Downloadable Program: Michicagoan 2019 Abstracts
May 10th-11th, 2019
Friday May 10th, 2019
1:45-2:00 pm Opening Remarks
2:00-3:30 pm Panel 1: Body Mind and Spirit
Emily Kuret (University of Chicago)- The Intangibilities of Care: Ambivalent Awarenesses and ‘Mental Health First Aid’
Held by The University of Chicago Health Promotion and Wellness once a quarter, ‘Mental Health First Aid’ training is an 8-hour program framed as an extension of red-cross CPR/First Aid certification; and, indeed, at the end of the scripted training event persons are granted a four year certification for administering first aid to sufferers of mental illness. In this paper, I discuss the tensions of talking about and cultivating a kind of awareness of illness (figured as intangible) within a scripted program, placing particular focus on imagined ways of suffering with and intervening in the chronotopes of (un)recognizable mental illness as a caring peer. I will discuss the creative “bringing back” to well-being of peers suffering from episodes of mental illness and the moments of trainee outrage that re-frame sort of imagined intangible qualities of suffering. Ultimately this paper asks the question: how do shifting awarenesses and ambivalences enregister a particular genre of care?
Yzza Sederati (University of Chicago)- Shifting Grounds: Gender, Sexuality, and Presence in the New Media of Morocco
A growing body of literature uses gender and sexuality to theorize the Internet in the MENA region, but few scholars have considered using linguistic anthropology as a tool of analysis for that purpose. Drawing on Michael Silverstein’s work on the metapragmatic function (1993), Susan Gal on the public sphere (2002), and Constantine V. Nakassis on presencing (2017), this paper examines how ideas of gender and sexuality are presenced into tangible and publicly legible identities in Morocco through videos posted on YouTube. By following the case of Jawjab, a filmmaking company in Morocco, this analysis moves within and beyond the frame of the camera, from the site of production of the videos to the Internet where the videos are publicly consumed. The videos feature individuals telling personal narratives around the topic of gender and sexuality. I argue that the videos’ content and stylistic variations fuse ideologies of realism, pluralism, and authenticity to establish the existence and heterogeneity of gender and sexual identities. Secondly, the sonic and visual presencing of the ideologies indexes a disalignment from a heteronormative and patriarchal hegemony. This disalignment is divisive, eliciting a wide range of affective responses from the public and none from the authorities. While authorities do not frame these videos as an act of transgression, online commenters who assert conflicting ideologies sometimes prompt the video-owners to erase comments that are “out-of-bounds.” This interaction urges to reconsider what counts as a transgression for the public, the authorities, and the producers.
Aaron Michka (University of Michigan)- A Sacred Palimpsest: Aural Confession, Religious Authority, and the Power of Words Withdrawn from Circulation
Anthropologists have attended to the ways that language is embedded and circulates within sociocultural systems. In these studies, language is sometimes theorized as a form of symbolic capital whose deployment reinforces, clarifies, and/or challenges social hierarchies (Bourdieu 1984, 1991; Irvine 1989). Building upon this literature, this paper asks how the removal from circulation of ritually entextualized discourse – in this case, words exchanged in the sacrament of confession – influences the way that religious authority is consolidated, exercised, and/or questioned. In short, how might discursive lacunae serve as symbolic capital?
To answer this question, I will draw upon seventeen months of fieldwork conducted in and around the Upper Egyptian city of Asyut (January 2017-May 2018). Having worked both as an ethnographer and a Catholic priest, I will use the experience of hearing confessions and of talking to other priests about confessions to reflect on the linguistic mechanics used to entextualize and erase the confession discourse. Far from being a simple act of forgetting, I will argue that this labor-intensive process works to authorize a particular status – of “having confessed” (mu‘atarif) – that sanctions the reference of erased discourse in subsequent social interaction. In accord with the theme of the conference, I will further examine how the immateriality or intangibility of the confession discourse is maintained and put to use in its social afterlife.
Zachary Lazarus (University of Chicago)- Ambiguous Perception: The Materialization of Psychological Projection in the Rorschach
While many people believe that the Rorschach test is no longer used, mental health practitioners still use the test as a clinical instrument and attest to its utility in making perception legible. By taking vision as a prototype of perception, the test makes it possible for a trained examiner to achieve perspectival alignment with a subject. Through a semiotic analysis of the most prominent manual for administering the Rorschach test, I show how the instructions for administration attempt to isolate the subject’s vision from its social-cultural surround by ritually purifying the examiner’s speech of overtly instructive language. I argue that the regimentation of the examiner’s speech is necessary to transform the inkblots into indexical icons of the mental states of the subject, and suggest that by materializing a coherent picture of the subject’s perception, the test gives the examiner access to the subject’s otherwise obscure and impenetrable psyche.
