Let’s start with two of the more famous songs which have been given misheard Chinese lyrics. The first is “Golimar” from the Telugu movie “Donga“:

To give you a sense of how this goes, the word “golimar” is translated as “幹你媽“ which is pronounced “gan ni ma” and literally means “fuck your mother.” The rest isn’t much more sophisticated than that.

Just to show how popular this song is in Taiwan, remember our guest post by Futuru Tsai about traditional Amis song and dance? Well, here’s footage I took of Futuru and his adopted Amis age set performing Golimar during last year’s Amis Harvest Festival:

(I highly recommend Futuru’s film “Amis Hip Hop” about the role of contemporary song and dance in the festival.)

A second, equally popular video for misheard lyrics is Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun, which is a popular internet meme in it’s own right.

OK. Enough context. Here’s the music video I wanted to talk about. I’ll let you watch it first:

What I like about this video is that it is buffalaxing in reverse. The song was written, in part, with the kind of fake lyrics one would come to expect from a buffalaxed movie, except those are actually the original lyrics of the song. Although, as a mainstream song the lyrics are not dirty, they are often just nonsensical (represented in the subtitles with the use of simplified and gibberish characters). Even better, the video comes with Hindi subtitles which I’ve been told look as if the original song lyrics were run through Google Translate.

Finally, a word about Bollywood movies in Taiwan. Unlike Indonesians or Russians, Taiwanese don’t watch Bollywood. Most of my students here would only have seen Bollywood movie songs as buffalaxed YouTube videos. However, there is one notable exception. Everyone I know in Taiwan and, as far as I can tell, the rest of East Asia as well, seems to have seen the comedy “3 Idiots.” I think the criticism of the education system in that film is felt even more strongly in East Asia than it is in India.

She is Freedom

For philosophers, sociologists and historians, freedom is a concept exquisitely defined and heroically distinguished. There are the familiar distinctions like positive and negative liberty (Isaiah Berlin), there is the long tradition of thinking freedom togther with sovereignty, government and arbitrary power (sp. the newly reinvigorated “civic republican” tradition from Machiavelli to Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit); there is the question of free will and determinism (a core Kantian Antimony that generates both moral philosophy and philosophy of science debates seemingly without end); there is the question of freedom and the mind (the problem of the “contented slave” or the problem Boas raised in arguing that freedom is only subjective); the question of coersion, of autonomy, of equality and of the relationship to liberalism and economic organization. Within each of these domains one can find more and less refined discussions (amongst philosophers and political theorists primarily) oriented towards the refinement of both descriptive and normative presentations of freedom as a concept and as a political ideal. And then there is Sartre.

As I mentioned in the first post, anthropologists have been nearly silent on the problem, while philosophers, political theorists and historians have not. There are shelves and shelves of books in my library with titles like A Theory of Freedom, Dimensions of Freedom, Freedom and Rights, Liberalism and Freedom, Political Freedom, etc. There are readers and edited volumes and special issues of journals to beat the band. In history there is Orlando Patterson and Eric Foner, and a 15 volume series called The Making of Modern Freedom that includes books on Freedom from the medieval era to the present, and includes books on China, Asia, Africa, slavery, migration and fiscal crises (!).

If anthropologists find the concept of freedom distasteful, how then do they organize their concern with things and issues related to what political philosophers or historians approach via freedom? What concepts stand in, challenge or reframe that of freedom? Here is a long list (which could no doubt be longer):

agency, authority, bare life, biopower, biopolitics, citizenship, civil society, colonialism, consent, contract, development, domination, empire, exclusion, governance, governmentality, human rights, humanitarianism, interests, interest theory, in/justice, kingship, neoliberalism, obligation, oppression, precarity, resistance, secularism/secularity, security, social control, sovereignty, suffering, territoriality and violence.

Note that this list concerns terms also familiar to North Atlantic political philosophy, which is to say, this is not a list of “indigenous” or ethnographically derived concepts of/related to freedom. That would constitute yet another distinct question (and a separate post, to follow).

Most of the concepts in that list are closer to the empirical than the theoretical, and I suspect this is why they are preferred to manifestly abstract ideal like freedom. Humanitarianism for instance, has seen a wealth of great work over the last couple of decades for the concrete reason that it is a practice, a domain of law, a set of international economic imperatives as a well as an ideal. Precarity nicely captures a particular economic condition and the effects that has on well-being, etc.

