- Convenors:
-
Dora Savoldi
(University of São Paulo)
Jan David Hauck (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel discusses challenges arising from ontological variation of language for documentation, revitalization, reclamation, pedagogy, and archiving, focusing on translation, transduction, and transformation as ontologically implicated crafts.
Long Abstract
The concept of language has received renewed attention recently as part of efforts to decolonize key epistemological tenets of anthropology, engaging with disjunctures arising from ethnographic and activist work in a deeper engagement with ontological variation—including the materiality, force, and cosmopolitical dimensions of language (Ferguson 2019; Hauck and Heurich 2018; Hauck 2023; Pennycook and Makoni 2020). This panel explores the implications of ontological variation for language documentation, archiving, revitalization, reclamation, and pedagogy, and attendant processes of translation, transduction, and transformation.
Many communities understand distinct languages/varieties to be ontologically nonequivalent, ‘different things’ (Course 2018)—a disjuncture that played a role in the failure of Occitan language revitalization (Costa 2025). By contrast, ontological differences may be motivating factors for revitalization initiatives and impact their forms. Indigenous Brazilian retomada experiences, for instance, are tied to cosmopolitical relations with more-than-human entities and territory (Bonfim and Durazzo 2023). What are the implications for language pedagogy when a language has autonomous agency (Echeverri 2023)? How can a song be archived if its voice is that of a dead ancestor (Heurich 2018) or the manifestation of the power of the universe (Lewy 2019)? What is at stake when everyday speech, verbal arts, metadata, and rights regimes are transmuted onto recorders, into repositories, and back into community life?
This panel invites ethnographically grounded papers that interrogate transformations of ‘language’ as it moves through different enunciative modes in everyday interaction, pedagogical and revitalization programs, and archival infrastructures. We are interested in how different natures or ontologies of language may collide or articulate with revitalization and documentation regimes, and attendant processes of translation (Silverstein 2003; Hanks and Severi 2014), transduction (Eisenlohr 2018), transmutation (Severi 2014), and co-operative transformation (Goodwin 2018). We want to explore the collaborative unmaking and remaking of language-objects and language-subjects across archives, classrooms, institutions, and ritual worlds.
Accepted papers
Session 2Paper short abstract
Based on research since May 2024 with a Timbira collective (Northern Jê), we analyze the transduction of verbal arts into pedagogical records. We explore how documenting chiefly oratory generates ontological frictions between ancestral agency and the bureaucratic 'Time of Major Projects'.
Paper long abstract
This paper discusses the challenges of linguistic documentation and reclamation within a Timbira collective (Northern Jê speakers) in southeastern Pará, Brazil. Adopting a perspective that understands "language" not as a fixed code, but as a cosmopolitical practice, we analyze how linguistic variations are navigated through three native generational times: the Time of War, the Time of the Brazil Nut, and the Time of Major Projects.
For these Timbira peoples (including Parkatêjê, Kyikatêjê, and Akrãtikatêjê groups), language is historically inextricable from the production of bodies, kinship, and Jê dualist social structures. However, the current "Time of Major Projects" imposes a documentation regime based on writing, normative grammar, and static archiving. This generates an ontological friction: how to document and teach verbal arts—skills fundamental to Jê chieftaincy, ritual, and the corporeal agency of the Time of War—within an archive that operates on the logic of static recording?
Based on collaborative ethnographic research with Indigenous researchers initiated in May 2024, we analyze how this collective attempts a difficult transduction: converting the potency of songs and the oratory of old warriors into documentary records and pedagogical materials, without the language losing its "force". We argue that for this Timbira collective, documentation is not merely preservation, but a reconstruction of a political mode of speaking capable of negotiating with the multiplicity of beings that inhabit their territories.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses the language reclamation initiative of an Afro-Brazilian reinado. The initiative is motivated by the need for inter-cosmic communication with more-than-human entities, which are incorporated in reinado sessions but speak a different language, Língua da Costa.
Paper long abstract
Much of the literature on language endangerment and revitalization documents language ideological tensions between utilitarian ideologies as drivers of language shift, and ideologies of language as indexing group identity as motivators for maintenance or revitalization (Kroskrity 2009). Both are based on the assumption of an ontological equivalence of languages (Course 2018; Hauck & Heurich 2018). All languages are commensurable.
In this presentation we will critically examine this assumption discussing language reclamation of the Língua da Costa (language of the coast) in an Afro-Brazilian community in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais. Língua da Costa is a contact language based on rural Brazilian Portuguese grammar with a largely African lexicon (Queiroz 1998). Recently, the first author of this paper was contacted by members of a reinado (Afro-Brazilian religious practice) in Divinópolis for assistance in the reclamation of Língua da Costa. The motivation was not only on grounds of its indexical function, but for fairly “utilitarian” reasons: Sessions of the reinado involve the incorporation of more-than-human entities, some of which spoke Língua da Costa. The inability to understand them led to a series of communicative disjunctures, compelling reinado members to seek help with language reclamation.
We will analyze those disjunctures to understand the practices of inter-cosmic translation within this setting. We will also discuss to what extent these practices might imply an ontological nonequivalence between Língua da Costa as being imbued with a cosmological force required for ritual efficacy, and Brazilian Portuguese, and how we might be able to analyze that difference methodologically.