bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Explaining Afro-Caribbean Social Mobility in the United States: Beyond the Sowell Thesis
Authors: James Winston
Published: December 2002

A considerable debate has surrounded the question of Afro-Caribbeans and their social mobility in the United States, much of it based on or written in response to the work of Thomas Sowell. The polemical purpose of a large portion of this literature has diminished its value: designed to deny or excuse American racism or to lay the blame for the sorry predicament of Afro-America on Afro-Americans themselves, it has operated in a historical vacuum as far as Afro-Americans are concerned. Equally so Afro-Caribbeans, whose history—largely ignored in studies of American and Afro-American history—is also, inexplicably, neglected in the large literature on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American immigration. The debate over Afro-Caribbean social mobility and Sowell's controversial arguments has been dominated by anthropologists and sociologists with little expertise or apparent interest in the history of Afro-Caribbeans and their immigration to the United States and little acquaintance with the historical experience of Afro-Americans. This historical vacuum must be filled if we are ever to make sense of the Afro-Caribbean experience and, in particular, the social mobility of black immigrants in the United States.
The Writings of Moïse (1898–1985): Birth, Life, and Death of a Narrative of the Great War
Authors: Hébrard Jean
Published: December 2002

For many historians, personal writings—whether correspondence, diary, or autobiography—are primarily of value as testimony. They become interesting to the scholar in proportion as they relate events (revolts, wars, celebrations, etc.) that the witnesses themselves often knew to be part of history. Personal papers can also illustrate the stages of a life that reveal shared experiences of members of a profession, a community, or some other group. The historian characteristically, though not always, tries to work with the text to reach the experience and its interpretation by the writer.
Writing Home, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengali Modernity
Authors: Mukhopadhyay Bhaskar
Published: December 2002

Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, “very much like the sky above our head,” in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers.
Craniums, Criminals, and the ‘Cursed Race': Italian Anthropology in American Racial Thought, 1861–1924
Authors: D'Agostino Peter
Published: December 2002

George Lipsitz, reflecting upon a growing body of American studies scholarship on whiteness, claims we now have a better understanding of “how people who left Europe as Calabrians and Bohemians became something called ‘whites' when they got to America.” As a summary of whiteness studies the statement is accurate. The verb “to become” in Lipsitz's assertion emphasizes the importance of deconstructing race in order to analyze it as an ideological and historical process. The statement implies, however, that European society did not also employ unstable hierarchical racial taxonomies. Indeed, the notion that it was in the United States where people defined by a European region or nation of origin became a race, isolates American racial thought from its Euro-American matrix.
Documenting History, Historicizing Documentation: French Military Officials' Ethnological Reports on Cilicia
Authors: Kaplan Sam
Published: December 2002

Archives are, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “the institutional sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process.” How this mediation structures the production of meaning, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other, is the major problematic of this article. I focus on how certain textual models and modes of representation impart a particular sense of purpose to the archives. That is, I am concerned with investigating how it is that texts are construed as documents that are destined for state archives. This project requires questioning how documents are made credible and authoritative in their myriad social contexts, in order to understand the relation between historicity and power relations. To study the potential impact of archival documents thus requires re-evaluating the uneasy relationship between documentary practices, canons of representation, politics, and scholarship.
Faulty Deployments: Persuading Women and Constructing Choice in Egypt
Authors: Asdar Ali Kamran
Published: December 2002

The aim of this paper is to discuss how in the wider context of capital expansion and accumulation in the late twentieth century development initiatives in general, and family planning in particular, have helped to train and produce new bodies and selves. Using the Egyptian case as an example, I argue that family planning programs do not just reduce the number of children and regulate reproduction; they also introduce or foster notions of individual choice and responsibility, risk aversion, and personal independence. In short, they help to construct a new kind of individuality which is guided by legal constructs of citizenship rather than by communitarian and familial control. Such a construction must be further situated within the global political economy that reorganizes markets and labor relations, and subsequently requires individuals to abstractly self-regulate themselves and respond to the pressures of want and self-interest (Scott 1995:211).
Editorial Foreword
Authors: Trautmann Thomas R.
Published: December 2002

