Sunday, 5/10
7:30-ish Burgers and beers with graduate students at La Jolla Brew House. (http://www.lajollabrewhouse.com/)
Monday, 5/11
9-9:30a Coffee, bagels, Opening Remarks9:30-10:05a Thea Strand (Arizona) “Ideologized Imitation: Policing a Local Dialect through the Ironic Use of Normative Linguistic Forms”
10:10-10:45a Tamara Jackson (UCSD) “Rounds and the Construction of Fair Turn-Taking During Children's Play”
10:45-11a Coffee break
11-11:35a A. Ashley Stinnett (Arizona) "Circulation and Multivocality in ‘Blood Talk’”
11:40-12:15p Elizabeth Peacock (UCSD) “The Intersection of Content and Social Organization in a Discussion of Out-migration”
12:15-1p Lunch break
1-2:30p Keynote presentation: Dr. Norma Mendoza-Denton
2:45-3:20p Lori Labotka, & Bryan James Gordon (Arizona) “Sampling in Experimental Anthropology: Bringing Together Gender Socialization and Gesture Performance”
3:20-3:30p Break
3:30-4:05p Melanie McComsey (UCSD) “Learning to Take a Stance: Socialization and Stancetaking in the Negotiation of a Conflict”
4:10-4:45p Mary Good (Arizona) “Super Smart or Super Sexual? Language Ideology, Code Choice, and Gender Identities among Youth in the Kingdom of Tonga”
4:45-5p Closing Remarks
Dinner with presenters, visiting grads, and professors at Apollonia Bistro. (http://www.apolloniabistro.com/)
Tuesday, 5/12
BBQ in Ocean Beach, hosted by the University of Arizona folks. (TBA)
The abstracts of presenters are posted here, as comments, in order of presentation time.
ReplyDeleteKeynote Presentation
ReplyDelete“Stance Triangulation among
Latin American Immigrants to Spain”
Dr. Norma Mendoza-Denton (Arizona)
The business of stance is tricky when one's ascribed status can vary widely within a group. Such is the case with Latin American immigrants to Spain, who variously face stiff visa regulations, ethnoracial epithets ("Sudaca!"), and discrimination if they are indigenous (typically from Ecuador, Bolivia, or Peru); while they may find a welcoming reception if they are fair-skinned (typically from Argentina or Chile), and can "prove" through state-instituted procedures that they are recent descendants of Spaniards: such proof can lead to Spanish citizenship. Whiteness, indigeneity, kinship claim documentation, and linguistic and national stereotypes all play a part in how recent immigrants talk about their experience in Spain and about each other. Using DuBois' (2005) notion of the stance triangle and Kockleman's (2004) ideas on subjectivity and stance, I explore Latin American migrants' delicate positioning of themselves in a field of valued and devalued others. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted among Latin Americans and Spaniards in Valencia, Spain in 2004, I explore Dubois' triangle of evaluation-positioning-alignment, showing how both Latin Americans and Spaniards compare within and among fields of Latin American and North African/ Arab stereotypes, using the details of Latin American and Peninsular Spanish accents and their phonetic implementation to lay claim to different stylistic personae (Zhang 2005, 2008).
Presentation of Work-in-Progress
“The Biomechanics of Language and Gesture”
Dr. Norma Mendoza-Denton and Dr. David Raichlen (Arizona)
This portion of the presentation highlights new research that the Biomechanics of Language and Gesture group has been conducting at the University of Arizona.
Our research represents a novel collaboration between a linguistic anthropologist (Mendoza-Denton) and a biological anthropologist (Raichlen). We utilize full-body optical motion capture cameras that record the motion of retro-reflective markers attached on the body, yielding images of the markers’ positions in 3-D space. We highlight some of the projects coming out of our group, and present some preliminary data on an experiment we have conducted to understand the relationship between speech and breathing among interlocutors with varying degrees of familiarity reading to each other texts of varying degrees of difficulty.
