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, and Anthropology & Education Quarterly along with Humanizing Research and the Encyclopedia of Language Socialization. Her forthcoming book Knowing Silence: How Children Talk About Immigration Status in School will be published in Spring 2024. Johanna Markkula is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Vienna, Austria. Her research is an anthropological study of global maritime labor and of the sea as a social, political, and legal space. As a maritime anthropologist, she has carried out long-term ethnographic fieldwork on board cargo ships and in the Philippines with maritime organizations and businesses, focusing on changing maritime labor politics and practices, the everyday life of seafarers, and the forms of sociality that emerge at sea. She is presently working on a monograph, Moving Worlds: Maritime Work and Life on the Social Ocean. Luisa Martín Rojo is Professor in Linguistics at the MIRCo Research Center for Multilingualism, Discourse and Communication at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, and founding member/former president of Iberian Association for Discourse Studies and Society (EDiSo). Throughout her research trajectory, she has conducted and led research in the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and communication, focusing on social inequality and sociolinguistic justice. Her publications include the volumes Constructing Inequality in Multilingual Classrooms (2010), Occupy (2016), and Language and Neoliberal Governmentality (with Del Percio, 2019). Barbra Meek is a citizen of the Comanche Nation, Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. She currently chairs a task force for the American Anthropological Association, Arlington, USA, charged with addressing the enduring residue of settler colonialism in Anthropology’s approaches to work with, and defining of, Native American communities. Laura Menna recently received her PhD from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, in Translation and Language Studies. Her academic background is in Spanish language and literature, critical discourse studies, and ethnographic sociolinguistics. Her core research and political interests are the conditions and outcomes of knowledge production within migrant and anti-racist social movements, from militant, discursive, and philosophical perspectives. Her PhD dissertation draws on the concept of voice to ethnographically trace the mantero (street vendor) subject production in Barcelona and its intersections with issues of labor, (institutional) politics, and (anti)racism, at local, national, and global levels. Rebecca Michelin, formerly Director of Wildlife Rehabilitation at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, USA, is now studying to be a wildlife veterinarian at Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. Margaret Mutu is of Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa, Ngāti Whātua, and Scottish descent and is Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She specializes in Māori language and society, treaty claims against the British Crown, and Māori

CONTRIBUTORS

 487

rights, particularly as they relate to Māori language preservation, constitutional matters, conservation, and resource management. Her publications include three books on her Ngāti Kahu nation’s histories and traditions, and on Māori rights. Her most recent book is Ngāti Kahu: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation (2017). Bernard C. Perley is Wolastoqey from Neqotkuk (Maliseet from Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick, Canada). Dr. Perley is the Director for the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (CIS), Vancouver, Canada, and Associate Professor teaching courses in First Nations and Endangered Languages as well as First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research emphasizes critical analysis of discourses on language death and endangerment in order to shift metaphors of “language death and extinction” toward metaphors of “language life and vitality.” His ongoing writing, research, and teaching integrate language, landscape, and identity to enhance Indigenous language revitalization. Anne E. Pfister is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville, USA, and current Director of the UNF Digital Humanities Institute, Jacksonville, USA. Her research interests focus on deafness and language socialization in Latin America and participatory methods including photovoice and digital storytelling. Her research has been published in Visual Anthropology Review, Ethos, and Medical Anthropology. Jennifer F. Reynolds is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA, where she teaches courses in cultural, visual, and linguistic anthropology. As a linguistic anthropologist who uses visual methods, she recently produced ethnographic films for an anthropolitical transborder study of kindergarten classrooms serving Mayan Mam children in Guatemala and the Southeastern United States. The films facilitate intracultural and transborder dialogue with teachers, administrators, and Guatemalan linguist activists to pinpoint contradictions manifest in their educational policies and language pedagogies within institutions as nodal points of converging networks, and to level support and redirect resources in more equitable ways. Kathleen C. Riley is Assistant Teaching Professor of Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, USA. She has conducted research on multilingual practices, foodways, food-and-language socialization, multilingualism, and cultural identities in French Polynesia, France, Montreal, New York City, and Vermont. She has coauthored (with Amy Paugh) Food and Language: Discourses and Foodways across Cultures. She has coedited a special issue of Anthropologie et Sociétés on food glocalization with Christine Jourdan and a special issue of Semiotic Review on the semiotics of food and language with Jillian Cavanaugh. Her publications appear in Annual Review of Anthropology, Language and Communication, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Signs and Society and several collected volumes. Jennifer Roth-Gordon is Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. She is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who has worked in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since 1995. Her current research explores how notions of white superiority and anti-blackness are produced in daily interactions and used to justify state-supported racial violence. She has recently published a review piece, “Language and White Supremacy,” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Her first book is Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro (2017). Louisa Schein teaches Anthropology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, USA. She has worked on cultural politics with the Miao/Hmong in China and the United States for four decades. Author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (2000), she coedited Translocal China with Tim Oakes and Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia with Purnima Mankekar. Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, Positions, Identities, Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology. She coproduced documentary films on Hmong Americans (1981, 2012) and since 2016 has directed the international collaboration “Chinese–English Keywords Project.” James Slotta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is the author of Anarchy and the Art of Listening: The Politics and Pragmatics of Reception in Papua New Guinea (2023). Chantal Tetreault is Associate Professor of Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology at Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA. Her scholarship focuses on migration, language, and social change in France. Tetreault’s past research addressed the interactional styles whereby French adolescents of Algerian descent construct and express their emergent identities as Arab Muslims and French youth. This research is showcased in her 2015 book, a cultural and linguistic ethnography entitled, Transcultural Teens: Performing Youth Identities in French Cités. Tetreault’s current research, funded by a Fulbright award, analyzes national debates about Arabic language educational reform in France. Quentin Williams is Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research and an Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. He was also the Ghent Visiting Professor (Leerstoel Houer) at the Centre for Afrikaans and the study of South Africa at Ghent University (Belgium) (2022/2023). He has published on the performance and practice of multilingualism, race, Hip Hop, language activism, Afrikaaps, and linguistic citizenship in South Africa. His most recent books are Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship with Tommaso Milani and Ana Deumert (2022) and Global Hiphopography with Jaspal Singh (2023). He leads the Trilingual Dictionary of Kaaps (TWK) project that will develop the first dictionary of Kaaps (also known as Afrikaaps) (see here: www​.dwkaaps​.co​.za). Fan Yang is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, Global Studies, and the PhD program in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA. She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). Yang’s work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, Positions: Asia Critique, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Environmental Humanities. Her new book Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements is forthcoming in 2024.

INDEX

Note: Page locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. Abascal, S.  217 accessibility  474–5 accountability  269 activism Afrikaaps  71–9, 80 n.1 Hip Hop  71–3 linguistic belonging  94–6 multilingual  67–70 Spanish language  84, 94–6 Taino/Boricua language  84, 94–9 translation  337 actor-network theory  289 Administration of Justice Act §149,1 (Denmark)  311 African mobility  265–9 Afrikaans  68 as Afrikaaps  73–5 Gamtaal  67, 71–3 group discussion on  74 as language  73–5 reinvention of  71–9 Afrikaaps activism  71–9, 80 n.1 group discussion on  74 language movement  73–5 lyrics for  78 in media, poetics, and commodification  76–9 for multilingual speakers  75–6 Aftershocks of Disaster (Bonilla and LeBrón)  91 agency  12, 43–4, 66, 70, 73–5, 76, 79, 80 n.2 Ainscow, M.  48 Akin, D.  108 Akiwenzie-Damm, K.  185–6 Aldridge, N.  142 Alexander, N.  68, 71 Alfred, T.  428–9 Alice through the Looking Glass (Carroll)  143, 147 Alim, H. S.  71