Perhaps most central to the anthropologist’s suspicion around freedom is its inherently individualist bent. The problem of freedom can be construed (though it needn’t be) as one of the free acting, willing or thinking of an individual. It might be safe to suggest that anthropologists, being constitutionally sensitive to the limits of individuals and individuality, see the concept as failing in places where social relations take precedence, and take unfamiliar forms. In this the socialist (perhaps even the anarchist?) traditions of anthropological theory are clear: a tendency at least, if not a commitment to thinking individuality as a feature of social relations rather than the reverse. But even a cursory familiarity with the concept of freedom shows that it is not always about individuality, nor is every philosophical or political theoretical take committed to a version of methodological individualism. A thinker like C.B. MacPherson for instance, very clearly recognizes that there are individual-based theories of liberty, and then there are theories that start from Marxist, socialist or anthropological bases that give primacy to social relations. Dewey ditto. And even in the theory of negative liberty, the problem it identifies is not just that individual liberty is freedom from restraint, but that restraint is the result of the actions of others, and that the fundamental problem of political liberty is that of “harmonizing” interests and actions. This is also why the economic model of freedom is so appealing to so many of our colleagues in the social sciences: freedom is a complex problem of balancing plural social and individual interests, and one that requires sophisticated techniques in order to do so. Insofar as this is about the design of social relations, it concedes the point that freedom is a result of social relations.

Anthropologists might also look to freedom’s opposites, since there are so many more examples of that in the world. Slavery for instance. Curiously, anthropologists seem to have been just as uninterested in slavery as in freedom. Igor Kopytoff noted as much in a 1982 review of anthropology of slavery: “Simply stated, the problem is this: why has modern anthropology, which claims that nothing human is alien to it, consistently ignored so widespread a phenomenon? (207)” Kopytoff suggests that slavery is not a concept, but a name for various phenomena in the world, also a bit of an umbrella term. But the same is not quite true of freedom; which does not pick out any particular arrangements or institutions in quite the way that slavery does. Slavery is something that might exist as an institution or a custom, and yet have an unrecognizable social and moral justification in different societies (and thus shade into the general problem of diverse forms of political institutions; see e.g. Pierre Clastres, Max Gluckman, Edmund Leach, George Balandier, Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard). Freedom, however, is a concept that draws together cosmological issues (free will/determinism) with political ones (sovereignty/arbitrary power) with individual action (restraint/autonomy). There is no apriori reason to suspect that other cultures wouldn’t have an equivalent concept, or at least a comparable set. As I say, there are a lot of candidates.

The most well-worn freedom-related concepts in anthropology have got to be those of resistance and domination: the long tradition of “peasant studies”; the figure of the “subaltern,” colonial and post-colonial contexts, peaceful and violent revolution, oppression, the impoverished, the lower status, the exploited etc. Domination is a clear problem of at least some aspects of political freedom; and I think anthropologists rightly start from the assumption that the opposite of domination is not necessarily freedom, which appears ethnocentric at best. Certainly the current mode of thinking about the issue (dominated by the language, if not exactly the concepts, of governmentality) suggests that domination produces culture and that resistance is about remaking it for diverse purposes, few of which are likely to appeal directly to the abstract ideal of freedom. Feminist anthropology also clearly brought attention to questions of domination, resistance, abuse of status, autonomy, and violence, and it would no doubt be insane to suggest that “freedom” or “liberty” were not motivating concerns throughout… nonetheless, it’s hard to find much in terms of explicit engagement in anthropology, compared to, for example, political theory. In most cases, the concept of freedom is either uncritically used as an ultimate human value, or it is ignored or rejected as a narrow, ethnocentric conception of the good. Freedom in this sense is just one value among others, and not a particularly accessible one for most people in the world.

Agency holds a respectable second to domination and resistance, especially in terms of language, linguistic action, speech act theory and so forth, where it serves to link hypotheses about language to social situations were constraint and liberty are at stake. A 2001 review (Ahearn) notes the ways in which this conception of agency overlaps with the concept of resistance, the domain of gender, and the articulatio of “practice theory.” Agency is (or at least should be) directly engaged with the antimonies of free will and determinism that constitute the more ontological philosophical questions about freedom; secondarily, agency is also about autonomy, in the sense of recognizing one’s own control over action and speech. Most often, however, it is used loosely to refer to varieties of effectiveness in the world, or more precisely, those places where that effectiveness is curtailed or repressed. Much of the work in feminist anthropology must (for better or worse) engage the concept of agency and its relationship to politics, to language or media, and to resistance.

