Valentina Pagliai

The Unmarking of racist Discourse in Italy and the Role of the Media. American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 2008.
A great deal of scholarship demonstrates the importance of media discourses in sustaining racism. My paper will contribute to that literature with a slight shift of perspective. I will consider how media discourse contributes to transforming racializing and racist discourses into unmarked topics of conversation in contemporary Italy. I will show that this unmarking has special consequences, especially in terms of the footing that the conversationalists take; for example, by putting the listener in a position of having to agree or openly disalign and thus endanger face. The paper is based on research conducted since 2005, focusing on racial formation processes in discourses concerning immigrants to Italy. During fieldwork it became apparent that racist/racializing narratives about the immigrants were used to initiate conversation among Tuscans who knew each other very little, just as in the United States people may comment about the weather. In this paper I argue the following: 1) The “unmarked” status of racist and racializing statements makes it easier for people to introduce them in conversation. Unmarked conversational stances are part of a regime of morality, thus they need no justification. Their repetition in turn reinforces their unmarkedness. 2) The media have an important role in this unmarking, as they continuously produce discourses about immigrants that are racist and racializing, while also reconstructing racism as a natural answer to immigrants’ “invasion.” 3) In understanding structural racism, we must consider the interaction between the role of the media and the role of individuals in everyday conversations.

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Conflict, Cooperation and Face-Work in Contrasto Verbal Duels. American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
Verbal duels reveal a subtly complex relationship between conflict and cooperation. Tuscan Contrasto duels are designed to conflict. The performers use their arguing skills to bring to the stage and debate the politics, customs and morals of contemporary Italy, calling attention to contradictions. As such they are bound to present different views of reality, unnaturalizing it, producing entangled knowledge rather than establishing clear domains of right and wrong. Yet, in creating a successful performance, the artists are also cooperating (through the rhymes, by suggesting directions for their arguments, etc.). This in turn points to a need to re-examine the meaning of communicative cooperation: for example, can we say that cooperation means building agreement? In verbal duels performers can cooperate in building disagreement, while skillful arguing can build sharing and agreement. What appears as an attack and insult can be the fruit of a careful synchronization and collaboration of the artists. At the same time, the performers can use politeness to disrupt a performance: thus politeness may reveal underlying conflict. Insults do not necessarily threaten a person’s face. In verbal duels, the exchange of insults may be a key to success, protecting face. What threatens the face of the performers is not the insult, but the possible failure to meet the requirements of a successful and entertaining performance. Here it is problematic to understand face-work as coterminous with politeness and polite behavior. In verbal duels, people collaborate in constructing conflict, and can use politeness to destroy cooperation and to insult.

Co-authored with Giulia Marchetti: Conversational Footing and the Creation of Racialized Sameness and Difference in Tuscany. International Pragmatics Conference, Sweden, July 2007.
As Italy is quickly becoming a receiving country, immigration is today a common topic of conversation. Notions of what “the immigrants” are like or act like are continuously proposed in conversation. This paper looks at the way people, in everyday conversation, shift their footing and align or dis-align with each other during the telling of narratives about immigrants. Our findings are based on an ongoing research carried out in Tuscany, in the metropolitan area between Florence, Prato and Pistoia, an area with high immigrant presence. We videotaped everyday conversations in public places, such as barbershops and social centers. In these settings people often discuss at length the immigrants’ presence and their behavior. The simple mention of immigrants immediately shifts the frame of the encounter, as people begin to reflect on the behavior, ways of thinking, ways of acting, and causes for actions of “us” (the Italians and Tuscans), versus “them” (the Albanians, Chinese or other immigrant group). As the relevant parties come to be animated in the narratives, becoming characters in the talk, speakers participate in the everyday creation of discourses about identity, belonging, and race. In the articulation of participant frameworks around the telling of stories about immigrants and their behavior, conversationalists may align toward each other as if they were sharing identities (Italian, Tuscan, etc.), at the same time underlining sameness among them and difference from the immigrant other. Whenever discriminatory statements are introduced, the conversationalists are doubly pressured to align with them to continue upholding identity and to protect face. This mechanism seems to unavoidably work at reinforcing racializing or racist discourses already present in the society, by reproducing them and creating consent around them. However, in many occasions conversationalists can also contradict statements about the essence of certain immigrants groups or persons, shifting footing toward disalignment. It is extremely important to understand how this happens, and how people are able to effectively dis-align themselves from racist discourses and contradict racist or racializing narratives. Studying dis-alignments could furnish information on the ways people, in interaction, can deconstruct categorizations and make identities fluid. This information could in turn be important for those groups trying to fight racism. Institutions in Italy that today are training social workers and teachers as “cultural facilitators” may find, for example, that an effective technique to contrast discrimination against immigrants is to teach people how to disalign themselves from it. If it is true, as Cameron (2001) argues, that people think through the discourses they have available, then an effective technique could be to teach them to effectively use different discourses present in a society to contrast racist narratives.