“Ideologized Imitation: Policing a Local Dialect
ReplyDeletethrough the Ironic Use of Normative Linguistic Forms”
Thea Strand (Arizona)
For 150 years, Norway has had two competing written norms. Today called Bokmål and Nynorsk, these two national varieties are legally equal, but symbolically representative of urban and rural culture and values, respectively. In addition, Norway functions largely without a widely recognized “standard” spoken variety, and citizens are officially encouraged to use their native, local dialect in all situations. In this sense, contemporary Norway is self-consciously, perhaps radically, heteroglossic. In 2005, the dialect of a rural, dairy-farming valley was voted Norway’s most popular dialect on national radio, and the “dialect popularity contest” outcome is both reflective of and has contributed to the revalorization of the local spoken variety. This is evident both at the level of metalinguistic discourse and linguistic ideology, and in the use of the local non-standard dialect and its current caché among younger generations.
At the same time that dialect use has become increasingly valuable, both within and outside of the local setting, the regional urban norm, centered in nearby Oslo, has simultaneously been devalued by many in Valdres. This is especially clear in dialect speakers’ policing of the use of “standard” linguistic variants by other Valdres natives, a practice that involves the highly patterned and exaggerated use of certain lexical, morphological, and phonological forms iconically associated with urban Oslo – thereby further valorizing rural dialect forms. This research focuses on identifying patterns of the critical or ironic use of urban language and locating this trend within the specific, historically-contingent sociolinguistic situation of contemporary Norway.
“Rounds and the Construction of Fair Turn-Taking
ReplyDeleteDuring Children's Play”
Tamara Jackson (UCSD)
In this presentation I analyze a series of video clips in which three nine-year-old girls develop a round-based pattern for turn-taking during play. This pattern provides the basis for assessing what constitutes an "unfair" turn -- that is, a turn that does not follow the sequence of the round as it has been constructed through past activity. Special attention is also paid to how bodily movement (as well as the absence of movement) can be a resource for constructing turn transition relevance places.
“Circulation and Multivocality in ‘Blood Talk’ ”
ReplyDeleteA. Ashley Stinnett (Arizona)
For the Sandrizona workshop, I would like to address some of the current theoretical and practical issues of my dissertation research. I am interested in the relationship between language circulation and multivocality in regards to a central concept of ‘blood talk.’ Anthropologists historically have been inclined to research issues of culture along larger theme’s such as ritual or kinship, but inspired by Mintz work on a singular topic, that of sugar, I intend to explore the circulation of ideologies of a singular sort, that of blood and look to its indications of how ritual and kinship function. By shifting the frame and focusing on a single word, that has huge ramifications regarding what it means to be human, I hope to explore the larger function and potential role that language plays. Exploring face-to-face language interactions, ethnographic interviews, and also utilizing media texts and popular culture resources the life of ‘blood talk’ is seemingly boundless. Theoretically, I am drawing from Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and multivocality as well as theories of circulation (Spitulnik 1996, Lee & LiPuma 2002). Some central themes up for workshop discussion are 1) the complexities of Bakhtin’s notion of the multivocal and historical function of language/utterance, 2) how to avoid positivistic structuring of the body/materiality/subject/object dualism, 3) methodological approaches to fieldwork.
“The Intersection of Content and Social Organization
ReplyDeletein a Discussion of Out-migration”
Elizabeth Peacock (UCSD)
Due to an aging population, low birth rate, and high level of out-migration, Ukraine is struggling, more so than other countries, to combat its negative population growth. While only so much can be done about birth and death rates, the focus has been shifted towards encouraging people, especially young people, to remain in the country. Both “push” and “pull” factors are open for contestation within this debate, however, as official discourses discouraging out-migration cannot overcome accounts of personal experience which present a more complex picture.
At this conference, I will present a group discussion about travel and emigration among teenage girls at one public school in L’viv, a western Ukrainian city 44 miles from the Polish border. Early in the discussion, the girls are amiable in talking about their desires to travel, study, or live in other countries, jovially disagreeing on finer points of one’s personal dreams and opinions. However, when asked about what they have heard about Ukrainians who work abroad, the discussion transforms into a heated argument of multiple competing viewpoints, none arising as the dominant one. I ask: how does the content of this discussion intersect with the social organization of the interaction, and, to what effect does it disrupt the identifications made salient earlier? While these interview segments are not central to my overall research project, I suggest that they may say something about conceptualizations of Ukrainians within global marketplace, and how discourses of immigration may be linked to broader understandings of claims to national belonging.