aloha `āina (love of the land)  141 Alsatian movement  230–1 ambiguity  195, 197–8, 200, 204 America First  302 American Sign Language  299 anatomy  178 Andújar, N.  219 Anglo-Americans  142 Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Chen)  184 animal rescue  457, 460–4 Anthropocene  424–5 anthropolitical approach to language socialization (APLS)  286, 288–9 anthropolitical linguistics  288–9 anthropological linguistics  5, 7, 9, 14, 227, 251, 260–1, 269, 339, 341, 345–6, 359, 361, 393, 472–4, 478 anthropology  5, 7, 9, 14, 227, 251, 260–1, 269, 339, 341, 345–6, 359, 361, 393, 472–4, 478 anti-blackness  158–61, 165, 172 anti-black violence  159–60 anti-hegemonic racial humor  158 anti-immigration  215–17 Anzaldúa, G.  242–3 Aotearoa, British colonization in  137–54, 154 n.2 background  138–41 constitutional transformation in  151–2 Humpty Dumpty principle  143–51 Māori language  137–54, 154 n.5 other indigenous peoples, threats to  141–2 Te Tiriti o Waitangi  137, 139–40, 142–7 treaty of Waitangi  142–3 apology  151 applied linguistics  5, 16, 472 appropriateness, educational standards of  89–90

490

Arabic language  212–13, 223–32 educational reform in France  223–32 education program  226–7 EILE program  226–32 ELCO program  224–5, 227–32 French nationalism and  231–2 as heritage language  225 instruction  223–5 as migrant language  224–5 of postcolonial citizens  225 in public schools  226 Araucanía  396, 398 Arawakan languages  97 Ariefdien, S.  72 Arnold, L.  303 arroz con pollo (chicken and rice)  441 arts-based practice  10, 117, 349 asymmetry  242, 336, 341 audibility  337–8, 351 audience coalescence  13, 417, 432 n.12 Austin, J. L.  3 Austronesian languages  105 authority  314–16, 321–9 autonomy  178 Avineri, N.  131, 473 Aznar, J. M.  217 babás  159 baem/paem gele (buy/pay girl)  112 Bakhtin, M.  166 Balam, L.  294–7 Baldwin, D.  421, 425 balijas  199–200, 202 Banco Reparação Histórico (Bank of Historic Reparations)  158 Baquedano-López, P.  23, 472 Barcelona  264–82 African mobility and  265–9 crossing practices and  281–2 discursive space of street vending  268–9 irregular street vending in  264 mantero, story of  277–81 narrative (b)orders and  281–2 Street Vendors Union  264–81 street vendors’ voice  264, 266–81 theoretical and epistemological approach  269–72 union’s voice  272–7 Barcelona en Comú party (BeC)  264, 267–9 Basso, K. H.  3, 441 Bauman, R.  226

INDEX

beaded anatomy  185–8 beading vulvas  185–8 beads  178–9, 183–5 beadwork  178–9, 188 anatomy  185–8 intimacy of  183–5 uterus, teaching about  185–8 vulva, teaching about  185–8 Bear, T.  188 Beaver Hills Burlesque  188–9 Belcourt, C.  189 belonging  419–23 to ancestral land  419–20 erasure and  420–1 fractal  444 inscription and  421–3 social injustice and  420–3 Benítez, C.  86 Bennett, J.  369 bentuhua (本土化 localization)  339 Berger, Ó.  292 Berman, E.  104 Bible  382 Biggs, Bruce  137, 141–5, 243 bilingual environments  48–9 bilingualism  400–2 bilingual schools  92 birthing practices  179 birthing rituals  180–1 Black Lives Matter movement  152, 158 Blanquer, J.-M.  223, 227 Blaqpearl, J.  71 Blommaert, J.  270–1 Boas, F.  473 bodily knowledge  178–80, 185–8 body, teachings about  178–80, 185–8 Bolsonaro, J.  159 Bonilla, Y.  91 Bopp, M.  158, 160, 172 border(s)  266, 271, 275, 280, 282, 298 enforcement  304 patrolling  300 borrowing  144–5 Bourdieu, P.  104 Bowen, J. R.  225 braedpraes (brideprice)  112 Brazil  159–73; see also Rio de Janeiro Breton  224 bridewealth  112 Briggs, C. L.  24–5, 226, 394–5 Briggs, C. S.  226

INDEX

British colonization in Aotearoa/New Zealand  137–54, 154 n.2 background  138–41 constitutional transformation in  151–2 Humpty Dumpty principle  143–51 Māori language  137–54, 154 n.5 other indigenous peoples, threats to  141–2 Te Tiriti o Waitangi  137, 139–40, 142–7 treaty of Waitangi  142–3 British colonization in Solomon Islands  114–16 British Columbia  423, 429 Brown, W.  360 Bucholtz, M.  3 Bulo  234 n.15 Burgess, M.  72–3 burlesque  188–90 Butler, J.  269–70, 281, 359–60 Buyi people of Guizhou  347 Caballo de Troya (Trojan Horse; Abascal)  217 cabaret  189 Cabrera, A. P.  292 Caldeira, T.  169 Canada  142, 180–2, 423, 428 aboriginal nature of  428–9 eugenics in  181–2 forced sterilization in  181–2 Indigenous languages and  429 Indigenous women/girls in  180–3 maternal mortality in  181–2 Métis civilization and  428 midwives in  181–2 Canaques  122 n.7 Cape Coloured people  76 capitalism  5, 110–11, 359–60 colonialism and  110–11 global  313–14 in Marquesas  110–11 neoliberal capitalism in Cuba  437 platform  362 political economy of  360 in Solomon Islands  110–11 supply chain  361 Capitalocene  414 Caribbean  6, 9, 95, 97, 129, 304, 438–9, 448 n.3 Carr, E. S.  205, 315 Carroll, K. S.  94 Carroll, L.  143

 491

Casa del Caribe (Caribbean House)  438, 448 n.3 Catalan Republican Party (ERC)  264 Catholic schools  113 Cavanaugh, J. R.  437 cayuco boat crisis  266 Cekaite, A.  23 Central Secondary School for the Deaf in Naxal, Kathmandu  53–4 Centros de Atención Múltiple (Centers for Multiple Services (CAMs))  48–52 ceremonies  179 četnik  199–200 chain migration  297 Chamberlin, Bob  423 charabia  111, 116, 118, 120–1, 123 n.16, 132 Charity Hudley, A. H.  3 Chen, M.  184 Chiang, H.  341 Chicago-based Latinx youth  290 childhood, cultural politics of  291–4 children  181–2 Chile Indigenous Law 19.253  395–6 intercultural health programming  396–408 neoliberal multiculturalism in  396 China  335–54 audibility  351 culture and literary discourse  342, 344–51 economic rise  336 ethnic tourism  348 folk  349 geopolitics of voice  336–8 intellectual property rights  337, 351–3 self-determination  338 society, modernization of  348 soft power, aspirational  337 traditional Chinese medicine into English, translation of  343 in twenty-first century  336 wenhua (文化) in  344–51 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak  336 Chinese-English Keywords Project (CEKP)  338–44 Chirac, J.  224 chisme  293–4 Christianity  382 Christian missionaries  112 Christian missions  380–3