2006

Art, Insult and Freedom of Expression in Italian Contrasto Verbal Duels. Performance Studies International Conference in London, June 2006.
A genre of improvised sung verbal duel that has existed in Central Italy since the Middle Ages, the Contrasto has offered a place where the voices of the poor and the oppressed could be heard.  Silenced during the Fascist dictatorship, it continues to be performed today.  This unique form of folk performance addresses topics like the War in Iraq, Globalization and the misdeeds of Italian politicians.  The Contrasto is performed by two artists who impersonate two characters chosen by the audience, and proceed to exchange insults, using stanzas of eight verses each, in rhyme. I will present one of these Contrasto, in which the characters featured are “Prodi and Berlusconi” (the ex-European president and current Italian prime minister). Using an ethnopoetic approach to language use in performance, I will examine how the veils of the performative style afford a protection to the artists, who can invoke tradition when they have to defend themselves from accusations of having insulted public figures. I will also show how the poets achieve their critique through a systematic use of ambiguity and through a use of language that increases what Paul Friedrich’s called “the indeterminacy of meaning.” Thus tradition becomes action and art “authorizes” the creative person to become the commentator and critic of society.

2006

Art and the Meaning of Being Human in the Tuscan Contrasto. Canadian Anthropology Society Conference in Montreal, May 2006.
Identity and a sense of the self are deeply connected to art and political militancy for the Tuscan Poeti Bernescanti. Their sung verbal duels, called Contrasti, have expressed the voices of the peasant masses for centuries. Here, I present the poets’ views of the essence of being human. I argue that their sense of identity, their vision of art, and their ethos as individuals contradict hegemonic views of “Italianness.” In their lyrics and through their lives, the poets contest sources of authority, to speak about art and about human feelings, reflecting on the deeper morality of existence in unresolved dialectics.

2006

The Mirror of Ethnography: Interpreting the Creation of Italian Folk Art and Its Exclusions. Central States Anthropological Society Conference, April 2006.
In this paper I use ethnography as a tool to investigate how Italian folklorists and anthropologists have approached traditional art genres in a way that silenced, ignored or explained away those that did not fit into the mold of “ethnic art” they were creating. I will examine the case of the Contrasto, a Tuscan form of verbal duel where artists impersonate opposing characters and engage in a contentious dialogue, presenting veiled social critiques and attacking powerful political figures. This beautiful genre has been largely disregarded by Italian scholars or labeled as “not art.” I will argue that the reason for such disregard is to be found in its blurring the established boundaries of “folk art” and “high national art” categories.  The Contrasto destabilizes the boundary between oral and written tradition, going against the images of the rural folk accepted as a foundation of an Italian fictional sense of national self.

2006

Anti-Language in the Contrasto and the Italian “Question of the National Tongue.” Council for European Studies International Conference, March 2006.
In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated that nationalism constructs correspondences between imagined homogenous standard languages and imagined nationalities (Irvine and Gal, 2000:73).  In the Italian case standard Italian was molded in conjunction with an emergent model of Italian citizenship, in the nineteenth century.  These processes, establishing the subordinate place of the other languages present in the Italian state (considered since as “dialects”), however, have not gone unopposed. In this paper, I will examine how language use in Tuscan sung verbal duels, called Contrasti, destabilizes the “standard” language and becomes a centrifugal force in the Italian language.  Invariably seen as dangerous by the state powers, and as “gibbering” by the literati establishment, the Contrasto’s language could be seen as a form of anti-language expressing the voices of the subaltern strata of Italian society.  The non-homogeneity of the artists’ language, where several varieties are mixed with the use of poetic and obscene registers, points to the non-homogeneity of their identities and, by extension, of Italian identities.  By showing and exalting the indeterminacy of linguistic expression, the artists index the chaotic element, the assemblages that constitute the national language.  Their poetry points out the indeterminacy of meaning and structure, and thus the falsity of linguistic boundaries and the mythological essence of “standard” language.  To understand the impact that this last effect can have in Italy, I will discuss the fundamental role that the creation of the Italian language played and still plays in the attempts to centralize Italians under a nationality.

