Journal of Linguistic Anthropology最新文献

{"title":"Making science (in)communicable: Lingering secondary effects of COVID-19 discourse","authors":"Charles L. Briggs","doi":"10.1111/jola.70049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70049","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article proposes alternative analytics for linguistic anthropology by exploring how the Lockean legacy of communicability and contemporary emphasis on indexical order simultaneously create <i>incommunicabilities</i>, stigmatizing people and cultural forms as communicable failures, and generating <i>indexical disorder</i>. It traces a regime of scientific communicability emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic through the World Health Organization's attack on “mis- and dis-information” and Anthony Fauci's televised COVID-19 presentations. Their precarious claims to communicability cast laypersons as incommunicable, opening space for counterclaims of scientific communicability by conservative critics, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Trump administration's attack on universities and scientific research.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A “primera gobernadora constitucional”: Relativizing indexical and successional orders in Puerto Rico","authors":"Carmín C. Quijano","doi":"10.1111/jola.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70051","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines public clashes over the indexical meanings of the register of governors in a non-sovereign context. It demonstrates how the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's naming of the first non-elected female governor elicited people's stances on the appropriate and effective semiotic entailment of “gobernadora” ([feminine] governor) within a sedimented androcentric and androcolonial order. The public's misrecognition of this new subjectivity prompted the production of a new shibboleth, “primera gobernadora constitucional” (first [feminine] governor, constitutionally recognized), making this naming ritual felicitous. I argue that people's investment in making meaningful the indexes of the state sustains the Commonwealth's political legitimacy.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147569956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The revolution within: Islamic media and the struggle for a New Egypt by Yasmin Moll, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2025. pp. 368. 9781503642423 (e-book)","authors":"Muhammad Lukman Arifianto","doi":"10.1111/jola.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70050","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mother tongue instruction as a sticky object: The making of a register of denunciation","authors":"Scarlett Mannish,&nbsp;Linus Salö","doi":"10.1111/jola.70048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the making of a political register to denounce mother tongue instruction (MTI) in Sweden. Nationally mandated since 1977, MTI is a state-sponsored, curriculum-stipulated subject for minority pupils of over 187 languages other than Swedish. However, the instigation by the far-right in 2023 of a commission into MTI's effects on integration helped conventionalize and legitimate a register of assembled features of anti-MTI discourse. Using a discourse-historical approach, we trace this register-making process across Swedish media and political documents from 1970 to 2025, and into Denmark, where MTI was partly abolished. We identify national and transnational interdiscursive clasps, grafts and relays through which legitimacy is drawn from historical claims to frame MTI as costly, outdated, and non-Swedish. The formation of this register of denunciation renders the social arena of MTI a feared sticky object attached to semilingualism, parallel societies, and failed integration that must be controlled and contained.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The algorithm's hidden layers: Nurturant matrices, quantitative poetry, and the religious ethics of language technology","authors":"Zachary Sheldon","doi":"10.1111/jola.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper builds on conversations at the intersection of artificial intelligence research and the linguistic anthropology of religion by exploring a mathematical technique that connects contemporary Large Language Models [LLMs] with the history of Islamicate occult sciences. In both cases, transformation algorithms are used to entextualize linear streams of discourse as geometric embeddings in higher dimensional arrays. Focusing on an algorithmic poem from a nineteenth-century Palestinian manuscript on the healing magic of midwives, I argue that the entextualization of language in computational space emerged as a ritual practice of self-transformation. A historical perspective on mathematical dialogues suggests that both older and newer algorithmic language technologies can reengineer selves and societies; but the comparison also exposes the peculiarity of our own assumptions about the opaque, quantified, and gendered language of math. By separating the technical affordances of semiotic transformations from the larger ideological frames into which they are taken up, this paper seeks to model a multilayered method of comparative analysis that can inform future linguistic anthropological studies across diverse contributions to the history of LLMs.