Salsa, Language and Transnationalism

Britta Schneider

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783091911
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What happens in globalised social contexts if people identify with a language that is not traditionally considered to be 'their' language? This unique contribution to the field of sociolinguistics scrutinises language ideologies of German and Australian Communities of Practice constituted by Salsa dance and asks what languages symbolise in transnational, non-ethnic cultures. Using ethnographic methodology and a deconstructive approach to language it examines these different Salsa communities and gives insight into the interaction of social discourses from local, national and transnational realms, examining differences, similarities and a simultaneous multiplicity of languages' symbolic functions. This book will be welcomed by postgraduates, professional sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists as well as scholars of cultural anthropology, sociology and cultural studies who are interested in the development of modernist categories in transnational culture.

1 Salsa, Zombies and Linguistics

We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognized from the outset; […]. And instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value, we must accept, in the name of methodological vigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events.

Foucault (1972: 22)

A while ago, a friend of mine gave birth to her second son. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany; accordingly, one may assume that his ‘native language’ is German. Yet, it is not only the place of birth but also the parents’ cultural and linguistic heritage that are taken as indicators for the language considered to be ‘native’ to a child. In the case of the little boy just mentioned, however, both a territorial and a heritage approach to linguistic identity are problematic. While the mother is ‘half’ Serbo-Montenegrin and ‘half’ Hungarian, the father’s parents stem from Spain and Greece.

In urban contexts today, linguistic complexities like this are by no means an exception. In Frankfurt, London, New York or Sydney, it has become unexceptional that people from different cultural backgrounds live together, become friends, attend the same schools and love each other. And, thus, affiliations with groups or with patterns of verbal and other behaviour oftentimes do not fit into established frameworks of culture and linguistic identity. However, although multiculturalism and multilingualism have become common, the categories with which culture, language and identity are described often obscure these complexities of social reality. Categories like cultures, nations or languages, categories that describe the world as materialising in static, bounded systems, draw an overly simple picture. Yet, they are still relevant for describing social life. It would be difficult to give an account of multicultural identity, as in the example above, without making reference to the concepts that are put into question through the existence of such identities. The notion of ‘zombie category’ (Beck, 2001) illustrates this paradoxical situation. Zombies are creatures that are dead and alive at the same time.

A concept that is crucial for the continuing relevance of such ‘zombies’, and that is the focus of this book, is the notion of language, in its function of denoting distinct and separate verbal systems. National cultures, for example, are co-defined through languages, and membership of a culture (or a sub-culture thereof) usually depends on language competence. The cultural autonomy of national and ethnic groups is typically legitimised by a language that proves their existence, and that is conceptualised as self-contained. Despite this important social function of languages, an understanding of the concept of language as a culturally constructed category has received relatively little attention. Even so, like nation, gender or class, the concept of language, as describing a distinct structural entity, has not fallen from heaven. Languages as bounded entities, marking cultural boundaries, have developed historically and are the result of specific discourses. They are central in imaginations of national cultures and are the result of language ideologies that are historically related to national epistemology and colonialism (see e.g. Errington, 2008; Gal & Irvine, 1995; Irvine, 2001; Irvine & Gal, 2009; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook, 2004; Pratt, 1987).

During the 20th century, the discipline of linguistics tended to regard linguistic systems, understood as separate entities, as fundamental and unquestioned objects of study. Therefore, the analysis of the discursive construction and the study of the cultural, political and social relevance of languages have remained somewhat marginal linguistics. Language ideologies that are found in linguistics often implicitly confirm the idea of the existence of culturally and linguistically homogenous groups and usually consider the language use of social elites to be ‘a language’: ‘To speak of the language, without further specification, as linguists do, is tacitly to accept the official language of a political unit’ (Bourdieu, 1980 [2000]: 468). To regard the official language of a nation as basis for research, without questioning its ontological status, is an instance of methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism has been defined as the ‘assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002: 301). Historically, it has developed on the grounds of the fact that ‘[t]he epistemic structures and programmes of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002: 303).