PROPERTY In so many ways property is a category of heightened importance just now. Property has become newly strange as it expands into unfamiliar places and develops novel kinds. The exchange of communism for capitalism in Eastern Europe; the claim of property rights over their own culture by indigenous peoples in Melanesia; and the ownership of bodily tissue significant for biomedical research in New Guinea are among the property issues that have been aired in CSSH (see Katherine Verdery, “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 1990–1994,” 1995:625–69; Simon Harrison, “From Prestige Goods to Legacies: Property and the Objectification of Culture in Melanesia,” 2000:662–79; and Warwick Anderson, “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange,” 2000:713–44). In our first two articles property under colonialism and after slavery come under scrutiny.
Debating the Land Question in Africa
Authors: Berry Sara
Published: December 2002

In February 2000, twenty years after their victories brought Rhodesia's ruling white regime to the conference table, veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation began to occupy some of the large privately owned commercial farms that controlled Zimbabwe's most valuable land. During the next few weeks, thousands of people followed suit: by May, nearly a third of the country's large-scale commercial farms had been seized (New York Times, 27 May 2000; Moyo 1998). Armed with a court order, landowners demanded that the “squatters” be evicted, but the police demurred, and President Mugabe refused to order them to carry out the court's instructions. A few weeks earlier, voters had rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have strengthened the President's powers to seize white-owned land, without compensation, for redistribution to land-hungry blacks. Angry over the deteriorating economy, rising levels of corruption, and Zimbabwe's costly involvement in Congo's civil war, a majority of those who voted were unwilling to increase the President's powers, even if they supported the cause of land reform. When the veterans took matters into their own hands, Mugabe lost no time in associating with their cause. He, in turn, was accused by Western governments, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and the international press, of sacrificing the rule of law in order to save his own political skin.
1848 in 1998: The Politics of Commemoration in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia
Authors: Brubaker Rogers , Feischmidt Margit
Published: December 2002

The year 1998 marked the 150th anniversary of the cascading wave of revolution that swept across Europe in the spring of 1848. Like all great upheavals (indeed like all great events, personalities, or works of art), the revolutions of 1848 do not contain their own meaning. Powerful cultural objects—whether events, persons, or cultural creations—are always ambiguous: indeed that ambiguity, according to Griswold (1987a) is a key part of what constitutes their power. Such objects always offer rich and varied, though not unlimited, interpretive possibilities. It is now widely agreed that the meanings of such cultural objects are not fixed, given, or uniquely ascertainable, but instead are created and recreated in different times, places, and settings through a series of “interactions” or “negotiations” between the objects and their socially situated, culturally equipped, and often politically engaged interpreters (Hall 1980; Griswold 1987a, 1987b; Liebes and Katz 1996).
Legal and Political Discourse in Seventeenth-Century Venice
Authors: Walker Jonathan
Published: December 2002

In a recent CSSH article, Jutta Sperling argued that in early modern Venice, political theory was a hermetically enclosed linguistic system, characterized by paradoxes and tautologies. In what we might describe as a “deconstruction” of the so-called “myth of Venice,” Sperling argued that it collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which reveal it to be “non-sensical.” The insistence that Venice was a perfect state not only prevented nobles from dealing effectively with conspicuous consumption and electoral corruption but made it impossible for them to admit to the real source of their problems without destroying their claims to legitimacy. In particular, Sperling singles out the demographic and social consequences of a commitment to lineal purity among nobles, resulting in limited marriage, inflated dowries, the enforced placement of women in nunneries, and increasing economic divisions within a nobility whose official ideology remained one of Republican equality.
Explaining Peasant-Farmer Hegemony in Redistributive Politics: Class-, Trade-, and Asset-Based Approaches
Authors: Horowitz Shale
Published: December 2002

What are the most important cleavages created by political struggles over redistributive economic policies? What are the likely policy outcomes of these struggles? The classic answer to the first question is that the most important cleavage is that of class, dividing rich and poor. The class-based model is usually not taken to yield clear predictions about outcomes, because rich and poor would be expected to engage in an inconclusive bidding war for the support of the median voter or pivotal middle stratum. A more recent answer is that the most important cleavages will reflect the position of a given country in the international economy, pitting those benefiting from international trade against those hurt by it. This trade-based model yields stronger predictions about outcomes, since there is usually a clear majority that either does or does not benefit from international trade. Finally, there is a long, though loose, tradition that largely grows out of empirical observation. This emphasizes the pivotal role that the agricultural population appears to play in the more important political battles concerning institutional development and economic policy.
Ann Anagnost. National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Authors: Chao Emily
Published: December 2002

