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CFP AAA: Circulating Discourses of Past and Present: Linguistic Anthropology and History

History traditionally was part of linguistic anthropology but in more recent years much of the focus of the field has been on close analysis of specific events rather than ideas of the past and historical patterns. This panel aims to bring many notions of history back into circulation within the field of linguistic anthropology and will explore the connections between language and history from multiple viewpoints. Papers already in the session include work on the ethnohistory of colonial Mexico and the history of linguistic anthropology.

Papers should focus on analyses of language and discourse within an (ethno)historical context and the invocation of historical concepts within specific ethnographic discourses.

Regional areas and/or historical time periods are open. Papers might include attention to contemporary anthropological approaches to historical linguistics, language and historically hegemonic discourses, language and archeology, the linguistic study of historical texts, or the historical lineage of ideas in linguistic anthropology itself. All should share an understanding of the power of the circulation of ideas of history and the past.

Please submit 200 word abstracts to Jacqui Messing (jmessing@cas.usf.edu) and Leila Monaghan (Leila.Monaghan@gmail.com) by March 15.

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By Leila – February 27, 2010

An orphan by any other name…?

Eight of the ten US missionaries arrested for attempting to bring a group of children from Haiti to the Dominican Republic have been released. Two others remain in Haiti after being interviewed by a Haitian judge, according to The Washington Post.

I know very little about adoption practices in Haiti, and all I know about events in that country since the earthquake last January I have learned from the news media. My reactions here are more personal than professional.

Still, I can’t help but be reminded of Kerim’s postings at Savage Minds on the perils of “translation” by the US military and others in Iraq and Afghanistan that neglects the cultural and interpersonal dimensions of language (for example here and here). As I commented at the time, simply being able to speak two languages does not make one a translator; a proper translation should attempt to take into account the social context of an utterance as well as the sense of its linguistic form.

Even more apropos, I think, is Colin Jones’ article in the Japan Times on different views of “human rights”. The Japanese Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the children of Japanese fathers and non-Japanese mothers should be granted Japanese nationality even if their parents were not married. This was necessary, the court reasoned, because Japanese citizens can expect “protection of fundamental human rights in Japan” in ways that non-citizens may not. Jones notes that the phrase jinken shingai (人権侵害, literally “human rights violations”) is often used in Japanese legal discourse to refer to bullying in school or disputes surrounding employment.

As I suggested in 2008, even though a Japanese-English dictionary will tell you that jinken means “human rights”, the two concepts are very different in Japanese versus Anglo-American legal traditions.

All of this has me wondering whether the thing that American missionaries call an orphanage is really the same as what most Haitians think of as an orphelinat. Again, my knowledge here comes almost exclusively from news media, but from those descriptions it appears that Haitian orphanages are quite different from my own image of an orphanage. Children may be sent to stay temporarily in an orphelinat, and their parents may visit them while they are there.

I’m willing to believe that people volunteering to work with orphans in Port au Prince have those children’s best interests at heart. I am not willing to take on faith, however, that they always know what those best interests are.

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By chad – February 20, 2010

AAA 2010: SLA Call for Invited Sessions

From the SLA Program Chair, Kira Hall:

(please feel free to forward this email to potentially interested parties )

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It’s that time of year again:  The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21.  As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November.  The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.”  I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme (see below), although you do not have to do so.

There are two deadlines for submission:  an internal SLA deadline for Invited Sessions (Friday, March 5), and the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, Thursday, April 1).  While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before these respective deadlines at www.aaanet.org , Invited Session submissions must also be sent by the March 5th deadline directly to the Program Chair (kira.hall@colorado.edu).  Your email to me should include a copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts from each of your proposed participants.  I will then send these out to the SLA Program (6-member) Committee for review.  (Note: Invited Session submissions to the AAA website by March 5 can still be somewhat preliminary;  you can make changes on your submission up until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper abstract 250 words.  More detailed information on panel or paper submission can be found on the AAA meetings website (www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm) under “Call for Papers PDF.”

This year, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology is encouraging panel organizers to make use of the official SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org.  We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress.  This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest.  The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

INVITED SESSIONS

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, Invited Sessions are, in the words of the AAA, “innovative, synthesizing sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields.”  The SLA Program Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme.  If you are organizing a panel and would like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your interest via email (kira.hall@colorado.edu) as soon as possible, but by March 5th at the very latest (when the full panel submission is due).  Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me (preferably in pdf format) by the March 5th deadline.  (When you submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a volunteered session.  We can always change the session status later, should your panel be selected as invited.)

Important note:  The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces for Invited Sessions:  we can choose either 3 single panels or 1 double panel plus 1 single panel.  We therefore encourage you to consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your panel with the SLA, so that we can put more Invited Sessions on the conference program.  If there are other sections that you feel your panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections to see if there is a possibility for collaboration.  For a list of other AAA sections, consult www.aaanet.org/sections/ .  (You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility.)

