Contact Talk

The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries

Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole, Howard Manns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138370746
• eBook ISBN: 9780429765209
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Written by a wide range of highly regarded scholars and exciting junior ones, this book critiques and operationalizes contemporary thinking in the rapidly expanding field of linguistic anthropology. It does so using case studies of actual everyday language practices from an extremely understudied yet incredibly important area of the Global South: Indonesia. In doing so, it provides a rich set of studies that model and explain complex linguistic anthropological analysis in engaging and easily understood ways.

As a book that is both accessible for undergraduate students and enlightening for graduate students through to senior professors, this book problematizes a wide range of assumptions. The diversity of settings and methodologies used in this book surpass many recent collections that attempt to address issues surrounding contemporary processes of diversification given rapid ongoing social change. In focusing on the trees, so to speak, the collection as a whole also enables readers to see the forest. This approach provides a rare insight into relationships between everyday language practices, social change, and the ever-present and ongoing processes of nation-building.

1

Theorizing the semiotic complexity of contact talk

Contact registers and scalar shifters

Zane Goebel, Deborah Cole and Howard Manns

Introduction

[T]‌he study of pidginization, by requiring us to study simplification, may lead to recognition of a sociolinguistic universal. Simplification may prove to be, not an isolated phenomenon, but one pole of a continuum applicable to outer form in all languages.

(Hymes 1971:73)

Understanding what happens when people with different linguistic repertoires come into contact has been a long term and intensely researched question, within the humanities and social sciences in general (Ang 2003; Vertovec 2007; Werbner 1997) and linguistics in particular (e.g., Auer 1998; Eastman 1992; Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; Milroy and Muysken 1995; Mufwene 2008). Changes in how capital and labor move through the world, decolonization, economic and political upheaval, and the development of faster and cheaper transport and communication infrastructures (Harvey 1989; Hobsbawm 1992; Wallerstein 2004) produce new contact zones on very large scales. A new wave of recent scholarship has emerged on increasingly complex multilingual contact zones (Auer 1998; Rampton 1995). This scholarship emerged in tandem with sustained work on language ideologies that has kept us focused on the constructed nature of ideas about language and identity (Agha 2007a; Kroskrity 2000). The need to understand these contact zones, as part of a wider and ongoing system of change that creates hierarchies of language, produced a new body of work in the areas of superdiversity and research on how language can move from being a marker of identity to a sellable commodity (Blommaert 2013; Blommaert and Rampton 2011; Heller et al. 2015; Heller and Duchêne 2012a). These subfields are also starting to focus on language in areas of the globe that have been called “marginal”, language and margin-center relations, and how all of these areas of inquiry relate to different infrastructures and historical circumstances (Goebel 2015; Heller et al. 2015; Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013).

This book documents and analyzes contact talk¹ or commentaries about speakers and languages in contact. It demonstrates discourse that provides us with the physical, observable, measurable, analyzable data that constitutes both the “borders” and the “contact” of contact talk. Since what counts as “a language” is itself constructed through discourse, what comes into contact in a language contact situation is not so much the rapprochement of different languages, but the coming together of multiple discourses about what a language is, who speaks it to whom, when, how, and why. Linguists have pointed out that such discourses, or metasemiotic commentaries, are crucial to the formation of semiotic registers. Semiotic registers are sign constellations whose meanings have been valorized and recirculated through a series of inter-connected metasemiotic commentaries. Valorization via these commentaries helps to add social value to the cluster of forms so that any sign within the cluster not only has a denotational meaning but also an ever-increasing connotational range. When this type of sign valorization is replicated within much large participation frameworks (e.g., within schools, the media, the bureaucracy), then this process is referred to as enregisterment (Agha 2007a). A crude approximation of the linguistic component of a semiotic register is thus a named language.

The authors of these chapters concern themselves both with existing or naturalized semiotic registers but also with those registers that emerge in the course of interaction, what we call contact registers. They chronicle the variety of resources and repertoires that figure in the enregisterment of linguistic and social boundaries that form the necessary conditions for contact phenomena to come into focus. These studies then move beyond the discursive organization of social and linguistic boundaries to show how contact talk enables the reconfiguration of the semiotic features of discourse about languages and identities to facilitate the emergence of new semiotic repertoires. This focus on the discursive organization of the metasemiotic commentary of contact talk also makes possible a reflexive examination of our own scholarly discourses and of how we as linguists and anthropologists talk about the contact and boundary phenomena we seek to understand.

