{"title":"Justice suspended: Rethinking institutions, regimentation, and channels from a human rights law perspective","authors":"Jessica R. Greenberg","doi":"10.1111/jola.12415","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12415","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes institutions as sites for political and social change by looking beyond regimentation and fixedness as the central discursive features of institutionalization. Drawing on research at the European Court of Human Rights—one of the world's most extensive human rights courts—I analyze how human rights actors redeploy normative institutional logics through creative approaches to institutional categories. I argue that lawyers and advocates working within the Court and Convention system naturalize and fix boundaries of law and politics <i>and</i> use that distinction to activate an excess of potential meanings and intertextual connections in legal judgments. This involves using institutional affordances to keep cases open and structure collaborative waiting. These strategies allow people to mutually inhabit open-ended relationships to texts in intentional ways. In so doing, lawyers and activists defer resolving legal judgments—until new coalitions take political power, there are generational shifts in attitudes or shifts in geopolitical power arrangements that render state actors subject to diplomatic pressure. Analyzing how people improvise, learn, and teach others to manage institutional channels and excess opens up the black box of institutionality as a site for social transformation.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"45-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139927434","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":"How to speak to the masses, part II: Hồ Chí Minh as a moral and linguistic exemplar and the dynamics of register formation in 20th century Vietnam","authors":"Jack Sidnell","doi":"10.1111/jola.12413","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12413","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Hồ Chí Minh's extended essay <i>Fixing the Way We Work</i>, written in 1947 after he and other high-ranking members of the recently formed DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam; <i>Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa</i>), had been forced to retreat from Hanoi to the uplands of Thái Nguyên province, elaborates on organizational and practical problems within the party and obstacles to mass mobilization. The final chapter describes a way of speaking HCM refers to as <i>ba hoa</i> and which he sees as a “speech sickness” afflicting many low and middle ranking cadres who are in direct contact with the masses. In the first part of this essay, I argued that the largely proscriptive and negatively formulated instructions articulated in this context cohere by virtue of a common focus on problems of action. Specifically, <i>ba hoa</i> names a stereotyped speech register in which the connection between speaking and doing comes undone. In what follows, the second part of the essay, I describe the other, positively formulated half of the larger project of register formation: the elevation of HCM's own mode of expression (<i>phong cách diễn đạt</i>) to the status of an exemplary model that all Vietnamese people are expected to emulate. This involved extensive metasemiotic elaboration and (re)framing which was accomplished, in large part, through the writings of contemporaries and later interpreters. A consideration of this literature along with an analysis of the continued spectral presence of HCM in contemporary Vietnam allows for a specification of the semiotics of exemplarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"23-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.12413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138561114","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":"How to speak to the masses, part I: Hồ Chí Minh's instructions to cadres and the dynamics of register formation in 20th century Vietnam","authors":"Jack Sidnell","doi":"10.1111/jola.12412","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12412","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The question of how to understand the relation between language and action lies at the heart of both philosophical pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. This same question, although framed in a very different way, also emerged as a basic concern for communist revolutionaries in Vietnam in the mid 1940s and, I contend, continues to exercise the imagination of party members and others up until the present day. Drawing inspiration from Asif Agha's definition of a (semiotic) register as a “cultural model of action,” in this essay, I consider the ways in which Hồ Chí Minh along with other high-ranking party members sought to reform Vietnamese through a project of register formation, and thereby to transform the language into an effective instrument of mass mobilization. I suggest that this project centrally involved reconceptualizing the relationship between language and action and was pursued by, on the one hand, identifying and proscribing ways of speaking in which the connection with action was seen to be broken such that speech amounted to “mere words” and, on the other, by promoting a way of speaking in which, as the frequently used Vietnamese expression has it, “speaking goes hand-in-hand with doing” (<i>nói đi đôi với làm</i>).</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"4-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.12412","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138592358","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":"Linguistic ethnography of a multilingual call center: London callingBy Johanna Woydack, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. xv + 214 pp","authors":"Raymund Vitorio","doi":"10.1111/jola.12414","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12414","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"168-170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139274156","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":"Affect in cross-chronotope alignments in narrations about Aristides de Sousa Mendes and their subsequent circulations","authors":"Michele Koven","doi":"10.1111/jola.12411","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12411","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes the role of emotion in narrations about the past, understandable as familial, intergenerational, or national. I examine how participants report and display affect in narratives about Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul of Bordeaux who issued thousands of lifesaving visas in June of 1940. Three sets of participants (descendants of visa recipients, Sousa Mendes' descendants, and Portuguese institutional representatives) each explicitly report and implicitly display how the Sousa Mendes story moves them <span>emotionally</span>. I then discuss how the emotion in these narratives may be circulated and taken up by broader audiences. Building on Irvine's discussion of the heteroglossia of affective expression (1990), participants may attribute emotion to others, signal emotion as occurring in the present or in a prior space–time, or merge emotional past and present in various types of emotional “reliving.” By treating emotion as eventlike, it can thus be considered chronotopic. I analyze the relationships between (re)presentation of emotion across multiple narrated and narrating chronotopes. This approach reveals how differently positioned participants' cross-chronotope alignments yield particular types of affective displays and experiences that others can then take up and recontextualize.