Kristina Wirtz (Western Michigan University)- Discussant Remarks
3:45-5:15 Panel 2: Channeling
Kenzil Huggins (University of Chicago)- Telops and the Animation of Character in Singaporean YouTube
Singaporean YouTubers have increasingly used “telops,” insertions of verbal visual text onto the screen for the purpose of translation, emphasizing certain visual or auditory objects, or otherwise explaining some aspect of the show. A media practice popularized through Japanese and Korean variety and reality shows, the use of telops challenges approaches to studying multimodal audiovisual texts within film studies and translation studies that have been preoccupied with limited Western uses of subtitles as principally a form of translation that conveys meaning across linguistic systems (Sasamoto et al. 2017). This paper takes a linguistic anthropological approach to the study of telops in the Singaporean YouTube series “Potato Box” using developing anthropological theories of animation, understood as the semiotic construction of lifelike entities through motion and other practices (Silvio 2010; Manning and Gershon 2013), to argue that the use of telops in these texts are a part of the multimodal construction of the actors as dynamic characters (Nozawa 2013).
Manning, Paul, and Ilana Gershon. 2013. Animating interaction. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 107-137.
Nozawa, Shunsuke. 2013. Characterization. Semiotic Review 3.
Sasamoto, Ryoko, Minako O’Hagan, and Stephen Doherty. 2017. Telop, Affect, and Media Design: A Multimodal Analysis of Japanese TV Programs. Television & New Media 18(5): 427-440.
Silvio, Teri. 2010. Animation: The New Performance? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2): 422-438.
Alexandria Lawrence (University of Chicago)- Performance, Animation, and Interaction in Video Game Live Streaming
Ideas of selfhood in relation to performance have long been a source of interest, stemming from theories by Butler (1990) and Goffman (1956), however there has recently been an emerging literature focusing on the animation aspect of selfhood in conjunction with performance. With the rise of new mediated modes, such as the internet and social media, performance and animation in creating the self are more relevant than ever. Anthropologists such as Boellstorff (2008) have already began to investigate the ways in which the self is performed in online game spaces, but there is more to be examined, such as in the intersection between those who play video games to entertain and those who watch them. To those who actively participate in video game live streaming on Twith.tv, as both streamers and as fans who are watching the stream, there are various ways in which they engage in performance and animation to signal themselves as a certain kind of performer that is worth watching, as well as an engaged fan. In this paper, I will argue that this responsive and cyclical performance of self between the entertainer and audience creates a new identity category outside of the standard ‘celebrity’ and ‘fan’ that is bounded in a sense of community and interaction. A discourse analysis of the interactions between streamers and their audience during these live streams in combination with ethnographic participation in the chatrooms of the streams and interviews from performers and the audience will bring out the specific applications of performance and animation in creating the self in these intangible online spaces.
Andrew Foster (University of Michigan)- Performance Actual and Possible
This paper examines the communicative resources with which coaches and athletes interactionally disentangle the biological and cultural dimensions of sports performance in everyday social encounters. I explore how coaches in the Peruvian Institute of Sport (IPD) envision and extract the physical potential of high-altitude Quechua girls and boys recruited and trained to succeed as long-distance runners. Coaches recruit Quechua children from the countryside of Cusco for their genetic and developmental adaptations to high altitude and also for the deep cardiovascular endurance they develop after commuting on foot for years to remote public schoolhouses. Because the potential of these untrained children only manifests materially in bodily dispositions and habits, coaches run candidate recruits through a battery of physical tests in order to hypothesize their success if trained in fully funded professional sports programs. In making this potential palpable and measurable, coaches extrapolate future achievements from everyday behaviors, drawing possible champions into the national sports infrastructure by granting them admittance to state-sponsored training facilities. Cut off from the ebb and flow of civilian life, coaches in one such residential training center in Cusco modify the musculature, coordination, gait, diet, and daily routines of new Quechua recruits while eradicating their perceived bad habits and tendencies. I examine the communicative and embodied labor of this moralizing exercise regimen as it extricates the intangible physical potential of budding athletes from their purported cultural heritage.
Wee Yang Soh (University of Chicago)- “What is the Meta”: An Analysis of Recursive Ideologies of Play in League of Legends
Along with the recent boom of the modern esports industry, the term “metagame” has been coined to describe the way players engage with competitive video games outside or beyond the immediate game environments. Discourse in esports communities revolve around the “meta,” which has entered everyday gaming parlance used to refer to the dominant strategies that give players a competitive advantage in the game at any single point in time. My paper hopes to explore how the “meta” is a collective, shared ideology of what the game is and how it is supposed to be played. Through analysing the discourse around the meta in League of Legends, I identify ideologies of play in competitive video games that are recursively produced across time. Ultimately, I argue in this paper that the “meta” is a constitutional and indispensable element of all competitive video games, and hope to investigate the semiotic applicability of the gaming “meta” as a concept into other (ostensibly) non-gaming contexts.