492

chuangxin (创新)  352 Chunying, H.  338 citizenship  70 civil discourse  196–8 civil inattention  197 civility  162, 197, 199, 200, 205–6, 243, 344 civilizing mission  123 n.17 clasping  294–7 class  9, 12–13, 26, 43, 67–8, 72, 85–7, 89–90, 104, 113, 119–21, 160, 162–73 clientelism  201 climate change  1, 5, 11, 190, 412–17, 423–8 climate migration  412–13 clinical communication  393–4 Clinton, R. N.  142 codes  109–10 code-switching  13, 87, 116, 120, 122, 132 Codó, E.  361–2 coercion, nation-state ideologies of  95 Cohen, O.  47–8 Cold War  337 collective action  244–6 colonialism  2, 5, 85–6, 239–40, 335–6, 428 American  424–5 British colonization in Aotearoa  137–54 British colonization in Solomon Islands  114–16 capitalism and  110–11 concept  239–40, 428 European  109–22 French  117, 223–32 language ideologies and  109–10 linguistic governmentality and  110–11 linguistic hegemony and  109–10 post-colonial era  113–20 regimes  109–13 religious re-education and  111–13 sociolinguistic hegemony and  111–13 Spanish  84–100 coloniality of being  240 coloniality of knowledge  240 colonial multilingualism  376–80 colonial violence  179–80 colonizer’s language  371 Combs, L.  184 common-law marriages  180 communal well-being  5 communautarisme  225 communication  45, 291

INDEX

“communication value” (Q-value) of languages  374–5 communicative competence, cultural norms for  37 communicative function of language  375–6 communicative hegemony  24–5 communicative inequality  376–80 communicative modalities  45–6 communicative refusal  437, 442–4, 446 communicative vigilance  204 communism  350 companion animals  452 competencies  44 compulsory fluency  44 comunidades (communities)  159, 163 Conrad, K.  241–2, 244 conventional language  46 conventional medicine  403, 408 n.2 Conversation Analysis (CA)-inspired approach  27, 38 n.2 cooperation  359 Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF)  292 cordial racism  160, 165 Cormier, Raymond  182 corruption  201, 287 co-speech gestures  45 Couldry, N.  271–2 courtrooms  317–29 creative development (创造性发展 chuangzaoxing fazhan)  350 creative transformation (创造性转化 chuangzaoxing zhuanhua)  350 creole  109–10 critical discourse analysis  45–7 Critical Indigeneity  416 critical sociolinguistic ethnography  109–13, 395–6 cross-cultural communication theory  393–4, 397–8, 406 cross-cultural health  393–404 cross-regional conditions, immigration  297–303 cross-species interaction  453–62 Crown grant  148 Crown purchase  148 Cuba  436–47 arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) dish  441 communicative refusal  442–4 discursive resistance  444–7

INDEX

ensalada fria (macaroni salad)  442 families in  436–47 food acquisition  438, 441–2 food-and-language communication  437–47 food distribution system  436–47 food problem  440–1 low-cost basic needs in  440 neoliberal capitalism in  437 (re)evaluation of food(s)  437 spaghetti  441–2 traditional food  438 Cubanidad (Cuban identity)  444 cultural anthropology  345 cultural beliefs  27–36 cultural industries (文化产业 wenhua chanye)  350 cultural politics of childhood  291–4 cursing  113 custom  110 Cuyul, A.  405 Dar Es Salaam  77 Darija (colloquial Arabic)  224 Das, V.  195, 202–3, 257, 259, 361 Dauenhauer, N.  475 Dávila, J.  172 Davis, J.  95 Dayton Peace Agreement  200 deaf children  42–59, 59 n.1 communicative modalities for  45–6 educational experiences in Mexico  47–52 experiences in Mexico  44–5, 47–52 Hoffmann-Dilloway’s contribution  44–5 ideologies for  44–5 language acquisition for  43, 45–7 Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems (IPPLIAP) for  44, 48–9 Pfister’s contribution  44–5 sign languages and  45–6 stigma  45–6 deaf schools  48 deaf sociality in Nepal biomedical/karmic understandings of  52–3 cause of  52 and language deprivation  52–8 NSL  53–8 ODP  56–8 debt crises in Puerto Rico  91–4 Deciding to be Legal (Hagan)  298

 493

decolonization  16 n.4, 185–6, 188, 266, 290, 342–3, 378, 472 Decolonize Your Gitch (Peters)  189 De Genova, N.  267 Delclós, C.  267 de Mendaña, A.  106, 107, 110 De Meulder, M.  45 Denmark  311–31 Administration of Justice Act §149,1  311 courtroom interpreter discourses, analyzing  317–29 EasyTranslate©  311–12, 318–29 English in  313–14 expert authority in  314–16, 321–9 globalization in  313–14 language  313–14 legal interpreters in  311–12 legal interpreting services in  311, 313–17 National Police  311–12, 314–18 neoliberal governance and interpreting  313–14 neoliberalism in  313–14 social justice in  312–13, 316–17 de Souza, L. M. M.  369 de Swaan, A.  374 detranslation  353–4, 363–4 Devette-Chee, K.  370 Devkota, N. K.  54 DeWalt  439 Dia da Consciência Negra (Black Consciousness Day)  159 dialects  109 dialogic/dialogism  7, 13, 36, 341–2 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin)  166 DiAngelo, R.  160 dianying wenhua (电影文化, film culture)  353 diaspora  25, 94, 298, 304 Dick, H. P.  168 disaggregating words  339–40 discourse analysis  214, 361 discourse of coloniality  240–1, 244–5 discrimination  2, 7, 10, 48, 66, 72, 75, 129, 132, 147, 152, 213, 232, 256, 264, 313, 361, 402–3, 407, 414, 473, 475 discursive construction  251–70 discursive formation  240–1 discursive racism  211 discursive regularities  240–1

494

discursive resistance  437, 439, 444–7 dispossession  137–8, 159–60, 287, 289, 445 dita  98 Dobrin, L.  381 Doctrine of Discovery  138, 147–8, 241, 244 Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos  352 Dollar, C.  382 domestic violence  115 dominance, nation-state ideologies of  95 domination  239, 244–6; see also power doula work  185–8 Dutton, T.  377–8 East-West  343 EasyTranslate©  311–12, 318–29 economic liberalism  360 educação (civility)  162, 197, 199, 200, 205–6, 243, 344 education  35–6, 111–13 Arabic language  212–13 Arabic language educational reform in France  223–32 Arabic language education program  226–7 deaf children educational experiences in Mexico  47–52 Education Reform Law of Puerto Rico  92 inclusive education systems  47–8 Mexico inclusive education systems  47–8 religion in  112–13 religious  111–13 vernacular education policy  371 Education Reform Law of Puerto Rico  92 egalitarianism  107 egalitarian multilingualism  108 Eisenberg, L.  393 Ek is Afrikaaps  77–8 el choteo  437 ELCO program  224–5, 227–32 elderly deaf people in Nepal  44–5 embodied signs  3 empiricist theory of medical language  394 empregadas  159 endangerment  415 Engels, F.  359, 364 n.1 English  67–8, 85–8, 92–9, 112, 313–14, 370–1 in Denmark  313–14 global  11–12

INDEX

language imposition in Puerto Rico  85–8 in Papua New Guinea  369–76, 378–80 skills, UK  314–15 in Solomon Islands  114–16 in South Africa  67–8 Spanish tensions  97 ensalada fria (macaroni salad)  442 Enseignements internationaux de langues étrangères (International Teaching of Foreign Languages; EILE)  226–32 enslavement  86 environmental disasters in Puerto Rico  91–4 é outro mundo (it’s a different world)  167–8 epistemic violence  363 equity  5, 16 n.3 erasures  420–1 “Españoles Primeros” (Spaniards First)  215 Espinosa Zepeda, H.  268 ethics, ordinary  205, 311, 318–20, 323, 326–7 ethnography  26, 197, 205, 214, 275, 341–2, 359 linguistic  6 multispecies  451 school-based  289 of speaking  359 ethnonyms  3–4, 106–7, 109 ethnoracial contortions  290 Europe colonialism in  109, 240 femininity in  181 immigration in, public discourse about  212 Islam in  212 Islamophobia in  8, 211–33 everyday peace  197, 204–5 exclusion  5, 10, 23–4, 74, 84, 88, 110, 115, 131–3, 212, 226, 230, 232, 238, 242–3, 276, 286, 303, 452 expertise  36, 52, 141, 311–19, 321–9 expert/novice  28, expert authority  314–16, 321–9 explanatory models of illness  393–4 exploitation  238–9; see also power expression, modalities of  4 Facebook  77 facial expressions  45 faixinheiras  159 Falconi, E. A.  227