Ann Anagnost's National Past-times is a collection of exceptionally perceptive essays addressing issues of governmentality: the language, workings and limits of state power; the formation of revolutionary subjects; the representation of national history in contemporary post-socialist China. The essays in this rich collection interrogate state discourse in a myriad of ways, drawing upon newspaper accounts, films, literature, and fieldwork encounters. Subtle changes in the language of state discourse are discussed in relation to how transitions from the superstructural determinism of the Maoist era to evolutionary notions of modernity in the post-Mao era are used to structure normative practice and transform the population into a disciplined labor force ready for global investment. An analysis of governance at the local level reveals how political rituals, such as the bestowal of status awards, actually distribute people into a moral hierarchy while simultaneously creating the appearance of the party and the people speaking in a unified voice. The controversial one-child family policy is interrogated in terms of state and popular understanding of ‘population quality,' a notion drawing on eugenics, commodities as markers of social evolution, fears of disorder, and national progress. A film tracing a rural woman's search for justice is the departure point for probing the workings of rural governance structures, personalized power, and forms of agency enabled by the market economy. The contemporary theme park “Splendid China” is analyzed as a narration of national identity that erases the Maoist era and presents a seamless continuity between symbols of imperial antiquity and the socialist state.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet. Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation 1804–1946. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 304 pp., $39.50 (cl.).
Authors: Najmabadi Afsaneh
Published: December 2002

Frontier Fictions begins with the now famous scene of Muhammad Riza Shah's departure from Iran on 16 January 1979. It recalls his father's departure thirty-seven years earlier, and the similar reported stories, that each monarch “departed with a box of Iranian soil tucked away in their belongings”(3).
John Dickie. Darkest Italy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Authors: Gobetti Daniela
Published: December 2002

To an Italian, la questione meridionale, “the Southern question,” is as inescapable as racism is to an American, or “the troubles” are to an inhabitant of the British Isles. But what do foreigners see when they look at the troubled relationship of the Italian South with the rest of the peninsula? In his interesting book, Darkest Italy, Dickie reminds us, first of all, that we face several “questions,” if we wish to use this term at all (13–14). The Mezzogiorno itself was, during the period he considers, 1860–1960, and remains to this day, comprised of diverse geopolitical, cultural, and social components. These appear to have become one in the minds of liberal modernizers, northerners and southerners alike (for example, Pasquale Villari, 55–63). They believed that building the Italian nation required changing cultural attitudes and values in the populace as much as in the elites (4–7); and they assessed the difficulty of their task in the degrees of deviance of various parts of the country from their own normative view of nationhood. “The South” was seen as highest on this scale.
ames Krippner-Martínez. Rereading the Conquest. Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico, 1521–1565. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
Authors: Cañizares-Esguerra Jorge
Published: December 2002

The Conquest of Mexico has long been cast as a tale of villains and heroes. The dastardly Nuño de Guzmán, we have been told, was the cruelest of conquistadors, massacring Indians everywhere, particularly in Michoacán where he tortured and summarily executed Cazonci, despite the fact that the Purhépecha ruler had originally struck a deal with Hernán Cortés. Vasco de Quiroga stands at the other end of the spectrum. This learned humanist bishop, we are told, single-handedly built utopian village-hospitals in Michoacán to shelter the Indians from the likes of Nuño de Guzmán. In this Manichean narrative of the Conquest, natives are either killed or saved by Spaniards. James Krippner-Martínez seeks to restore some Indian agency conspicuously missing in such simpleminded accounts. More important, he seeks to explain how these narratives came about in the first place.
Elizabeth Thompson. Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. xvii + 402 pp., $49.50 (cl.); $17.50 (pap.).
Authors: Lawson Fred H.
Published: December 2002

