Singing for the dead, on and off line: Diversity, migration, and scale in Mexican Muertos music

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…Linguistic anthropologists have remained skeptical of these epochal claims and “new” theoretical moves (Faudree ; Moore ; Reyes ), pointing out that previous generations of scholars had already focused on, and theorized, precisely these issues and, more critically, that such epochal claims misconstrue shifts in ideological and institutional regimes particular to contemporary Europe (how European nation‐states, in particular, “see” diversity) for shifts in demographic or sociolinguistic diversity per se . As Michael Silverstein () points out in reviewing English's long history of language contact and in revisiting his now 40‐plus‐year‐old work on 18th‐ and 19th‐century Chinookan jargon, there is nothing particularly new about “superdiversity” as sociolinguistic condition (cf.…”

“…Spurred by such critical engagements, recent conversations among linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists have shifted and extended the focus of such new paradigms to worrying projects of diversity and authenticity as ethnographic data. Linguistic anthropologists, for example, have interrogated the pragmatics of “diversity talk”—metasemiotic practices that take diversity as their object of focus (Faudree and Schulthies )—in multiple contexts, from indigenous cultural and linguistic revitalization projects in Mexico (Faudree ) to pan‐Arab media spectacles (Schulthies ), as well as exploring the metasemiotic frames (Wilce and Fenigsen :137) that orient projects of authenticity, analyzing ethnographic objects as diverse as the psychotherapeutic self (Smith ), coffee shops (Perrino ), cheese and rugs (Heller ), anime characters’ vocal quality (Starr ), and regional (Johnstone ; Silverstein ) and age‐linked speech registers (Eckert ).…”

“…In short, Schulthies's study elucidates the dialectics of diversity, detailing how particular projects of diversity and the ideological frameworks they presuppose construe and reanalyze a particular indexical field of sameness and difference, whereby linguistic and regional diversity is refigured as an economic asset. Further, she shows how in doing so such projects enable a range of pragmatic activities (of television producers, hosts, contestants, and viewers) that thereby come to reconfigure and “shift” (Faudree :33) both the speech forms that circulate on and off the air (viz. linguistic diversity) and the ways in which such forms are indexically meaningful, in this case, what “Arabness” may comprise.…”

“…We can parse this vibrant area of research into, on the one hand, the study of (meta)semiotic practices that constitute capitalist organizational forms such as corporations (Cohen ; Urban and Koh ) and the bearers of value to which they orient, such as commodities (Faudree ; Kockelman ; Wilf ) and brands (Agha ; Gershon ; Koh , , ; Shankar ; Urban ; Wang ), and, on the other hand, literatures on the commodification of language and other emblems of identity (Faudree , ; Heller ; Henne‐Ochoa and Bauman :144–145; Johnstone ) and neoliberal ideologies of subjectivity and language (Cohen ; Hall ; Holborow ; Park ; Urciuoli ). Much of the latter discussion has focused on the ways in which global English has increasingly been linked to expanding neoliberal market logics under conditions of globalization (Hiramoto and Park ; LaDousa ; Price ; Proctor ; Zentz ).…”

“…This felt tension is most pronounced, unsurprisingly, among those who are liminally placed between such regimes of indexicality, be they migrant workers (Bae ; Hiramoto ; Park ), youth (LaDousa ), marginalized groups, or some combination thereof (Proctor ; Said‐Sirhan ). While often anxiety‐inducing (Hall ; Park ) and indicative of exclusionary practices and forms of inequality, such ambivalent framings are also potentially productive—not simply for those flexible workers who can successfully manage this terrain but also for capital itself, as when identities of various kinds come to be linked to projects of profit (Faudree , ; Heller ; Johnstone ; Wang ).…”