2005

Co-authored with Elia Gilbert: “What We Don’t Know We Create:” Teaching the Art of Insulting in Tuscany. Central States Anthropological Society conference.
The Contrasto is a Tuscan Italian form of sung verbal duel, performed in improvisation by pairs of artists called Poeti Bernescanti. In the performances, the artists impersonate opposing characters and engage in a contentious dialogue, artfully insulting each other in highly structured and metaphorical poetry. Carrying on a tradition based in the middle ages, such duels are a locus for presenting veiled social criticisms and attacking powerful political figures. Today, however, the Contrasto is in danger of disappearing. Its survival is in the hands of a few young people that are still interested in learning it. This paper, based on an ethnographic research conducted between 1994 and 2001, will examine the contradictory and complex relationship between the older artists and their protégées. Since the first believe that poetic creativity is innate to the person and cannot be taught, the second feel they lack knowledge of the genre. Thus, relying on a copresent view of creativity as norm-breaking, they introduce changes in the music, the language and performance, to meet the expectations of new social contexts. The performances become the ground for a dialogue between two generations of artists, through which the Contrasto is changed from one generation to the next.

2004

Verbal Duels: The Participation Structure of Disrupting Everyday Realities.  Poster paper, American Anthropological Association.
The relevance of gendered categories, political parties, occupational statuses, and the reputations of Tuscan medieval towns is commonly debated through the elaborately structured verbal duels that Tuscan Italians know as Contrasti. Carrying on a tradition based in the middle ages, such duels provide venues in which the form and substance of popular debate is set to verse. I conducted research on the Contrasti performances since 1994, showing how the performers can veil effective political critique and negotiate definitions of gender and ethnic identities. In this poster, using videoclips of the performances as well as their integral texts, I illustrate the elaborate rhymed structure of the duels that transform insults into a carefully calculated dance, where personal conflict becomes a filter through which to carry out attacks on social norms. I turn my attention on the form of the verbal duel to examine how ritual insults define a participation structure that allows for the disarticulation of everyday discourses defining common sense truths and realities. This participation structure allows for the collaborative disarrangement of face among participants: here selves and identities are made and shattered. From Rap to the Yemenite Balah poems, verbal duels are a form of expression and resistance in many cultures. Notwithstanding this, they have received relatively little attention in recent times. The poster intends to become a space to start a dialogue among scholars interested in ritual insults and their different forms across cultures.

2003

The Construction of Images of Masculinity and Family Ties in Tuscan Verbal Art. International Pragmatics Conference.  Part of the panel “Masculinities in the Plural: Discourse Analyses of Men's Identity
Performances.” Works on gender today have pointed increasingly to the relationship between gender and kinship, interrogating their connections as they are both “concerned with understanding the rights and duties that order relations between people defined by difference” (Collier, J. F. and S. J. Yanagisako 1987 Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.  Page 29).  Unfortunately, most of these studies are still centered on “womanhood.”  Masculinity and male identities seem to be still understood as separate from family ties. In this paper, I analyze and trace how in Tuscan Italian verbal duels, known as Contrasto, the difference between a man and another is defined according to their position vis-a-vis marriage.  As the dueling artists present themselves as “males,” they construct images of masculinity.  These include definitions of rights and duties connected to the creation and maintenance of the family unit and the meaning of “care” inside it. The Contrasto is a traditional genre of sung performance poetry, where two or more poets impersonate different characters and trade insults according to a chosen topic.  I videotaped these performances over several fieldwork periods between 1994 and 2002.  The topics that I will take into consideration include “the bachelor vs. the married,” “the husband vs. the lover,” “the husband vs. the wife,” and similar.  Here, the reciprocal insults among male performers most often involve attacks on each other’s masculinity. The analysis follows a Pragmatic and Ethnopoetic approach to language use to show that “men” as a discursively constructed category cannot be taken as existing outside social relationships.  The male identities portrayed in the Contrasto show that one is always a “man in relation to.”  Thus, I will argue, when the poet positions himself as a man, (but not a generic man, rather a husband, or a bachelor, etc.), he also positions himself with respect to a universe of social and family relationships.

2002

Ideologies of Art and the Formulation of Subaltern Aesthetic Systems in Italian Verbal Art. American Anthropological Association.
This paper examines how artists and their communities construct alternative ideologies of style, performance and language use, accepting or resisting dominant definitions of art while strategically articulating subaltern aesthetic systems.  Definitions of art and artistry reflect dominant discourses, often reinforced by the hegemonic apparatuses dedicated to the study of “art” itself, like art academies, art critics and academic disciplines.  These definitions have important effects on the work and the bodies of the artists, since they create categorizations and hierarchies (“high” art, “folk” or “ethnic” art, etc.) that can then become reflected in policies of inclusion and exclusion.  The verbal artists and community artists I work with in Tuscany (like many other “ethnic” artists) often find themselves among the excluded.  As a result, they may be denied access to funding or performance venues.  While such artists have partially internalized the ideologies that portray them as “not really” artists and their work as “not really” art, on the other hand, they resist dominant definitions by creatively weaving alternative discourses around the meaning of art.  They reaffirm their systems of perceptions regarding their own and others’ performances, and their place in the panorama of various art genres.  In this essay, I will use data from interviews with Tuscan artists conducted during my past fieldwork on Tuscan Italian verbal art, verbal duels and community theater.  I will demonstrate how the alternative aesthetic systems that the artists share allow them to recover a positive image of the self, continuously re-constructing their identities as artists.

