AN42CH11-Urciuoli ARI 14 July 2013 12:20 Register: a language variety specific to a set of social actors engaged in some defining form of interaction (social, occupational, etc.) Enregisterment: the process by which registers continually develop from preexisting registers Metasemiotic: general semiotic (interpretive) principles organizing specific acts of cultural action and interpretation WHAT MAKES LANGUAGE INTO LABOR? As any good Marxist knows, what counts as labor is the place of work in an economic order. Under capitalism, workers exchange their labor for wages. In an earlier capitalism, wage labor generally went into the production of material goods, which were sold as commodities. Work, then, was generally thought of as physical labor and commodities as material goods. Under contemporary conditions of capitalism [or late capitalism or, after Harvey (1989), post-Fordism], the work may take the form of (rather stylized) interactive linguistic practices, as might the commodities. The difference lies in whether that practice is imagined as an act of communication emerging from social relations or imagined as what Cameron (2000a) calls communication skills, a form of linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991, Irvine 1989) valued in relation to its workplace utility (making such knowledge a specialized instance of cultural capital). In short, whether linguistic practices are social interaction or job skills depends on whether they are performed as labor and the extent of the speaker's agency in their production. Insofar as people sell their labor power, and insofar as the value of their labor power depends on their knowledge of particular linguistic practices, such practices become commodified (Heller 2010a,b; Heller & Duchêne 2012, Duchêne et al. 2013b). The commodification of language as labor, like other dimensions of the commodification of language, is nested firmly in the conditions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Harvey 2005) that structure the places and options available to workers. Language as neoliberal labor further presupposes the reimagining of the person of the worker as an assemblage of commodifiable elements, i.e., a bundle of skills (Urciuoli 2008). Language as a form of labor (like language as commodity) has material dimensions (Shankar & Cavanaugh 2012, pp. 360-62). If people are paid for language work, what constitutes work is likely to be objectified, especially when such work is considered a skill set subject to monitoring and assessment. Linguistic practice as a form of cultural capital is convertible to economic capital: People get paid for doing it. If they get paid for doing it under conditions that demonstrate an authentic or classy performance, their linguistic practices accumulate symbolic capital that can further maximize the conversion to economic capital (Bourdieu 1986). Recent work on branding (Moore 2003, Foster 2007, Meneley 2007, Manning 2010) examines the discursive work involved in the provision of market value to commodities, a process in which semiotic and material value ar...
In this article, I explore the ideological underpinnings of the Indian government's language policies in the school setting, and I investigate why they fail to be compelling to residents of Banaras, a city in North India. The multiple language markets that exist in India are incommensurate and subvert the government's language policies in multiple ways. By exploring the uneven quality of these markets, this article illustrates the especially complicated dilemmas in which postcolonial nation‐states are implicated.
A B S T R A C TWritten school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi-or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction -a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral. (Language politics, genre, language community, advertising, North India.)* While conducting fieldwork in Banaras, a city of approximately two million in North India, I decided to take the fourteen-hour train trip to Delhi, the national capital. There, I met with a retired official of one of the many school accreditation boards in India. We talked about schooling and language. I explained that most of the Banaras residents, students, teachers, and even school principals with whom I had been working were not aware of many of the topics she had mentioned. The retired official was not surprised, and she replied quite simply, "Education outside of Delhi is a disaster." Her statement constructed Delhi as a center, a place of order where the activities and aims of educational bureaucracies are known to its inhabitants; people who reside outside, in the periphery, are ignorant. On the return trip, I met a couple of middle-class appearance traveling from Delhi to Banaras to visit relatives. As the train slowed on its entry into Banaras, the man lifted the aluminum shade shielding us from the sun. His wife, glancing out of the window as she readied their things to disembark, exclaimed in Hindi, 'We have reached hell' (narak pahũc gaye hãĩ ). The clever woman enacted an arrival scenario whose ironic twist relied for its effect on Banaras's place in the periphery. She toyed with potential meanings of hell (narak), one contradicting Banaras's
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