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Talking Like Children
Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social product...
Other Indonesians
In 1928, members of a young subaltern Indonesian elite pirated the language of the Dutch empire, bringing the Indonesian language into being along with its nation. Today, Indonesian is the language of two hundred and forty million citizens but is the native language of no one. Through rich analysis focused on the interplay of language varieties in two remote Indonesian provinces, Other Indonesians describes the unique language dynamic which has enabled the development of modern, democratic Indonesia. Complicating binaries that pit low against high Indonesian, or standard against mixed, J. Joseph Errington argues that it is precisely the un-ethnic, non-territorial quality of Indonesian that enables its speakers to express themselves as members of a national community. This detailed account locates Indonesian not only within the institutions which give it distinctive value in the nation, but also in the biographies of its young, educated speakers. With a nuanced understanding of national identity, this book shows how careful analysis of Indonesia can provide insight into broader dynamics of postcolonial nationalism in a globalizing world.
Approaches to Language and Culture
This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.
Living Together Across Borders
Living Together Across Borders: Care Through Communication in Separated Salvadoran Families tells the stories of extended families living stretched between a rural Salvadoran village and the urban locations in the United States where their migrant relatives live. Author Lynnette Arnold focuses on their cross-border conversations, demonstrating that this communication is a vital resource for enacting care-at-a-distance. She examines seemingly mundane interactions including greetings, remittance negotiations, and reminiscing together. Arnold demonstrates that while these practices are distributed in ways that reinforce boundaries between migrant and non-migrant relatives, families simultaneously use these same practices to build convivencia (living-together) despite ongoing separation.
On Becoming Bilingual
On Becoming Bilingual: Children’s Experiences across Homes, Schools, and Communities provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to research on children’s participation in and across a multiplicity of activities where they display complex linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. From a perspective that engages intersections of language, race, and class, the book reviews foundational and recent studies highlighting innovations, trends, and future directions for research. The book offers a helpful set of resources, including guiding questions at the start of each chapter, links to online and bibliographic sources, discussion questions and activities, and a glossary of key terms. This book is intended for scholars and students in language-oriented fields of study who are interested in learning about how bilingual children engage with, negotiate, and transform their social worlds.
Going Tactile
In Going Tactile, Terra Edwards explores life in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. through an ethnographic lens. Drawing on thirty months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, the author shows how the "protactile movement" of the 1990s created new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. Assessing the limits of language and representation, this book contextualizes linguistic and interactional work that has been conducted in the U.S. for scholars and students of Deaf studies, anthropology, and linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics.
The Struggle for a Multilingual Future
In The Struggle for a Multilingual Future, Christina Davis examines the tension between ethnic conflict and multilingual education policy in the linguistic and social practices of Sri Lankan minority youth. Facing a legacy of post-independence language and education policies that were among the complex causes of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983 - 2009), the government has recently sought to promote interethnic integration through trilingual language policies in Sinhala, Tamil, and English in state schools. Integrating ethnographic and linguistic research in and around two schools during the last phase of the war, Davis's research shows how, despite the intention of the reforms, practices on the ground reinforce language-based models of ethnicity and sustain ethnic divisions and power inequalities. By engaging with the actual experiences of Tamil and Muslim youth, Davis demonstrates the difficulties of using language policy to ameliorate ethnic conflict if it does not also address how that conflict is produced and reproduced in everyday talk.
Climate Change and Tradition in a Small Island State
The citizens of the Marshall Islands have been told that climate change will doom their country, and they have seen confirmatory omens in the land, air, and sea. This book investigates how grassroots Marshallese society has interpreted and responded to this threat as intimated by local observation, science communication, and Biblical exegesis. With grounds to dismiss or ignore the threat, Marshall Islanders have instead embraced it; with reasons to forswear guilt and responsibility, they have instead adopted in-group blame; and having been instructed that resettlement is necessary, they have vowed instead to retain the homeland. These dominant local responses can be understood as arising from a pre-existing, vigorous constellation of Marshallese ideas termed "modernity the trickster": a historically inspired narrative of self-inflicted cultural decline and seduction by Euro-American modernity. This study illuminates islander agency at the intersection of the local and the global, and suggests a theory of risk perception based on ideological commitment to narratives of historical progress and decline.
Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race
Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationship to issues of power and national identity. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to U.S. Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, raciolinguistic transformation, and urban inequity. Jonathan Rosa's account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in Chicago's highly segregated Near Northwest Side...
Schoolishness
In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread. Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically. Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."