Recent scholarship on twentieth-century Syria has thrown new light on the popular movements that opposed the Arab nationalist government of King Faisal and then resisted the imposition of the French mandate in 1920, on state economic policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and on the workers' organizations and radical parties that emerged as major political actors during the Second World War. Elizabeth Thompson offers a stimulating synthesis of this literature, and supplements it by devoting explicit attention to the way in which gender dynamics interacted with other factors. Specifically, she argues that a “crisis of paternity” (37–38) set the stage for French rule over Syria and Lebanon following the First World War; the mandatory authorities subsequently established a complex “paternalistic colonial civic order,” in which state officials manipulated the disbursement of material benefits to “a mediating elite” of local notables as a way of exerting “control [over] the unprivileged majority” (66). This system led to the emergence of a full-blown “colonial welfare state” by the late 1930s, which entailed an extensive network of state-funded schools and clinics, along with rights of popular expression and association (163–69). Key elements of the mandate order even outlived the French presence: “Paternal republicanism—the refusal to democratize and expand the colonial welfare state, and the persistence of heterogeneous citizenship rights—would contribute to the causes of Syria's successive coups beginning in 1949 and to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1958” (286).
Robert Alun Jones. The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Authors: Benton James S.
Published: December 2002

This book, part of the “Ideas in Context” series printed under the editorship of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, is an important contribution to the better understanding of Emile Durkheim's sociology and social philosophy.
Ida Altman. Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560-1620. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Authors: Owens J. B.
Published: December 2002

Ida Altman has written a book that both probes deeply the significance of tying together Iberian and American domains under a common Crown government and brilliantly demonstrates how the comparative history of the first global age ought to be approached. Several recent works have shown the importance of bullion flows, especially those of silver. But for the development of a truly world economy and history, the resulting networks did not have the same impact on all of the localities that they increasingly connected. Altman does an outstanding job of exploring such differences, and their relationship to the interface between the macro-history of the period's new economic and political domains and the micro-history of locality, in ways that highlight human agency.
“Form” and “function” in Soviet Stage
Romani: Modeling metapragmatics through performance institutions
Authors: LEMON ALAINA MARIA
Published: December 2002

A crucial division of linguistic labor is that among
metalinguistic labors. Who is authorized to speak about language,
how, and where? Language ideologies not only ascribe different
functions to different languages; they also ascribe different
sorts of metadiscourse to speakers of (or about) those languages.
Drawing from archival and field work, this article traces the
ways particular Soviet and post-Soviet institutions and actors
modeled and regimented metapragmatic discourses, specifically
through stage and screen practices and representations that
hypercontextualized utterances in Romani. They became so hegemonic
that, in public arenas, Romani speakers spoke only about
nonreferential functions; only in less well broadcast contexts
(and mainly with other Roma) did they articulate metalinguistic
and metareferential discourses. These practices reverse and
contrast with the mainstream metapragmatics of Russian. Language
ideologies commonly rank codes and metadiscourses; this case
illuminates not only that they do so, but also
how they do so, and it suggests what their social
effects may be.
Display and reaffirmation of affect bond and relationship:
Invited guessing in Chinese telephone conversations
Authors: SUN HAO
Published: December 2002

This article examines an interactive strategy of invited
guessing in Chinese telephone conversations. Oriented toward
affect bonding between the participants, invited guessing both
indexes and strengthens their relationship. Caller identification,
typically perceived as a procedural component in telephone
conversation, is shown to be constructed as an interactive process
serving social functions as well as a discourse-structural
function. Its primary purpose is to signify and enhance
rapport-building. The observed interactions present patterns
of variation from the proposed universal sequence of telephone
conversation openings, suggesting that this discourse structure
can respond to variables such as the purpose of the interaction
and the relationship between participants in the Chinese context.
Finally, invited guessing indicates that relationship constitutes
an important cultural variable shaping discourse and interaction
in Chinese society.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Authors: Hill JANE H.
Published: December 2002

The current issue inaugurates an increase in frequency
for Language in Society, which will now appear five
times a year. We will be able to publish more papers, and thus
be able to reduce the amount of time that authors must wait
to see their accepted papers in print. This time lag has recently
been a year from acceptance (and has threatened to be as long
as 18 months) and was difficult to reduce within the four-issue
per year constraint given the high quality of our submissions.
The new schedule will help cut the time from acceptance to
appearance in a printed issue. It will also permit me to continue
to be flexible about the length of papers, and will allow more
flexibility to consider proposals for special issues.
Mother and friends in a Holocaust life story
Authors: SCHIFFRIN DEBORAH
Published: December 2002

