In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities ed. by Paul V. Kroskrity
  • Zdenek Salzmann
Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities. Ed. by Paul V. Kroskrity. (School of American Research advanced seminar series.) Santa Fe: School of American Research Press/Oxford: James Currey, 2000. Pp. xi, 411.

The nine essays in this volume were prepared for a School of American Research advanced seminar titled ‘Language Ideologies’ which met in April 1994. The topic that brought the seminar participants together—the beliefs that speakers hold about their language and its use—has been a focus in its modern form of much recent research by linguistic anthropologists. There now have been many articles and symposia on the subject as well as a survey article with an extensive bibliography (Kathryn A. Woolard and Bambi B. Schieffelin’s ‘Language ideology’ in Annual review of anthropology 23:55–82 [Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, 1994]).

Editor Paul V. Kroskrity contributes two chapters to the book. In the introductory chapter, he comments at some length on the papers of the volume. In Ch. 9, ‘Language ideologies in the expression and representation of Arizona Tewa ethnic identity’ (329–59), he attempts to show that Edward P. Dozier, an accomplished ethnographer and through his mother a Santa Clara Tewa, failed to recognize one of the important resources for the expression and maintenance of an Arizona Tewa ethnic identity in a multiethnic society. According to K, Dozier, who was not a native speaker of Arizona Tewa, did not give sufficient attention to Arizona Tewa language ideology and speech use and allowed the influence of the professional language ideology of the time to ‘deafen his ability to hear the discursive production of Tewa identity by the Arizona Tewa themselves’ (357).

Judith T. Irvine and Susan Gal identify in their ‘Language ideology and linguistic differentiation’ (35–83) three semiotic processes that operate worldwide in language ideologies: iconization (transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic features and the associated social images), fractal recursivity (projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto another level), and erasure (process in which ideology simplifies the sociolinguistic field by rendering some sociolinguistic phenomena invisible). They illustrate the three processes by cases from southern Africa, West Africa, and southeastern Europe.

Michael Silverstein revisits the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf in his ‘Whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality’ (85–138). He compares Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined communities (1991) with Whorf’s essay ‘The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language’ (1941) and, keeping linguistic ideology in mind, he detects an ideological distortion in Anderson’s argumentation.

The variety of topics chosen by the contributors is further illustrated by Jane H. Hill’s ‘ “Read my article”: Ideological complexity and the overdetermination of promising in American presidential politics’ (259–91): The heart of her essay is the analysis of the famous promise ‘Read my lips: No new taxes’ made by George Bush in 1988. Other essays in this collection deal with the influence of the Indonesian language on the shaping of modern Indonesian culture, the construction of the Tongan nation-state through language ideology in the courtroom, and the sharp cleavage between the traditional language ideology of a cultural group in Papua New Guinea and the modern ideologies represented in the literacy program introduced by Christian missionaries. References (361–400) and an index conclude this interesting and thoughtful volume.

Zdenek Salzmann
Northern Arizona University
...

pdf

Share