Michael Lempert (University of Michigan)- Discussant Remarks
5:30-7:00 pm Keynote Talk by Liz Gunner- MIGRANT PUBLICS
Can migrants constitute publics? Drawing on Michael Warner’s notions of multiple publics (2002), I believe they can. My talk will make a case for migrant publics as plural and shifting entities, at moments material, at others, immaterial, and similarly both tangible and intangible. I will draw my evidence from Southern Africa, in particular from Johannesburg known also as ‘the city of gold’, eGoli, and focus on the figure of the insider- migrant and the migrant from without ie someone who in the course of his or her life may cross and re-cross the national border innumerable times, possibly legally and often illegally. Using Charles Briggs’ (2005) notion of ‘ideologies of communicability’ I suggest that in the Southern African context the migrant in some instances exists as a substitute category for the racial ‘other’. But I ask can one also talk of ‘ideologies of counter-communicability’? This is not a simple counter-voice but a refiguring of the power of communicable language which exists in part through the active ‘communities of voice’ and the subjectivities which radio in Southern Africa enables, particularly the vigorous and popular African language stations of the public broadcaster, the SABC. Here the intangibility as well as the tangible exist through the discourses of self-making and belonging as migrant listeners may interpellate themselves performatively as citizens through radio stations (Kunreuther 2015; Englund 2018; Gunner 2019). What happens, however, when overlapping migrant publics separate into antagonistic difference, setting the migrant insider against the migrant from without? And how is this complicated by the fact that each group may listen to a single station in a shared language? Finally, thinking how we may see migrant publics as sites of power I ask how the often hidden African languages of the city show ways of striking back against the often arrogant and hegemonic ‘communicability’ of English.
Saturday May 11th, 2019
9:00-10:30 am Panel 3- Material Ac(Knowledge)ments
Lily Ye (University of Chicago)- Knowing the Unknowable: Unlocking the Mind of a Child
This talk addresses how educational interventionists work with teachers in order to help them evaluate the mathematical ability of young children, ages 3–5. In training the teachers on assessment administration, these interventionists coach teachers on how to turn observable behaviors and responses into interpretable patterns which signify unobservable cognitive abilities and processes. I show how this pedagogy materializes/entextualizes what is otherwise deemed inaccessible, and attempts to bring teachers toward the legibility and scientific interpretation of such signs.
Hannah McElgunn (University of Chicago)- The Intangible Results
In 1900, Field Museum curator George Dorsey gave a paper before the Chicago Society of the Archaeological Institute of America about four expeditions undertaken to Hopi. Reflecting on the museums’ rapidly growing collections, he drew his audience’s attention to the “contents of the two halls… devoted to the Hopi, for here, it may be properly assumed, are the visible, tangible results of these McCormick expeditions” (Dorsey 1901, 221).
This paper focuses on, by contrast, the invisible and intangible results of the expeditions, taking as a starting point the tags that accompanied these tangible items. The tags, which can be found in the museum’s archives, are the traces of a moment of ontological and epistemological translation. They mark a point at which Hopi material became re-entextualized for an Anglo-American audience: sorted, categorized, and given meaning under a new framework of interpretation and value. Once arrived in Chicago, what would be moved upstairs as “archival” material and what became part of the “collections”, downstairs? How was this division between so-called intangible and tangible heritage implemented? More importantly, what are the enduring effects of this divide on Hopi efforts to (re)claim ownership over inscriptions and precipitates of Hopi life?
Dorsey, George A. 1901. “The Stanley-McCormick Hopi Expeditions.” Science 13 (319): 219–22.
Megan MacGregor (University of Chicago)- Microbiotic Dialogisms: Variation in Scientific Discourse on the Microbiome
The term ‘microbiome’ refers to the vast collection of bacteria, viruses, and fungi living in and on bodies and spaces. Following the availability of gene sequencing technologies that led to the Human Microbiome Project, launched in 2007, interest in the field is high, and claims abound regarding its medical and ecological potential. Anthropologists are not immune; the social sciences have shown marked interest in the microbiome, both as an object of study and as a way of theorizing social life. However, little attention is given to heterogeneity or variance in scientific narratives surrounding the microbiome, leaving anthropological engagement with this emerging field open to both “cherry-picking” scientific theories and taking scientific claims at face value. This paper addresses the heterogeneous discourses of established microbiome researchers, paying special attention to perceived audience as they make various claims regarding microbiome science and its implications. I examine my own interviews with microbiome researchers alongside their prior public and professional communications through media, scientific journals, and social media. Using this analysis, I discuss the challenges microbiome researchers face in mediating scientific and public excitement about the microbiome with what they consider legitimate claims and realistic expectations, focusing on the role of expected audience in this process.