Although oral histories about the Holocaust
are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as
well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities
for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely
personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns
relationships with significant and familiar “others.”
By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the
use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships
(with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life
story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position
“others” within both their own lives and more broadly
construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent
identities (victim, survivor, bystander).
Social epistemology in broadcast news interviews
Authors: ROTH ANDREW L.
Published: December 2002

This article investigates how participants
in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a
social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events
and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits
of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The
article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show
that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers
distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are
responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct;
and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect,
second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third
parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the
production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses
either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines
how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for
interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.
Narrating in protective order interviews: A source of
interactional trouble
Authors: TRINCH SHONNA L. , BERK-SELIGSON SUSAN
Published: December 2002

This study examines the types of interactional
trouble that arise from narrative variation in institutional
interviews. Specifically, we examine protective order interviews
in which Latina women tell of domestic violence to paralegal
interviewers charged with the duty of helping them obtain a
protective order. Victims' narratives are shown to take
different shapes, and paralegals respond to them in different
pragmalinguistic ways, depending on how they diverge from
institutional needs. The factors found most heavily to influence
narrative outcomes are contextual ones, related to participant
social roles, the type of communicative activity interlocutors
perceive themselves to be engaged in, and their interactional goals.
An additional finding is that when expectations of what constitutes
appropriate speech behavior differ, the interlocutor holding greater
institutional power will try to constrain the speech of the other,
despite the fact that both appear to share an extralinguistic goal,
in this case obtaining a protective order.
Listening with an attitude: A model of native-speaker comprehension
of non-native speakers in the United States
Authors: LINDEMANN STEPHANIE
Published: December 2002

This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative
attitudes toward non-native speakers and poor comprehension of those speakers.
Twelve native English speakers whose attitudes toward Koreans had been
assessed were asked to complete an interactional map task paired with native
Korean speakers. In the task, some but not all of those who had been assessed
as having negative attitudes toward Koreans were found to use either
strategies that were described as problematizing their partners'
utterances, or strategies that were described as avoidance. All participants
completed the map task reasonably successfully except where the native
English speaker used avoidance strategies, suggesting that the relationship
between attitude and comprehension is mediated by the native speaker's
choice of strategies. However, there appeared to be a direct relationship
between attitude and perceived success of interactions, which may
ultimately have the same consequences for interactants as if the relationship
were between attitude and actual success.
René Kager, Optimality theory. Cambridge,
UK, and Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp.
xiii, 452. Pb $24.95 April McMahon, Change, chance, and optimality.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 201.
Pb $19.95 Bruce Tesar & Paul Smolensky, Learnability in optimality
theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 140. Pb $25.00
Authors: Pennington Martha C. , Clark Brady Z.
Published: December 2002

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force
driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade.
Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range
within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters,
OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages,
arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength
that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The
constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness
of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i)
markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward
unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless
final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints,
which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable
types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two
types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular
constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT,
“satisfaction” and “violation” are not
absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play
a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different
order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.
John H. McWhorter, The missing Spanish creoles:
Recovering the birth of plantation contact languages.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California
Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 281. Hb $45.00.
Authors: Schwegler Armin
Published: December 2002

Meant to be challenging, controversial, and even radical,
McWhorter's (McW) latest work on creole genesis may well
be the most revisionist book on contact languages to appear
since Bickerton's Roots of Language (1981) and
Thomason and Kaufman's Language contact, creolization,
and genetic linguistics (1988). It will therefore be required
reading for anyone interested in the ongoing exploration of
the origins of plantation creoles and of contact languages in
general.
Philip Lieberman, Human language and our reptilian
brain: The subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 221. Hb
$39.95; Chris Knight, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and James
R. Hurford, The evolutionary emergence of language:
Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. xi, 426. Hb $74.95.
Authors: Urban Greg
Published: December 2002

The two volumes reviewed here thumb their noses at the 1866
ban by the Linguistic Society of Paris on publications concerning
language origins – a ban imposed by those august guardians
of public faith in linguistic science because of the disreputable,
speculative, nonempirical character of language origins scholarship.
Yet nose-thumbing has been on the rise in the past two decades, even
alarmingly so. Why? Have we witnessed epochal new empirical or
conceptual breakthroughs that would warrant the overturning of that
sober 19th-century decision?
Arthur K. Spears (ed.), Race and ideology:
Language, symbolism, and popular culture. (African American
Life Series.) Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Pp.
242. Hb $39.95, pb $19.95.
Authors: Tanikella Leela
Published: December 2002

