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$C:\Documents and Settings\Mada\Pulpit\Pragmatics\Pragmatics13$ Pragmatics 13:4.453-456 (2003) International Pragmatics Association INTRODUCTION Janina Fenigsen In recent years, the role of language ideologies in charting, incorporating and legitimizing sociolinguistic fields and identities has attracted considerable attention (Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998; Silverstein 2003). Work in this direction has been centrally concerned with relationship between metapragmatic representations and the pragmatic phenomena observable from other - usually academic - vantage points in language use, and with the ways language ideologies are situated in the political economic fields of their production and circulation. Theoretical approaches that have defined this line of inquiry focus on misrecognition (Bourdieu 1991), on the semiotic limits of awareness (Silverstein 2001[1977]), and on the semiotic processes that contribute to disjunctions between metapragmatic representation and pragmatic practice (Irvine and Gal 2000; Silverstein 1995). The present volume is a set of ethnographic and theoretical explorations of processes involved in ideologizing linguistic boundaries, hierarchies and communities.1 The articles seek to critically examine these conceptualizations, to probe the analytic purchase to be gained from their various integrations, and to explore the relative weight of political and formal semiotic factors in shaping language ideologies. Drawing on experimental and ethnographic evidence of students and teachers’ recognition of polynomy in the orthographic system, Jaffe shows that new forms of misrecognition are engendered by the paradigm’s implementation in educational settings. We examine these issues and phenomena within multiple contexts, sites and practices. Janina Fenigsen considers political economic and semiotic factors and processes that collude in the regimentation and entextualization of representations of sociolinguistic diversity in the Barbadian media and popular literature. Fenigsen suggests that by refracting and simplifying linguistic practices in a creole continuum, these representations regiment Bajan Creole and Barbadian English as socially marked language varieties. Reconsidering Silverstein’s semiotic paradigm of limits of awareness, Fenigsen identifies pragmatic phenomena liminally available to awareness that contribute to, and mask the disjuncture 1 The earlier drafts of the articles have been presented at the invited session, “Misrecognition, Linguistic Awareness, and Linguistic Ideologies: Ethnographies and Approaches,” American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings, New Orleans, LA, November 21, 2002, co-sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and General Anthropology Division. We would like to acknowledge the contributions of other participants in the session, Tony Berkley, Patrick Eisenlohr, and Ben Zimmer as well as the helpful comments from the discussants, Susan Gal, Kathryn Woolard, and Jim Wilce. 454 Janina Fenigsen between metapragmatic ideology and pragmatic practices. Brigittine French examines struggles between linguistic experts - foreign and local - over authority in the representation of Mayan languages in Guatemala, their competing social and political goals, and the role of phonetic and syntactic analyses - the privileged and rarified domains of linguistic knowledge - in the construction of linguistic sameness and difference. French finds the examination of “expert” regimentation of Mayan languages to suggests a reconsideration of Silverstein’s paradigm as further mediated by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses. Adi Hastings considers processes of linguistic simplification involved in the institutional revival of spoken Sanskrit in contemporary India. The revival, initiated by privately-funded movements that conceptualize/imagine Sanskrit as a lingua franca remedy for the nation’s problems with multilingualism and emblem of specifically Hindu nation, attempts to turn Sanskrit into a popular language of everyday conversation by subjecting it to a formal simplification. Hastings attends to the semiotic processes involved in the simplification and considers the extent to which misrecognition is an inherent part of the revivalist discourse that frames Sanskrit as an icon of the professed democratizing goals of the movement, an index of its aspiring speakers, and a link to a primordial golden Hindu age it seeks to recall and entail. Alexandra Jaffe discusses the shift in expert discourses that underpin revitalization of Corsican, from the one that by privileging diglossia reproduced socially divisive dominant language hierarchies to a “polynomic” paradigm intended as inclusive and non- hierarchical. In a turn disappointing to those of us still politically na Vve, Jaffe identifies new forms of misrecognition engendered by the paradigm’s implementation in educational settings. As we know from other historical lessons in attempts at engineering social equality, by recursively mapping themselves onto new kinds of relationships social hierarchies can be remarkably resistant and resilient. In a similar vein, Anita Puckett considers the semiotic and political processes of misrecognition implicated in the scholarly construction of Appalachian English as a regional dialect and its spin-offs, the dialect awareness programs. In the effort to counteract the stigma attached by the natives and outsiders to the local ways of speaking, sociolinguists have advocated the recognition of Appalachian dialect and its emblematic value as a part of the regional heritage of Appalachianness. As the authors of this well- intended exercise in ethnolinguistic validation (also see Silverstein 2003) now realize, the targeted native population has been largely reluctant to embrace the project. Puckett suggests that at blame are the processes of objectification and disembodiment involved in the expert construction of the generic code and in its simplistic ideological mapping onto likewise objectified population of its presumed speakers. She argues that, ironically, the movement reproduces the hegemonic and alienating relations and regimes of knowledge it hoped to unsettle. Finally, Dan Suslak describes the attempts at standardizing Mixe orthography as the vehicle of modern and autonomous Mixe polity in Mexico (you have guessed it right) failed by inter-community rivalries and dialectal diversity in Oaxaca. Under different political or historical circumstances, one could imagine the diversity of codes in Oaxaca designated as several different languages rather than a single “Mixe.” As in many other settings (Schieffelin and Doucet 1998), the struggle over orthography in Oaxaca is a struggle over the politics of representation. It is triangulated by complex politics of dependence and Introduction 455 autonomy between the local codes and their speakers and the relationship with Spanish. Several themes emerge from the consideration of these articles taken together and set against other research. First, in various ways, these contributions demonstrate the uses and utility of a theoretical approach that integrates the three theoretical approaches we have taken as our starting point. In ideologies of language representation, semiotic characteristics and processes are intertwined with the dynamics of political economic fields of these ideologies’ production and circulation. Next, and this is not the anticipated outcome of this collective enterprise, we highlight the problems (and failures) involved in the attempts at unsettling hegemonic regimes of knowledge and practice that motivate (socio)linguistic hierarchies, whether undertaken by the experts or by the native animators of self-mobilizing movements (Silverstein 2003). These findings raise important questions about factors and forces that underpin such discouraging outcomes. And, even at this point we can offer some insights. First, to restate, the academic discourses of misrecognition should not be taken to imply an existence of some primordial truth about language, social collectives and relationships between them. The regimes of knowledge, including our own, are always situated and motivated by particular interests of those who participate in their production, circulation, consumption and legitimization. Misrecognition, then, only obtains in relationship to interpretive frameworks, interests and goals of those positioned within the political economic and cultural fields that are implicated in particular contexts of practice. In other words, there is no cathartic “gotcha” moment in sight. Next, and perhaps more importantly, many of these revitalization and revaluation projects seem premised on the regimes of knowledge and value they seek to undermine. They are motivated by well-meaning neo-liberal ideologies of diversity and its tolerance that posit and creatively entail ethnolinguistic entities. The recipients of this liberal largesse, however, are inevitably immersed in the hierarchies of centers and peripheries. The question, then, is whether these somewhat quaint hegemonic regimes are not preferable, after all, to non-apologetic Nietzschean discourses of unmitigated right to domination and supremacy. References Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) Language and symbolic power. John B. Thompson (ed.), G. Raymond and M. Adamson (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal (2000) Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities . Santa Fe NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 35-84. Kroskrity,

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