Ricardo Rivera (UC Berkeley)- Deciphering the Signs of ‘Kiyameti’ in a Georgian Quran School
A couple weeks before Ramadan, in a Quran school in the mountains of southwestern Georgia [the country], a ‘hoja,’ or religious teacher, engages a group of high-school boys in a discussion of the end of the world. He asks, what have you heard about ‘kiyameti,’ about Judgment Day? The boys go around and share what they’ve heard, laughing uncomfortably about the rumored ‘alametebi,’ the supposed signs in this world of the imminence of its end.
This paper attempts give an account of this moment from the field, a sermon on the end of the world, on the signs that mark the entrance of the intangible into the realm of the material. It tries to understand what it means to possess and report knowledge of the next world through a discussion of the signs of its coming, and what is at stake for these Georgian Muslims to reflect on this as Ramadan approaches. In giving this account, I pay special attention to the linguistic devices in Georgian used throughout the sermon that mark hearsay, quoted speech, and indirect knowledge source, attending to how the hoja and his students navigate access and authority to speak of that which even the Prophet himself did not know.
In focusing on grammatical markers of hearsay and indirect knowledge, I show how the hoja and the students speak together about the unknown and the unknowable, rendering the very inscrutability of the apocalypse tangible in their speech, all while the teacher invokes his own authority to establish truth from rumor, ‘official’ Islamic knowledge from the students’ folk myths.
Kate Graber (Indiana University- Bloomington)- Discussant Remarks
10:45-12:15 pm Panel 4- Scaling the Institution
Janet Connor (University of Chicago)- “Norway’s legacy after Gro”: sustainability and neoliberal forms of responsibility in an Oslo neighborhood
This paper analyzes the politics of discourses around sustainability in a neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. In particular, I examine how the local community center struggled with governmental calls to become “economically sustainable” (økonomisk bærekraftig), meaning that it could finance itself and would no longer rely on public funding to run. This push for “sustainability” led to the seemingly opposite effect of increased precarity among employees and the many programs and activities that the center provided, as they would never know more than a few months, or at worst weeks, in advance if they would be able to continue into the future.
How do calls for sustainability lead to increased precarity? I argue that to answer this question we need to understand the sorts of register relays and graftings (Gal 2018) that are occurring between local and national governmental agencies, humanitarian organizations and the UN, and neighborhood activists, developers, and social entrepreneurs. In attending to these, we can better understand contemporary Norwegian imaginings of the future of the welfare state.
Adrienne Lagman (University of Michigan)- Chinese Client Confidential: Corporate Secrets in the Face of Government Transparency and the Attorneys Caught in Between
The 2008 promulgation of China’s Labor Contract Law marked a fundamental shift to make transparent companies’ responsibilities towards their employees and further government regulation of corporations. In the years since, employees have sought to hold companies accountable for their rights in the workplace. Companies, for their parts, have become increasingly anxious and sought to mitigate the risks of unforeseen litigation while maintaining veils of secrecy both internally and externally. Though much has been made of plaintiffs and cause lawyering in the media, another group of enterprising attorneys whose roles remain unexamined have jumped into the mix to consult corporations. Their business is not only growing, but diversifying as they seek to offer an ever-wider array of general products and services that can be tailored to fit each client’s specific needs. And, unlike in-house counsels or traditional outside litigation defense, consulting attorneys’ ability to know the outcomes of particular cases is severely circumscribed, as companies most often will elicit and receive recommendations, but handle the matter themselves internally. These attorneys are not only obligated to both follow the spirit and letter of the law, but also serve clients’ needs. Grounded in fieldwork at a Shanghai law firm, this paper addresses the ways secrecy and transparency are semiotically mediated. It considers the material and immaterial ideologies and practices surrounding these attorney-client interactions in order to elucidate the roles of these attorneys in the process of creating, continuing, and changing corporate veils of secrecy even as government efforts seek to render them transparent.