Following a long tradition in anthropology and linguistics,
introductory textbooks typically claim that all languages are
equal and have an equal potential for communication and thought.
The theoretical model posed in this anthology, as articulated
by contributor Angela Gilliam, similarly suggests that “all
languages are equal in terms of their expressive potential”
(p. 84). However, editor Arthur K. Spears and the contributors
aim to situate linguistic relativity within a framework of
political, social, economic, and (most centrally) racial
inequalities. The key theme of the collection is the centrality
of politics, particularly what Spears terms “racial
hierarchies of oppression” (13), in the study of language
and linguistic diversity. As the contributors provide detailed
historical, economic, and social frameworks for their studies,
they demonstrate a claim made by Dell Hymes more than two decades
ago that linguistic relativity “omits the costs and the
constitutive role of social factors” (1973: 64). Thus,
this edited volume challenges the tradition of claiming linguistic
equality and demonstrates sociolinguistic inequality; it is
part of a theoretical movement in this direction also exemplified
by Zentella 1995, Hymes 1996, Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity
1998, and Kroskrity 2000.
Ian Glynn, An anatomy of thought: The origin
and machinery of the mind. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999. Pp. vi, 456. Hb $35.
Authors: Gray Ronald
Published: December 2002

In this highly ambitious book, Glynn attempts to provide a
description of both how the brain works and how it has developed.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach (he is a physiologist by
training), he relies on insights from a wide number of disciplines,
including psychology, neurology, anthropology, linguistics,
artificial intelligence, psychiatry, physiology, and even philosophy.
He is interested in providing answers to some perennial and
interconnected questions that relate to the mind: “What kind
of thing is mind? What is the relation between our minds and our
bodies and, more specifically, what is the relation between what goes
on in our minds, and what goes on in our brains? How did brains and
minds originate? Can our brains be regarded as nothing more than
exceedingly complicated machines? Can minds exist without
brains” (p. 4). Although his arguments are rather technical,
the book is intended for a nonscientist audience.
Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard (eds.), Languages
and publics: The making of authority. Manchester, UK, &
Northampton, MA: St. Jerome, 2001. Pp. vii, 184.
Authors: Tsitsipis Lukas D.
Published: December 2002

A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as
an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new
publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public
sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989
[1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the
public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting
the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among
individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures)
constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work
under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being
critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern
in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective
on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance
of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other.
In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important
contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages
are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical,
power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction
of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed,
and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying
ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and
institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending
to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural
products having little, if anything, to do with human agency
and invested interests.
Karol Janicki, Against essentialism: Toward
language awareness. Lincom Studies in Pragmatics 07. Munich:
Lincom Europa. 1999. Pp. vi + 253. Pb $55.
Authors: Kopytko Roman
Published: December 2002

The book under review is a special one in regard to both
content and form. The rich content of Against essentialism
(AE) includes philosophical, linguistic, and social
claims as well as the interrelationships between them. The form
of AE is a continuation of a respectable tradition
of dialogical and argumentative writing from Plato to Feyerabend.
However, the focus of Janicki's investigations is not
Feyerabend and his iconoclastic principles – for example,
“Anything goes,” or the critique of the scientific
method that is, Feyerabend's contribution to postmodern
thought – but rather Popper's (1945) rejection of
Aristotelian essentialism (cf. Janicki 1990). The main goals
of AE are clear: first, to show the errors and harmfulness
of essentialist thinking, the unjustified belief in the importance
and power of definitions (or defining concepts and terms in
sciences), and the claim that words and their definitions
adequately reflect physical, mental or social reality; and second,
to propose language awareness as a remedy that can alleviate
the problems produced by the uncritical acceptance of essentialist
ideology and philosophy. The main object of Janicki's critique
is the social-scientific insistence on providing definitions
of all concepts, including those that in reality cannot be defined.
The eight dialogues in AE deal with crucial aspects
of language use and its consequences for human (mis)communication,
interpersonal relations, and various other social phenomena.
Maryann Overstreet, Whales, candlelight, and
stuff like that: General extenders in English discourse.
(Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) Oxford & New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 171. Hb. $39.95.
Authors: Ball Catherine N.
Published: December 2002

