"Intersecting histories and diverging agendas in language revitalization: El Proyecto Para la Recuperación del Idioma Iquito," Lev Michael, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Date of Event:
Friday, November 13, 2009 - 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Intersecting histories and diverging agendas in language revitalization: El Proyecto Para la Recuperación del Idioma Iquito
In recent decades, language revitalization projects have sprung up in numerous communities across the world, as the interests of indigenous communities and those of regional, national, and international elites have intersected in complicated ways to spur the launching of these joint educational-political-scientific endeavors. These projects have created new arenas for the negotiation of language ideologies and political economies within indigenous communities and constitute new spaces in which members of indigenous communities, representatives of local and national governments, NGOs, and language researchers pursue their interests. Despite the significance of language revitalization projects as key sites for political and language-ideological negotiation at local and trans-local levels, however, these projects have received relatively little ethnographic scrutiny. In this talk I draw attention to the richness of language revitalization projects as ethnographic sites by examining one in which I have been involved with, the Proyecto Para la Recuperación del Idioma Iquito, which was active in the Iquito community of San Antonio de Pintuyacu, in northern Peruvian Amazonia during 2002-2006. My main goal in this talk is to describe the frequently divergent motivations and goals of the varied groups of local, (non-)governmental, and academic actors and stakeholders in the Iquito language revitalization project, sketch out the historical roots of these actors' positions, and show how they shaped the development of the project.
Location
Gifford Room, Kroeber Hall
Berkeley, CA
94720
United States
37° 52' 25.3416" N, 122° 15' 4.3524" W
See map: Google Maps
11/14/2009 3:57 pm
Comments and questions on Professor Michael's talk
As pointed out by one of our participants, Professor Dawn-Elissa Fischer, in her questions, Professor Michael's talk hits home on so many points on the role of language attitudes, community-oriented research, and the politics of knowledge production and reciprocity in research matters. Professor Michael's talk pushed me to consider the role of self-reflexivity in social movements around language, particularly on behalf of the researcher, and rendered visible critical and, often, muted perspectives on language revitalization. As such, this was truly a talk with much to be gained for anyone who participates in or is concerned about the responsibility of researchers in regards to the community. For me, one of the interesting questions was the ways in which new questions of speaker authenticity get contested and reconsidered during language revitalization projects. Historically, authenticity has been an issue in subjects such as the African American English case on Carla when there are competing criteria for what defines a speaker (Labov 1980, Jacobs-Huey 1996, etc.). However, within these discussions, these conflicts are usually considered to be quite minor in consequences, without resources being on the line. In contrast, within language revitalization movements, definitions of who is and is not an authentic speaker are often public battles with major consequences, even down to questions of who is appropriate to oversee bilingual schools in contexts like the Iquito ethnographic situation, which also has consequences for language transmission. As such, as scholars continue to turn to scholarly debates on the role of authenticity and authenticating practices in identity work (Bucholtz and Hall 2005), language revitalization movements, especially the Iquito case, may turn out to be quite important sites of investigation. Moreover, if there's one question that continues to lurk for me, it is, how does gender operate in these authenticating battles? Is "age" the primary category that is invoked in these debates of authenticity, or does 'gender' also become a particular site in which these struggles of defining an authentic speaker also get worked out? FInally, to press further on a comment made by Dawn-Elissa Fischer, what might we gain out of a comparison between the "Ebonics" debates in the mid-1990s and the debates around language revitalization and language pride in the Iquito context?