INDEX

families  436–47 Fanon, F.  239 fanqiang (翻墙)  337 favelas (shantytowns)  159 Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina  201 Feliciano-Santos, S.  131–2, 475 Fellows, M. L.  170 feminism  360 fengsu xiguan (风俗习惯)  345 Fernando, M. L.  225 fertility  179 Festival del Fuego (Fire Festival)  448 n.3 fieldwork  25–7 fieldworker positionality  24–5 Figueroa, A. M.  11–12, 23, 26–7, 38 n.1, 129–31 Filipinos  256 First Nations/Peoples  10–11, 123 n.8 Fishman, J.  475 Flags of Convenience  253, 256 Flores, N.  89–90, 290, 472 Floyd, G.  158, 159 folk  349 fongo  443–4 Fontaine, T.  182 food access  7, 436, 446, 447 food acquisition  438, 441–2 food-and-language communication  437–47 food distribution system, Cuba  436–47 foodways and discourse  447 forced translocality  412–13 forgotten space  361 formal justice  314 Fortuño, L.  92 Foucault, M.  241, 360 fractal belonging  444 France Arabic language educational reform in  223–32 gender oppression against Muslim immigrants in  212 Islamophobic rhetoric in  211–33 political anxieties in postcolonial  223–32 Fraser, N.  245, 267, 270, 316–17, 359–60 freedom of expression  2 freelancers  311 Freire, P.  1 Freitas, J. A. S.  159 French colonialism in French Polynesia and in the Marquesas  117, 223–32 French colonial linguistics in Africa  109–10

 495

French Polynesia  105, 111, 114 fri (free)  112 friendship  259–60 full and fair  151 Gal, S.  95, 288 Gamtaal  67, 71–3 Gapun  375–6 Gárate, M.  48–9 García-Sánchez, I. M.  23, 239, 244 gas anesthesia (isoflurane)  454 gavman (government)  110 gays  359 gender  118–20 colonial violence  180 equality  212 inequality  118–20 oppression  211–12 transitions  119 violence  179 Genevard, A.  229 geopolitics of voice  336–8 Germany  377–8 gestures  45 ghoema song  77 Gibbs, V.  302 giving voice  264, 269, 271–2, 281–2 global capitalism  313–14 globalization  15 n.1, 313–14, 360 global labor  359–60 global languages  383–4 global perspectives  6–8 global shipping  253–4 global warming  428 “God is a Woman” (Grande)  189–90 Goffman, E.  195 “Going to the People” (到民间去 dao minjian qu)  349 Goldstein, D.  170 Good, B.  393–4 good ship  255, 258–60 Gosse, W.  431 n.11 Graber, K. E.  227 Gradual Civilization Act of 1857  191 n.3 Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869  191 n.3 Graham, L.  475 Grande, A.  189 Grand Falls  421 Grand Remplacement  238 Great Firewall  337 Guajataca, T.  96

496

Guatemala  286–8 CACIF  292 childhood in redes  291–4 clasping  294–7 democracy  293 indigenous youth and their families  286–8 migrants  297–303 oligarchs  287 spiraling  294–7 youth mobility in  297–303 Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party  292 Gumperz, J.  393 Guobin Yang  337 Guzmán, J.  475–6 Hagan, Jacqueline  298 haka’iki (chief)  111 Hall, M. L.  42 Hamann, E. T.  301 Han  345, 347 Handman, C.  474 Hangaroa  142 hapū  138 Hartman, S.  165–6 Harvey, D.  364 n.2 hate  240–3 hate speech, anatomy of  215–23 Hatiheu valley  106 Haupt, A.  71–2 health/communicative inequities in Latin America  392 clinical communication, limitations of  404–6 ethnographic context  395–6 intercultural health programming  396–404 theoretical framework of  393–5 health/communicative justice  392–408 health inequities  392–406 health sovereignty  393, 400, 405 hearing amplification devices  47 hegemony of Afrikaans  71 Heller, M.  5, 269 Henare, E.  142 Henare, J.  142 Henare, M.  142 Henegan, C.  71 He Puapua  152 heritage languages  26, 84, 96–7, 225, 243, 348–9

INDEX

Hernández, L. M.  302 Hernández, S.  11–12, 23, 26, 38 n.1, 129–31, 302 Heugh, K.  68 He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni (The Declaration of the Sovereignty of New Zealand)  139, 146–7, 154 n.7 həǹq̀əmiǹəm̀-speaking (Coast Salish) people  412–13, 416 hijab (Muslim headscarf)  225 Hinn, B.  382 Hip Hop activism  71–3 Hiri Motu language  376–9, 381 hiri voyages  378 History of the Deaf in Nepal (Acharya)  53 Hito, S.  141 Hoffman-Dilloway, Erika  44–5, 58, 130–1 Hōhepa, P.  142 Hollande, F.  227 Holocaust  196 Honiara bone (born in Honiara)  115 household  439 Hromadžić, A.  201, 207 n.4 huayuquan (话语权)  336–7, 343 Hudley, A. C.  472 Hui, W.  343 Humanist Research and Documentation Center (RDC)  201, 241 humanizing research  36–7 human rights  2, 313–14 humor  73, 158, 341, 417, 436–41, 447 Humpty Dumpty principle  137–8, 143–51 borrowing  144–5 and “Doctrine of Discovery,” entrenchment of  147–8 falling/cracking  151–2 in He Whakaputanga  146–7 in land transactions  145–6 mistranslations in  143–7 in Te Tiriti  143–4 in twenty-first century  148–51 hybrid language  75 iconization  95 identities  26–7, 114–16, 289 identity politics  316 image-making  43 immigrants  137–40 immigration  3, 25–6, 32, 37, 137–40, 212, 214–22, 289, 297–303

INDEX

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE)  300, 302 immigration policy  32 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986)  298 INALCO  224 inclusionist ideology  47–8 inclusive education systems  47–8 incommensurability  168, 343 indexical bleaching  277 index linguistic equality in artifacts  417 Indian Act  179–80, 191 n.3 Indian women  180 Indigeneity  416 Indigenous, Black, and other People of Colour (BIPOC)  179, 181 Indigenous communities  94–6, 369, 392–408, 413–14 Indigenous deficiency  181 Indigenous feminism  479 Indigenous Justice: Clearing Space and Place for Indigenous Epistemologies (Victor)  179 Indigenous languages  68, 94–6, 115, 118, 121, 131–3, 141–2, 179, 242, 299, 369–72, 375–84, 475, 477 eradication of  421 social justice and  131, 473–4 treaties  142 “words to live by”  425–7 Indigenous Law 19.253 (Chile)  395–6 indigenous mothers  241 Indigenous place-names  416–18 Indigenous population  7, 95–6, 180, 396, 423, 428 Indigenous reproductive justice  179–83 Indigenous women and girls burlesque and  188–90 Catholicism on  180 gendered colonial violence against  180 Indian Act and  180 reproductive justice  179–83 Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITIN)  300 inequalities  371; see also class; gender; Indigeneity; power; race; religion; sexualities Inoue, M.  104 inscription  415–19 intellectual property irreverence  351–3 intellectual property rights (IPR)  337, 351–3