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"33 3","pages":"350-372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.12411","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135112927","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":"Learning Putonghua, (not) becoming Chinese: “Sinicized” figures and intersectional personae on Tibetan peripheries","authors":"Xiao Schutte Ke","doi":"10.1111/jola.12401","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12401","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Few Sino-Tibetan bilingualisms are celebrated in Amdo Tibet. Registers like “mixed language,” “peasant language,” and vernacular Mandarins are denounced through their perceived association with Chinese colonial influence. However, <i>Putonghua</i>-Tibetan “bilinguals” are revered among the same demographic. When Tibetan and Chinese language communities intersect each other, a concern for many arises as to how one calibrates one's own “bi-ness” as a Tibetan bilingual. In this paper, I explore how “Sinicized” figures are configurated for Tibetans. I argue that language works in many ways to disrupt previously stable ethnoracial identities as well as to mediate ethnoracial alignment or a lack thereof. Intersectional personae—binding intersections of linguistic repertoires with biographic fractals like gender, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality, profession, and many more—personify such disruptions for users of languages. I also describe the affective motion—or ethnoracialized anxieties and aspirations— in adopting or sidestepping these intersectional personae for a population that feel they are going through racialization (for different publics) in many aspects of their lives. Attending to intra-ethnoracial evaluations, I also delineate and compare vernacular colonialism and <i>Putonghua</i> colonialism in showing that “same but different” registers might be a vantage point to a more empirical understanding of Sino- as well as other forms of colonialism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"127-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135251719","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":"Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice. By Pooja Rangan, Akshya Saxena, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press. 2023. xvii +301 pp.","authors":"Chaise LaDousa","doi":"10.1111/jola.12410","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12410","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"34 1","pages":"165-167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135580158","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":"Transposition, not translation: Recuperating attentionality on Pantelleria, Sicily","authors":"Nicco A. La Mattina","doi":"10.1111/jola.12408","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12408","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how elderly rural Sicilians recall the meanings of words rendered obsolete by infrastructural, technological, and economic changes that occurred in their lifetime. I examine conversations from my 2016 and 2019 fieldwork on Pantelleria, Sicily, characterized by what I term recuperated attentionality, speaking from erstwhile attentional circumstances. To unpack the meanings of words, elderly islanders employ transposition, contextualizing their attentional guidance from a moment of reference anchored in the remembered past, orienting to an obsolete way of being in the world. Socio-biographical discontinuity means that acquaintance and familiarity with the denotata of these words is asymmetrical, once accessed by participating in island life, issuing and responding to directives, attending to tasks, and so on, but now accessed principally by memory. I examine conversational discourse in which transposition is used to unpack word meanings, which clashes with elicitation norms that request translational equivalents for words.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"33 3","pages":"311-329"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.12408","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136062180","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":"Sunu Coosan: Creating “our tradition” in Senegalese wrestling songs","authors":"Bina Brody","doi":"10.1111/jola.12409","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jola.12409","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article explores the term “<i>sunu coosan</i>” as a Senegalese trope of self-articulation and as a semiotic strategy in contemporary discourses surrounding nationhood. The term, meaning \"our tradition\" in Wolof, is used by professionals as well as lay people in their promotion of the national sport, <i>Làmb</i> wrestling. By examining this phrase within the broad repertoire of Senegalese wrestling songs, I show that the musical commentary performed in the sport of <i>Làmb</i> situates it within a narrative of traditional continuity, subsequently producing a modern tradition for the consumption of the Senegalese nation. I argue that this collection of songs is a performative embodiment of a modern state's struggle to form its national identity. In Senegal's national wrestling arenas, ongoing lyrical engagement with the themes of history, heritage, and morality in genre-specific, stylized formats, makes these songs the site of both ‘traditional discourse’ and a ‘discourse about tradition’. In this article, I explore three central features of <i>Làmb</i> songs: the use of poetic personas; \"out of time narration\"; and the recitation of praise poetry. By implementing these stylistic techniques inside and outside of the arena, local musicians continually create a meta-discourse about the meaning of tradition.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"33 3","pages":"330-349"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135206091","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":"Unruly speech: Displacement and the politics of transgressionBy SaskiaWitteborn, Stanford University Press. 2023. 250 pages. £17.31 (Softback); £65.74 (Clothbound). ISBN: 9781503634305, 1503634302","authors":"James McMurray","doi":"10.1111/jola.12407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12407","url":null,"abstract":"Journal of Linguistic AnthropologyEarly View BOOK REVIEW Unruly speech: Displacement and the politics of transgressionBy Saskia Witteborn, Stanford University Press. 2023. 250 pages. £17.31 (Softback); £65.74 (Clothbound). ISBN: 9781503634305, 1503634302 James McMurray, Corresponding Author James McMurray [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-6521-3507 Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UKSearch for more papers by this author James McMurray, Corresponding Author James McMurray [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0001-6521-3507 Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 18 September 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12407Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES I. Bellér-Hann, and C. Hann, eds. 2020. The Great Dispossession: Uyghurs between Civilizations, Vol 42. Münster: LIT Verlag. Frangville, V. 2022. “Testimonies and the Uyghur Genocide Metanarrative: Some Reflections from the Field.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12(2): 413–420. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"168 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135207502","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}