Kate Gibson (University of Chicago)- Trials without Error: Assembling Public Pills in Illinois’s Child Welfare System
This paper examines how psychotropic drug trials are monitored in a residential treatment center for youth wards of the state. I begin with two key facts about how psychotropic drug trials are monitored in Illinois’s foster care system. First, numerous documents are required to coordinate, inform and legitimate the actions of the various institutions, professionals and caregivers involved in administering and monitoring psychotropic drugs. Second, despite all this documentation, when a child arrives at a new placement, only traces of their past medication trials come with them, even if they have been prescribed multiple medications that have gone through the aforementioned documentary system. Prescribers and other professionals who are meeting a child for the first time comb through piles of documents which often only mention the child’s most recently prescribed medications and dosages and contain minimal, incomplete or contradictory information about why past medications were prescribed. This paper asks: how do psychotropic drugs end up disappearing into the very documentary apparatus the state has designed to regulate and oversee them? I will first demonstrate that these documents act as “scene-setting” objects that position professionals as performers of particular roles in medication trials. I will then describe how these documents delineate particular “domains of scrutiny” and elicit certain “discursive practices” that not only represent drugs and kids, but continually bring them into being as particular kinds of drugs and kids (Goodwin, 1994). I conclude with the idea that these documentary practices serve to continually establish and re-establish pills as public actors in certain ways and private actors in others.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606-633.
Grigory Gorbun (University of Chicago)- “What is important are the questions we ask”: grasping “practice” in a moot court
The last decade of legal education in Russia was marked by a boom of interest in moot courts, extracurricular competitions for law students that simulate case-based court debates and memoranda writing. The moot courts are promoted as «practical education» meant to bridge the gap between theory of the classroom and practice of the courtroom in order to make students more fit for the job market. In my paper I will analyze interactions between arbitrators and students at the final round of the Online Moot, a moot court organised by the Russian Arbitration Association. My aim is to grasp how we can find “practice” in the moot debates about fiction cases. I will specifically focus on the role of asking and answering questions in the exchanges between arbitrators and students. My broader interest lies in figuring out how the interplay of specific ideas about law and language held by Russian lawyers shape social interactions in the context of moot courts and how in turn the format of the competition influences received understandings of how law and legal language work, and what the work of the lawyers is.
Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway (Oberlin College)- Discussant Remarks
1:30-3:00 pm Panel 5- Intangible Values
Kelly Mulvaney (University of Chicago)- Intangible Enactables: Blockchain “Assets,” Political Economy and Language
If a blockchain organization goes bankrupt, its assets will likely be considered “intangible property” in bankruptcy case. My paper will take as a point of departure this situation, a bankruptcy case involving blockchain “assets,” and thus will begin with an “intangible” object that, precisely through this definition, is figured as “an object to be enacted on” in the world. I will compare blockchain “assets” to a more familiar example of intangible property, the brand, in order to show how blockchain raises unique questions about materiality. In discussions of lawyers, economists and software developers about blockchain, these questions center on the distinction between “utility” and “value,” a debate that traces not least to the political economy of Adam Smith. Whereas the former considered human labor on matter to produce value, an abstraction that by virtue of its separability from utility could function as an equivalent, Marx’s critique posited a dialectical concept of (abstract) labor as the substance of value, which can then become qualitative (as the use-value side of commodity) or quantitative (as money). My paper parses issues and terms at stake in Smith’s and Marx’s concepts of utility and value, in order to offer a set of hypotheses about what is or is not “new” about blockchain. As it turns out, blockchain itself consists largely in/of language, an issue that prompts further complications that should be of interest to those tuned into recent debates about the materiality of language, which the Michicagoan this year will hopefully explore, challenge and extend.
Feng Ye (University of Chicago)- Academic Freedom and “Free Speech”: cases from the University of Chicago
Issues of “free speech” on American college campuses have increasingly sparked debates in recent years. The University of Chicago has been an active participant in “free speech” campaigns: the “Chicago Principle,” drafted by First Amendment scholar and prior University Provost Geoffrey Stone, highlights that the University would not restrict or prohibit any debate simply because the ideas presented are thought to be offensive or wrong-headed (Stone, 2012). Citing both “free inquiry” and “free expression,” the Chicago Principle presents the higher-education-specific principle of “academic freedom” as compatible and consistent with the First-Amendment-inspired “free speech” principle; in several conflicts surrounding controversial speech and speakers, however, these principles came in tension. My project asks how the different registers of speech, configurated in the tangible tokens of speech events on the University of Chicago campus—in the classroom as well as in open forums and speaker series—mediate distinct linguistic and political ideologies—the intangibles—under the same encompassing umbrella of the “Chicago Principle.” More specifically, I will look at how the cross-cutting folk ideologies or beliefs of freedom, of language and of thought emerge, are negotiated, put to social praxis, in conflicts involving “free speech” on the University campus, in relevant public speeches in and outside of the University, and in the interviews that I will conduct.
Stone, Geoffrey.
2012 Statement on principles of free speech. https://freeexpression.uchicago.edu/page/statement-principles-free-expression (accessed January 4, 2019).
