Languages and Publics

The Making of Authority

Susan Gal, Kathryn Woolard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317639787
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

The essays in this collection examine the public construction of languages, the linguistic construction of publics, and the relationship between these two processes. Cultural categories such as named languages, linguistic standards and genres are the products of expert knowledge as well as of linguistic ideologies more widely shared among speakers. Translation, grammars and dictionaries, the policing of correctness, folklore collections and linguistic academies are all part of the work that produces not only languages but also social groups and spheres of action such as "the public". Such representational processes are the topic of inquiry in this voume. They are explored as crucial aspects of power, figuring among the means for establishing inequality, imposing social hierarchy, and mobilizing political action.

Contributions to this volume investigate two related questions: first, how different images of linguistic phenomena gain social credibility and political influence; and, secondly, the role of linguistic ideology and practices in the making of political authority. Using both historical and ethnographic approaches, they examine empirical cases ranging from small-scale societies to multi-ethnic empire, from nineteenth-century linguistic theories to contemporary mass media, and from Europe to Oceania to the Americas.

Contributors include Susan Gal, Kathryn Woolard, Judith Irvine, Richard Bauman, Michael Silverstein, Jane Hill, Joseph Errington, Bambi Schieffelin, Jacqueline Urla and Ben Lee.

1. Constructing Languages and Publics Authority and Representation

SUSAN GAL AND KATHRYN A. WOOLARD

1. Introduction

Cultural categories of communication, such as named languages, dialects, standards, speech communities and genres, are constructed out of the messy variability of spoken interaction. Such bounded and naturalized representations are the products of experts and expert knowledge as well as of more widely shared linguistic ideologies. These representations are enacted and reproduced in familiar linguistic practices: translation, the writing of grammars and dictionaries, the policing of correctness in national standards, the creation of linguistic and folklore collections or academies. The work of linguistic representation produces not only individualized speakers and hearers as the agents of communication, but also larger, imagined social groupings, including our focus here, publics. Such representational processes are crucial aspects of power, figuring among the means for establishing inequality, imposing social hierarchy, and mobilizing political action.

The essays in this collection investigate the public construction of languages, the linguistic construction of publics, and the relationship between these two processes. Using both historical and ethnographic approaches, they examine empirical cases ranging from small-scale societies to multi-ethnic empires, from Europe to Oceania to the Americas.

The immediate point of departure for these essays on the historical construction of languages and publics is the larger project of understanding language ideologies and the ways that they mediate between social structure and linguistic practices (Woolard 1998:3). In the simplest formulation, language ideologies are cultural conceptions of the nature, form, and purpose of language, and of communicative behaviour as an enactment of a collective order (Silverstein 1987; Rumsey 1990; Irvine 1989). These are phenomena that, under a variety of labels, linguistic anthropologists and scholars in related fields have long studied. The recent reformulation of these as language ideology emphasizes the social positioning, partiality, and contestability of practical and discursive ideologies, as well as the way they reflexively (re)shape linguistic and social structures. (See Woolard and Schieffelin 1994; Gal and Irvine 1995; Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity 1998; Blommaert 1999; Kroskrity 2000.)

The chapters gathered here explore two related questions: first, how different images of linguistic phenomena gain social credibility and political influence, both within the academic disciplines of language and in larger social fields; and second, the role of linguistic ideologies and practices in the making of political authority. We will take up these two themes in turn in this introduction, aiming to make explicit some of the questions, critiques, and arguments that underlie these concerns.

2. Authoritative representations of language

An ongoing project in the field of sociolinguistics is the critique of the concepts on which its growth in the 1960s was founded. For instance, the notion of speech community has come under scrutiny. Useful in theorizing the functional diversity of codes within linguistic repertoires, it has also directed attention to consensus and shared interpretations within a bounded social unit. Such a focus neglects processes of conflict, competition, exclusion, boundary-making, differentiation, and transgression, which are at the centre of current social scientific investigations of identity formation (Rickford 1986; Irvine 1987; Irvine and Gal 2000).

In the present collection, several chapters contribute to this critique of the analytical categories, sociolinguistic and more general, with which we work. They explore expert notions such as oral literature (Bauman) and genealogical relationship (Irvine) by locating their historical sources in discursive fields and particular social and political processes.

In examining the scholarly production of basic units of analysis such as the language family and folklore or oral literature, these chapters do for linguistic anthropology the reflexive task that has become familiar in the humanities and social sciences. Inspired in part by Foucault, but also by the history and sociology of science, scholars ask how – through what practices – their disciplines have constituted themselves and invented (not discovered) their objects of study. We follow this tradition by using ‘representation’ and ‘constructing’ in our title to signal a commitment to understanding scholarly categories less as aspects of some objective world than as ideologically loaded parts of culture and social life.