2002

Co-Authored with Brooke Bocast. Performing Hierarchies: Language and Gender in Italian Verbal Art, Conference on Language Interaction and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles.
The study of the construction of hierarchies among women shows that women may uphold or oppose ideas of gender and gender roles in a strategic way, to obtain or maintain power.  In this paper, drawing on research on the performance of Italian verbal duels, known as Contrasti, we analyze and trace how the artists manipulate language to assert dominance over one another.  Many Contrasti require the poets to impersonate "women” in particular sexual or kinship roles (e.g. mother-in-law and daughter-in-law).  Thus the Contrasto becomes a locus where power relationships among women can be portrayed, contested and negotiated.

2002

Co-Authored with Nedra Lee. Nationalism, Art and Language in the Unfinished Creation of the Italian Nation State.  International Conference of Europeanists. 
In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated that standard languages are not only key to the creation of nation-states, but are themselves "imagined" together with the nation-states. In the Italian nation-state case a common language and a national art were molded in conjunction with an emergent model of Italian citizenship, in the nineteenth century. Through processes such as "iconicity, "fractal recursivity" and "erasure" (see Irvine, J.T. and S. Gal 2000 "Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation." In P.V. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. Santa Fe: SAR Press), the Italian folklorists, linguists and literati were involved in the creation of this model of "citizenship." These processes at the same time established the subordinate place and definition of the other languages present in the Italian state (considered since as "dialects") as well as the subordinate positions of other aesthetic systems. This is the case of the "Contrasto," a Tuscan Italian genre of verbal art which proposes a view of art which is alternative and in partial opposition to the dominant image of artistry, thus proposing an alternative model of "citizenship." The creation of Italy as a nation-state was never "finished business," as contrasting interests intermingled in its definition, each contributing to the creation of today's Italian regional and local identities. Although pushed aside, art forms like the "Contrasto" have continued to propose alternative aesthetic systems that are both in opposition to the national view of "art" and that refuse to use the "standard" Italian language.

2000

Singing the ‘Original’ Male: Doing/Undoing Masculinity in Speech Play.  American Anthropological Association.
This paper starts from the analysis of the “Contrasto,” a traditional Tuscan Italian genre of sung verbal duel.  The reciprocal offences among male performers in these verbal duels most often involve attacks on each other’s “masculinity” through attacks on the “sexual prowess” of the other person.  Using a Pragmatic and Ethnopoetic approach, I show that these public performances are key to understanding how masculinity is imagined in Tuscany.  Thus, at one level of analysis, the performance represents a Tuscan ideology of manhood, showing the workings of the construction of gender identity.  However, the positioning of the self as “male” -- through an evocation of “masculine” attributes and behaviors -- is driven to its extremes by the performers.  In this sense, the speech play becomes a parody that shows not only the means through which the construction of masculinity is achieved, but also its weak points, the juncture where the verbal attack can effectively negate the other person’s masculinity.  This parody and humor invites the audience to look into the complexity of the construction of the social self, and the complexity of the social elements that make each person a unique individual.  By laughing, the audience indirectly shows recognition of the portraiture, but also an appreciation of the deconstruction implied in making manhood a “laughable matter.”  Thus, they show to recognize in the “Contrasto” a mono-dimensional account of what, in everyday experience, is instead a unique construction of individual particular selves.