</p><p>يساهم هذا المقال في إثراء الحوار الدائر بين دراسات الذكاء الاصطناعي والأنثروبولوجيا اللغوية والبحوث اللاهوتية. ويرتكز على تقنية خوارزمية مشتركة بين النماذج اللغوية الكبيرة والعلوم الباطنية الإسلامية، ألا وهي: تحويل النصوص اللغوية إلى أرقام، ومن ثم ترتيبها في مصفوفات رياضية. تتمحور الدراسة حول قصيدة تعليمية وردت في مخطوطة فلسطينية تعود للقرن التاسع عشر، حيث تتناول هذه المخطوطة دور القابلات التقليديات. وتشرح القصيدة التعليمية توزيع الأرقام في مصفوفات رياضية (أو ”أوفاق الأعداد“). تعمد القابلات إلى هذه المصفوفات في نقش التعويذات والأحراز، رغبةً في تأمين سلامة الوالدة ومولودها. ونكتشف في هذه العمليات الروحية الأصول التاريخية لتحويل النص اللغوي إلى بيانات رياضية. يُلقي هذا الاكتشاف المثير للدهشة الضوء على تطبيق تقنيات اللسانيات الحاسوبية، قديمها وحديثها، في تطوير النفس والمجتمع. وفي الوقت ذاته، تكشف هذه المقارنة عن اختلافات جوهرية بين النقاشات المعاصرة حول هذه النماذج الرياضية وبين الرؤية التقليدية لها، وتحديداً حول العلاقة بين الرياضيات والدور الاجتماعي للمرأة وبين التقاليد الدينية والتقدم العلمي. إنّ التركيز على استمرارية الهياكل الخوارزمية عبر ممارسة نوع من التجريد المنهجي الذي يهدف إلى عزل المنطق الصوري عن سياقات تطبيقه البراغماتية، يكشف عن جذور تاريخية عابرة للثقافات لمنطق الذكاء الاصطناعي المعاصر.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147299785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Record the track and track the record: On the call-and-response dynamics in Hip Hop practice","authors":"Dastan Abdali,&nbsp;Steven Gilbers","doi":"10.1111/jola.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Call-and-response has primarily been studied in Black Atlantic artistic traditions. We transpose call-and-response dynamics to the writing and recording process of a Hip Hop studio session. Combining collaborative autoethnography with formal analysis and using Communication Accommodation Theory's conceptual parameters of conscious and subconscious convergence and divergence, we explore how our output and expression as practitioners are relationally affected in terms of rhyme, content, and flow. We argue this focus on intersubjectivity offers a window into how identities—here via Hip Hop practice and its engagement with language, music, and history—are in a process of “becoming” in real time.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70046","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147315524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The politics of language oppression in Tibet By Gerald Roche, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2024. pp. 264","authors":"Charisma K. Lepcha","doi":"10.1111/jola.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147275043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative formatting, chronotopic orderings, and moralization in ex-gay stories","authors":"Vincent Pak","doi":"10.1111/jola.70044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70044","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Formatted stories rely on spatiotemporal cues to evoke recognizability through linearity, which prescribes a particular template for meaning-making. This article examines stories narrated by ex-gay members of a Christian organization in Singapore and considers how chronotopes within the stories are ordered to regiment ways of feeling for viewers. By ordering these experiences differently, affective flows between each chronotope become altered and the uptake of meaning is impacted. Drawing on Bakhtinian thought and linguistic anthropological ideas in narratives, I suggest that the structuring of recognizable stories is an exercise in narrative formatting: the discursive practice of ordering and presenting experience as morally and normatively desirable.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70044","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145909360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested heritage landscapes for Arabic language learning in a postcolonial France","authors":"Chantal Tetreault,&nbsp;Alexandrine Barontini,&nbsp;Kiana Sakimehr","doi":"10.1111/jola.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes the contested and multiple meanings of “heritage” that emerge for advanced Arabic language learners in a postcolonial France. A linguistic life histories approach reveals a fraught duality of privileged access and exclusionary adversity for heritage students of Arabic. We analyze three university students' politicized subject positions relative to a postcolonial French heritage landscape in which Arabic language study is marked by cultural, racialized, religious, and linguistic differentiation. We argue that while Arabic language learning in France can accurately be described as a highly valued, widely practiced endeavor, it is also virulently stigmatized and marginalized to the point of cultural erasure. In our analysis, we claim that this apparent contradiction is not merely due to the association of Arabic language with North African migrants from previous French colonies, but rather to a contemporary postcolonial semiotic framing of Arabic. Instead of a neo-liberal framing of Arabic that is more typical of North American educational contexts, Arabic is either lauded as part of French (post-)colonial <i>patrimoine</i> (“heritage”) or, more often, degraded as “separatist” heritage or <i>communautarisme</i> (“communalism”).</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146057913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Recruiting Mubai: Race turning into qualification in China's private English language education\u0000 招聘“母白”外教: 中国私立英语教育行业中的种族与资质","authors":"Shuling Wang,&nbsp;Raviv Litman","doi":"10.1111/jola.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Native speakerism in English language teaching (ELT) has become associated with Whiteness. However, how this association is sustained in everyday practices within China's unique socio-cultural-political context remains underexplored. This study examines the raciolinguistic construct of Mubai, a central recruitment criterion in China's ELT industry, and analyses how <i>Mubai</i> codifies the explicit conflation of Whiteness and English nativeness, persistently privileging Whiteness over qualifications through a highly prescriptive recruitment process, which undermines teaching quality, produces unsustainable labor practices, and perpetuates structural racism often unacknowledged in Chinese public discourse. It highlights how <i>Mubai</i> both sustains and destabilizes racialized ideologies of English in China.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145904679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}