Other problems and concepts are more recent; sovereignty, governmentality, biopolitics, bare life, or territoriality are all centrally concerned with problems of long pedigree in political philosophy, but approach them through a series of displacements initiated by Foucault primarily (Foucault on freedom is no doubt a separate post), and taken up in Agamben and crew. Here again, the central problem is not freedom but power. Power remains the central mystery around which these investigations cluster, and even though in Foucault “ethics as a practice of freedom” is central, most work in anthropology places domination in the central position, or sometimes hegemony, or sometimes consensus (as in “neoliberal consensus”), as an effect of power. It might be more accurate to say, however, that power is an effect of freedom, but that, again, will have to wait for another post, or another poster.

Finally, perhaps the work most directly relevant to questions of freedom has been the recent vogue for “anthropology of secularism” which has returned questions about the relationship between freedom and religion to the center of attention (see e.g. Fenella Cannell’s 2010 review of the subject). The work of Talal Asad and his students (esp. Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind) exemplify a certain concern with the triad of religion, freedom and community. Mahmood especially engages critically with political theorists like Charles Taylor in her work (whose mammoth Age of Secularism also remixes political philosophy under this new label). What role “freedom” plays here is less certain than it might seem at first with chapter titles like “The Subject of Freedom.” I certainly don’t think these works are centrally concerned with the problem of freedom; rather it is a kind of environment or background that cannot be ignored–somewhat like Charles Taylor’s notion of a “social imaginary”– concepts and arguments that circulate both in academic language and in popular sentiment and discourse. What this work does do is to point out that things which appear at first sight to be manifest cases of domination or restraint (the veil, pietist movements, severe forms of religious observance) actually satisfy some of the conditions for freedom–or at least, represent a kind of agency in the service of values that we associate with the results of freedom. Again, not the same thing as approaching freedom directly, but an oblique critique nonetheless.

What I think a lot of anthropologists (would like to) believe, however, is that there is a world of “indigenous” or at least diverse, conceptions of freedom in different cultures that it has been our work and duty to explore. It is this that makes Boas’ claim that “primitive peoples” do not have a concept of freedom so puzzling, and if I can sustain this little investigation, the subject of part 3… to be continued.

From the December 17, 2010, issue of the journal Science comes a News of the Week piece “Google Opens Books to New Cultural Studies.” It sketches the ongoing research of a mathematician, Erez Lieberman Aiden, who is studying word frequencies using all of Google Books as his data source. Here’s the abstract of the technical publication.

By analyzing the growth, change, and decline of published words over the centuries, the mathematician argued, it should be possible to rigorously study the evolution of culture on a grand scale.
…
The researchers have revealed 500,000 English words missed by all dictionaries, tracked the rise and fall of ideologies and famous people, and, perhaps most provocatively, identified possible cases of political suppression unknown to historians. “The ambition is enormous,” says Nicholas Dames, a literary scholar at Columbia University.”

Just what the humanities needs! More studies of domination and resistance.

I already tend to view quantitative research with a skeptical eye, although I appreciate the insight statistics can provide when they’re well done. However this project immediately rubs me the wrong way and its not just the fawning praise of its massiveness. (Quantitative research, motto: “Size Matters”)

Why are word frequencies significant? The whole thing seems like a glorified version of those inane word count “studies” done by Ok Cupid like this one on gays and straights or this one on whites and non-whites.

To understand a word’s meaning (as opposed to its definition) you have to look at context, style, and tone. In short you have to read to interpret. Which is why I was particularly intrigued by how the researchers and their collaborators at Google navigated the copyright controversy associated with the Google Books project.

The project almost didn’t get off the ground because of the legal uncertainty surrounding Google Books. Most of its content is protected by copyright, and the entire project is currently under attack by a class action lawsuit from book publishers and authors. [Peter Norvig, head of research at Google] admits he had concerns about the legality of sharing the digital books, which cannot be distributed without compensating the authors. But Liberman Aiden had an idea. By converting the text of the scanned books into a single, massive “n-gram” database – a map of the context and frequency of words in history – scholars could do quantitative research on the tomes without actually reading them.