Not content to note that the categories of a discipline might work as cultural capital for its practitioners, these articles describe in detail the relationship between linguistic ideas and other cultural conceptions, e.g. about the individual, the psyche, sexuality, national provenance, or Christian morality. They attempt to specify, as well, the social location and historical context of the social actors who propose the different linguistic views. As Silverstein notes, however, the aim is not thereby to discredit such concepts, but rather to get a better sense of the way in which linguistic ideologies have real historical effects.² Thus, when Bauman shows the textual strategies and assumptions through which Henry Rowe Schoolcraft created a body of Chippewa folklore out of a series of oral interactions, he is not dismissing Schoolcraft. Rather, he sheds light on practices of entextualization that create an apparently unified object of study. These entextualizing practices are aspects of Schoolcraft’s legacy that are still often taken for granted. Or, when Irvine shows that some nineteenthcentury philological categorizations of African languages were entangled with assumptions about sexuality and family relations, she is not simply debunking the theory of genealogical relationships among languages. Rather, she shows how that theory, like all scholarly discourse, is comprehensible as a principled product of a historical moment. Similarly, Silverstein is not interested in presenting Ogden and Richards’ project of Basic English as crackpot science. Instead, he wants to show how the popularity of the movement was made possible by the political structuring of applied science and language, not in the academy so much as in the public sphere.

The historical chapters in this volume share a number of other general strategies. Rather than a single conceptual schema characterizing an epoch, they each find within their historical period competing images of the aspects of language treated as focal. In other words, they attend to debates and discursive battles that reveal not only shared assumptions or presuppositions of the participants but also alternative commitments. Often, as in the chapters by Gal and Silverstein, the fights are between professionalizing students of language and those who will later be defined as amateurs. Thus, part of the battle has to do with the definition of legitimate enquiry. The chapters suggest that images of linguistic phenomena gain credibility when they create ties with other arguments about aspects of aesthetic or moral life. And, as Silverstein in particular argues, representations of language phenomena gain social authority – in fact may only be thinkable – from the institutional locations from which their proponents speak.

Frequently, one position in such debates is subsequently established as natural, obvious, objective. That is, one characterization of language comes to be seen as emanating not from any particular social position but rather from the phenomenon itself. A careful recuperation and contextualization of such debates allows us to dislodge these later assumptions of naturalness. Showing the earlier positioning of a regime of representation that now seems simply to let nature speak for itself is especially important when, as often happens, the establishment of a natural phenomenon not only warrants a scholarly discipline but also authorizes political programmes.

We can illustrate with a brief, familiar example. By the end of the eighteenth century, and in contrast to well-established earlier views, languages were conceived in Western European thought as natural entities, out there to be discovered, the product of human nature, to be sure, but independent of individual voluntary acts, and therefore not the creation of any self-conscious human will or intervention (Taylor 1990). Exactly because they were understood to be prior to intentional human political activity, they could be called on to justify and legitimate political actions, such as the formation of nation-states. The Victorian linguist Max Müller commented that, “the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing social and political questions”, acting “in favor of nations and languages against dynasties and treaties” (cited in Crowley 1989:67; see also Irvine, this volume).

As Daston and Galison (1992) have argued, our current notion of objectivity comprises a number of distinct ways in which what is seen as personal is systematically censored, denied, or extirpated from the project of scientific observation and analysis. The definition of a phenomenon as independent of human will, as in the example above, creates one kind of objectivity. Another kind depends on the attempt to escape from an individual or socially locatable perspective; it invokes a view from nowhere (Nagel 1986). This aperspectival objectivity, discussed in several of our chapters, is interestingly related to the category of the public.

3. Publics

We are interested in the category of the public as a language-based form of political legitimation. Discussion of publics has been reinvigorated in American social theory by the translation and republication of Habermas’ early work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1989). Our aim here is not to add to the large literature of explication and criticism around this text (see, e.g. Landes 1988; Robbins 1990; Calhoun 1992). We note instead that very little of this commentary has been sociolinguistically or semiotically informed. How might a language-oriented perspective clarify ongoing debates, and how could we rework the notion of ‘public’ to advance our own understanding of linguistic ideologies?

