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- Convenors:
-
Tatsuma Padoan
(University College Cork)
Lijing Peng (Trinity College Dublin)
Julia Sonnleitner (University of Vienna)
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- Discussant:
-
Andrew Graan
(University of Helsinki)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/026
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the reciprocal production of place and language: How do places create specific subjectivities and temporalities through linguistic practice and material agency? And how do discourse and language ideology constitute space and endow subjectivities with differing degrees of agency?
Long Abstract:
In their recent work The Anthropology of the Future, Bryant and Knight (2019) have strongly connected Aristotle's notion of "potentiality"—described as the possibility of the future inscribed into the materiality of the present, as an immanent anticipation of what might or might not be—to Ernst Bloch's definition of hope centred on the "not-yet" (Noch-Nicht). In this panel, we would like to stimulate discussion on the potentialities of semiotic landscapes, not only by ethnographically exploring the prospective temporalities inherent in places—using notions like chronotope, semiosphere, affect, etc. to investigate spaces of hope—but also by pushing the concept of semiotic landscape itself further, exploring its "not-yet-realised" theoretical potentials. The concept of semiotic landscape, dealing with the textual and discursive construction of places and the use of space as a semiotic resource (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), has cast light on the interplay between language, visual discourse, spatial practices, and the spatial dimension of culture.
In this panel, we wish to extend such interplay by looking more closely at the role of language practices, language ideologies and material agency generated along spatial transformations. We welcome papers from linguistic and social anthropology (and related fields) to present ethnographic and theoretical discussions that enrich the study of semiotic landscapes. By connecting language practices, material agency, and language ideologies to the study of semiotic landscapes, we wish to draw attention to the potentialities of places to produce specific subjectivities and temporalities, but also to orient our potential actions, plans, future expectations and hopes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -John Leavitt (Université de Montréal)
Paper short abstract:
In both the Central Himalayan region and in a part of northwest Ireland, named places associated with form chronotopes that are “laid over” quotidian space. In one, these form a field of myths to be drawn on in ritual; in the other, they give a real/virtual setting for ancient story.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will compare two situations in which landscape features set the context for narrations involving an “other scene”: a sacral chronotope in one case, glimpses of a legendary past in the other. In both cases, the languages used are of the Indo-European family, and the traditions in question are relatively conservative; in both cases, stories and maps are made to correspond.
In the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon in northern India, rituals involving the local divinities begin with a “song to the twilight” in which a series of locations are named with a brief evocation of the god or gods associated with it. This virtual movement among mountains and vales sketches out a living mythology, a sacral scene co-present with quotidian concerns.
In the northern part of County Donegal in northwestern Ireland, a number of features—islands, headlands, beaches, valleys—bear names that link them to an oral legend first recorded in print in the early nineteenth century and that seems to be the preserved transform of a medieval Irish tale of pre-Christian origin.
In both cases, old stories, that is, stories that people today take to be old, are inscribed on the landscape. While in the Himalayas the landscape is mobilized as an immediate ritual resource, in the Irish case a scattering of place-names offers a coherent but ghostly and virtual presence of the past. In both, an “other scene” is laid across the surface of this world, offering possibilities of reorientation.
Steve Coleman (Maynooth University)
Paper short abstract:
In Teac Damsa's Mám, language is muted in favour of sound and movement as media of encounter within the landscape and soundscape of West Kerry. I explore the relation of these three media within Mám, and how Mám gains its tremendous power to "communicate and extend" the living forms or West Kerry.
Paper long abstract:
In Teac Damsa's 2019 production, Mám, contemporary dance and music encounters the landscape and soundscape of West Kerry. In its production process and in the show itself, language is muted in favour of sound and movement as media of encounter within the landscape and soundscape of West Kerry. Cosmopolitan contemporary dance and music meet locally embodied practices and sensibilities both within dance itself and in the dialogue between traditional musician Cormac Begley and the Berlin-based ensemble, s t a r g a z e. In this paper I explore the relationships between sound, movement and speech as media of encounter within the production of Mám. I argue that the muting of language enables us to evade dominant semiotic ideologies, creating a revelatory encounter between ourselves and the powerfully communicative congeries of forms we experience, such that we are brought into the presence of West Kerry itself as a newly-recognisable "semiotic landscape."
Marilena Frisone (University of Padua)
Paper short abstract:
By looking at how space, language ideologies and sounds are combined during a ritual performed by Nepalese followers of Tenrikyō, this paper intends to show how semiotic landscapes have the effect of shaping the subjectivity of practitioners, connecting them to a different place and hoped-for time.
Paper long abstract:
Every morning Nepalese followers of the Japanese New Religion called Tenrikyō (“Teachings of the Heavenly Wisdom”) gather in a small room in Kathmandu, and perform a ritual consisting in singing and dancing codified songs in old Japanese, while also playing traditional Japanese instruments and performing specific hand movements. Ritual songs and gestures indexically refer to the main shrine in Jiba, Tenri city (Japan)—the place where, according to them, God the Parent created humankind—and bring it present in the “here-and-now” (Silverstein 2004) of the space of performance in Nepal. Based on fifteen-month fieldwork, this paper intends to expand the concept of semiotic landscape in two directions, by looking at the specific temporalities it produces, and the language ideologies it entails. We will see how by singing and dancing the ritual, Nepalese followers enter a new temporality based on Tenrikyō teachings, which is future-oriented, towards the realisation of an ideal Joyous Life—conceived by them as a possible future for Nepal, imbued with hope for development and reconciliation of “tradition” and “modernity”. But they also participate in a new space, characterised by a different soundscape and specific gestural practices, subscribing to a language ideology which considers Japanese as the privileged medium for expressing Tenrikyō truths. I will thus show how, by including ritual space and language, the materiality of the instruments and their sounds during the ritual performance, semiotic landscapes have the effect of shaping the subjectivity of practitioners, connecting them to a different place and hoped-for time.
Julia Kowalski (University of Notre Dame)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on fieldwork with frontline workers in domestic violence centers in northern India to explore diverse language ideologies about how speech addresses violence, arguing that language ideologies are central to how people re-imagine the risks and potentials of relations violence's wake.
Paper long abstract:
Women’s movements around the world rely on both spatial and semiotic tools to imagine more just futures. Programs addressing gender violence, for example, have long focused on reconceptualizing the divisions between public and private—for example, liberating women from harmful private relationships. While such rhetoric relies upon spatial metaphors, these movements are also semiotic, relying on shared understandings of linguistic activity, or language ideologies. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with frontline workers in anti-domestic violence centers in northern India to explore how diverse language ideologies about how speech addresses violence complicate such spatializing metaphors. Such centers operated in a network shaped by powerful global framings of domestic violence that drew on ideologies of intervention that centered labeling “violence” in the past as a core interactive goal. As a result, when their interactive strategies did not explicitly label violence, frontline workers were treated as if they had failed to grasp the referential meaning and political importance of “violence” as a category. Such criticism was often spatial, accusing workers of sending vulnerable women “back” to the home. Yet workers’ interactive strategies relied on the ability of speech to call forth, rather than label, more caring relations in the future. With these strategies, they taught clients to transform families and communities. These findings suggest that language ideologies—and the complex connections they draw between relatedness, agency, and temporality—are at the core of the contested terms through which people re-imagine the risks and potentials of relations in the face of intimate violence.