Take that hermeneutics! Now we can interpret texts without reading them.

I’ll allow that there is a significance to word frequencies. After all stuff like this (from the online supplement to the technical report) is pretty cool:

Why it matters, I’m not so sure. But it is kinda neat.

Leiberman Aiden is a student of genomics by training, so by naming his new study “culturomincs” he’s playing a little word game. Genomics is a very broad field of study that features as its principle methodology using math and statistical modeling to draw conclusions about gene frequency within a population. For instance, genomics might inform clinal studies showing how gene frequencies vary geographically among humans. Culturomics seems to apply this idea through analogy, taking words for genes and language for the genome.

But there are limitations to how far this analogy can go. There is no part of the genome that is beyond the purview of genomics, but culturomics, with its data set limited to scanned pages of Google Books does not consider “culture” in its entirety. Admittedly Google Books is great in scope, “It currently includes 2 trillion words from 15 million books, about 12% of every book in every language published since the Gutenberg Bible in 1450.” But even to intentionally limit the study to language and set aside all non-linguistic aspects of culture, you are still bound only to the written word. And the published written word at that.

More importantly genetics, of which genomics is but a subfield, is only one of many different perspectives for understanding an organism or population. You are not your genes. There is much, much more that goes into making a living organism what it is than just its genetic composition. As the father of identical twin girls I can testify to this. Although each sister’s DNA is a perfect copy of the other’s they are very different people. Genomics helps geneticists draw conclusions about gene frequencies, it does not tell us which genes are turned on and off or how genes interact with their environment.

Culturomics, by analogy, doesn’t come close to its grand claim to be a rigorous study of the evolution of culture. It can provide us with some interesting information about word frequency, however. The question is, what are you going to use this new tool for?

“This is a wake-up call to the humanities that there is a new style of research that can complement the traditional styles,” says Jon Orwant, a computer scientist and director of digital humanities initiatives at Google.
…
Humanities scholars are reacting with a mix of excitment and frustration. If the available tools can be expanded beyond word frequency, “it could become extremely useful,” says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley. “But calling it ‘culturomics’ is arrogant.” Nunberg dismisses most of the study’s analyses as “almost embarrassingly crude.”

Perhaps a problem lies in how the culturomic search has been limited to only variation in word use over time, when there are so many other variables to be considered. In the results above, showing that “spilt” became less popular as “spilled” became more dominant, one is left wondering… So what? That’s an interesting description of language and the documentary function is valuable, but what good is it? How can such descriptions inform what we know about the way humans use language to interact with one another?

What questions would you ask of culturomics? You can run your own culturomic experiments here.

Culture (blue) vs. society (red), 1800-2000:

The problem here, I conclude, is not one of intellectual theft. It’s really a problem of journalism itself.

The rules of attribution and credit in the domain of scholarship are established, strict and well-understood. Journalism, by contrast, lacks a formal code for citing scholarly work. When scholarly subject matter traverses the border into popular journalism, it simply isn’t clear how much attribution is enough.

The way he paraphrased Mr. Silverstein’s response can easily be construed as giving at least partial credence to Ms. Boroditsky’s claims to important contributions that I should have cited instead of or alongside the seminal ones I named. I asked Mr. Silverstein what he had actually said, and it turns out to have been the opposite. He had described Ms. Boroditsky’s examples as “in essence reproducing others’ results long in the literature.” Mr. Brisbane chose not to mention that.The way he paraphrased Mr. Silverstein’s response can easily be construed as giving at least partial credence to Ms. Boroditsky’s claims to important contributions that I should have cited instead of or alongside the seminal ones I named. I asked Mr. Silverstein what he had actually said, and it turns out to have been the opposite. He had described Ms. Boroditsky’s examples as “in essence reproducing others’ results long in the literature.” Mr. Brisbane chose not to mention that.

In the book I make even stronger criticisms of Whorf’s argumentation and his representation of linguistic facts. But as opposed to the article, these criticisms are made in context, and are discussed with relation to particular examples that Whorf used and quotation from Whorf’s work, e.g. his claims about the alleged timelessness of the Hopi language and its alleged influence on the Hopi’s inability to understand the concept of time as we know it. I don’t think I caricaturized his position – I’m afraid he doesn’t need much caricaturizing there.