The particular setting for the contact talk examined here is the archipelago of Indonesia in the last two decades, a setting which provides a particularly rich context for examining semiotic repertoires in contact, for reasons we make clear later. The chapters’ authors have collected data that demand analyses that can successfully deal with semiotic complexity (which we define later). These data include samples of face-to-face interactions, recordings of public discourse, social media feeds, public signage, clothing choices, television serials, and advertising campaigns. Three facts become clear across these varied samples. First, these seemingly disparate signs and the registers that make use of them are performed and evaluated through similar kinds of discursive processes. Second, these signs and registers are in some cases conscripted for boundary making projects and in others for boundary dismantling projects. Third, the individual features of each sign and the individual signs of each register are themselves constantly available for reconfiguration into new signs, registers, and value projects. This possibility for constant re-valuation and recombination demand the theoretical machinery to deal with semiotic complexity.

Semiotic complexity can be used in a narrow multimodal sense to refer to the multiple co-occurring signs that are used to signal and interpret meaning (e.g., Gumperz 1982; Norris 2004; Tannen 1984). Increasingly, however, semiotic complexity encompasses a multimodal aspect, the simultaneity and tensions created by all sorts of co-occurring practices, the need to understand the connections and entanglements between signs used in one communicative encounter with signs used in other encounters from other times and places (e.g., Blommaert 2015; Clonan-Roy et al. 2016a; Tsing 2005), how this relates to human mobility (Blommaert and Rampton 2011), and how all of this relates to the market, social value, and identity and branding projects (Goebel 2008; Heller et al. 2015; Heller and Duchêne 2012a; Manning 2010; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). Recent work on creoles, the prototypical example of language contact, confirms the need for a focus on complexity:

[S]‌ynchronically, far from being the world’s simplest languages, Creole languages can be seen as some of the world’s most complex languages. That is if we take a social perspective. This can be seen in the sociolinguistic dynamics of Creole communities, the degree of multilingualism that characterizes them, the complexity of registers being negotiated on an everyday basis, as well as competence in switching and mixing that is required by its speakers.

(Ansaldo 2017:2)

In this book, rather than focusing on one aspect of complexity—e.g., one of the following: multimodality, connection, mobility, market, social value, or identity projects—we look at all of these aspects within the one volume as a way of exemplifying approaches to understanding semiotic complexity in its multiple manifestations. Our working definition of semiotic complexity is thus:

the connections between signs used in one communicative encounter with signs used in other encounters from other timespaces (i.e. The intertwined time-space of Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope), their relationship with the mobility of their users, the relationship of this to nation-building regimes, market forces, value, identity and branding projects, and the unintended consequences of some of these projects.

By focusing on complexity, this book also adds to contemporary work in some of these areas, but especially “peripheral” or “small” languages (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2013; Pietikäinen et al. 2016), and the ideas around the development of pride in a language and using a language for profit (Goebel 2014; Heller et al. 2015; Heller and Duchêne 2012a).

We focus on complexity by looking at a unique national context, Indonesia, where complexity and boundary management has been a two hundred year project of ideologizing and managing hundreds of ethnic languages (Goebel 2015; 2016; 2017). Since the early 1990s, many unintended consequences of this ideologizing have emerged, especially discourses proclaiming the need to decentralize and pointing out the ongoing fragmentation along territorial and ethnolinguistic lines (e.g., Aspinall 2011; Aspinall and Fealy 2003b; Bünte 2009). The authors in this book all show how the ideologies produced by this process have been reflexively appropriated for all sorts of interactional projects. This book provides the complement to Hymes’ observation quoted above by focusing on complexification at the other end of the contact continuum.

To be clear, these possibilities for semiotic complexity are not new. They have always existed in human language. What is new, and what makes this book timely are first, the political changes that occurred in recent Indonesian history, which enabled discourse that dissolved previous boundaries between semiotic registers leading to new patterns of contact talk and behavior and second, the proliferation both in public/everyday discourse and in academic scholarship around the world of complexity talk. Like contact talk, complexity talk is a metasemiotic commentary, but one that focuses on and contributes to an understanding of contemporary communication processes as (increasingly) complex, a discourse in which the authors of this book are clearly participating. In what follows, we sketch how these two processes set the stage for the studies in this book (including our own reflexivity about participating in the scholarship of complexity), introduce the theoretical contribution of the book as a whole, and outline how each of the chapters contributes to the volume.