1999

Like Romeo and Juliet Upside Down: Gender and Power in Tuscan Community Theater.  American Anthropological Association.
Performance does not just reflect pre-existing social realities, but it has the power to rearrange them, create them, comment on possibilities. In this paper, I show how Tuscan Italian Community Theater performances create a gendered view of Tuscan social values, cultural memories, and identities. The analysis is based on the result of my fieldwork in Tuscany (between 1994 and 1998), where I worked with several theater groups, videotaping their performances and participating to their preparation and rehearsal. The groups use performance to propose alternative readings of people's behaviors and decisions, touching on gender roles, family relations, the meaning of friendship and love. The presentation of old customs and new ones, often reflected in the text through the contrast between generations, allows performance to become a way of reflecting on the self, of reckoning with the possibility and conflict, of being at times “men” and “women”, as they are at times “Tuscans”. As they stand at the intersection of gender and cultural identities, of art and everyday life, of past and present, theater performances become a mean of empowerment. Through their heteroglossia, they present a different view of what counts as real, what has been hidden from view, what is relevant and what is not. They scrutinize the accepted moral values of Tuscan society, at the same time that they give voice to those values. The groups thus become mediators between the past and a present in which recovery of memory and reflection on the meaning of cultural heritage becomes fundamental.

1999

In Rhyme I Will Answer You: Verbal Fights and the Poetical Construction of Politics in the Tuscan Contrasto.  VII Annual Symposium About Language and Society Austin.
This paper explores a genre of Tuscan Italian verbal art, the “Contrasto” to show the articulation of politics and language in verbal dueling. The “Contrasto” is a kind of improvised sung poetry, in Tuscan dialect, performed in the context of public festivals and events. The detailed analysis of the performances of two Tuscan Poets, shows how the Contrasto’s complex, articulated and precise structure offers a protection, that allows the artist to voice opinions on social behaviors and political decisions. This includes bringing attacks to the established political structure, to religious institutions, and to social norms and roles, using offending words that would not otherwise be appropriate. Moreover, the bipolar structure of the genre allows and requires that two opposite voices may be heard, and both in turn be attacked. Thus the Contrasto always present two sides of reality. It transforms power relationships and political knowledge into a highly dynamic terrain of dispute. The dueling poets depict, and thus create, the political arena itself, showing its boundaries and their arbitrariness. Thus performance becomes a mediating link between the socio-political structure and the personal lives of the individuals. The data and results presented are part of a larger research on Tuscan verbal art, carried on over several different fieldwork seasons, starting from 1994. The methods used included extensive videotaping of performances, participant observation, and interviews. From the study, emerges the potentiality of art as a means of reflection over social events and of expression of people’s voices. The potential for social change and resistance is shown to reside in the creative potential that verbal art unleashes, in its heteroglossia, and in the number of possible and alternative realities that performance presents to the view. As different discourses are represented in it, performance furnishes a commentary on society, and thus acquires agency, and becomes reflexive.

1998

I Found Myself Singing in This land: Reflexing Emotions/ Creating Identities in the Tuscan Contrasto.  American Anthropological Association.
This paper on a genre of Tuscan Italian verbal art, the Contrasto, uses performance as a key to look at the connections between art and ethnic identity. The Contrasto is a kind of improvised sung poetry, in Tuscan dialect. It is performed by pairs of artists called Poeti Bernescanti, in the context of public festivals and events. The Contrasto takes its name, “contrast”, from its humorous representation of a verbal duel among entities, people or ideas. Structurally, it is formed by a series of chained Octets, in hendecasyllables. The first six verses have an alternated rhyme, while the last two have a coupled rhyme. The data and results presented are part of a larger research on Tuscan verbal art, carried on over four different fieldwork seasons (from July 1994, to September 1998). I worked with several artists, using a vast range of methodologies. These included extensive videotaping of performances, participant observation, and interviews. I recorded a total of more than 35 hours of videotapes and 15 hours of audio-tapes. Here I focus in particular on the performances of two artists, Altamante Logli and Realdo Tonti. The paper is articulated in two parts. First, through the analysis of the “openings” of several Contrasti, I will show how a “repertoire” of ethnic identities becomes evident in the way the artists choose to represent themselves across contexts. These identities are connected to place. They are rarely defined at the regional level. They are instead connected to towns, villages, valleys and mountains, monuments and historical events and legends. By referring to particular Tuscan sub-groups or sub-cultures,the Poets portray the identity that allow them to feel closer to the audience. Thus, Tuscan ethnic identities and the communities to which they refer come to be imagined in the dialogue between the poets and their public, they are emergent in the performance itself. In the second part of the paper, the in depth stylistic and textual analysis of a Contrasto furnishes a key to understand how performance names and defines, but also contests, definitions of places and the associated identities. As identities overlap over the landscape, connections to places become contested sources of identification. Poetry and singing thus become a way for expressing contrasting Tuscan voices. In performance, the contrast between a very articulated and precise structure and the great freedom as to the topics discussed and the attitudes expressed, brings to view the layers of complexity of ethnicity, warning us against fixing and simplifying descriptions of it. Ethnic identity in the Contrasto is always shifting, constructed, bipolar or multipolar, dual or multiple, and defined in opposition to others. The Contrasto, thus, mines at its root the sense of the absoluteness of a particular identity, showing to the public how it lays in the eye of the beholder.