 497

interaction, cross-species  453–62 intercultural facilitators  400–2 intercultural health model, in Gulumapu, Chile  392–408 bilingual signage in clinical spaces  398–400 clinical communication, limitations of focus on  404–6 cultural competency training for healthcare personnel  402–4 ethnographic context  395–6 intercultural facilitators  400–2 programming  396–404 theoretical framework  393–5 interculturality  397–8 interdiscursivity  288 International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)  201, 241 interpellation  270, 281, 288–91, 295, 304 interpreter-mediated interaction  318 interpreting services  311–12 intersectionality  277 interspecies relations  464, 468 Intimate Grammars (Webster)  94 Irvine, J. T.  95 Isin, E. F.  70 Islam  212, 219–23 Islamic radicalism  211 Islamic religious teachings  219–23 Islamo-linguistic-phobia  212, 228–32, 241 Islamophobia in Europe  8, 211–33 Islamophobic rhetoric in France  211–33 Arabic in  223–32 circulation of  212–13 political anxieties  223–32 (re)production of  212–13 Islamophobic rhetoric in Spain  211–33 circulation of  212–13 hate speech, anatomy of  215–23 old and new  213–23 re-emergence of far right and  213–23 (re)production of  212–13 iwi (nations)  138 Izquierdo, C.  403–4 Jansen, S.  206 Jelves, I.  402 Jendraschek, G.  384 Jíbaro Spanish; see Rural Puerto Rican Spanish (RPRS) Johnson, E. J.  241–5

498

Jourdan, C.  107, 132 “just” and “fair,” vernacular discourses of  255–7 justice  414–19 as equality  417 as equity  417 as fairness  418 transformative  419 Justice, D. H.  181 Kaaps  80 n.11 KAD; see Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD) Kanaka  122 n.7 Kaqchikel Mayan language community  293 Karrebæk, M. S.  362–3 kastom  123 n.12 Kâte  379 Kathmandu Association of the Deaf (KAD)  56 kāwanatanga  144–5, 152 Kāwharu, H.  142 Kerkhof, E.  87 keywords  338–44 Keywords (Williams)  338–44 Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies  340–1 Keywords in Taiwan Theory  341 Kidron, C.  196 kind of person  456–60 King, P. J.  189 Kirilova, M.  362–3 Kleinman, A.  393 knowledge  240, 322 Kockelman, P.  289–90 Kororāreka  139 Kroskrity, P.  473–4 Kulick, D.  289, 375 Kwaio women  108 Kymlicka, W.  373 labeling  105–7 labor exploitation  238 as language  359–60 Labov, W.  3 Ladefoged, P.  369 laïcité (secularism)  225 land transactions  145–6 language acquisition  43–4 critical period for  45–7 for deaf children  43, 45–7

INDEX

language at sea  253–4 maritime labor and  253–4 social justice and  254–5 language deprivation  43, 59 n.3 critical period for  45–7 and deaf sociality in Nepal  52–8 languagelessness  44 language life  425–7 languages  1–4, 43, 359, 369 access to  43 attitudes  91–4 belonging  91–4 as code  394 as commercial object  313–14 commodification  313 “communication value” (Q-value) of  374–5 communicative competence  24–5, 37 communicative function of  375–6 competence/work in legal interpreting  317 Danish  313–14 in economic exchange  317 education  9, 223, 226–7, 231, 233, 370, 372, 378, 380 endangerment  415, 418, 425, 473, 479 fluency  43 global perspectives on  6–8 good ship and  258–60 hate and  240–3 hegemony  68 heritage  26, 84, 96–7, 225, 243, 348–9 ideologies  2–3, 7, 9, 42–3, 46–7, 58, 75, 84–5, 87–91, 94–5, 98–9, 104, 109–10, 112, 118, 120, 223, 226, 251–5, 258–60 ideologies of communities  3 Indigenous  68, 94–6, 115, 118, 121, 131–3, 141–2, 179, 242, 299, 369–72, 375–84, 475, 477 as labor  359–60 as marker of identity  376 policies  44, 84–5, 92, 95 and political economy  359 politicization of  68 politics  84–99, 119, 131, 341 practices  48 in Puerto Rico  85–6, 88–91 reclaiming  179 reclamation  94–5 reinvention  66 revitalization  95

INDEX

social inequality, in (re)producing  359 social injustice, in (re)producing  359 with social justice  3–6 Spanish  84 violence and  238–43 as world view  166 language socialization (LS)  23–4, 286–8 anthropolitical  24 language practices and  48 mealtime socialization and  27–36 research  23–4 langus  114–16, 124 n.25 las ples  371 late learners  46 Latina  26 Latino  25, 289 Latinx  25, 28, 32–3, 129–30, 290, 302–3 lawentuchefe (herbal healer)  397 Leakey, R.  415 LeBrón, M.  91 legal interpreters  311–12, 315–29 legal interpreting, Danish expertise and authority, perspectives on  314–16, 321–9 language competence/work in  317 neoliberal governance and  313–14 neoliberal reconceptualization of  317–21 social justice and  312–13, 316–17 legitimacy  114–16, 118–20 Lemon, A.  290 Lengua de Señas Mexicana (Mexican Sign Language (LSM))  44, 47–52 Lenneberg, E.  45 Leonard, W.  94 lesbians  359 Levenson, D.  291 Lewin, R.  415 Ley de Extranjería (Spanish Migration Law)  267 Ley Mordaza (Gag Law)  266–7 Libertad Digital (Digital Freedom; Abascal)  217 Liga Guakía Taína Ké (LGTK)  97 Lindquist, K.  188 linguistic anthropology  5, 7, 9, 14, 227, 251, 260–1, 269, 339, 341, 345–6, 359, 361, 393, 472–4, 478 linguistic belonging activism  94–6 linguistic citizenship (LC)  66, 131 definition  67 linguistic justice, case study for  71–9 multilingual activism as acts of  67–70

 499

linguistic diversity  375–6 linguistic equity  380–3 versus communicative equity  371–5, 385 n.5 linguistic ethnography  6 linguistic governmentality  110–11 linguistic hegemony  109–10 linguistic justice case study for  71–9 gender  118–20 in globalized present  113–20 identity  114–16 legitimacy  114–16, 118–20 Linguistic Citizenship, multilingual activism as acts of  67–70 linguistic voice  114–20 Marquesan hierarchy and heritage  116–18 Pijin  114–16 for social life  67 sovereignty  114–18 linguistic landscapes (LL) approach  213 linguistic primitivism  475 linguistic regimes  84, 113, 119 linguistics colonialism  95 imperialism  95 linguistic voice  114–20 linguonyms  3–4, 106–7, 109 L’Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations)  224 lip movements  45 Liu, L.  339, 343 los delincuentes (delinquents)  291–3 Loveless, N.  189 luohou (落后 backward)  347 Lutheran  379 lynching  293 McCarthy, G.  425 McCarty, T. L.  3 McElhanon, K.  370 McElhinny, B.  5, 167 Mac Ginty, R.  197, 204 machi (shaman)  397 McIntosh, J.  160 McKnight, M.  197 MacMurchy, H.  181 Macron, E.  225–8, 231 Maghreb  224

500

mahu  108 Makewe Hospital  400 Maliseet  415–16 Maliseet language  13, 97 Maliseet-Passamaquoddy communities  415 Malkki, L. H.  270–1 Mallison, C.  3 mama karae (mom is crying)  115 mana  144 mana whenua (land power)  138 mano dura (iron fist) policies  292 manta  268 mantero, story of  268, 270–1, 277–81, 283 n.5 Maoist guerilla warfare  352 Māori language  137–54, 154 n.5 people  137–54 sovereignty  137, 243 Mapuche language  396, 400 medicine  397 people/communities  392–408 Mapudungun  396, 399–408 maras (poor Guatemala City youth gangs)  291–2 marginalized languages  68 Marin, L. M.  85 maritime industry  253–4 maritime labor  253–4 Markkula, J.  252, 255–60, 361 Marquesas  105, 132 capitalism in  110–11 gender  118–20 hierarchy and heritage  116–18 language in  108, 113 linguistic governmentality in  110–11 linguistic justice in globalized present  113–20 linguistic voice  114–18 religious re-education in  111–13 sociolinguistic hegemony in  111–13 symbole technique in  113 marriage practices  112 Marsá, D.  244 MartínRojo, L.  10 Marx, K.  359, 364 n.1 Marxism  350 mass media  291 Masta Liu  115 materialities of social justice  417 material violence  238