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect in late March, with a password to use on-line.  You will need this password to answer question 2 on the proposal form, so as to complete your on-line submission by the deadline on April 1.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme, at www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm .  The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:

“New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes, and for whom; and what their consequences might be for humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what exactly circu lates: signs, objects or bodies. Do different things circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities does circula tion produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and why do rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
“Circulation” also invites us to think across boundaries, whether those are boundaries orga nizing phenomena we seek to describe and explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among anthropologists or other social groups. It asks us to turn our attention to zones of encounter, conjunctions and liminal passages. It also requires us to ask whether “circulation” is a helpful trope for the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it shed on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of “culture”—argu ably the central organizing construct of anthro pology—and on anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the perspectives of all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them, investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all temporal and spatial horizons.”

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats.  You can certainly fall back on the tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation.  This year, the AAA is also encouraging submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

Finally: Registration waiver. In an effort to facilitate the participation of and increase members’ access to international and community-based scholars at the AAA annual meetings, one registration waiver will be made available to each of the 38 sections of the AAA Section Assembly, of which SLA is a member. Unused or unallocated waivers will go back into a pool and a lottery held to redistribute them. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members and cannot hold employment in university-based anthropology departments nor work as practicing anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic). Registration and membership fees will be waived for the qualifying scholar nominated by sections to receive this waiver. Individual qualifying scholars are responsible for all other conference-associated costs.The AAA deadline for the waiver nomination is March 1, so session organizers must contact Kira Hall before that date with nominations. Along with information on the proposed session, please provide the name of the qualifying scholar nominated to receive the section’s waiver, and a short description of the nature of the scholar’s proposed meeting participation as well as her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

Please contact me if you have any questions.  I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Kira Hall
Chair, SLA Program Committee

***************
Kira Hall, Associate Professor
Director, Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP)
Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado  80309-0295
Phone: (303)492-2912
Fax: (303)492-4416
Web: www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/

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By admin – February 11, 2010

SLA Call for Invited Sessions

From the SLA Program Chair, Kira Hall:

(please feel free to forward this to potentially interested parties )

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It’s that time of year again: The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21. As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November. The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.” I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme (see below), although you do not have to do so.

There are two deadlines for submission: an internal SLA deadline for Invited Sessions (Friday, March 5), and the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, Thursday, April 1). While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before these respective deadlines at www.aaanet.org , Invited Session submissions must also be sent by the March 5th deadline directly to the Program Chair (kira.hall@colorado.edu ). Your email to me should include a copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts from each of your proposed participants. I will then send these out to the SLA Program (6-member) Committee for review. (Note: Invited Session submissions to the AAA website by March 5 can still be somewhat preliminary; you can make changes on your submission up until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper abstract 250 words. More detailed information on panel or paper submission can be found on the AAA meetings website (www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm ) under “Call for Papers PDF.”

This year, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology is encouraging panel organizers to make use of the official SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org . We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress. This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest. The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

INVITED SESSIONS

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, Invited Sessions are, in the words of the AAA, “innovative, synthesizing sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields.” The SLA Program Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme. If you are organizing a panel and would like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your interest via email (kira.hall@colorado.edu ) as soon as possible, but by March 5th at the very latest (when the full panel submission is due). Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me (preferably in pdf format) by the March 5th deadline. (When you submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a volunteered session. We can always change the session status later, should your panel be selected as invited.)

Important note: The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces for Invited Sessions: we can choose either 3 single panels or 1 double panel plus 1 single panel. We therefore encourage you to consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your panel with the SLA, so that we can put more Invited Sessions on the conference program. If there are other sections that you feel your panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections to see if there is a possibility for collaboration. For a list of other AAA sections, consult www.aaanet.org/sections/ . (You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility.)

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect in late March, with a password to use on-line. You will need this password to answer question 2 on the proposal form, so as to complete your on-line submission by the deadline on April 1.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme, at www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm . The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:

“New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes, and for whom; and what their consequences might be for humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what exactly circu lates: signs, objects or bodies. Do different things circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities does circula tion produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and why do rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
“Circulation” also invites us to think across boundaries, whether those are boundaries orga nizing phenomena we seek to describe and explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among anthropologists or other social groups. It asks us to turn our attention to zones of encounter, conjunctions and liminal passages. It also requires us to ask whether “circulation” is a helpful trope for the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it shed on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of “culture”—argu ably the central organizing construct of anthro pology—and on anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the perspectives of all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them, investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all temporal and spatial horizons.”