In her now classic 1989 paper on language and political economy, Judith Irvine talked about situations where language doesn’t merely index political and economic relations in the way that accent is linked to class in Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” but where speech acts are themselves a form of political and economic economic activity. Her example is that of the Wolof griot “whose traditional profession involves special rhetorical and conversational duties such as persuasive speechmaking on a patron’s behalf, making entertaining conversation, transmitting messagesto the public, and performing the various genres of praise-singing.” She discusses how while not anyone can be a griot — you have to be born into the right caste — it is the “most talented and skillful griots” who “earn high rewards and are sought after by would-be patrons.” Irvine then goes on to discuss not just the verbal skill of the griot, but “cases where a verbal statement is the object of exchange.” It is worth quoting this discussion in full:

Recently there appeared a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, entitled “Flattery getting someone somewhere” (M. Stevens, 28 July 1986). “You’re looking great, Frank!” says a man in business suit and necktie to another, perhaps older, man with glasses and bow tie. “Thanks, Chuck! Here’s five dollars!” Bow Tie replies, handing over the cash. The joke depends, of course, on the notion that the exchange of compliments for cash should not be done so directly and overtly. We all know that Chuck may indeed flatter Frank with a view to getting a raise, or some other eventual reward; but it is quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment. A compliment should be acknowledged only with a return compliment, or a minimization, or some other verbal “goods.” If it is to be taken as “sincere,” it is specifically excluded from the realm of material payments.

Some cultural systems do not segregate the economy of compliments from the economy of material transactions and profits, however. It is doubtful, for example, that the cartoon would seem funny to many Senegalese. With a few suitable adjustments for local scene, the transfer it depicts is quite ordinary. There is, in fact, a category of persons-the griots-specializing in flattery of certain kinds, among other verbal arts. The income they gain from these activities is immediate and considerable, often amounting to full-time employment for those whose skills include the fancier genres of eulogy.

I remembered this article because something I read made me wonder about the claim that it is “quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment.” It was a piece in the Washington Post by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh entitled “Five myths about prostitution.” The second of these five myths is that “men visit prostitutes for sex.”

Often, they pay them to talk. I’ve been studying high-end sex workers (by which I mean those who earn more than $250 per “session”) in New York, Chicago and Paris for more than a decade, and one of my most startling findings is that many men pay women to not have sex. Well, they pay for sex, but end up chatting or having dinner and never get around to physical contact. Approximately 40 percent of high-end sex worker transactions end up being sex-free. Even at the lower end of the market, about 20 percent of transactions don’t ultimately involve sex.

Figuring out why men pay for sex they don’t have could sustain New York’s therapists for a long time. But the observations of one Big Apple-based sex worker are typical: “Men like it when you listen. . . . I learned this a long time ago. They pay you to listen — and to tell them how great they are.” Indeed, the high-end sex workers I have studied routinely see themselves as acting the part of a counselor or a marriage therapist. They say their job is to feed a man’s need for judgment-free friendship and, at times, to help him repair his broken partnership. Little wonder, then, that so many describe themselves to me as members of the “wellness” industry.

So here we seem to have a situation where Americans do pay to be told how great they are. The difference, of course, is that this activity is illegal, and it is private. While a woman at a Japanese hostess bar may be paid to listen and make complements in a public setting, in the US this activity seems to have been relegated to the private sphere – between the man and his griot.

Whorf never said that language determines thought… It would be interesting to examine why people feel the need to recast Whorf’s argument in such essentialist terms.

I went on to try to set the record straight as to what Whorf asctually said. And Mark Liberman chimed in that people are always forgetting about Edward Sapir.

Now with the Deutscher piece SLA President Kathryn Woolard has taken up the torch with an excellent piece on the SLA blog, loaded with a very useful bibliography:

Whorf’s own statements of his theory look little like the caricature that opens the NYT article and much more like the position that Deutscher himself offers as reasonable and compelling. Far from holding that “the inventory of ready-made words” in a language “forbids” speakers to think specific thoughts, Whorf argued that patterns of grammatical structures, often the most covert ones at that, give rise not to a language prison but to a “provisional analysis of reality” and habits of mind, very much as Deutscher concludes. This is a view that many in linguistic anthropology continue to find compelling, in varying ways…Below are just a few references to the extensive linguistic anthropological background to the NYT article.