INDEX

Matike Mai Aotearoa  151–2 maurophobia  212 May, S.  373 Mayan communities  298 Mayan language  95 Mayan youth  95–7 Mazak, C. M.  94 mealtime socialization  27–36 mealtime talk across two fieldsites  27–36 medical language  394 Meek, B.  94 meiyou wenhua  345–6 Melanesian-Polynesian-Micronesian distinction  105–8 Meléndez, M.  92 Mellet, T.  71 memes  4, 13, 215, 218, 220–1, 226–30 Menna, L.  361–2 method, politics of  338–44 Métis civilization  428 métis (mixed heritage) elite  111 Mexico CAMs  48–52 deaf children experiences in  44–5, 47–52 hearing amplification devices  47 inclusive education systems  47–8 Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems (IPPLIAP) for  44, 48–52 sign language in  47–52 speech read in  47 Miaamia language  425 Miao people  335, 340, 345–8 Miaozu wenhua zhuanjia (苗族文化专家)  345–6 micronesia (small islands)  122 n.4 Migrant Protection Protocols  298 migration  86–8, 286–7, 297–303, 412–13 Mikisew Cree Nation  182 mîkisis  179 Mills, C.  160–1, 172 minorities  242, 316, 341, 343–9, 395 minzu  344 misrecognition  245 misrepresentation  137, 150, 172 missionaries  143–4 mission civilisatrice  112 mission schools  372–3 mistranslation  137–54 mixed-status families  25–6 mobility  286, 313 Mökkönen, A. C.  23 Mondino, A.  231

INDEX

monolingualism  46 monologic linguistic strategies  166–8 Moore, L. C.  24–5 moral engagement  419 Morgan, M. H.  104 Morocco  229 multilingual activism  66–70 as acts of Linguistic Citizenship  67–70 definition  66, 69 discourses  69 egalitarian approach in  69 practices  69 multilingualism  42, 59–60, 68–9, 79, 107–8, 115, 119, 331, 373–80, 383–4 multispecies ethnography  451 Murillo, Jr., E.  25 Murphy, D.  336–7 Muslims  211–33 gender oppression in  211–12 migrants  212–13 minority  213 refugees  212–13 Musqueam  412–13, 416 Mutu, M.  142, 243–5 Ñanco, J.  402 narrative inequality  271 narrative orders  266 nation (民族 minzu)  350 National Advancement Party (PAN) party  292 National Police, Denmark  311–12, 314–18 nation-building  373 Native Courts  110 nativism  232 Nazario, M. Á.  85 negotiations  150 nehiyawewin  179 (neo)colonialism  239 Neofotistos, V. P.  197–8 neoliberal capitalism  5 neoliberalism  313–14, 360–1, 364 n.2 neoliberal globalization  2 neoliberal governance  313–14 political economy of  360 Nepal, deaf sociality in biomedical/karmic understandings of  52–3 cause of  52 and language deprivation  52–8 NSL  53–8 ODP  56–8

 501

Nepali Sign Language (NSL)  53–8, 131 networks  286, 288–91 Nevins, M. E.  95 Nevins, M.  474 New Latino Diaspora  25 new Latino immigration  289 new media  214 new signers  46 New Testament translation  382 New Zealand, British colonization in  137–54, 154 n.2 background  138–41 constitutional transformation in  151–2 Humpty Dumpty principle  143–51 Māori language  137–54, 154 n.5 other indigenous peoples, threats to  141–2 Te Tiriti o Waitangi  137, 139–40, 142–7 treaty of Waitangi  142–3 Ngāti Kahu  138, 147–8, 154 n.4 Ngāti Kahu: Portrait of a Sovereign Nation (Mutu, Margaret)  147 Ngāti Whātua  138 Niger-Congo languages  86 Ning, W.  342, 343 non-human beings  451–2 and human, relations between  451–2 neighbors, relations between  467–8 in terms of social justice  451–68 in United States  451–2 non-Indian women  180 non-White communities  24 Noodin, Margaret  421, 425–6 NSL; see Nepali Sign Language (NSL) Nueva Política Indígena  395 Nuku H.  106 Nyiri, P.  337 Oakes, T.  348 O’Brien, J.  95 Ochs, E.  24, 36 ODP; see Older and Vulnerable Deaf Persons Project (ODP) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)  298 Older and Vulnerable Deaf Persons Project (ODP)  56–8 Oli, M. F.  158 oligarchs  287 “One Belt One Road” (一带一路, yidaiyilu) initiative  335 online communication  213 Ons Klank (Our Sound)  77

502

ontological vulnerability  423–5 OpEd  219 Open Arms  216–17 oppression  179 oralism  42 oralist language ideologies  42–3, 47, 59 n.2 oralist paradigms  42 oralización (oralization)  47 Orbán, V.  11 Ordenança del Civisme (Civility Ordinance)  267 Organic Law on Public Security  283 n.4 Orientalism (Said)  342 Origenes  405 Osteen, J.  382, 474 otherness  211 outro mundo  167 Pagliai, V.  169, 296 Pākehā  146 Papua New Guinea  369–84 Christian affiliation in  382 Christian missions in  380–3 colonial multilingualism  376–80 communicative function of language  375–6 communicative inequality  376–80 English in  369–76, 378–80 global languages as tools of social justice  372, 383–4 Hiri Motu language  376–9, 381 language of instruction in schools  371 linguistic diversity  375–6 linguistic equity  380–3 linguistic equity versus communicative equity in social justice  371–5, 385 n.5 mission schools  372–3 multilingualism in  373–4 schools  372–4 SIL projects  380–1 social intercourse  375–6 spiritual autonomy  382–3 Tok Pisin in  371–2, 375–81, 384, 384 n.2 translation in  380–3 paramansif (paramount chief)  110 Parijs, V.  373 Parras-Konrad, S.  302 Parsons, M.  189–90 Partido Popular (People’s Party-PP)  214–15 patriotism  141 Patten, A.  373

INDEX

Pax Britannica  110 Pax Romana  123 n.13 Peace Accords  287, 292 Pedagogical Institute for Language Problems (IPPLIAP)  44, 48–52 Pelto  439 performances, performativity  13, 66, 68, 71, 73–5, 76, 78–9, 107, 108, 169–70, 178–9, 188–91, 197–9, 204–6, 245, 256–7, 295, 315, 319, 328, 343, 347 Perley, B.  97, 131 Personal History Timelines project  44, 49 personalized violence  200 Peters, S.  189 Pfister, A.  44–5, 58, 130 phaticity  290 Philippines  251–2 picadillo  441–3 pidgin  109–10 Pierre-Lewis, K.  424 Pijin  114–16 Pillar, I.  383 Pinyin, Chinese  344, 354 n.1 Plataforma Cuidadana Contra La Islamofobia (Citizens Platform Against Islamophobia)  217 platform capitalism  362 POC  72–3 poem  76–7 polarization  201 police surveillance  32 political discourse  1, 86, 214, 217, 221–3, 225–7, 230–2, 297, 338 political economy  88, 113–14, 118, 120, 200, 251, 254, 258, 312–13, 317, 331, 359–60, 364, 406 political justice  316 political liberalism  360 politics of method  338–44 Polynesia  105–8 pono  141 Porras Bulla, J.  268 porteiros (doormen)  159 Portuguese language  369 positionality  24–7 postcolonialism  338 Postville Response Coalition’s Response Center  301 power  2, 36–7, 137–9, 159, 161, 166, 172–3 of Afrikaans  67, 71, 79 of ancestral knowledge  132

