© 2012 Steven M. Maas WELSHNESS POLITICIZED, WELSHNESS SUBMERGED: THE POLITICS OF ‘POLITICS’ AND THE PRAGMATICS OF LANGUAGE COMMUNITY IN NORTH-WEST WALES BY STEVEN M. MAAS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Janet D. Keller, Chair Professor Walter Feinberg Associate Professor Michèle Koven Professor Alejandro Lugo Professor Andrew Orta ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the normative construction of a politics of language and community in north-west Wales (United Kingdom). It is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily between January 2007 and April 2008, with central participant-observation settings in primary-level state schools and in the teaching-spaces and hallways of a university. Its primary finding is an account of the gap between the national visibility and the cultural (in)visibility communities of speakers of the indigenous language of Wales (Cymraeg, or “Welsh”). With one exception, no public discourse has yet emerged in Wales that provides an explicit framework or vocabulary for describing the cultural community that is anchored in Cymraeg. One has to live those meanings even to know about them. The range of social categories for living those meanings tends to be constructed in ordinary conversations as some form of nationalism, whether political, cultural, or language nationalism. Further, the negatively valenced category of nationalism current in English-speaking Britain is in tension with the positively valenced category of nationalism current among many who move within Cymraeg- speaking communities. Thus, the very politics of identity are themselves political since the line between what is political and what is not, is itself subject to controversy. The result is what I call the “submergence” of Cymraeg-oriented cultural communities: People who would say Cymraeg is an essential part of their personality and communities mark out cultural space for their sense of continuity (to the past, to others) in ways that do not require or enable them to make any substantive cultural claims. Within these settings of a modalized Welsh culture—always only partially expressed— indigeneity and ethnic difference are symbolized by the emblematic and lived importance of Cymraeg, while the significance of Cymraeg tends to be implicitly conveyed by means of overt references to “Welshness”. This cultural submergence of the resources for Cymraeg-centered identity seems motivated and sustained by the fact that it produces a haven from holiday-goers and English patriots who do not value Welsh cultural features as highly as do those who take pride in the Cymraeg-centered cultural community. In light of these features of local life, I suggest several terms of art—including “language demesne” and “language corridor”—because they are more fitting of local politics than is the idea of a (global) language community. This dissertation also contributes a theoretical basis for examining the pragmatics of language communities, which requires differentiating phenomenal-level semiotic analyses from ii investigations of the dynamics of cultural discourse. The “obvious” empirical situation in Wales—as analyzed using a Peircean-phenomenological semiotics—runs contrary to the relatively opaque and counter-empirical cultural dynamics in Wales. As a result, this account of the tensions between semiotic descriptions and cultural dynamics signals a wrinkle in received theories of metapragmatics. Conventionally, metapragmatics makes sense of the text–discourse relation, but not the relations between discourse and consciousness because theories of metapragmatics apply only to the former. Unless the relationship of text-and-discourse to consciousness is explicated at the epistemological level of analysis, ethnographic descriptions of locales within language communities—particularly those rife with language politics—can take on the appearance of an ontology of human kinds. Given this condition, any broad account of the cultural dynamics of language and community must take an analytic position regarding the relationship between the surface-level of semiotics and the historical and cultural processes of community constitution. My approach engages directly with the neglected conflict between the strategy of primordialist essentialism and that of constructivism. The analytic strategy and theoretical perspective of this dissertation avoids the scholarly tendency to treat certain local conceptions as misconstruals of sociocultural life. Instead, they are treated as locally valid and proper constitutings of divisible community. Academics would be no less inclined to reject analogous conceptual entailments in their cultural worlds despite their commitment to the view that sociocultural realities are constructed. The position adopted here underwrites an account that denaturalizes without denaturing the essentializing claims (e.g., of language activists) in north- west Wales. In engaging with current analytic strategies in linguistic anthropology, my “inferentialist” and pragmatistic strategy frames the politicizing of language and community in north-west Wales using an alternative to linguistic indexes or icons, which are grounded in an empirical sense of necessity. The framework adopted here envisions an empirical field organized not only by necessary principles of Welsh belonging that are practiced or not, but by tensions among many different “modal” types of constraints—normative principles that are inferable from community-specific ways of enacting belonging to a particular sociocultural imaginary that owes its coherence to language affinity. Consequently, this dissertation treats languages themselves as inhabitable and provides a theoretical justification for doing so. iii FOR Gwyneth and Duncan One of whom came into this world and the other went out during the writing of this work. Each lent immeasurable meaning and purpose to this research in a comparably short period of time. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is no mark of distinction to have spent a quarter of your life on the training and research that go into a doctoral dissertation. In having done so, however, I now have the realization that many, many people were instrumental in helping me to reach that end—more than I can possibly name. Given that I am certain to neglect even some who were a boon in fairly important ways, I have decided to focus on the more recent years in which research and writing occurred—with notable exceptions. The foremost expression of my gratitude must go to the person who has provided the longest and most steadfast support over the years: my thesis supervisor and longtime mentor, Janet Keller. I can only attribute her willingness to read draft after draft to an untiring spirit and her long experience and gifted abilities in editing. I also owe a particular debt to the other members of my dissertation: Walter Feinberg, Michèle Koven, Alejandro Lugo, and Andy Orta. Apart from benefiting from Walter’s guidance, I have been privileged to work with him on his religious instruction project. His kindness has been a model for me of how a renowned scholar can encourage and teach younger scholars. Andy, like Janet, was “there” at the beginning, patiently helping me through my first teaching assistantship in anthropology. His dialogic mode of inquiry and examination of both practical and theoretical aspects of ethnography has pushed me in highly constructive ways. Outside of my dissertation committee, Alma Gottlieb was enormously helpful in editing and critiquing grant proposals. Mahir Saul read and wrote letters for many grant proposals, and offered many insights on theory and methodology. Helaine Silverman reviewed my Master’s thesis, which provided the groundwork for this project, and also edited two manuscripts intended for publication in edited volumes. For the guidance of these members of the cultural and linguistic faculty of the Department of Anthropology at this University, and all the rest who helped in other ways, I can hardly do them justice with mere words of gratitude. Beyond the cultural and linguistic anthropological faculty of my department, I would like to thank Ruth Anne Clark (Speech Communication), Larry Hubert (Psychology), and Barry Lewis (Archaeology, Department of Anthropology) for their considerable assistance with more structured kinds of data. The latter two, in particular, volunteered dozens of hours training me in the use of computer-assisted techniques and software that culminated in Chapter 7. While the broader findings there might deviate from their (and my original) expectations of what I intended v to do with the structured data, what I learned from each of these three professors cannot fit in a single chapter. In addition, I benefited greatly from the work of organizers and discussants on many conference panels, including the North American Association of Celtic Language Teachers, the Midwest Conference on Culture, Language, and Cognition at Northwestern University, the American Studies Symposium at Purdue University, the Central States Anthropology Society, the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association. I am thankful for Tim Pilbrow’s comments on draft presentations while we co-organized a AAA panel on memory work, history, and symbolic mediation at the early stages of this research. Anita