In an age of globalisation, it has become apparent that nations, cultures and languages are no ‘natural’ entities. Yet, how can we talk about such ‘zombie’ categories without giving them a ‘natural’ status? How can we conceptualise language and identity in a world in which the connection between culture and language is no longer as straightforward as it seemed to be in the past? How can we use the concept of language without assuming that there are fixed communities to which languages are ‘naturally’ tied? To develop an understanding of how languages and their symbolic functions are constituted in discourse is central to grasp their role in the creation of community and society in a post-national context. The study presented in this volume is an attempt to get a hesitant glimpse of the contemporary discursive constitution of languages, assuming that the language–culture nexus needs to be put into question. Due to the relevance of these questions in many realms, I regard not only linguists, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists as the potential audience of this book but consider to be a potential a reader anyone who has an interest in the role of language in a transnational world. This involves above all cultural anthropologists, but also students and scholars of sociology, of political sciences and of cultural studies, and teachers in urban classrooms who want to get a closer understanding of the ideologies underlying the language practices of their multilingual pupils.

Transnational Salsa – The Object of Study

In approaching language in an age of globalisation empirically, I will try to avoid methodological nationalism. The study presented therefore focuses on language ideologies in transnational social formations that are not based on ethnicity. Instead of choosing an ethnic or national group as the object of study, communities based on salsa dance, located in Australia and in Germany, are the focus. Their language ideologies – their discourses and beliefs about language – are at the centre of attention. Such a choice is slightly unusual in a linguistic study and requires explanation.

First of all, popular music in general, in production and consumption, has a strong tendency to produce transnational ties (see e.g. Lipsitz, 1994: 4). With their history of cultural mixing, popular music and dance styles are inspiring examples for the study of discourses between cultures, languages and spaces. As such, salsa dancing is a globally popular cultural activity. From Japan to Greece, from Canada to Senegal, salsa clubs are found all over the world. Cultural studies (see e.g. Hall, 1992; Rampton, 1997; Williams, 1966) have emphasised the need to look into the practices of everyday life, influenced by capitalist mass culture, not necessarily tied to ethnicity. In the everyday life of contemporary societies, cultural practices based on music, 4 Salsa, Language and Transnationalism connected to commercialism, the production of lifestyle and mass media are at least as common as more traditional activities that reproduce social orders such as ethnic or national identity. Studying communities based on commercial music culture is not a random and exotic choice but is anchored in the development of contemporary capitalist culture. Leisure culture related to music, like the activity of dancing salsa, is an essential part of everyday discourse and influences the way people locate themselves – and thus also the way they use and conceptualise language.

Secondly, salsa brings along local ethnic mixing, as there are many dancers in salsa communities who relate to the dance due to their cultural heritage, as well as even more whose ethnic heritage is completely unrelated to salsa. The latter group includes local majority populations (in the study presented here, ‘German’ Germans, Anglo-Australians), as well as a large number of members of ethnic minority groups, for example Turkish, Sudanese, Arab or Greek in the case of Germany, or Chinese, Vietnamese, southern European, Lebanese and other Arab dancers in the case of Australia. Salsa communities are therefore an interesting example to use to study ‘the operation of language across lines of social differentiation’, related to the idea that linguistics should focus ‘on modes and zones of contact’ (Pratt, 1987: 60) instead of engaging in a ‘linguistics of community’ (Pratt, 1987: 49) that assumes that language emerges from ethnicity (see also Chapter 2).

Finally, despite the transnational connections that can and do develop on the grounds of salsa, it is still very often seen as ‘ethnic’, namely as a more or less ‘Latin’ or ‘Hispanic’ cultural practice.¹ As a consequence of this, the activity of dancing salsa typically involves certain language(-listening) practices, as salsa music is mostly sung in Spanish. And, interestingly, salsa often not only leads to people listening to music with Spanish lyrics. In the contexts observed in this study, there are quite a number of people of non-Hispanic descent who enthusiastically identify with the Spanish language. Thus, globally popular salsa communities, with their transnational Latin and mixed origins, their many non-ethnic Spanish-speaking members and their ethnically hybrid constitution, form an interesting case for studying language ideologies in a transnational environment, in which issues related to language and ethnicity remain nevertheless significant.²

The type of identity that is constructed in salsa communities is obviously different from, for example, gender or ethnicity. However, it is its precarious, temporary and also consumerist nature, different from ‘traditional’ conceptions of identity, which makes salsa and its discourses interesting for studying the development of language ideology in a capitalist culture with transnational connections. While stability and order have been tacit assumptions of studies of the social in structuralist approaches,