“Sampling in Experimental Anthropology:
ReplyDeleteBringing Together Gender Socialization and Gesture Performance”
Lori Labotka & Bryan James Gordon (Arizona)
Although anthropology has traditionally avoided experimental methods, we consider their value for an anthropological understanding of interactions between gender and gesture. Anthropological approaches to gender chart local constructions of meaning and their effects on behavior. Although such approaches are not in principle incompatible with experiments, they fit poorly with traditional sampling ideals. In particular, random, demographically balanced samples can both erase important local phenomena and encourage materialist, innatist and reductionist interpretations of the supralocal generalizations they capture.
We conducted a matched-guise experiment in which participants were shown stimuli that differed in gender content: one was significantly closer to hegemonic masculinities than the other. We compared performance before and after the stimulus video, and sought relationships between participant gender, stimulus gender, and change in gesture. Participants who saw the less hegemonically masculine video decreased gesture velocity by 40%. However, we are without a clear explanation, and some effects failed to surface, because we lacked a full understanding of the local factors shaping these relationships.
We conclude that in order to produce anthropologically meaningful results, sampling procedures unique to anthropology must be created. Thus, we propose an anthropology-specific experimental design based on sampling within specific communities of practice, and highlight our findings which support such design.
“Learning to Take a Stance:
ReplyDeleteSocialization and Stancetaking in the Negotiation of a Conflict”
Melanie McComsey (UCSD)
Stancetaking involves the evaluation of an object, the positioning of a subject in relation to the object, and the alignment of another subject in relation to the first (Du Bois 2007). In taking stances, participants monitor subtle convergences and divergences of alignment or disalignment and participate in a dynamic process of positioning themselves vis-à-vis their words and texts, interlocutors and audiences, and a context that is both responded to and constructed (Jaffe 2009).
At this workshop I will present preliminary audio data in which a mother and her two sons negotiate and resolve a conflict. By monitoring subtle cues and making delicate shifts in alignment, the participants both index and construct social relationships through language. I am especially interested to explore the ways in which young children are integrated into emerging stance triangles, how stancetaking is learned as an important aspect of communicative competence, and how bilingual (Spanish/Isthmus Zapotec) resources are employed in the stancetaking process.
“Super Smart or Super Sexual?
ReplyDeleteLanguage Ideology, Code Choice, and Gender Identities
among Youth in the Kingdom of Tonga”
Mary Good (Arizona)
Despite the mandatory status of English in all high schools in the nation, actual code choice within any given interaction is heavily laden with ideological meaning for youth in the Kingdom of Tonga. Choosing to speak English rather than Tongan, and maintaining a performance of fluency and comfort with that code choice, are ideologically aligned with the “traditional” identity of the “perfect Tongan girl:” docile, obedient, and uninterested in activities outside the spheres of family or school. On the other hand, both adults and youth view English as critical to “modern” success, including opportunities to travel abroad for work or study and to participate in romantic relationships with non-Tongan partners. While school-age girls explicitly cite their desire to have English-dominant boyfriends and/or husbands as one reason for improving their English competence, at the same time, these girls and their elders argue that young women’s “natural” and “uncontrollable” desires for young men impede their ability to adequately learn English. For young women in Tonga, then, the acquisition and use of English language is inextricably tied up with ideologies of gender and tradition.
This paper will explore how ideologies of language and code choice interact with ideologies of gender and sexuality among youth in the Kingdom of Tonga. While English is indexical of “traditional” femininity in some ways for school age youth, English code choice is also at times aligned with “modern” or “cosmopolitan” gender and sexual identities, creating a situation where individuals must navigate complicated boundaries of linguistic and cultural meaning.