And Greg Downey made some very similar points over at the always interesting Neuroanthropology blog (congrats on their 1000th post!):

The one thing that turns me off to Duetscher’s writings is his pretty harsh bashing of Benjamin Whorf, who, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting anthropological linguists.

And while I’m at it, I should also include this interview with Arika Okrent on her new book “In the Land of Invented Languages” which Leila recommends as “including a good description of the Whorf Hypothesis.”

Previously: My problem with journalism.

I’m not saying Guy Deutscher plagiarized Lera Boroditsky’s work. What I’m saying is that if this was an academic publication he would have been expected to cite her, but because it is journalism there is no such expectation, and that bugs the hell out of me. Even blog posts are expected to link to sources. Perhaps he does cite her in his book, but again, my point is about the standards of the NY Times. Now it is possible that these are simply common stories told by people in the field, but I find it strange that Boroditsky’s isn’t even mentioned in this article. After all, Newsweek’s article on the topic focused on her research.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and even journalists would feel something is amiss here, but I suspect not. It seems quite normal when one newspaper writes a story for other newspapers to go out and find their own reporters to give them the same story, sometimes even interviewing the same sources. In fact, I’ve even been a victim of this. An Indian TV news station went out and remade a short documentary film of ours, but since it was all new footage and interviews, there wasn’t much we could do about it. Nor am I certain that I would expect anything else from journalists if I weren’t an academic. Still, it drives me crazy whenever I see this kind of thing, and so I thought I’d vent. Am I way off base here? Or does this kind of thing bother you as well?

How to represent foreign speech? Many filmmakers are content to shoot against a painted backdrop, toss in a few bonjours, and call it France, while others go to great lengths to have characters look and speak as authentically as possible. There are no hard and fast rules, but it’s a tricky business—directors must balance the expectations of realism with ease of viewing. They want dialogue to be convincing, but they don’t want to alienate their audiences with accents or subtitles that aren’t essential to the story.

And if you enjoyed that you will probably also enjoy the discussion about “fake translations” which took place on the linguistic anthropology listserv. Over at the SLA blog (scroll down) Alexandre Enkerli took the time to embed all the videos from that discussion in a single post.

Via the PostSecret website, it is unclear whether the poster intentionally picked a photo of Sikhs or if this was unintentional irony. Not that the sentiment would have been any less offensive if the person wearing a turban was actually a Muslim. It certainly didn’t matter to the families of victims of post 9-11 hate crimes whether the victim was Muslim or not. I bring this up because William Dalrymple has an op-ed in the NY Times about the proposed Islamic center planned for lower Manhattan (for those living under a rock, see William Saletan’s piece in Slate for a good roundup of the issues surrounding the center):

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion. Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors. Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith.

Dalrymple’s main point is that the Sufis behind the Cordoba Initiative are themselves “infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate[s]” in the eyes of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. We’ve been here before:

In 2006, the investigative reporter Jeff Stein concluded a series of interviews with senior US counterterrorism officials by asking the same simple question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia?” He was startled by the responses. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” said Congressman Terry Everett, a member of the House intelligence committee, before conceding: “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know.” When Stein asked Congressman Silvestre Reyes, chair of the House intelligence committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, he answered: “Predominantly – probably Shia.”

Clearly the United States would be better off if our leaders, journalists, and citizens knew a little more about Islam. But there are also some lessons here about the semiotics of racism which I would like to think offer some insights beyond the 24 hour news cycle.

A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working class. The closer we get to home, the more refined are our perceptions.

The above quote is taken from a discussion in Asif Agha’s masterful book Language and Social Relations. Agha’s focus here is on the limits of of performativity. By pointing out that the hearer’s own prior socialization provides an important context for the successful performance of identity, Agha sets the stage for one of the book’s central themes: that identity is not only mediated by discourse, but also requires a process of negotiation between speaker and hearer—and that this process of negotiation can be transformative, changing the possible range of identity positions available to both parties as well as society at large.