Sheng Long (University of Michigan)- Stove and Wife: A Geomancer’s Finding of Auspicious Time
This paper discusses how esoteric knowledge is applied and validated, by examining a geomancer (fengshui shi) who finds auspicious direction and time for his clients. It focuses on indexicality that enables connection-making in modified and adapted rituals. A couple from a village in Southeast China purchased an apartment in the county seat, and they invited a geomancer to choose dates for installing the kitchen stove. The apartment is bought for the couple’s son, but what the geomancer focuses on, during the whole process, is not his clients—the father or the son, but a girl who has not showed up at all. By repeatedly asking about the relation between the son and his girlfriend, the geomancer establishes and reinforces the linkage between the stove and wife, and that between birthdate and auspicious time. Analyzing the recontextualization of the geomancy ritual in contingent circumstances, this paper discusses how esoteric knowledge becomes perceivable and comprehensible to outsiders and how social relations are redefined and negotiated in the performance of knowledge.
Rob Gelles (University of Chicago)- Voicing an Attack on the American Free Enterprise System
In 1971, Lewis Powell submitted a memo the the US Chamber of Commerce. In it, he characterized the American Free Enterprise System as under attack. This memo has since been marked as an inflection point in the rise of the US conservative movement, particularly the conservative legal movement—the part of the conservative movement that opposes environmental regulation, affirmative action, and “activist judges” in the courtroom and beyond (Teles 2008). This memo-as-critical-moment has been analyzed for its exhortation to respond to the “attack on the free enterprise system” (Southworth 2018); its insistence that businessmen should not be timid about engaging in ideological debates (Decker 2016).
But how does a system come under attack? What is the character of the attack and those who attack it? In this paper, I analyze the voicing structure of the Powell Memo, and suggest that its text-internal figuration troubles dominant accounts of its uptake. While the Memo is thought to have been a call to arms for ideological warfare in courts, think tanks, and political parties, it is striking (or perhaps banal) how little it engages substantively with its figurated opponents. Ideas have consequences, but understanding those consequences required considering the pragmatics and metapragmatics of their (intangible) meanings.
Powell, Lewis F., 1971. “The Memo”. Powell Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/1
Teles, Stephen, 2008. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. Princeton University Press.
Southworth, Ann, 2018. “Lawyers and the Conservative Counterrevolution,” Law & Social Inquiry 43(4): 1698–1728.
Christopher Ball (Notre Dame University)- Discussant Remarks
3:15-4:45 Panel 6- Intersubjective (Mis)Interpretations
Patrick Lewis (University of Chicago)- Cafe Culture, the Commodity, and “Samimiyet”: Tea and the Values of Face-to-Face Public Formation
Liberal political philosophers and historians of early Modern Europe have long draw attention to the centrality of the cafe in the emergence of new commodity cultures and the spread of a bourgeois public sphere (Habermas 1991, Fraser 1990). Historians of the Ottoman Empire have likewise argued for the importance of the cafe in shaping new forms of sociality, albeit ones distinct from those that emerged in the cafe in Western Europe (Kömeçoğlu 2005). More contemporary work in linguistic anthropology has brought new ethnographic attention to the role of cafe culture in shaping processes of ‘mediatization’ (Agha 2011) and the formation of face-to-face publics (Cody 2011). Drawing on fieldwork in newly opened youth cafes in Kurdish regions of Turkey, I explore the kinds of social work that goes on these spaces, paying special attention to how the preparation, exchange and consumption of tea is shaped by and articulated through a concept of ‘samimiyet’ – an everyday social value discourse designating forms of non-hierarchical and disinterested forms of relationality that is central to emic evaluations of both face-to-face relationships and mass mediated political publics.
Agha, Asif. “Meet mediatization.” Language and Communication 3, no. 31 (2011): 163-170.
Cody, Francis. “Echoes of the teashop in a Tamil newspaper.” Language & Communication 31, no. 3 (2011): 243-254.
Fraser, Nancy (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social text, (25/26), 56-80.
Habermas, Jurgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press, 1991.
Kömeçoğlu, Uğur. “The publicness and sociabilities of the Ottoman coffeehouse.” Javnost-The Public 12, no. 2 (2005): 5-22.
Carrie Ann Morgan (University of Michigan)- Intangible Voices: An Ethnography of a Failed Experiment
Although the study of voice represents a point of connection between linguistic anthropology and sociophonetics, methodological differences have prevented significant interaction across these fields. While linguistic anthropology uses ethnographic methods to explore voice as phenomenological experience (e.g. Harkness, 2014), sociophonetics uses experimental methods to test hypothesized correlates of voice from variable acoustic signals (Kreiman & Sidtis, 2011). I conducted a small sociophonetic experiment in an attempt to uncover the ‘precise acoustic correlates’ of what many people in Albania describe as ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ voices. My results showed no pattern, not even an unexpected one. Why had participant after participant ‘played bingo’, as my friend in the field described it, with my experimental task? In order to answer this question, I take an ethnographic look at interactions surrounding the experiment and people’s metalinguistic comments about my own voice. I find that experimental attempts to objectify voices and control for context end up revealing that the moral dimensions of voice (Hill, 1995; Keane, 2011) direct attention to more than acoustic signals. Thus, what counts as a ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ voice is an emergent property of awareness and control (Babel, 2016) within an interaction.
