This was an interesting text for me, my undergraduate work being in English and cultural studies, with an emphasis on semiotics. Maybe because of that, I didn’t find the “jargon” (which itself is a pretty pejoratively laden term, right? In this academic context, we use it to connote something unnecessarily complicated, a certain vocabulary used for its performative reception, rather than its constative meaning) a problem. Yes, at times I wished Inoue explained what she meant by “paratext,” “entextualization,” and “metaleptic” instead of just pointing us to other texts in the footnotes, but in a way, the linguistic particularities were her ethnographic proof. The meticulous analysis gives her project a solid, intensely substantial ground.
Conor’s question about the “It really is pitiful” example demonstrates just how carefully we have to speak about speaking, and how truly elaborate and entangled linguistic studies are. In that case, Inoue is showing, “Though they say exactly the same thing, kango words (jitsuni [really], renbin [pitiful]) are used in the latter sentence.” It is this appropriation of these kango words (“words of Chinese origin…traditionally used for specialized texts in commerce, law, and administration and thus had been exclusively associated with the (elite) male writing style.” (63)) that signify a shift in the place of the speaker, even though the denotative meaning is the same.
In the spirit of the feminist anthropology workshop this week, and Janelle’s comments about our own and Inoue’s situatedness, and the fact that this is the first gender-focused ethnography that we’ve read, I’m interested to see how the discussion in class will play out. There is something that sticks in the craw of my classmates, and it makes me wonder if any text would be criticized so categorically as “overdetermined” if it were about race, or class. As a woman, one feels that gender can never be overdetermined. It is daily, relentless, and inescapable.
What was most salient to me is the central idea that language is not just representative, but formative, that “It is the discourse that makes the person who invokes it look like its agent.” (22). Can we then see language as in the same, agentive (or actant) role as people, or objects? Is language, as Janelle says, “a ‘network’ of cultural practices...sounds, figures, manners and organizations of talk,” or is it part of the larger network of modernity and nation building? Or both? This “feedback loop” of questionable causality reminds me of a Frontline documentary a few years ago called “Merchants of Cool” which was about teenage consumers. The filmmakers follow several thirteen year old girls, who watch girls dancing on MTV and then themselves mimic the hyper-sexualized dancing styles as they are being filmed for the documentary, which will then be seen by other teenage girls. An imagistic discourse is produced, replicated, makes and takes meaning.
Ok, I am feeling like I am really simple since no one yet has referenced Yurchak in relation to this book. Since they are both about language and what language can do, I immediately began to compare this text with Everything Was Forever.
Both look at language in important historical moments and moments of historical change. The process of “gembun’itchi” reminded me of the process of hypernormalization after Stalin, as both were processes of standardization. Also, the "metapragmatic commentaries" on school girl speech were similar to the hypernormalization process as well--as both created opportunities for new kinds of meanings of language to emerge. Both metapragmatic commentaries and hypernormalized language "retroactively create context". Although there are similarities between these two texts and between these two kinds of discourse (hypernormalized language v. school girl speech v. “gembun’itchi” ) I know there are also differences that I can't articulate that well right now. Perhaps we can discuss this in class tomorrow.
And random aside, but as I read I thought of Inoue as a woman, but then I stopped and asked myelf why I had assumed that the author was a woman--because her subject was gender? This is also perhaps something to discuss.
Oh and I also thought about Mol as Inoue's task is to "problemitize what is natural" or the natural origin of women's speech--Mol in way problemitized atherosclerosis.
3 Comments:
At 7:05 PM,
amber said…
“To cite is, thus, to alter.” (52)
This was an interesting text for me, my undergraduate work being in English and cultural studies, with an emphasis on semiotics. Maybe because of that, I didn’t find the “jargon” (which itself is a pretty pejoratively laden term, right? In this academic context, we use it to connote something unnecessarily complicated, a certain vocabulary used for its performative reception, rather than its constative meaning) a problem. Yes, at times I wished Inoue explained what she meant by “paratext,” “entextualization,” and “metaleptic” instead of just pointing us to other texts in the footnotes, but in a way, the linguistic particularities were her ethnographic proof. The meticulous analysis gives her project a solid, intensely substantial ground.
Conor’s question about the “It really is pitiful” example demonstrates just how carefully we have to speak about speaking, and how truly elaborate and entangled linguistic studies are. In that case, Inoue is showing, “Though they say exactly the same thing, kango words (jitsuni [really], renbin [pitiful]) are used in the latter sentence.” It is this appropriation of these kango words (“words of Chinese origin…traditionally used for specialized texts in commerce, law, and administration and thus had been exclusively associated with the (elite) male writing style.” (63)) that signify a shift in the place of the speaker, even though the denotative meaning is the same.
In the spirit of the feminist anthropology workshop this week, and Janelle’s comments about our own and Inoue’s situatedness, and the fact that this is the first gender-focused ethnography that we’ve read, I’m interested to see how the discussion in class will play out. There is something that sticks in the craw of my classmates, and it makes me wonder if any text would be criticized so categorically as “overdetermined” if it were about race, or class. As a woman, one feels that gender can never be overdetermined. It is daily, relentless, and inescapable.
What was most salient to me is the central idea that language is not just representative, but formative, that “It is the discourse that makes the person who invokes it look like its agent.” (22). Can we then see language as in the same, agentive (or actant) role as people, or objects? Is language, as Janelle says, “a ‘network’ of cultural practices...sounds, figures, manners and organizations of talk,” or is it part of the larger network of modernity and nation building? Or both? This “feedback loop” of questionable causality reminds me of a Frontline documentary a few years ago called “Merchants of Cool” which was about teenage consumers. The filmmakers follow several thirteen year old girls, who watch girls dancing on MTV and then themselves mimic the hyper-sexualized dancing styles as they are being filmed for the documentary, which will then be seen by other teenage girls. An imagistic discourse is produced, replicated, makes and takes meaning.
At 9:24 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
Ok, I am feeling like I am really simple since no one yet has referenced Yurchak in relation to this book. Since they are both about language and what language can do, I immediately began to compare this text with Everything Was Forever.
Both look at language in important historical moments and moments of historical change. The process of “gembun’itchi” reminded me of the process of hypernormalization after Stalin, as both were processes of standardization. Also, the "metapragmatic commentaries" on school girl speech were similar to the hypernormalization process as well--as both created opportunities for new kinds of meanings of language to emerge. Both metapragmatic commentaries and hypernormalized language "retroactively create context". Although there are similarities between these two texts and between these two kinds of discourse (hypernormalized language v. school girl speech v. “gembun’itchi” ) I know there are also differences that I can't articulate that well right now. Perhaps we can discuss this in class tomorrow.
And random aside, but as I read I thought of Inoue as a woman, but then I stopped and asked myelf why I had assumed that the author was a woman--because her subject was gender? This is also perhaps something to discuss.
At 9:28 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
Oh and I also thought about Mol as Inoue's task is to "problemitize what is natural" or the natural origin of women's speech--Mol in way problemitized atherosclerosis.
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