Emerging patterns in boundary discourses in contemporary Indonesia

Our empirical focus is multiple settings in Indonesia where the tension between semiotic sameness and difference is strikingly evident across (semiotic) registers and where the facts of semiotic complexity appear in sharp relief thanks to political and fiscal decentralization that began in 2001 (Aspinall and Fealy 2003b). Scholars of the humanities and social sciences have, for a long time, been interested in the relationship between centralization and fragmentation and uniformity and diversity (Anderson 1972; Bakhtin 1981). Ben Anderson (1972:20–21) commenting on power, political life, and history in Javanese aristocratic society notes:

[T]‌he Javanese view of history was one of cosmological oscillation between periods of concentration of Power and periods of its diffusion. The typical historical sequence is concentration-diffusion-concentration-diffusion without any ultimate resting point. In each period of concentration new centers of Power (dynasties, rulers) are constituted and unity is recreated; in each period of diffusion, Power begins to ebb away from the center, the reigning dynasty loses its claim to rule, and disorder appears—until the concentrating process begins again.

Embedded in the contact talk documented in this book are geosocial metaphors of the Indonesian nation like “center”, “periphery”, “margins” and “hubs”. During the Suharto era, Jakarta was enregistered as the center within national discourse. It was discursively framed as the hub that mattered most for the nation. Everything outside of Jakarta was enregistered as peripheral. Where there were other hubs outside of Jakarta (other centers in the margins), their peripheral, marginal status was maintained through a neatly divided categorization of national vs. local or regional (Kuipers 2015). After the Suharto era, the perspective shifted or rather, another perspective started to become enregistered alongside the previous one. In this emergent perspective, local, regional hubs became centers whose very peripherality became necessary to a zoomed out view that the nation encompassed all of these regional hubs. Jakarta was now only one hub among many—no longer the center, but a center that could also attract commentaries and evaluations that could position Jakarta as marginal or peripheral from the perspective of being on the ground in one of those other hubs of the previously enregistered periphery. This process has been called “decentralization” but it could also be called “redistributed centralization” or “multi-centered peripherality”. These geo-social metaphors, we argue later, are scalar shifters that facilitate the continuous redrawing of relevant boundaries on which samples of contact talk depend.

As part of talk about centers and peripheries in the spatio-temporal imagination of the Indonesian nation, two semiotic registers became available at the national level, within discourse that was directed at or engaged with the enregistered opposition between “centrality and the nation” and “peripherality and the local”. Two semiotic registers were successfully enregistered and received wide uptake during Suharto era nation talk (roughly the period between 1966-1998, but we will discuss this in more detail in the following chapter). One register was associated with exemplary Indonesian usage and was hierarchically organized, aligned with, and emblematic of the national center, while another was hierarchically organized, aligned with, and emblematic of the peripheral, marginal, local and ethnic. During the Suharto era, these two semiotic registers also came into direct contact within the same discursive spheres, and as happens in any contact situations, new participant specific registers emerged as indexes of shared interactional history and stances. While this is nothing new, what was new is that such mixing of resources began to be authorized by multiple infrastructures which were formally controlled by the state. In multiple sites, it was not only increasingly common to find the use of resources from these registers, but metasemiotic commentaries that policed mixing and impurity seemed to be less prevalent as the Suharto regime lost control of media censorship and embraced market forces in the area of domestic tourism (Goebel 2015).

This book demonstrates how the discursive coming together of two important semiotic registers in the recent history of Indonesia has led to the re-organization of linguistic realities and social practices. The importance of this demonstration is threefold. First, the general structure of two semiotic registers in Indonesia (one that links a particular language to the national and another that links oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Theorizing the semiotic complexity of contact talk: Contact registers and scalar shifters
• 2 Indonesia and Indonesian
• 3 RECENTERING the margins?: The scale of “local language” in a decentralizing Indonesia
• 4 Moving languages: Bivalency and scalar shifters in Central Javanese language ecologies
• 5 From “top-down” to “bottom-up”: The New Order’s vertical synchronicity and the vintage aesthetics of the margins in post-Suharto political oratory
• 6 Revaluing and rescaling national and ethnic language boundaries in online discourse
• 7 Adolescent interaction, local languages and peripherality in teen fiction
• 8 Modeling contact talk on television
• 9 Localizing person reference among Indonesian youth
• 10 Revaluing Papuan Malay
• 11 The emergent selectivity of semiotically playful utterances
• 12 Coda
• Index