Characterizing the discourse functions of linguistic
expressions is surely one of the most difficult tasks in linguistic
analysis. The starting point for any study of discourse functions
is the examination of naturally occurring data; the limiting
factor is the lack of well-developed theoretical frameworks
for understanding language use. Still, a good descriptive study
has lasting value, and empirical claims invite further analysis.
Overstreet's study of the “general extenders”
or something, and everything, and other members
of this class makes a solid contribution on both fronts.
Paul Saenger, Space between words: The origins
of silent reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1997. Pp. xviii, 480. Hb $75, pb $25.95.
Authors: Aronoff Mark
Published: December 2002

This is an impressive, fascinating, and exasperating work of
scholarship, based on an astonishingly exhaustive survey of
manuscript codices produced in the British Isles and western
continental Europe between the 7th and the 13th centuries. Saenger
traces the transition from continuous to word-divided script, which,
he contends, reflects a fundamental shift in style from reading aloud
to reading silently.
Ulrich Ammon (ed.), The dominance of English
as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language
communities. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter,
2001. Pp. xiii + 478. Hb. DM 256.00.
Authors: Kheimets Nina G. , Epstein Alek D.
Published: December 2002

This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the
effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on
other languages and speech communities. The global search for a
common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities
for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and
dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well
as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume
under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic
diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman
et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of
English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global
language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992,
Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997,
Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich
Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.
Germán de Granda, Español y lenguas
indoamericanas en Hispanoamérica: Estructuras, situaciones y
transferencias. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid,
1999. Pp. 306.
Authors: Hidalgo Margarita
Published: December 2002

This is a collection of twenty matchless essays on the
subject of language contact (Quechua, Guaraní, and
occasionally Aymara in contact with Spanish). The first one
serves as an introduction to the main theme and as a justification
for the author's rejection of certain methodologies.
“Observaciones metodológicas sobre la
investigación sociolingüística en
Hispanoamérica” (pp. 7–18) offers an excellent
review of stratificational sociolinguistics, a field the author
proves to know but prefers to discard on the basis of its
inadequacy for studying marginalized Amerindian communities.
The major deterrent is the application of quantitative methods
to populations that do not belong to post-industrialized societies,
where the continua of social strata and sociolinguistic variables
are more easily grasped with contemporary methods of the social
sciences. In contrast, groups in Latin American societies display
wider socio-economic and socio-political gaps, not to mention
massive peripheral strata.
Fern L. Johnson, Speaking culturally: Language diversity
in the United States. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. Pp.
xviii + 365. Hb $59.95, pb $28.95.
Authors: Adams Karen L.
Published: December 2002

Speaking culturally is designed as a
language-oriented introduction to ethnic and gender issues in
the United States, concentrating on what the author perceives
to be widely unrecognized intercultural communication problems.
The text is divided into three sections, with the first –
“Language in demographic and cultural perspective”
– providing theoretical background on the relationship
of speech to community. The second, “Locating cultural
discourses,” provides overviews of language and gender
and of three ethnic communities: African American, Hispanic
and Asian American. The last section, “Language consequences
and controversies,” addresses the consequences of linguistic
and cultural diversity and current language policy designed
to deal with this diversity.
Leanne Hinton & Ken Hale(eds.). The Green
Book of language revitalization in practice. San Diego
& New York: Academic Press, 2001. Pp xvii + 450 pp. Hb.
Authors: Argenter Joan A.
Published: December 2002

A brief editors'note about the title of this book begins
with the following statement: “The title of this volume
is an answer to another publication, the UNESCO Red Book
on endangered languages.” It ends by making a vow:
“We hope this Green Book will be of use to everyone
who wants it to be no longer necessary for their language to be
listed in the Red Book.
Jacqueline Lindenfeld, The French in the United
States: An ethnographic study. Westport, Conn.: Bergin
& Garvey, 2000. Pp. xiv + 184. Hb $55.00.
Authors: Makropoulos Josée
Published: December 2002

