All intimate grammars leak: Reflections on "indian languages in unexpected places"

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 161-172

  Kroskrity, Paul V ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959545834     PISSN: 01616463     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17953/aicr.35.2.y8741385m74gh055     Document Type: Note

References (40)

1. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).
2. The notion comes from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1903), which obviously treats the specifics of what was then referred to as "the Negro problem." The applicability of this concept to Native American groups and individuals suggests the utility of developing this concept to fit the consequences of racialization, racism, and the experience of hegemonic pressure that have affected the indigenous peoples of North America better. I would contend that so much attention has been paid to an "othering" of Native Americans by scholars (and their attendant erasure of social inequality) that there has been a failure to appreciate Native awareness of Euro-American practices and Native syncretic projects involving the combination of different cultures.
3. The famous Sapir quote, from his textbook Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921, p. 38), was concerned with the internal consistency of languages: "The fact of grammar, a universal trait of language, is simply a generalized expression of the feeling that analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms. Were a language ever completely 'grammatical,' it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak."
4. But despite the formal linguistic origins of the notion of grammatical leakage, my interest here, as in the case of Anthony Webster's development of "intimate grammar" is very much social in nature (see Webster, "'Please Read Loose': Intimate Grammars and Unexpected Languages in Contemporary Navajo Literature," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 [2011]: 62).
5. We need, in my view, to develop a relevant notion of leakage that would be maximally useful in contemporary applications. Such a notion would focus on the leakage of languages and identities that occur within linguistic repertoires as well as what I have called "repertoires of identities" in my book Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993).
6. Webster's notion of intimate grammars ("On Intimate Grammars: With Examples from Navajo English, Navlish, and Navajo," Journal of Anthropological Research 66, no. 2 [2010]: 187-208)
7. builds upon Elizabeth Povinelli's "Intimate Grammars: Anthropological and Psychoanalytic Accounts of Language, Gender, and Desire," in Language, Culture, and Society, eds. Christine Jourdan and Kevin Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 190-206;
8. Michael Herzfeld's Cultural Intimacy (New York: Routledge, 1997).
9. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Press, 1971).
10. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971). Ibid., 11.
11. See Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
12. Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (2006). Ibid., 231.
13. See Barbra Meek's "And the Injun Goes 'How!': Representations of American Indian English in White Public Space," Language in Society 35 (2006): 93-128; (Pubitemid 43388779)
14. Barbra A. Meek, "Failing American Indian Languages," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011): 43-60.
15. For more on Standard Language Ideology and its dual function in elevating national "standard" languages while deprecating minority languages, see Rosina Lippi-Green's English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (London: Routledge, 1997);
16. James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (London: Routledge, 1999).
17. Nancy Dorian, "Western Language Ideologies and Small Language Prospects," in Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response, ed. Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3-21.
18. Jane H. Hill, "Structure and Practice in Language Shift," in Progression and Regression in Language: Sociocultural, Neuropsychological and Linguistic Perspectives, ed. Kenneth Hyltenstam and Åke Viberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68-93.
19. Paul V. Kroskrity, "Language Renewal as Sites of Language Ideological Struggle: The Need for 'Ideological Clarification,'" in Indigenous Language Revitalization: Encouragement, Guidance and Lessons Learned, ed. Jon Reyhner and Louise Lockard (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University Press, 2009), 71-83.
20. I am using the notion of "counterlanguage" developed by Marcyliena Morgan in Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Certainly, there are particular historical circumstances that inform the development of African American counterlanguage, such as its use as a deliberately ambiguous code during slavery, that do not apply to Native American groups. But I think there is a similarity of indexical meanings relating to the production of counterhegemonic cultures and identities that seem to be especially relevant here.
21. On the notion of "professional language ideologies," or those beliefs and feelings about language that become a part of a field's disciplinary surround, see my chapter, "Language Ideologies in the Expression and Representation of Arizona Tewa Ethnic Identity," in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000), 329-59.
22. "Language Ideologies in the Expression and Representation of Arizona Tewa Ethnic Identity," in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity (2000), Ibid., 6.
23. Deborah House, Language Shift among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).
24. This liberating effect of verbal art is a rather common feature of many genres that permit their performers to say things that they would not otherwise be able to say. For a well-known example from a far different cultural context, see Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
25. Erin Debenport, "'As the Rez Turns': Anomalies within and beyond the Boundaries of a Pueblo Community," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011): 87-109.
26. For discussion of Pueblo storytelling as a moral activity as well as for some discussion about evidentials, see Paul V. Kroskrity, "Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2010): 40-56.
27. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 225.
28. See, e.g., Ken Hale, "Strict Locality in Local Language Media: An Australian Example," in The Green Book of Language Revitalization and Practice, ed. Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001), 277-83.
29. See also Stephen Greymorning, "Reflections on the Arapaho Language Project, or When Bambi Spoke Arapaho and Other Tales of Arapaho Language Revitalization Efforts," in Hinton and Hale, The Green Book of Language Revitalization, 287-98.
30. For more on the interaction of indigenous language ideologies with those imposed by those of the nation-state, see Paul V. Kroskrity and Margaret C. Field, eds., Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009).
31. Michael Silverstein, "Encountering Language and the Languages of Encounter in North American Ethnohistory," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6 (1996): 126-44.
32. Andersonian here refers to the views of political scientist Benedict Anderson and his highly influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
33. The notion of iconization involves the naturalization of particular languages as symbols of specific identities. For an example, consider standard American English and its use as an icon of US national identity. This notion is developed in Judith Irvine and Susan Gal, "Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation," in Kroskrity, Regimes of Language, 35-83.
34. Lisa Philips, "Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011): 22.
35. Lisa Philips, "Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011), Ibid., 23.
36. Lisa Philips, "Unexpected Languages: Multilingualism and Contact in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century North America," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011), Ibid., 36.
37. See Nancy Dorian's arguments about how the "onerous" and "impossible" image of bilingualism, fostered by many nation-states, has destroyed this as a possibility for many would-be minority-language speakers. See also Ronald Schmidt, "Defending English in an English Dominant World: The Ideology of the 'Official English' Movement in the United States," in Discourses of Endangerment, ed. Alexandre Duchene and Monica Heller (London: Continuum, 2007), 197-215.
38. For an excellent treatment of Herder and his theories of language and identity, see Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, "Language, Poetry and the Volk," in Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163-96.
39. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 231.
40. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, Ibid., 10.