The potential complexity of “universal ownership”: Cultural property, textual circulation, and linguistic fieldwork

Debenport, Erin

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2009.11.001

Cited by 49 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…I had spent seven years working as part of the San Ramón Pueblo 4 language program and have advised projects at Pojoaque and Nambe Pueblos, which provided me with knowledge of the grammar and phonology of Kiowa-Tanoan languages, the family to which Southern Tiwa belongs. Like my previous work (Debenport, 2010a(Debenport, , 2010b(Debenport, , 2011(Debenport, , 2012(Debenport, , 2015(Debenport, , 2017, I…”

Section: The History Of This Research Intersects With Applied Linguissupporting

confidence: 55%

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

Debenport

2018

AMAE Journal

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Discussions about migration, geography, and Indigenous language use are key ways that community members perform, negotiate, and contest identities and politics in multilingual Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a federally-recognized Native nation located within the city of El Paso, Texas. This linguistic anthropological piece illustrates how tribal members creatively use local ways of speaking and the indexing of language ideologies to critique hegemonic discourses that constrain tribal members' Native identities and call into question the tribe's status as an Indigenous community. Through "indexing"-or pointing to-dominant and emergent narratives about place and language, Ysletans are able to enhance their visibility as a nation and their political and social influence in the region and beyond. Speech genres focusing on the 17 th century Pueblo revolt, the seizure of lands near the U.S.-Mexico border, and the loss of the tribe's Indigenous language allow community members to assert sovereignty, belonging, and indigeneity in the face of these criticisms by Indian and non-Indian audiences.

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Section: The History Of This Research Intersects With Applied Linguissupporting

confidence: 55%

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

Debenport

2018

AMAE Journal

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“…Over a decade ago, Jane Hill's () critical comments on themes used by anthropologists and linguists to elicit support for endangered language preservation in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (Chafe ; Dorian ; England ; Fishman ; Hinton ) sparked a broader conversation about “discourses of endangerment” (Duchêne and Heller ) and their implications for language communities around the world (Debenport ; Dobrin et al. ; Errington ; Garrett ; Meek :136–154; Moore ; Muehlmann ; Nevins :47–78; Perley ; Suslak ; Whiteley ).…”

Section: Language Culture and Community In Endangered Language Advomentioning

confidence: 99%

The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities

Schwartz

2018

J Linguistic Anthropol

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A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of “culture” to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology's contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like “language is the core of culture” and “when a language dies, a culture dies” are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities’ efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti‐essentialist and counter‐nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages. [advocacy rhetoric, dormant language communities, language and culture ideologies, agency, Chiwere]

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“…This might have been expected given a growing list of Tewa complaints about Hopi discrimination, feelings of disenfranchisement by some Tewa, and a fluorescence of Tewa micro-nationalism which may pose new challenges to a Hopi dominated political system on First Mesa in which Tewa Villagers are not represented as a discrete community. But apart from the current political tensions and, of course, Tewa language endangerment as exacerbating forces in the present, there is the much older, kiva-related, discourse convention of viewing Tewa linguistic knowledge and specific linguistic practices as something to be dispensed and propagated on a need-to-know basis rather than in accord with some neoliberal notion of free textual circulation (Debenport, 2010).…”

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confidence: 98%

Borders traversed, boundaries erected: Creating discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa

Kroskrity¹

2014

Language & Communication

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The potential complexity of “universal ownership”: Cultural property, textual circulation, and linguistic fieldwork

Cited by 49 publications

References 13 publications

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities

Borders traversed, boundaries erected: Creating discursive identities and language communities in the Village of Tewa

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