The semiotics workshop will be entirely virtual and held via
zoom in the Fall 2021. Zoom links will be distributed via email to
the Semiotics workshop mailing list on the day of the workshop.
4/6
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Perry Wong
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, |
“A sketch grammar of the Kunenteko language, a peripheral K’iche’an (Eastern Mayan) dialect, |
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This chapter is an introduction to the symbolic code called qáylöj ‘our speech’ by its users, and which we will refer to as Kunenteko in American English. I introduce the Kunenteko language through a sketch grammar which describes key aspects of its overall lexicogrammatical organization (i.e. morphosyntactic “ergativity,” phonological “tone,” etc…), supplemented by tables and transcribed discourse samples which substantiate my description. Throughout, I stress a typological-etymological approach in the presentation of data. In and by systematically sketching out Kunenteko, a total vision of the current state of linguistic description, is also, by analogy, systematically sketched out for future linguistic research, with the hope of imagining a more anthropologically-sophisticated future. |
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11/4
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Aron Marie
PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development, |
“Silent, Invisible People: |
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Chapter two “Silent, Invisible People” examines the question of voicing and representation from the perspective of sign language interpreters. Given the barriers deaf activists face in advocating for the development of interpreting, interpreters are left in a precarious position with little to no recognition from the government, society at large, or steady source of employment. Although interpreters have greater access and knowledge of Vietnamese speech genres they are prevented from advocating for themselves due to the normative expectation that interpreters be silent, invisible people. In this chapter I unpack what it means for interpreters to be silent invisible people. I argue that being silent and invisible gives interpreters the flexibility to navigate tensions and power dynamics at the heart of deaf activism and interpreting. In particular, the selective use of silence and invisibility allows interpreters to be highly active in the Hà Nội deaf community while at the same time foregrounding deaf peoples’ agency, voices and leadership capacity rather than their own. While interpreters often want to play an active role in the deaf community beyond interpreting (i.e. planning events, mentoring future interpreters), doing so runs the risk of hearing people focusing on interpreters rather than deaf people. Thus interpreters selectively used silence and invisibility as a way to foreground the agency of deaf people. However, silence and invisibility, far from preventing interpreters’ active engagement and participation in deaf activism, actually enables interpreters to be deeply involved in deaf development while appearing not to be. | |||
11/11
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Alice Yeh
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, |
“’You’ll never be able to buy your father’s house’: |
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How has real estate – for many immigrants and would-be immigrants an object of interest – become a Christianized talking point? In this paper, I describe how a well-to-do Hangzhou family attempted to craft a threadbare network of Catholic “kin” in order to establish a foothold in California. I examine Chinese Americanness as a category in contention: Chinese transnationals see it not as a space of perpetual foreignness, but rather as a flexible positionality that resists stereotypes of subalternity. In the absence of propertied connections and English language facility, the church-qua-repository of spiritual (and potentially legal) kin is arrayed as a guarantor of hospitality and through it, real property. | |||
12/9
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Joshua Babcock
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, |
“Southeast Asian Island City-State, Singapore: |
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Singapore has the distinction of being the world’s only sovereign island city-state, yet the terms available for its categorization—as island, city, state, or belonging to a region—each entail mutually destabilizing pragmatic paradigms (Silverstein 2014). Singapore is described as an outlier in—but not of—a Southeast Asian region (a categorial residue of Cold War geopolitics; Goh and Yeoh 2003), a Chinese island in a Malay-Muslim region (Rahim 2010), an island without a mainland (Holden 2001), a city without a hinterland (Tan 2007), a state without a single nation (Wee 1993). Though not overtly contradictory, each paradigm selectively focuses attention by provisionally silencing alternatives, and differently focalizing anxieties that get endlessly rearticulated and debated at sites ranging from literature to political talk. This chapter tracks the production and circulation of multi-scalar urban fictions (Watson 2011) in Singapore: the mutually constitutive, contested entanglements of built environments with creative texts and other communicative genres. I argue that individuals’ choices of pragmatic paradigms—focusing on island over city, city over state, etc.—drive semiotic processes of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) that produce what I call the hinterland within: the iterative, spatialized introflection of each paradigm’s social- and cultural “outsides.” I track this across the five-volume Balik Kampung series of (non)fiction short stories and mid-20th century speeches by Singaporean lawmakers as they navigate the experience of discovering the outside, inside: when the mainland comes to the island; when the hinterland appears in the city; and when the region makes itself at home.
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