INDEX

British colonial  139 to change world  7 codes  118–20, 371 colonial  99, 114 of dominant discourses  10 dynamics  24–5, 37, 130 of English  115–17 of expression  4 food  36 French  116 ideologies  118 of languages  4, 67–9 national  16 n.4 paramount  138, 142–6 political  119 pragmatic  120 relations  95 of research  129–32 social  24, 108–11 Spanish colonial  99 of Tahitian  117 US economic and political  99 pragmatics  3 precarity  9, 257, 288–90, 294, 297–303 precolonial language/culture/social (in) justice  105–8 differentiation and exchange, ethnolinguistic  107–8 internal sociolinguistic differentiation and dominance  108 labeling  105–7 Pritzker, S.  343 problematization  244–5 production of inequality  239; see also inequalities Programa de Enseñanza de Lengua Árabe y Cultura Marroquí (Arabic Language and Moroccan Culture Teaching Program)  221–2 progressive politics  265, 275, 281–2 pronominal reference  464–7 Prophets of da City (POC)  71 PRS; see Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) PSA; see Public Service Announcement (PSA) Public Service Announcement (PSA)  76 public words  168 Puerto Rican English (PRE)  84–8 Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS)  84–6, 88, 94–6 Puerto Rico  84–100, 131 colonialism in  85–6 debt and environmental crises, language attitudes and belonging in  91–4

 503

Education Reform Law of  92 English language imposition in  85–8 language ideologies/discourses in  85–6, 88–91 linguistic belonging activism  94–6 national identity  86–7 PRE  84–8 PRS  84–6, 88, 94–6 and return-migrant students  88–91 Spanish language activism  84, 94–6 Taino/Boricua language activism  84, 94–9 and United States, migration between  86–8 university polices and classroom dynamics, relationship between  94 quality  318–19 Queen of England  143–5 queer politics  359 quid pro quo  149–50 Quijano, A.  240 rabies epidemic in Delta Amacuro, Venezuela  394 race  3, 5, 9, 12, 26, 160–2, 165, 171–2, 239, 245, 254, 265, 267, 277, 290, 299, 359, 361, 444 race relations  150 Racette, S. F.  179, 187 racial contract  161 racialization  23, 254–5, 267–9, 277, 296 raciolinguistic ideologies  89–90 racism  276–7 racismo cordial (cordial racism)  165, 173 n.5 radicalization  212 rangatira  144–5 rangatiratanga  143–4, 152 Rapanui resistance  141–2 rap groups  72 rap music  72 Rawls, J.  419 Razack, S.  170 reci (hot words)  339 reciprocal bilingualism  107 reconciliation; see truth, and reconciliation redes (networks)  286, 288–91 assessing risk in  291–4 childhood in  291–4 Reeves, J.  301 refugees  212–13

504

regroupement familiale (family reunification)  224 religion  9, 112–13, 120, 138, 211–12, 219–22, 232, 239, 241, 245 religious education  111–13 religious fanaticism  211 religious re-education  111–13 renleixue (人类学)  345 reproductive justice  1, 179–81 Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Ross and Rickie)  180–1 Republika Srpska  201, 207 n.3 rescuers  453–68, 469 n.3 Research and Documentation Center (RDC)  201, 241 researcher positionality  24–5 Residential School System  181–2, 191 n.5 resignification  268, 277, 353 resistance  244–6 respectability, politics of  162–6 responsibility  269 return-migrant students, Puerto Rico  88–91 reverse racism  396 revolutionary culture (革命文化 geming wenhua)  350 Reynolds, J. F.  362 Richards, P.  405 righteousness  141 Riley, K. C.  132, 171, 437 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil  159–73 anti-black violence in  159–60 hypervaluation of white life  166 lifestyle  162 monologic linguistic strategies in  166–8 racial violence in  160 respectability, politics of  162–6 structural racism in  160 structural silences in  159–62 vulnerability in  162–6 White benevolence in  168–72 white middle-class city residents in  159–62 as white supremacist society  161, 168–72 “R.I.P. Kaaps”  76–7, 80 n.10 Romero, S.  130 Rosa, J.  3, 89–90, 290 Roselló, P.  86 Ross, L.  180–1 ruan shili (软实力 soft power)  349 Rubio-Marin, R.  385 n.5 Ruiz-Bedolla, F.  49

INDEX

rule of law; see formal justice Rupp, L.  190 Rural Puerto Rican Spanish (RPRS)  86, 94–9 Sáez Salgado, M.  397 Said, E.  336 Salamanca Statement (UNESCO; 1994)  47 Salam Plan  220–1 Salas, R. N.  424, 427 same-sex marriage  119 San Antonio  293–8 Sánchez, G.  241 Sandel, M. J.  419 Sankoff, G.  370 Sapir, E.  3 Sarajevo  10, 194–206 Sarazúa, L.  302 Saul, J. R.  428–9 savages  106 Schein, L.  363 Schieffelin, B.  289 Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education  453–68 Scott, J. W.  225 scrip land  148 seafarers  251–61 Seamen’s Church Institute (SCI)  259 search engines  338 secularism  212 self-employment  436 self-enterprising  360 self-governing  360 self-recognition  246 Seligman, A. B.  205 semiotics  3, 45 sexualities  179–83, 185–8, 359–60 sexual justice  179, 188, 190–1, 191 n.1 “Shake it Hard: Feminist Identity and the Burly-Q” (King)  189 Shakya, P.  54–5 Shanzhai Lyric, The  351–2 shanzhai phones  352 shanzhai wenhua (山寨文化 shanzhai culture)  351–2 Shattered Dreams: The story of a historic ICE raid in the words of the detainees (Hernández)  302 “shehui zhengyi” (社会正义)  343 Shohet, M.  196 Shui Hu Zhuan (水浒传，Water Margin)  352

INDEX

sign languages  42–3, 45–6, 56, 58 in Mexico  47–52 in Nepal  53–8 narratives to  4 in visual and/or tactile modalities  46 silence  196, 204–6 SIL International  380–1 Silva, N. K.  141 Silverstein, M.  3 sincerity  204–6 Sinophone  341 Sixth Extinction  424–5 Sixties Scoop  181, 191 n.5 slavery  165–6, 172 Slotta, J.  474 Smith, P.  472 Smyth, L.  197 social action  3 social beliefs  27–36 social capital  27 social cooperation  418 social exclusion  115 social inequality  109, 313 social (in)justices  6–8 social intercourse  375–6 socialism  350 socialist culture (先进社会主义文化 xianjin shehuizhuyi wenhua)  350 social justice  1–2, 4–6, 359–60, 415, 431 n.3 candidacy for  451–2 erasure and  420–1 food distribution system in Cuba  436–47 Fraser’s approach to  316–17 global languages as tools of  383–4 global perspectives on  6–8 Indigenous approaches to  179–83 Indigenous languages and  473–4 inscription and  421–3 “just” and “fair” as vernacular discourses of  255–7 language at sea and  254–5 language with  3–6 legal interpreting and  312–13, 316–17 in linguistic anthropology  255–61 linguistic equity versus communicative equity in  371–5, 385 n.5 materialities of  417 on moral consideration  451–2 non-human beings for  451–2 to non-human neighbors  467–8