1996

Confronting Identities in Los Angeles: Italian Americans and Italian Nationals on Uncommon Ground.  American Ethnological Society.

1996

Code-Switching and the Communicative Construction of the Italian American Identity.  California State University Conference on Theory and Research on Communication and Culture.
Italian and Italian Americans today, have different images and definitions about what “being an Italian” means. These representations are influenced, and must be related to the American context, and to the transnational encounter. In my analysis, part of a study on the Italian American construction of ethnic identity, I start from a case of misunderstanding involving an Italian American and two Italians, to show how these different images can clash. Withdrawal from the communication and experience of negative feelings can be the consequence, especially considering the Italian tendency to not recognize their past as immigrants.

1995

The Italian Americans in Los Angeles: Representations of Identity and Community. American Anthropological Association.

The Discreet Charm of Insults: The Argumentative Dimension of Communication. Double-panel, American Anthropological Association, Washington DC.
This panel starts from the realization of a contradiction: we are surrounded by disputes all of our lives, and yet arguments have often been rendered invisible in scholarship as aberrations, problems suited for psychological counseling, rather than active ways of communicating and resources for constructing agency. Conflict has been seen as a problem that language users must overcome, as the marked, as something requiring explanation, as the abnormal in respect to the “normal” flux of cooperation and construction of agreement. Bringing together scholars working on argumentative discourse, verbal duels, and ritual insults, this panel will seek to abandon the received-wisdom that arguments are exceptional occurrences, to see them as central to communication. Instead of seeing disputes as disruptive of social interaction, we intend to look at them as constitutive of social interaction and social organization. Reclaiming a central place for argumentative language in communication, the panelists problematize the definition of conflict itself and the relationships between conflict and cooperation. Larson, for example, examines how participants in Slovak print journals interpret each other’s texts alternatively as producing “conflict” or “productive debate.” The complex relationship between insults and intimacy, verbal duels and face-work is examined by Tetreault and Pagliai. Bringing forward this argument, Haviland and Jacquemet will analyze the complex structure of argumentative language in institutional settings, including the restructuring of participant structures in the alignments and disalignments among participants. The social consequences of such realignments and their effect for the social standing on the individuals will be explored by Goodwin and Alim. The important role of argumentative language in creating, maintaining or deconstructing identities, will also be considered. Sbait, for example, will look at the role of Palestinian verbal duels in the preservation of national identity, while Tetreault will examine the use of ritual insults in maintenance of a sense of community among Algerian French adolescents. The frequency of use of argumentative language in courts and institutional settings points to their fundamental role in the political sphere and their use as means of empowerment. Dubuisson, for example, will show how the Kazakh verbal duels called aitus are used to criticize the action of the government while avoiding censorship. In the context of a scientific debate, Wolfgram will consider how ?yurv?da doctors debate the modernization of traditional medical practices. As we attempt to reintegrate arguments at the center of the study of language, several panelists will explore speakers’ socialization into argumentative language. LeMaster will look at preschool children’s verbal dueling during structured floor-time activities and peer-driven socialization into conflict, while Okuno will explore how “driving rants” are learned by Japanese drivers living in Los Angeles. The diversity of the ethnographic cases described in the papers of this panel, spanning verbal poetry, everyday conversations, scholarly debates, institutional and legal talk, and children's playtime clearly demonstrate the argumentative language cannot be confined to particular (liminal) contexts. We argue that it is equally problematic to construe these cases to exceptional events that reinforce a rule, or as reinterpretable through the frame of cooperation.

