Ant 5144 Foundations of Linguistic Anthropology

Contact between people and things, and the products of such contact, are increasingly discussed using the notion of semiotic complexity. Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have sought to understand this complexity and its many moving parts through multiple theoretical perspectives, including enregisterment, chronotope, value, imitation, heteroglossia, superdiversity, indexical selectivity, and scale. This special issue seeks to show demonstrate how we can productively see all these theoretical bits working together at the same time, enabling us to see patterns at on yet another scale. Crucially, this viewpoint enables us to offer two meta-constructs that subsume many of these previously established theoretical parts. Our constructs are contact registers and scalar shifters. We define contact registers as sign constellations – linguistic and non-linguistic – that emerge through sustained contact between previously established registers, while the latter can be defined as semiotic configurations used to identify scales of participant frameworks with respect to time, space and/or size. We argue that offering these meta-concepts – contact registers and scalar shifters – encourages analysts to consider all of these theoretical parts and their inter-relationships, ultimately providing a more precise understanding of semiotic complexity. Scalar shifters enable interactants and analysts to identify how, and the degree to which, speakers and hearers understand the meaning and function of signs, while contact registers enables us to see how understanding is shaped by the wider ‘social order’ across time and space. The data that we use to demonstrate the utility of this approach is drawn from multiple sources from different scales of time and space in one national context, Indonesia.

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“The Discipline of Emotions between Introspection and Performance: Practices and Narratives of Control in Toraja (Indonesia)”, 2005

La disciplina delle emozioni tra introspezione e performance: pratiche e discorsi del controllo a Toraja (Indonesia) 2 La letteratura antropologica sulle emozioni relativa alle società dell'Indonesia e dell'area più vasta che comprende il Sudest asiatico e il Pacifico sembra convergere sull'enfasi attribuita alla questione del controllo emozionale 3 . Gli antropologi che hanno lavorato in quest'area sono stati inevitabilmente affascinati dalla compostezza e dall'assenza di espressione diretta dei sentimenti dimostrata nel comportamento quotidiano delle persone che cercavano di comprendere ().

Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies, 2012

Part of a larger dissertation research, the paper will investigate preliminary data on the code-switching and language mixing use of Javanese (a local language), Bahasa Indonesia or BI (the national language) and English by youth, both in conversations as well as in writing, in the city of Semarang in Central Java, Indonesia, a multilingual developing country of the global South. The preliminary findings indicate that youth in Semarang use Javanese, BI and English under a norm of polylingualism, with Javanese and BI being the predominant bilingual medium in spoken conversation. Gaul Indonesian, a sub-dialect of BI, acts as an intermediate scale between local and global scales of language. While BI is predominantly used in writing, the use of Javanese re-emerges in the least regulated and most informal domains of writing. The youth in this study use English more in writing than in spoken conversation, using it as a means of expressing a voice that is locally different and resonates with global popular culture but for the purpose of expressing very local and personal expressions.

Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies (No. 135), 2015

From 1968 to 1998 the bureaucracy, the education system, and the media became key to centralization and language standardization efforts in Indonesia. During this period these processes helped create versions of the familiar formula of language plus person plus territory equals nation and ultimately an ideology that Indonesian and ethnic languages were unitary languages. Those who spoke state-authorized versions of Indonesian and ethnic languages become Indonesian citizens and members of ethnolinguistic cores residing in Indonesia’s peripheries. While this process was pushed along by the marketization of ethnic languages on television in the early 1990s, marketization also challenged the ideology of unitary languages through the modelling of mixed languaging practices. The constant tension between centralization and fragmentation is the central focus of this paper which shows how ethnolinguistic identity and mixed languaging practices were modelled on Indonesian television. My focus is 400 hours of footage recorded in 2009 which shows that mixed language practices were modelled across all television stations, most genres, and most timeslots. This co-occurred with other semiotic content that anchored this practice to territory; helping produce older unitary formulas of personhood. As with the early 1990s, this tension appears to be a reflex of the seeking of niche markets (fragmentation).Yet the copying of the sell-well format of representing ethnolinguistic cores created another round of market saturation and of seeking new markets, this time in the peripheries of established ethnolinguistic peripheries.

From 1968 to 1998 the bureaucracy, the education system, and the media became key to centralization and language standardization efforts in Indonesia. During this period these processes helped create versions of the familiar formula of language plus person plus territory equals nation and ultimately an ideology that Indonesian and ethnic languages were unitary languages. Those who spoke state-authorized versions of Indonesian and ethnic languages become Indonesian citizens and members of ethnolinguistic cores residing in Indonesia's peripheries. While this process was pushed along by the marketization of ethnic languages on television in the early 1990s, marketization also challenged the ideology of unitary languages through the modelling of mixed languaging practices. The constant tension between centralization and fragmentation is the central focus of this paper which shows how ethnolinguistic identity and mixed languaging practices were modelled on Indonesian television. My focus is 400 hours of footage recorded in 2009 which shows that mixed language practices were modelled across all television stations, most genres, and most timeslots. This co-occurred with other semiotic content that anchored this practice to territory; helping produce older unitary formulas of personhood. As with the early 1990s, this tension appears to be a reflex of the seeking of niche markets (fragmentation).Yet the copying of the sell-well format of representing ethnolinguistic cores created another round of market saturation and of seeking new markets, this time in the peripheries of established ethnolinguistic peripheries.

The concept of rapport has received sustained attention within anthropology and often it has been related to language in one way or another (e.g. the papers in Borneman & Hammoudi, 2009b; Kulick & Willson, 1995; Moerman, 1988; Sluka, 2012), although actual attention to semiotic practices as they unfold from one speech event to the next is a notable gap. Some early reflections on anthropological practice have pointed out that to understand relationships with consultants in the field requires us to understand what has gone on before in a particular field site (Berreman, 2012 [1963]). Others have reflected on how rapport changes over the course of fieldwork (Wagley, 2012 [1960]), and it is now commonplace to reflect on rapport in the field as part of the process of writing an ethnography (e.g. Marcus, 1998; Rosaldo, 1989). In this paper I bring together these different forms of reflexivity. For want of a better descriptor, I refer to this as “scalar reflexivity”. I take as my starting point work on connection, scale, and chronotope (e.g. Blommaert, 2015; Blommaert, Westinen, & Leppänen, 2015; Lempert & Perrino, 2007; Van der Aa & Blommaert, 2015), which requires us to see how emblems of chronotopic formulations from different scales are invoked and converge within a semiotic encounter. I start by drawing on data from a relatively short five month period of fieldwork within one Indonesian government office to illustrate the type of reflexive work required to come to more nuanced understandings of semiotic encounters and their relationship to rapport. In doing so, I point to the different types of data that ended up becoming part of my broader efforts to understand rapport in situated semiotic encounters.

Social categories need to be continually replicated to endure. What drives replication are commentaries about others’ social practices. In contemporary nation-states mass education, bureaucratic processes, and mass media create large participation frameworks that facilitate replication. I term these participation frameworks “infrastructures for ethnicity”. Replication produces imperfect copies that contain some of the old features of a category, thus rendering it recognizable, and something new which attracts attention and commentaries. This paper examines two types of infrastructure, television and the internet, that have helped facilitate replication of emblems of ethnicity in Indonesia. My data is drawn from a soap opera, internet commentaries about this soap, and news stories about clothing and culture. In looking at this data, I will be especially concerned with how old elements that point to ‘ethnicity’ are combined with new elements and how this new combination invites commentaries.