Babel, Anna M. 2016. Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harkness, Nicholas. 2014. Songs of Seoul. University of California Press.
Hill, Jane H. 1995. Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative. In Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (eds.) The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. University of Illinois Press.
Keane, Webb. 2011. Indexing Voice: A Morality Tale. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21:2.
Kreiman, Jody & Sidtis, Diana. 2011. Foundations of Voice Studies. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
Yeon-ju Bae (University of Michigan)- Re-voicing, de-voicing, and silence: On an emergent hierarchy among language ideologies at a Korean Buddhist temple
This paper explores forms of reporting reported speech in a conflict resolution meeting at a Buddhist temple in South Korea. By examining the process of calibrating responsibilities through stance-taking in quoting, this paper argues that the intangible relationship among language ideologies can be reorganized and reordered through dialogic process including a performative use of silence. The Buddhist temple that I study engages in organic farming drawing on the Buddhist concept of interconnectedness, but in one summer there was an incident in which one of the temple staff put pesticide onto a potato field. All the temple staff gathered together to discuss this issue by employing the practice of “restorative circle,” during which another conflict between two kitchen staff arose to the surface. Due to speech rules of the “restorative circle,” the two kitchen staff had to report what the other person just said that quoted each other’s alleged previous speech. In order to distance oneself from the quotes, the two interlocutors show gradient deployment of discursive strategies: hedges, ellipsis, and conjectural quotative form in re-voicing the other’s quotes as uncertain; third-person pronouns (proper names) in de-voicing a first-person perspective and objectifying the on-going utterances; and ultimately, silence by returning to the Buddhist ideology of meditative performance. While referential and performative language ideologies can generate conflicting discursive forms, the relationship between these ideologies may not be opposing or alternative on an equal plane but can be hierarchically framed depending on the institutional setting in which dialogic processes are emergently unfold.
Chen Chi (University of Chicago)- Elderly Care in Urban China: Filial Piety and Social Transformation
Chinese people’s understandings of self and society are historically centered around the concept of family. The state-endorsed Confucianism promoted an ideal family model based on hierarchical relations of age, generation and gender, where filial piety—the responsibility to care for, respect, and obey senior parents, particularly father—was one of the virtues to be held above all else. However, since the post-Mao era in late 1970s, the “individualization of Chinese society” (Yan, 2009) began to severely undermine the long-established family structure and intergenerational relationships. Consequently, more older adults are living in “left-behind” or empty-nest households, receiving less care from their children than previous generation. However, older adults have demonstrated more positive attitudes than negative ones—expressing content in their current situation and speaking highly of their filial adult children. Given this huge contrast, how are we to make sense of older people’s appreciation of their children’s filial performance compared with the less care they have actually received? First, I hypothesize that the definition of filial piety is recalibrated as a set of flexible care arrangements suitable in multiple locations according to financial practicality, care necessity and professionalism. Second, I hypothesize different social institutions play their roles in contributing to the reproduction and reformulation of filial piety. Through this study, I intend to study elder care issues to examine not only micro dimensions of embodied experience and practice, but also macro biopolitical and economic forces such as governance, policies, and social changes across time and space.
Natalia Bermudez (University of Chicago)- Discussant Remarks
5:00-7:00 pm Special Panel- The Intangible Legacy of Jane Hill
Barbra A. Meek (University of Michigan)- Opening Remarks
Niku T’Arhechu T’Arhesi (University of Michigan)- Kaxumpikwa: The social consequences of short-durance material phenomena
From UNESCO to the Michicagoan conference, various social groups have depicted discursive practices as partially consisting of intangible, immaterial, dimensions. Yet, people perceive sounds and movements through their physical senses, attributing culturally particular meanings to them, and experiencing lifelong social effects of these very physical processes. In this paper, I build off of Jane Hill’s research on Mexicano speakers to analyze the social consequences of vocal communication and bodily hexis. I draw on ethnographic research among elderly P’urhépecha speakers in an endangered language setting in the Meseta P’urhépecha of Michoacan, Mexico. One of the means by which elderly P’urhépecha speakers ascribe P’urhépecha identity onto someone is by evaluating the extent to which another party displays kaxumpikwa ‘respect.’ Elderly P’urhépecha speakers associate kaxumpikwa, ergo P’urhépecha identity, with physical processes of short-term durance such as 1) use or non-use of the P’urhépecha code, 2) proper code use, and 3) bodily actions. I will argue that researchers misrepresent their ethnographic data by labeling physical phenomena of short-term durance— vocal communication and bodily movements—as “intangible” because to do so underestimates their long-term social consequences ingrained in individual and collective and bodies.