I quite like Agha’s argument, and in chapter after chapter he makes a convincing case for it. Particularly interesting is his discussion of kinship terms, in which he shows how a mother might refer to her in-laws using terms which, taken literally, would place her in the role of her own child vis-a-vis her relatives, but are nonetheless lexically differentiated from the terms a child might use. In doing so she claims her rights as the mother of the child without reducing herself to the status of a child.

While the discussion of a Liverpool working-class accent shows that Agha is aware of the limits to such performativity, I would have liked to see more discussion about situations where one party refuses to negotiate. Agha’s approach to limits implies that performativity might fail because of one party’s lack of socialization, but what about if one party has a will to ignorance? I think such willful ignorance is behind much American confusion with regard to Muslims, and so I’m not sure how much use historical, ethnographic, or journalistic accounts of the various divisions within Islam can help.

It seems to me that part of the problem derives from the very idea of a “just war.” As Judith Butler argues, such a concept requires the “division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war.” For some section of humanity to remain “ungrievable” requires a willful ignorance which refuses to engage in the kind of dialog which would allow for negotiated meanings to emerge. Thus, Islamophobia is in some ways a prerequisite for waging a global war on Terror, even as our leaders insist otherwise.

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

Below the jump is the e-mail I sent out to the SLA announcing the new site.

Some of you may know that last year we established a new spot on the executive committee of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology: that of “digital content editor.” The idea was that the SLA website shouldn’t just be a dumping ground for bureaucratic rules and regulations, but should be both a platform to showcase the discipline to a wider public, as well as portal where members can share resources and ideas. Although the position was only created last year, it is a project we have been working on for over two years now. The first step was to migrate our old Web 1.0 site to a new, modern, platform which was capable of handling the new features we wanted to add to the site. We finished that a little over a year ago, and since then we’ve been working on issues of information architecture and design, finding ways to add new features and content without making the site too difficult to use or navigate. I’m happy to announce that, together with SLA “web guru” Alexandre Enkerli, we finished this second round of website revisions over the weekend! You can read on to learn about some of the changes or, if you’d rather see for yourself, just click on the link:

http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/

The biggest change is that the blog is now much more prominently featured on the main site. It takes up half the front page, instead of a little section on the sidebar. This is because we hope to make the blog a central place for online discussion of issues relating to linguistic anthropology. It is hoped that the blog will draw more people to the site, building a vibrant community in the process. Now that he’s done with the website revisions Alex will put on his “blogger” hat and start putting up new posts on a regular basis, including a regular roundup of posts from the language-related blogsphere. After the AAA meetings, Leila Monaghan, who founded the first linguistic anthropology group blog, will take over my position as “digital content editor.” In this role she will be a true “editor” — helping guide the development of the blog by attracting guest bloggers, organizing web-seminars, as well as other exciting ideas she has up her sleeve.

But that is not all, we’ve also added other features to the site, such as links to our new Twitter feed and Facebook page. A link to subscribe to our blog via e-mail or RSS. A Google calendar with all the meetings and deadlines mentioned in our blog. And a new “resources” tab which will be the home for new features we hope to add to the site. Already up under resources is a new directory of programs in linguistic anthropology (an idea we got from the Society for Visual Anthropology website). Planned for the near future is a database of syllabi (something we used to have but which is now hopelessly out of date). Even though I’m handing the reigns over to Leila, I will continue to work closely with Alex on these new features.

Finally, we’ve tried to spruce up the journal website. More and more scholars are submitting “web enhanced articles” with audiovisual content that supplements their writing. So even though our table of content alerts and archives are now handled by AnthroSource and Wiley, the website still plays an important role supplementing journal articles. To ensure longevity, we are asking authors to post this content to the Internet Archive at archive.org, before sending us the link. This is an area of the site we hope to continue to improve. Alex is already thinking about ways we might standardize the layout of these pages so that they are easier to navigate.

Once again, that URL is:

http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/

Check it out, and let us know what you think! If you have any suggestions, or would like to help out, please let us know. One of the things we’ve added to the site is a feedback form, visible on the botton of the sidebar on every page throughout the site. If you see something that isn’t right, or have a suggestion, just fill out the form and hit “send” – it is that easy!

Cheers,

Kerim

Last Friday our distinguished colleague Dell Hymes passed away peacefully in his sleep.