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats. You can certainly fall back on the tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation. This year, the AAA is also encouraging submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

Finally: Registration waiver. In an effort to facilitate the participation of and increase members’ access to international and community-based scholars at the AAA annual meetings, one registration waiver will be made available to each of the 38 sections of the AAA Section Assembly, of which SLA is a member. Unused or unallocated waivers will go back into a pool and a lottery held to redistribute them. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members and cannot hold employment in university-based anthropology departments nor work as practicing anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic). Registration and membership fees will be waived for the qualifying scholar nominated by sections to receive this waiver. Individual qualifying scholars are responsible for all other conference-associated costs.The AAA deadline for the waiver nomination is March 1, so session organizers must contact Kira Hall before that date with nominations. Along with information on the proposed session, please provide the name of the qualifying scholar nominated to receive the section’s waiver, and a short description of the nature of the scholar’s proposed meeting participation as well as her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

Please contact me if you have any questions. I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Kira Hall
Chair, SLA Program Committee

***************
Kira Hall, Associate Professor
Director, Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP)
Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0295
Phone: (303)492-2912
Fax: (303)492-4416
Web: www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/

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By Leila – February 10, 2010

Code switching and language alternation

A colleague writes to ask:

I read your article ‘Code Switching’ in Sociocultural Linguistics. What I wonder is [why] you didn’t write something about the author Grosjean (1982, Life with Two Languages). He also used the term Code Switching as one of the first. And I can’t get the differences between ‘ language alternation’ and ‘ code switching’? Can you describe the differences?

These are excellent questions. There are two principal reasons that I do not discuss the work of Professor Grosjean in my 2005 paper. The intent of the paper is to highlight work by linguistic anthropologists, sociolinguists, and sociologists of language; I would classify Grosjean’s earlier work in speech production, perception, and comprehension as works of psycholinguistics. There is a large and important literature on bilingualism in psycholinguistics which, as my introduction warns, the paper neglects.

Second, by the time Grosjean’s work on bilingualism and biculturalism came to the fore people like Einar Haugen (e.g. 1953), Roman Jakobson (e.g. 1961), and John J. Gumperz (e.g. 1964) had been discussing these issues – albeit in somewhat different ways – for quite some time.

Perhaps a third reason is simply space constraints. The paper as originally written is more than 18,000 words and still neglects many linguists and other scholars who made important contributions to the study of code switching.

The more substantive question is: what is the difference between language alternation and code switching? This is a controversial question, and my answer to the question is not the most widely used one in the field. I will therefore offer two answers.

First, I believe that the more standard practice is to make little distinction. Many linguists use the term code switching to mean the use of two languages within one conversation or text. Romaine (1989) attributes this definition to Gumperz (1982), though as my paper suggests, Gumperz did not actually use the word “languages” in his definition of conversational code switching.

The distinction between language alternation on one hand and code switching on the other comes from the work of Celso Alvarez (e.g. 1998, 2000). My definitions of language alternation and code switching are deeply indebted to Alvarez, and also owe debts to work by Gumperz (1982, 1992) and Auer (Auer and di Luzo 1992, Auer 1998), among many others.

Second, then, I will try to describe how I use the terms in that paper. You may think of language alternation and code switching as two different ways of thinking about language output, the first relating to grammatical form and the second to communicative function. Language alternation describes the alternating use of two recognizable grammatical systems – two “languages” in some sense of that word. For example, if a conversation contains some utterances in, say, Mandarin and others in, say, French, you may say that the conversation features language alternation. Recognize that the definition of what counts as a language is not an uncontroversial one. While most people will probably accept the suggestion that Mandarin and French are discrete languages, it may be more difficult to make the same assertion about Dyirbal and Giramay or about English and Scots. There may also be argument over whether an English speaker who utters the string “je ne sais quoi” is speaking French or using a stock English phrase that was borrowed from French.

Where language alternation concerns linguistic form, code switching concerns the contextualization of communication. In my own work, code switching is defined as a use of language alternation or of code choice (that is, deciding to speak one language rather than another) in order to contextualize an utterance. Contextualization refers to Gumperz’s (1982) description of the ways in which speakers give cues about how to understand an utterance. These cues are generally subtle and not related to propositional content, for example signalling the formality of the situation, the relationship between speakers, or other elements of context.

When a change in linguistic form (language alternation) signals a change in context (contextualization) the practice may be described as code switching. It is therefore possible to use code switching without switching “language” per se, for example by switching registers. It is also possible, at least in theory, to observe language alternation that does not effect contextualization and therefore does not count as code switching under this definition. This may be the case, for example, in what Myers-Scotton (1993) calls “codeswitching as unmarked choice.”

References

Alvarez, Celso. 1998. From ’switching code’ to ‘code-switching’: towards a reconceptualization of communicative codes.” In P. Auer (ed.) Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity, 29-48. London: Routledge.

– 2000. Para um modelo do ‘code-switching’ e a alternancia de variedades como fenomenos distintos: dados do discurso Galego-Portuges/Espanhol na Galiza. Sociolinguistic Studies 1(1), 111-128.

Auer, Peter. 1998. Code-switching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London: Routledge.

Auer, Peter, and di Luzo. 1992. The Contextualization of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Grosjean, Francois. 1982. Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gumperz, John J. 1964. Linguistic and social interaction in two communities. American Anthropologist 66(6): part 2, 137-153.

– 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

– 1992. Contextualization revisted. In P. Auer and A. di Luzo (eds.) The Contextualization of Language, 39-53. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haugen, Einer. 1953. The Norwegian Language in America: A Study of Bilingual Behavior volume 1. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1961. Linguistics and communication theory. In R. Jakobson (ed.) Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects: Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics volume XII. American Mathematical Society.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1989. Bilingualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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By chad – February 4, 2010