In lieu of “keywords”: Toward an anthropology of rapport

Abstract

The identification of socioculturally important "keywords" remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of "keyword projects" as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key "words" emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer-grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally "key" within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of "rapport," it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond "keyword talk" to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about "keyness" itself.

Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay‐speaking archipelago

“…3 For a complementary angle on Shamsul's (2001, 355-357) "authority-defined discourses," see Goebel's (2019, 4) account of "authorization frameworks" in Indonesia. 4 For an abbreviated genealogical account of the relations obtaining between units of form and units of senseand one written for a general anthropological readership -see Carruthers (2023). 5 To highlight one of the grammatical-categorial distinctions made by Whorf, this in turn means that the noun/verb distinction in Malay is important on a "modulus," not "selective" basis (Whorf, 1956, 99; see also Asmah, 1968;Teeuw, 1962).…”

Learning Putonghua, (not) becoming Chinese: “Sinicized” figures and intersectional personae on Tibetan peripheries

“…One can regularly “pick up ongba ”, “dry lciba ”, and “flatten out rilma ”, but one is not supposed to handle any of the above with Skyag‐pa . This lexical “configurative rapport” (Carruthers, 2023; Lucy, 1996) is common sense for most competent Amdo Tibetan speakers. It is also widely known that Han Chinese migrants or tourists who appear in the region do not share this linguistic‐ and (meta)semiotic competence.…”