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.

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