Language and Racial Formation Processes. Double-panel for the International Pragmatics Association conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, July.
This panel welcomes contributions from scholars working on processes of racial formation in discourse. Racial formations are understood, in Omi and Winant’s definition (1986:55), as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” Paper topics may include the construction of racial categories in everyday interactions and in institutional encounters, the use of language ideologies to reinforce them, discourse practices that constitute people as racial subjects, racial formations inside educational institutions, racial formations and immigration, racialization processes in the creation of national identities, and the connection between such processes of racial formation and racist or hate discourses.
The complexity of racial formation processes is demonstrated, for example, by the turn taken in Europe by the so-called new racism, which is based not on biological differences but on naturalized cultural differences (Balibar, 1988). Connected to this naturalization is a substitution of the term “ethnicity” to replace the scorned term “race,” and an understanding of identity as innate, natural and fixed trait of the individual, namely as essential and defining the self permanently. It is a goal of this panel to demonstrate that such complexity cannot be properly understood without an attention to language and discourse. Racializing discourses constitute people’s social identities and justify their differential treatment. In this sense it is opportune to understand the connections between racial formations and racism. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has showed that racism is not just the aberrant behavior of a few individuals but central to the structure of the nation-state. Similarly, creations of racial distinctions among people are at the base of the maintenance of national state boundaries. This aspect allows us to understand why past “multiculturalism” approaches to anti-racist action and policy creation have been largely unsuccessful.
In this respect, the panel also wants to indicate new means to rethink anti-racist theory and action. The papers will not only present data and/or discuss theoretical issues, but will also discuss how research results can be used to fight racism and discrimination, or influence policy changes, or help organizations and institutions (both governmental or NGOs) working against racism, for social justice and/or immigrant and minority rights. Programs created to diminish racist attitudes among the general population must consider the mechanisms through which racializing discourses are reproduced either at the level of everyday encounters or in institutional settings.
The panel will be open to diverse theoretical points of view and methodologies of analysis, including but not limited to conversation analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, ethnography of speaking, multimodal analysis or sociolinguistics. The presentations will not be limited to a particular area and may include studies focusing on minority as well as majority discourses.

2006

Empowering Fieldwork: Rethinking Reifications and Misrepresentations of Cultures and Identities and the Role(s) of Ethnography. Central States Anthropological Society Conference, April 2006.
This panel offers a critique of the discourses through which images of local groups, communities and particular individuals have been created, both inside and outside anthropology. As ethnographers, the panelists propose a reconceptualization of those images, and utilize the tools of ethnography to redress the balance. Three of the papers examine how the social sciences have created and reified biased images of particular minority groups; a fourth seeks to problematize images created by the mass-media of immigrants in Britain. Finally, two papers explore how groups build identities and representations of themselves. Each paper attempts to rethink these processes though fieldwork. Each paper addresses the problem of representation, in the attempt to avoid reinscribing hegemonic notions of belonging and identity. Each also offers a critique of dominant imagery of otherness to which past anthropological and social research has contributed. In doing so, ethnography is again a tool for deconstruction and reconstruction.

2002

(Co-organized with Brigittine French) Envisioning Language, Ideology, and Human Agency:  Approaches, Critiques, And Possibilities.  American Anthropological Association.
People invoke ideologies in strategic ways to create imaginable presents and futures for themselves. In this way, individuals can anticipate changes in ideology, further their human and personal rights, contest authority or deal with the transformations of identity in the transnational era. In this panel we situate the study of language ideologies within the larger matrix of studies on ideology, while bridging the pragmatic and ideological dimensions of language use. By piecing together our various perspectives, we emphasize human agency and the ways in which it is articulated through language use. We thus show how people assert and contest a variety of dominant cultural representations including, art, gender, ethnicity, motherhood, childhood and citizenship. The study of linguistic ideologies has shed new light on processes like colonialism, linguistic discrimination, and nationalism. It also presents challenges. Of relevance for us, is how to avoid the insidious possibility of perceiving ideologies as all explaining and encompassing. In this case, ideology would increasingly become a synonym of a hegemonic version of culture. The danger is then, to go back to indulge in a perception of people as cultural automatons. To avoid this possibility, a study of ideologies and linguistic ideologies must be connected to an understanding of the ways in which people, as "loosely structured" agents, can use, manipulate, appropriate and reinterpret or hybridize ideologies. Studies focusing on pragmatics have shown that people use language strategically. In bridging this understanding with the study of ideologies, we start from the recognition that people's lives are cross-cut by multiple ideological domains. The questions then, is partially one regarding the degree in which ideologies can be seen as shared, and the degree in which people can be seen as straddling several ideological systems. We collectively demonstrate the ways in which individual human actors display complex, layered, and knowledgeable understanding of the social phenomena around them and in the ideological systems in which their lives are embedded. Some papers in this panel focus on the ways in which ideologies are used to construct and imagine a sense of identity. Others focus more on the connection between ideologies and the actual shaping of socialization practices (including language socialization practices) both by the children and caregivers. Presenters analyze a variety of data including naturally occurring quotidian discourse, interviews, and sociolinguistic data in order to elucidate the struggles between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic representations that are articulated in individual experiences. Pagliai focuses on ideologies of art and the "Artist" among folk poets and theater groups in Italy. Aubry looks at competing linguistic ideologies among Tlapanecs of Mexico. Kroskrity will examine a Mono elder's contestation of received Western Mono language ideologies. Modan's work elucidates contested notions of citizenship and place through an analysis of a multiethnic business association meeting. Keller-Cohen analyzes the ways in which young women in the US articulate self-constructions within the framework of competing notions of motherhood. Finally, Reynolds examines competing models of childhood in Guatemala as they are experienced and negotiated by Maya-Kaqchikel youth.