It hasn’t yet been reported in the newspapers, but Jason Baird Jackson has a post speaking to Hymes’ contribution in the fields of anthropology and folklore:

Dell Hymes was a amazingly influential folklorist, anthropologist, and linguist who revolutionized the study of language in (/and) culture in general, and of Native American narrative traditions in particular. He made important contributions to the history of anthropology, to descriptive and theoretical linguistics, to sociolinguistics, to folkloristics, and to Native American studies. He essentially created the areas on inquiry known as (1) the ethnography of speaking and (2) ethnopoetics and he played a key role reshaping linguistic anthropology from the 1960s onward.

For those at the AAA in Philadelphia, there will be a memorial Saturday December 5, 2009 from 7:30-9:30 in Grand Ballroom III at the courtyard Marriott.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

Our Spring semester just started here in Taiwan, so I’ll keep this entry short. I just wanted to link two recent studies:

1. One uses phylogenetic methods to determine that “the origin of the entire Austronesian language family can be dated back to Taiwan around 5,200 years ago, and moved through Island South-East Asia, along New Guinea and into Polynesia.” (More over at Language Log.) I’m not qualified to judge their methodology, but it looks like an important contribution to a long-standing debate over the dispersal of Austronesian languages.

2. The second link is to the New edition of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which brings some good news amidst the bad, stating that “there has been an increase in the number of speakers of several indigenous languages.” (Specifically “Central Aymara and Quechua in Peru, Maori in New Zealand, Guarani in Paraguay and several languages in Canada, the United States and Mexico.”)  Since it is a UNESCO map, it follows UN policy of not recognizing Taiwan as a country, but it does document the dangers faced by Taiwan’s indigenous languages. News of the report led to renewed demands from Aboriginal lawmakers for the preservation of indigenous languages.

UPDATE: Right after posting this I saw a Twitter post [can't quite bring myself to say "tweet" - but saying "Twitter post" feels like saying "web log" before "blog" gained widespread usage] about a test Wikipedia in the Pazih language. Pazih is a severely endangered language. Its last fluent speaker is Mrs. Pan Jin-yu who was born in 1914.

In this installment I want to discuss more about what it means for a language to be called “endangered.” In doing so I will draw on David Crystal’s book Language Death. The picture below is from National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project:

There are some reasons for anthropologists to be skeptical about the various discourses surrounding language endangerment (for a good discussion of those see Joseph Errington’s excellent article, “Getting Language Rights: The Rhetorics of Language Endangerment and Loss” as well as my AN editorial, “The metaphor of ‘endangered languages’” [PDF]), but I’ll be putting that aside for this post, focusing instead on some of the issues involved in trying to determine “threat levels” for endangered languages.

When is a language a dead language? When the language can no longer be used for daily conversation. By this definition, having one living speaker is not enough, because she will have no one to speak to. There are some complicating factors, such as languages which have literate or religious traditions, but its good enough for our purposes.

Where things get difficult is determining the other end of the equation. How many speakers does a language need to be “safe”? Is 20 speakers enough? 200? 2,000? 200,000? Unfortunately, as Crystal points out, there are too many contextual (linguistic, social, political, economic, etc.) factors to be able to answer the question with a simple number. In a stable, rural setting with little migration in or out of the community, it might be enough to have 500 speakers (barring wars or natural catastrophes). On the other hand, in a highly urbanized environment where members of the linguistic community are scattered throughout the city even 50,000 speakers might not be enough to keep a language alive if it is not taught in the schools or used on the radio and television.

Crystal provides the following threat levels for endangered languages:

• Potentially endangered: Fewer children are learning the language.
• Endangered: The youngest good speakers are young adults, few or no children are learning the language.
• Seriously Endangered: Youngest good speakers are 50 years old or older.
• Moribund: Only a handful of very old speakers.
• Extinct: No speakers

This chart is useful for the discussion I started in parts 1 and 2 of this series, as it can help us understand when, exactly, we are dealing with an endangered language. Some anthropologists work in rural, isolated, communities which lack a written language, but these languages are not (yet) properly called endangered languages since the linguistic community remains fairly stable. Others might be working with large populations in urban areas and yet encounter a language that is “seriously endangered” or even “moribund.” In the former situation it might be feasible for the anthropologist to learn the language herself after an extended period in the field (although a translator might be required for comparative work in the next village over). In the latter case, however, the need or ability of the anthropologist to learn the language might be entirely dependent on the age of the population she is working with.