The French in the United States offers valuable
insight on processes of identity formation among French-born
individuals living permanently in the US. The book's title
foreshadows the ambiguity of how the French in America are defined
in objective terms, as well as their subject positioning as
members of an ethnic group. For instance, Lindenfeld cautions
against relying on the criterion of ancestry used in census-based
rankings to study the French presence in the United States,
since census identification includes people of various national
origins and does not distinguish the number of intervening
generations since departure from France. The limitations of
the native use of the French language as a valid indicator of
direct French origin neglects the fact that native speakers
of French who reside in the US often possess Canadian or Caribbean
lineage. Although Lindenfeld does not say so directly, relying
on native use of French to identify direct immigrants from France
would equally exclude the possibility of identifying French
citizens who do not speak French as their first language, as
well as those who were raised speaking two or more languages.
Another concern raised in the book is the broad significance
of the label “French American,” traditionally used
to identify Americans of French ancestry, such as Cajuns in
Louisiana. The designation currently enjoys a certain popularity
among French immigrants because it offers a direct parallel
with other immigrant groups, such as Italian Americans.
Manfred G. Krug, Emerging English modals: A
corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. xv, 332. Hb DM148, US $74
(approx.).
Authors: Rudanko Juhani
Published: December 2002

“Grammaticalization,” to quote what is probably
the best known definition of the term, “consists in the
increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to
a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical
status, e.g., from a derivative formant to an inflectional
one” (Kuryłowicz 1965:69). As far as studies of
grammaticalization in English are concerned, the history of
the modals has been the focus of considerable attention in recent
years. Manfred Krug's (K's) book is an important new
contribution to this area of ongoing research.
Kormi Anipa, A critical examination of linguistic
variation in Golden-Age Spanish. (Berkeley Insights in
Linguistics and Semiotics, no. 47). New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Pp. xx, 254. Hb $57.95.
Authors: Cacoullos Rena Torres
Published: December 2002

This book is about variation in 16th-century Spanish between
forms and patterns that triumphed and those “archaisms”
that did not, with a focus on the latter. The goal is to investigate
resistance to language change. Contrary to the widespread assumption
that this was a period of rapid changes, Anipa shows the intricacies
of persistent variation during the Golden Age, drawing on literary
data and a novel source: the testimony of contemporaneous grammarians.
ERRATUM
Authors: TANAKA HIROKO
Published: December 2002

In Hiroko Tanaka, “Adverbials for turn
projection in Japanese: Toward a demystification of the
‘telepathic’ mode of communication” (Language
in Society 30:559–87), p. 580, next to last line,
omiyari should read omoiyari.
Ritual and foreign language practices at school
Authors: RAMPTON BEN
Published: December 2002

This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London
secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly
in a foreign language class, and then using the language
to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's
pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively
intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided
symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently
inverted in a set of micro-ritual improvisations. There are
some endemic problems of evidence in the argument that
instructed German was connected to improvised Deutsch
by cause-and-effect processes associated with ritual, but the
discussion ends by affirming ritual's value as an analytic
frame that can be applied both to institutional language learning
and to historical shifts in classroom experience.
Social identities and language alternation in non-formal
institutional bilingual talk: Trilingual service encounters
in Barcelona
Authors: TORRAS MARIA-CARME , GAFARANGA JOSEPH
Published: December 2002

Identity-related accounts of language alternation among
bilingual speakers have traditionally drawn on the social
values of the languages involved in specific communities (Gumperz
1982, Myers-Scotton 1993). However, recently researchers have
expressed reservation against this approach (Wootton and Sebba
1998, Li Wei 1998, 2002). Following from this, Gafaranga 2001
argues that, in order to account for the orderliness of language
alternation, language preference (Auer 1984) must be
seen as a membership categorization device (Sacks 1966,
1974). In developing his argument, Gafaranga draws on instances
of ordinary everyday conversation among bilingual speakers.
In this paper, we take Gafaranga's argument a step further
and look at language alternation in first-time trilingual
service encounters collected in the Barcelona area. The
languages involved are Catalan, Castilian, and English. Analysis
of these data reveals that, in addition to doing service-relevant
tasks, participants accomplish “medium-related
activities” (Gafaranga 2001) drawing on their various
linguistic identities. Therefore, the analysis confirms
the need to see linguistic identities as social identities in
their own right.