2000

(Co-organized with Cynthia Strathmann) Repositioning Masculinity as Public Display: Anthropological Perspectives. American Anthropological Association.
In recent years, masculinity has become a common topic in American popular discourse. Participants range from the Promise Keepers to well-known feminist writers, from conservative political groups to men’s drumming circles. While cultural and political pundits have approached the topic of masculinity from a variety of political positions, they have all tended to simplify masculinity, as though it formed a discrete and homogenous subject divorced from other social institutions. This panel suggests ways in which Anthropology can constructively speak to public debates as well as contribute to recently growing scholarship on masculinity in the social sciences by showing how masculinity varies from culture to culture, and how its construction is linked to social structures and processes. Repositioning masculinities as public display means to shift the focus from the actions or biological make-up of individual males toward the social and political practices that create boundaries of gender and gendered behavior. All of the papers show the links between the construction of masculinities and social structures such as kinship, work, class, and sexuality. This panel conceptualizes masculinities as “done” in interaction, from the level of everyday encounters between two individuals to the consumption of mass media products by general audiences. The papers use a variety of anthropological methodologies, from linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis to textual analysis to participant observation, in a variety of cultural settings (Japan, Italy, Guyana, the United States, Australia and Germany). The panel includes both cultural and linguistic anthropologists who use theoretical orientations as different as ethnopoetics, pragmatics and language use, cultural studies and political economy. The authors use these different methodological and theoretical approaches to address the question of how masculinities are displayed and consumed. While some underscore the co-construction of masculinity in conversation or verbal art, others examine images of masculinity in large-scale cultural productions. Still others look at audience responses to displays of masculinity. The articulation of these different approaches sheds light on the ways in which people accept, resist or parody official images of masculinity, and how they may propose alternative ones. By putting together papers that study masculinity from a variety of perspectives and with a variety of methods, we can show its contextuality and the ways in which larger social structures are both created by it and create it. These insights can speak to public debates on masculinity by problematizing the monolithic constructions of masculinity that are often posited in popular discourse and by showing that masculinity is not divorced from other spheres of life, but is integral to the maintenance of many social institutions.

1998

Art and the Expression of Complex Identities: Imagining and Contesting Ethnicity in Performance. American Anthropological Association.
Lately there has been a substantial debate in anthropology regarding ethnic groups and the construction of identity. By bringing such a discussion in the domain of art, our intent is to add ulterior layers to it, building a ground to confront different approaches and perspectives, different domains of society and culture. The relationship between art and identity is an elusive one, and such elusiveness becomes increasingly evident as we abandon the safe ground of accepted definitions of art and ethnicity, to venture into complexity. Here two transformations happen immediately: art becomes performance, and identity multiplies in a "repertoire" of ethnic, gender, social and class identities, each shifting and changing, each contexted and contested. At the same time that art can be shown to be a "diacritica" or "symbolic" of specific identities, identity loses its "specificity" to become performative, and thus sharing in the essence of art. As the authors analyze various genres of verbal art, music and song, a first focus is performance, as it creates a context in which identity can be foregrounded. This context is in turn a space of dialogue and a space of memory. The "dialogue," is articulated between the artist(s) and their audience. Through it art comes to give expression to several voices, including the voice of tradition and the voice of change, the voice of the dominant culture as well as those of the subaltern ones. Textual as well as structural aspects of the art forms are also considered. For example, humor is highlighted, and its potential in proposing and upholding images of identity or negotiating and deconstructing them. Finally, some of the papers consider the set of beliefs and linguistic ideologies surrounding the art genres. Several theories previously formulated on ethnic identity are revisited and commented upon, such as the concept of the "Diacritica of ethnicity," the theory of "Cultural Hybrids," the "Double Boundary," and the concept of "Repertoire of ethnic identities". At the same time, ethnic identity is confronted with other identities, like gender, class, social and national ones. Overall remains the attempt to see identities not only as multiple, but as a ground for contestation, as a political ground. Though, as identity becomes open to discussion, so does art. An attempt to rethink and expand ideas about the multiple roles of art forms needs to show their connection to the structuring of political power and to the shaping of human experience. By furnishing a commentary on society, art displays the potential to move people to action. Art as political, can be used as an instrument of hegemony or resistance to it. This is turn becomes inextricably connected to showing its role in the construction of identity. We try to emphasize the ways in which verbal art points us towards contradictions within ethnic formations. The way in which art performances play with and comment on both the social divisions in the community and the generic universe that embodies those divisions.