In the present context, the category of public is perhaps best thought of as just one in a spectrum of forms of sociolinguistically created authority. One of the best-known forms is that described by Bourdieu for standard French, whose speakers’ power is misrecognized insofar as it is perceived to be legitimately rooted in, rather than merely indexed by, their control of linguistic structures. Another is exemplary Javanese usage, which Errington reports here to be misrecognized as a quasi-natural attribute of elitehood. While these and many other examples of language ideology link sociopolitical systems to the formal structural properties of a communication code, Habermas’ notion of public sphere valorizes a communication process. The Habermasian public is in part a form of verbal interaction; groups of private individuals gather to discuss matters of common political concern, bearing on state authority. Their debates are decided on the basis of reason rather than the relative status of the interactants. This is what Kant characterized approvingly as the “conversation of mixed companies, consisting not merely of scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people or women [who have] besides storytelling and jesting […] another entertainment, namely arguing” (cited in Calhoun 1992:2). The public opinion produced by such critical talk has authority by virtue of being construed as ruled by reason, openness, and political equality. It was conceived to be as free from the private status-given interests of the participants as from the coercive powers of the state and the economy.

Habermas presents this as a historically specific phenomenon, emerging not just as an ideology, but also as a set of institutions and everyday practices in the western Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For him, the category of the public is explicitly a product of an emerging bourgeois, urban society, based on an increased traffic in commodities and news, and spurred by early capitalist long-distance trade. The institutions that supported it included not only newspapers and the increasing use of print, but also coffeehouses, salons, and voluntary associations of innumerable kinds that provided the fora for reasoned debate. Clearly this is a different sense of public than that characteristic of the ancient world or of feudal Europe, and it required a reconceptualization of the private as the sphere for the formation of individuals. State and society were understood as discrete entities set against each other, just as private interest was set against the public opinion of a new category of bourgeois citizens who did not fit into the feudal orders.

This portrait of the early bourgeois public sphere has been criticized on numerous grounds. Not just a historical study, it is at least as much an idealized and nostalgic image with which Habermas aims to criticize what he considers a debasement of twentieth-century public discourse, overly dependent on mass media and the culture industry. And there has been much controversy since the work’s initial publication about the actual historical processes involved. The institutional and ideological changes were quite different in England, France, Germany, and the US, and the dating, location, and even definition of the processes continue to be matters of controversy. Many question whether egalitarian, politically significant, public fora based on the rule of debate and reason ever existed anywhere. Feminists have pointed out that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century public fora were means of exclusion rather than of universal openness, and that the discursive construction of the public – private split was enabled by its association with a gender dichotomy that restricted women by definition (Landes 1988; Fraser 1990). Finally, many scholars have suggested that there have been, since as early as the seventeenth century, multiple publics – proletarian, regional, religious – often in competition, contesting each other as well as the state.

But for our more modest purposes here, these criticisms only add to the potential interest of the concept. Indeed, all the articles in this collection that deal with the construction of publics implicitly take one or another of these critiques as their starting point.

First, many of them (see especially Gal, Lee, Hill, and Errington) observe a negative logic by which the public, as an ideological construct, works to legitimate political action. One theme that has been developed in Habermasian studies is that publics derive their authority from being in a sense anonymous (most notably Warner 1990). They supposedly or potentially include everyone but abstract from each person’s interest-bearing and privately defined characteristics. By this reasoning, publics can represent everyone because they are no-one-in-particular. This disinterested, disembodied public, a form of aperspectival objectivity, was constructed against the personified and embodied legitimacy of the absolutist monarch, whose authority was often enacted exactly through spectacle and self-display.

However, many of the chapters here identify and explore an authority of authenticity (Hill, Errington, Gal, Bauman, Urla) that exists simultaneously with this authority of anonymity in the public sphere.³ Although the projection of authenticity (in the sincere individual or the particularistic community) can oppose anonymity as a form of legitimation, it does not necessarily do so. The relationship is often far more complex. Strategic glimpses of authenticity may actually serve the authority of the impersonal, clinching the force of public discourse (see especially Hill and Errington for illustrations). Or, the voice-from-nowhere may be constructed as the most authentic of voices competing for recognition as the embodiment of a particular community (see Gal and Urla; cf. Bauman for a related process in the construction of oral literature).

Further, these articles assume that a public need not be a countable, face-to-face group. The critique of sociolinguistics discussed earlier has recognized the limitations and distortions that result from taking face-to-face communication as the prototype of all communication. To be sure, if we unpack central concepts such as speaker, hearer, and audience, recognizing their internal complexity, a focus on face-to-face interaction provides a subtle understanding of interpersonal power dynamics (see, e.g. Goffman 1979). But analyses based on the face-to-face mode...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Constructing Languages and Publics Authority and representation
• 2. The Family Romance of Colonial Linguistics
• 3. Linguistic Theories and National Images in Nineteenth-century Hungary
• 4. Representing Native American Oral Narrative
• 5. From the Meaning of Meaning to the Empires of the Mind
• 6. Mock Spanish, Covert Racism and the (Leaky) Boundary between Public and Private Spheres
• 7. State Speech for Peripheral Publics in Java
• 8. Creating Evidence
• 9. Outlaw Language
• 10. Circulating the People
• Notes on Contributors
• Index