 505

principles of  418 visions for  5 social listening  338–44 social lives  113, 339, 341, 354, 363 social media  339 social networks  286–9, 298 social semiotics  290 social unionism  267 sociocultural justice  316 socioeconomic justice  316 sociolinguistic hegemony  111–13 sociolinguistic social network  289 sociopolitical economic inequities  5 soft power  337, 349 Solinger, R.  180–1 Solomon Islands  105–20, 132 capitalism in  110–11 creole in  109–10 cultural legitimacy  115–16 English in  114–16 gender  118–20 identity in  114–16 legitimacy in  114–16, 118–20 linguistic governmentality in  110–11 linguistic justice in globalized present  113–20 linguistic voice  114–18 Pijin in  114–16 religious re-education in  111–13 sociolinguistic hegemony in  111–13 Sorabji, C.  200 South Africa  66–79, 131 English in  67–8 Linguistic Citizenship, multilingual activism as acts of  67–70 linguistic justice, case study for  71–9 sovereignty  5, 16 n.4, 114–18, 143–4 spaghetti  441–2 Spain/Spanish  84–5, 92–3, 233 n.1 colonialism  84–100 gender oppression against Muslim immigrants in  212 hate speech, anatomy of  215–23 Islamophobic rhetoric in  211–33 Jíbaro  86, 94–9 language activism  84–5, 94–6 maurophobia in  212 national identity, integral part of  86–7 as site of cultural nationalism  85 varieties of  85–6 Spanish-English tensions  97

506

Special Health Program for Indigenous Peoples (PESPI)  397 speech read  47 speech therapy  47 spiraling  294–7 Spitulnik, D.  166 spoken languages  43 St. John River  414, 420, 432 n.14 standardization  48, 314, 319, 331, 361, 363 Status Indian  180 storytelling  178 strategic inarticulateness  167 street vending in Barcelona  264, 266–81 Street Vendors Union, Barcelona  264–81 Stroud, C.  70 structural exclusion  212 structural oblivion  160 structural violence  115, 124 n.24, 179 subjection  239–40, 244–5, 274; see also power supply chain capitalism  361 surplus lands  147–8 symbole technique  113 symbolic murder of the Other  238–9 symbolic violence  238–9, 246 n.2, 343; see also violence Syrian refugee crisis of 2015  212 Tagalog  257–9 Tahiti  114, 116–18 Taino/Boricua language activism  84, 94–9 Taiwan  341 takis (taxes)  110 Tanton, J.  297 tapu  108 Taylor, J.  205–6 Taylor, V.  190 te henua ’o te ’Enana  107 Tenzin, J.  343 Te Rarawa  138 terrorism  211 te Taipivai  106 Te Tiriti o Waitangi  137, 139–40, 142–7 Tetreault, C.  239 te Ua Pou  106 tikanga  152 tino rangatiratanga  144–5 tino whiwhinga (full possession)  144 Tipi Confessions  192 n.11 Tlingit community  475 Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada  416, 427 “The Tobique Rock”  418, 420–1, 427

INDEX

Tok Pisin  124 n.28, 371–2, 375–81, 384, 384 n.2 Tolai (Kuanua)  370 Tolkesamfundet (The Interpreter Society)  327 tongzhi (同志 comrade)  341 top down model of medical communication  392 topmanta  268, 275 TopManta Project  268, 276 toponyms  3–4, 106–7, 109 traditional territories  427–30 Trafficking Victims Protection Authorization Act  298 transborder migration  287 transborder social networks  287 transcription  27–36, 38 n.2 transcripts symbols  283 n.9 transformative justice  413–14, 419 translation  4, 74, 78, 220–1, 292, 311–12, 320 activism  337 of Bible  144 French  107 for migrants in Denmark  12, 311–12 in Papua New Guinea  380–3 of sovereignty  144 translingual communication  341 translingual practice  339 translocality (translocalism)  412–13, 428, 431 n.4 transnationalism  413 transraciolinguistic justice  472 trauma  14, 179, 183, 185, 187, 190, 196, 416, 424, 428 treaty of Waitangi  142–3 truth and reconciliation  12, 480 n.1 telling  194–7 without justice  198–201 Tsing, A.  343–4, 361 Tuccaro, A.  182 “Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art” (Racette)  187 tuku whenua (release land)  140, 145, 147 Turner, D.  428–9 Uluru  431 n.11 un conecte  287 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)  291

INDEX

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples  152 unemployment  115 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage  346–7 union’s voice  272–7 US colonization  85 uterus  187–8 Vallaud-Belkacem, N.  223, 225–30 Valley, D.  71 value-giving measure  239, 246 n.3 Vannie Kaap  76–7 veil of ignorance  429, 432 n.18 vernacular education policy  371 vernacular language  370–1 veterinary care  453–6 Victor, W.  179 Vidas Negras Importam (“Blacks Lives Matter”)  11 Vietnamese families  196 Villenas, S.  25 violence  238–43 anti-black  159–60 colonial  179–80 of counterinsurgency  287 domestic  115 epistemic  363 languages and  238–43 material  238 personalized  200 structural  115, 124 n.24, 179 symbolic  238, 246 n.2, 343 Virago Nation  189 vocabulary  341 voice  80 n.3, 114–20, 269–81 geopolitics of  336–8 Volker, C.  370, 372 Vox Populi  213–14, 233 n.2 anti-immigrant sentiment  215–17 hate speech, anatomy of  215–23 political discourse  214 political leadership  214 political rhetoric  214–23 vulnerabilities  44, 56, 162–6 VulvEarrings  185–7 wads (wards)  110 Waitangi Tribunal 1997  139–41, 148–9 wānanga (training sessions)  140 wantok bisnis (one-talk business)  115, 124 n.26

 507

Waria Valley  370, 379 war on terror  211 Weber, M.  420–1 Webster, A.  94, 474 Weller, R. P.  196 Weller, S. C.  439 wenhua (文化)  344–51, 354 as group attribute  346–7 as measure  345–6 as resource  347–9 for revolution  349–51 traditional  350 wenhua chanye (cultural industries)  354 wenhua qiye (文化企业, cultural enterprises)  354 wenhua shamo (文化沙漠 cultural deserts)  347 wenhua zijue (自觉; cultural selfawareness)  349 wenhua zixin (自信)  349 wenti zhiminzhuyi （问题殖民主义）  335–6 wenyi (文艺 literature and arts)  349 white benevolence  168–73 white comfort  161–2, 168–72 white fragility  160 white ignorance  161 white life, hypervaluation of  166 whiteness  160–3, 169, 172–3 White Paper of 1969  192 n.12 white privilege  161, 173 n.4 white supremacy  147, 161, 168–72 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Justice)  181 Whyte, K.  425 wildlife  452–6 wildlife rehabilitation  452–6 wildlife-rehabilitation clinics  453–4 Williams, Q.  70, 131 Williams, R.  338 Wilson, S.  129, 132 Wirtz, K.  168–9, 444 witaskewin  429 “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style” (Akiwenzie-Damm)  185–6 Wolastoq River  414, 417, 427, 429, 432 n.16 women  111–13, 197, 205, 218, 294, 360, 369, 376, 479 access to multilingualism  119–20 bourgeois domesticity  172 buying and selling  112 colored  77 commodifying  112

508

elite  108, 119–20 faixinheiras  159 First Nation  10 Indigenous  7, 178–91, 238, 245, 298, 301 Kwaio  108 Marquesan  119–20 (re)productive value of  112 rights  1, 121 sexual violence against  7, 178–91 white  163, 172 Wong, R. B.  342 words  3–4 Wortham, S.  289 Xi Jinping  335, 349–50 xuanchuan (宣传)  337 xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam) people  412–13, 416

INDEX

Yabem  379 Yang, F.  340, 346, 363 ya wenhua (亚文化 subculture)  352 Yinong, Z.  340 Yopno Valley  369–70, 375 youth mobility  297–303 YouTube  77 yuanshengtai (原生态)  347 Yu Hua  351 Zanzibar  77 Zedong, M.  349 Zentella, A. C.  87, 288–9 Zhan, Y.  343 Zhang, L.  339 zhishi chanquan  351 zhongchan jieji (中产阶级, the middleproperty class)  351 zoulang regions  335

509

510