{"title":"The passion of butterflies: Notes on “translating” a Navajo poem by Rex Lee Jim","authors":"Anthony K. Webster","doi":"10.1111/jola.70059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70059","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay honors three kinds of tradition. The first tradition is the poetry of Rex Lee Jim. The second tradition is the translation work of Blackhorse Mitchell. The third tradition is the discourse-centered and ethnopoetic tradition of linguistic anthropology. I do this by focusing on a brief poem in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim. I then discuss a translation of the poem by Blackhorse Mitchell and his influence on a translation that I did. I follow this by placing the poem within a particular Navajo view concerning ‘butterflies.’ In the final section, I offer reflections on linguistic anthropology and on the life of poetry.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70059","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174223","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":"Delomization, or the esoteric Nechung kang so, the Dalai Lama, and exilic imaginings of a Tibetan community","authors":"Urmila Nair","doi":"10.1111/jola.70054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I propose the concept of <i>delomization</i>, the process whereby a sign comes to be understood as a symbol. I term such signs <i>delomes</i>. With rhematization and dicentization, delomization completes the triplet that linguistic anthropologists derive from Charles Sanders Peirce's third trichotomy. The triplet serves in analyzing <i>how social actors' reflexive understandings of signs may shape social orders and cultural worlds</i>. Delomization serves to explain the Nechung monks' practice of the <i>kang so</i> (bskang gso) ritual in exile at Dharamsala, a practice integral to the ritual infrastructure underlying the institution of the Dalai Lamas. The monks routinely declare their inability to perform the ritual's requisite meditations. Yet their practice continues unimpeded. Given that the monks deem such meditation opaque to observers, I argue that the perceptible ritual performance is <i>simply accepted as a symbol—a delome</i>—of the requisite, imperceptible meditations. Delomization in the Nechung <i>kang so</i> then helps perpetuate the social role of the Nechung monk, independent of ritual adeptness. Ultimately, this delomization is imbricated in processes that yield an exilic imagining of a Tibetan community, as unified by a collective karma that is protected by the god Nechung and rhematized, dicentized, and delomized in the Dalai Lama's person.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70054","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174143","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":"Speaking with the dead: An ethnography of extrahuman experience By Brooklyn Matt Tomlinson, NY: Punctum Books. 2024. 191 pages","authors":"Debasmita Ghosh","doi":"10.1111/jola.70065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70065","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174144","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":"Etymology and entomology: The semiotics and ethics of multispecies gene nomenclatures","authors":"Colin M. E. Halverson","doi":"10.1111/jola.70058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70058","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines controversies surrounding gene names that are perceived as humorous in the context of fruit flies but are considered rude in the clinical context of human medicine. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in insect laboratories, interviews with entomologists and geneticists, and an analysis of scientific and clinical commentaries, I show how gene names coined as jocular mnemonics by drosophilists become the source of moralizing metapragmatic discourse when conserved genes circulate in the patient-facing context of genetic testing. I identify three semiotic functions of these multispecies gene names: a referential function that stabilizes genetic homology across clades; a descriptive function that encodes the phenotypic consequences of prototypical mutations; and a performative function through which naming enacts in-group membership. This third function renders gene names sensitive to audience and context, causing them to become taboos when they enter the trading zone of translational medicine. I show how clinicians, professional organizations, and journal editors respond by creating “avoidance nomenclatures” and imposing a sort of diglossic distribution of naming practices to be used at both bench- and bedside. I argue that extrascientific norms of politeness can motivate linguistic standardization of scientific dialects just as compellingly as do epistemic demands for clarity and universality.</p>","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jola.70058","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148166918","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":"Rainforest radio: Language reclamation and community media in the Ecuadorian Amazon By Georgia C. Ennis, Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 2025. 296 pages","authors":"Yuichi Asai","doi":"10.1111/jola.70063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70063","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148174869","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":"Kill talk and the (re)humanization of self and other Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics by Janet McIntosh, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025, 339 pages. ISBN: 9780197808054","authors":"Gregory A. Thompson","doi":"10.1111/jola.70060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.70060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47070,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Linguistic Anthropology","volume":"36 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2026-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148094675","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":"Making science (in)communicable: Lingering secondary effects of COVID-19 discourse","authors":"Charles L. Briggs","doi":"10.1111/jola.70049","DOIUrl":"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":"","authors":"","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"148063201","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":"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":"","authors":"","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"148093583","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}