Rachel Howard (University of Chicago)- Of Sight and Speech: Aging and the Will to Be Seen
In an early season of the Netflix show Grace and Frankie, Frankie Bergstein, played by Lily Tomlin, steals a pack of cigarettes from a grocery store. In response to her friend Grace’s surprise, Frankie says, “It’s okay. I learned something. We’ve got a super power…You can’t see me, you can’t stop me.” In the series, neither Grace nor Frankie are particularly unseen by their family, friends, and lovers—it is rather cashiers, security guards in retirement communities, and potential business partners who render these women invisible. In other words, Grace and Frankie’s bodies—decked out in pants suits and new age shawls, respectively—are not treated as connected to an individual agential self. Rather, viewers watch as they experience what it means to be invisible…even if the characters resist institutional invisibility wrought by a traditional nursing home (Foucault 1984). In this paper, I argue that the show teases out the tensions in the contemporary narrative about confessional politics in the US that rely upon the importance of being “seen” as part and parcel of the ethical capacity to speak. What are the political stakes of, on one hand, connecting sight with speech, and on the other, refusing this to older women? How are new chronotopes about older women being worked out in the media? And how might the uptake of these mediatized characters refigure the chronotope of the older woman at a time in which people are living for much longer than they ever have?
Nikolas Sweet (University of Michigan)- Modes of Objectification and the Semiotic Intangibilities of Social Life
Research within linguistic anthropology has long shown that individuals act not only on the basis of shibboleths of social indexicality and group membership, but that meaningful semiotic signs may not always available to metapragmatic awareness. Jane Hill’s work on Mock Spanish, for instance, exemplifies the ways in which voicing this particular register can have significant indexical entailments even as it remains under the level of awareness of its Anglo speakers. This paper brings into conversation approaches from linguistic anthropology and phenomenology to examine the discursive means through which particular signs come to be objectifiable (and therefore subject to processes of typification) in interaction. Heidegger, for instance, posed two particular modes of being: readiness-to-hand, things which present themselves within habitual modes of action, and presence-at-hand, things which are objectified in a “theoretical” attitude. Yet objectifications and not only modes of embodied habitual action (or habitus) are patterned in social life. For Heidegger, breakdown and failure often constituted a trigger that allowed actions in the flow to be analyzed in a process of objectification. Although the capacity to objectify, i.e., to render as an object of reflexive awareness, is a basic human capacity, I am interested in expanding upon the notion of metalinguistic awareness by investigating the routinized, dialogic configurations through which signs are rendered available to scrutiny in social life. Moments of objectification are emergent in genre, which can drive particular representations; through materiality when material forms break and are therefore rendered present; or even in grammatical structure when moments of perceived difference through translation or contrast draw attention to particular semiotic signs. This paper thus engages with this year’s theme, “Intangibilities” by examining the patterned, discursive means through which previously unnoticed phenomena are rendered publicly available in social interaction.
Georgia Ennis (University of Michigan)- Ideologies of (Standard) Language Revitalization
Jane Hill, in asking her prescient question of the academic discourse of language endangerment—“How might this global conversation resonate for communities that are custodians of endangered languages—communities that are themselves a diverse audience?” (2002:119)—called attention to the consequences of the discursive strategies of advocates for language revitalization. One way, then, that Hill invited us to attend to the immaterialities of ideology in language endangerment advocacy was in terms of the material effects of these discourses for the communities they presumably serve.
In this talk, I shift the analytical focus to another locus of linguistic ideology by considering the ways that that experts’ and community members’ ideologies of language have influenced approaches to indigenous language revitalization. Grounded in a discussion of the standardization and revitalization of Ecuadorian Quichua (Kichwa), I examine the ways that seemingly immaterial linguistic ideologies have had very material consequences for speakers of regional, unstandardized varieties of Lowland Quichua in the context of state-directed language education focused on standard language literacy. This talk explores the cross-cutting assemblages of linguistic ideologies involved in making Ecuadorian Quichua material—as the written and emergent oral standard Unified Kichwa—as well as the ways this materiality is sometimes contested by speakers of regional varieties.
Hill, Jane H.
2002 “Expert Rhetorics” in Advocacy for Endangered Languages: Who Is Listening, and What Do They Hear? Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2): 119–133.
Susan U. Philips (University of Arizona)- Discussant Remarks