Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

Abstract

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically 'translated' sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, 'transformed' so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something 'of Hawaiian' and not 'of white capitalists'. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making 'sustainability' an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…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 ).…”