[r]andomness and disorder have […] become much more important in recent social theory, where instead of trying to define the core features of any social group or institution, there is major interest in the flows of people, knowledge, texts and objects across social and geographical space, in the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and in fragmentation, indeterminacy and ambivalence. (Rampton, 2000b: 11)

Despite a recognition of the precariousness of cultures and identities, one should be aware that national discourses are still decisive factors in everyday life and determine very real boundaries and identities. Cross-national comparison allows for a visibility of national discourses and for a study of the influence of national discourse and language policies on localised transnational culture (see also Hornberger, 2005). The two countries chosen for the present study, Germany and Australia, have very different histories and ideologies of citizenship and belonging. Germany, with a tradition of national ideologies of belonging, contrasts with Australia as an immigrant nation, where the official acknowledgement of diversity has a much longer history. Studying salsa communities in different countries therefore generates insights into non-essentialised, non-ethnic forms of language identity, without losing sight of the potentially continuing relevance of ethnic and national discourse and language.

Overcoming Linguistic Essentialism

One inspiration to study transnationalism and language is of an intellectual nature, as it means to question and analyse the constitution and ontological status of the concept of language. On the other hand, the underlying motivation of this study is linked to ethical demands. Racial and cultural discrimination is often reconstructed and made possible on the basis of linguistic differences. ‘[T]he ethical demand to imagine otherwise’ (Kearney, 1988: 364, quoted in Pennycook, 2001: 154) leads to an interrogation of the idea that each culture is tied to one language. In academic and educational discourses concerned with discrimination based on language, the connection between a culture and ‘its’ language is often constructed as self-evident (see e.g. Gogolin & Reich, 2001; Hamel, 1997; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1999; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000). This can be an important strategy in constructing a ‘voice’ in the political arena of education in multicultural and multilingual contexts. ‘Strategic essentialism’ (Spivak, 1996 [1985]) is crucial to make arguments accessible to the public, to politicians and to other policy designers in a world in which the majority of nations are still reluctant to meet the requirements of basic language rights as demanded by Unesco as early as 1953 (e.g. the right to become literate in one’s native language; Unesco, 1953).

Thinking of the little boy introduced above, however, an understanding of the connection between language and culture as ‘given’ can be problematic for quite practical reasons. It is not possible to say which language is the boy’s ‘native’ language and maybe he will not identify most closely with one of his parents’ languages. In such cases, which are no longer exceptions, linguistic essentialism, assuming that people have to ‘stick to who they are’ (see Djité, 2006), can be a form of symbolic violence. In an age of globalisation, where new identities are formed and hybrid cultures develop, conceptualisations that assume that people simply reproduce their parents’ culture and language become particularly controversial. It is crucial to understand that – next to the language–culture nexus – there are other local, national or transnational discourses to which a language can be connected.

If, for example, the little boy’s mother does not use Hungarian because no one in her environment uses the language, because she has never learned it, or because it is linked to lower-class immigrant status in her local context, it is not very likely that Hungarian will become a dominant language for her son. On the other hand, the global dominance of English, the recent popularity of Spanish in popular culture, or a family stay abroad in Brazil or Japan, for example, may have an impact on his identity formation and language practices. Thus, it is many different discourses, related to ethnic heritage, social networks, political positionings, working conditions and consumerist practices that affect linguistic identity in many present-day contexts. Reducing people to their parents’ ethnic and linguistic heritage, even with the best of intentions, not only creates an unrealistic picture but furthermore runs danger of unwillingly excluding, stigmatising or ‘othering’ people on the grounds of their heritage.

Studying language ideologies in salsa communities aims at documenting newer forms of social positioning and thus at getting a glimpse of the discursive regimes beyond nationalism that are operating in contemporary, globalised societies. The study thus indirectly asks whether, through new forms of social structure, new forms of social knowledge have developed. The overall aim of studying language ideologies in transnational salsa contexts is therefore to document the discourses that influence the choice and conception of languages. In order to do this, certain methodological choices are demanded.

Methodological Approach

Basically, this is a study of what language means to people and how this is linked to the discourses they routinely engage in. As this interest is not quantitative in nature but rather aims at understanding meaning-making practices on a local level, and their ties to more widespread discursive regimes, a qualitative, ethnographic approach forms the core methodological choice. The ethnographic method allows access to cultural contexts and insiders’ views on a particular culture in order to understand situated behaviour (see e....