Contested Mobilities On The Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation Charles Briggs
Contested Mobilities On The Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation Charles Briggs
Contested Mobilities On The Politics and Ethnopoetics of Circulation Charles Briggs
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfolkrese.50.1-3.285?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal
of Folklore Research
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Charles L. Briggs
Abstr act: This article argues that ethnopoetics can make important
contributions to current work in anthropology, science-technology-
society studies, and other disciplines on the mobility and circulation of
cultural forms. Scholars have suggested that mobility is not an intrinsic
property of words, images, technologies, etc.; it rather takes particular
types of interventions to make phenomena seem intrinsically mobile. The
articles in this special issue by Gerald L. Carr and Barbra Meek, Sean
Patrick O’Neill, and David W. Samuels provide ethnographic challenges
to dominant models of circulation, as promoted by anthropologists, mis-
sionaries, and educators. They document how Native American transla-
tors, language teachers, and Christian converts scrutinize models that,
as O’Neill and Samuels point out, have long histories. In doing so, they
engage in practices that disrupt hegemonic models, propose alternatives,
and question the foundational premise that promoting the circulation
of cultural and linguistic forms is always a moral good, one that confers
positive—if not superior—ethical standing on anthropologists, linguists,
missionaries, and educators.
Lik e Fr anz Boas and Edward Sapir, Dell Hymes connected lin-
guistic anthropology with social/cultural anthropology. The terms
he coined and the perspectives he advanced drew on wider anthro-
pological perspectives, thus bringing linguistic anthropologists into
larger conversations and enabling work in linguistic anthropology to
gain greater visibility among colleagues with different subdisciplinary
allegiances. I would argue that this is precisely the move that has long
fostered new spurts of creativity within the subdiscipline and greater
visibility for linguistic anthropologists. Work on performance inaugu-
285
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
286 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
rated in the 1970s by Hymes (1981) and Richard Bauman (1977) ener-
gized not only anthropology but also linguistics, communication, and
literary studies; the cross-fertilization between linguistic anthropology
and folkloristics at this juncture was crucial, as has been true at other
points as well. Ideologies of language (Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et
al. 1998) suddenly transported linguistic anthropology from the rela-
tive doldrums of the 1980s to a period when new positions opened up
and anthropologists came to see that linguistic anthropologists had a
great deal to offer to studies on such topics as colonialism (Hanks 2010;
Irvine 2001; Keane 2007), media anthropology (Spitulnik 2002), and
more. A crucial feature of these points of intersection is that they did
not simply “borrow” from adjacent fields but critically revised concepts
in social/cultural anthropology as well as assumptions underpinning
linguistic anthropology.
We are, I would argue, at precisely another juncture where a
shot of epistemological energy would be particularly valuable. A
number of linguistic anthropologists have recently taken on issues that
are of interest to other anthropologists by focusing on race, racism,
and anti-immigrant discourses (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998;
Hill 2008; Mendoza-Denton 2008), therapeutic regimes (Briggs and
Mantini-Briggs 2003; Carr 2011; Dick and Wirtz 2011), globalization
(Blommaert 2010), and how languages, linguistic practices, and con-
structions of language get commodified in neoliberal market schemes
(Duchene and Heller 2012). Rather than take up objects framed as
“new,” these articles by Gerald L.Carr and Barbra Meek, Sean Patrick
O’Neill, and David W. Samuels engage a traditional focus of Ameri
canist linguistic anthropology—ethnopoetics—thus requiring a differ-
ent strategy for building dialogues with other anthropological issues
and perspectives. Recently, a great deal of work by anthropologists
and other social scientists has focused on circulation and mobility,
and here, I think, is a way to extend issues raised by these articles and
articulate what they can offer to scholars of other stripes.
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 287
(2006), Aihwa Ong (Ong and Collier 2005), and Ana Tsing (2005)
have been important here. For people who think about language and
performativity, Jacques Derrida’s critique of what he characterized as
the analytical limits of J. L. Austin’s (1962) “total speech situation” was
important. Derrida sought to locate performativity not in originary
acts of speaking but in iterative movements in which “something new
takes place” ([1972] 1977, 40). Discourse, he suggested, is neither free
floating nor locked in contexts. John Urry’s (2007) work suggested,
however, that mobility is not an intrinsic property of words, images,
technologies, bodies, and so forth; such phenomena as walking, bi-
cycles, cars, and airplanes have come to be seen as immanent embodi-
ments of mobility because of the broad transformations of bodies,
landscapes, the built environment, and social relations that enabled
them. Urry reminded us that the same processes produce forms of
immobility simultaneously.
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) suggested that in the
case of diagnostic categories and statistics, producing mobility involves
two contradictory processes. First, particular practices, epistemologies,
and technologies must be employed in order to enable objects, cultural
forms, and other entities to inhabit particular sites. At each location
through which they circulate, texts, objects, narratives, and the like
get connected indexically to features of these assemblages at the same
time that they performatively reshape them, albeit generally in minute
ways. Bowker and Star suggest that in order to move on to other sites,
however, dimensions of the complex indexical histories generated at
each site must be erased. Some actors, interests, languages, conflicts,
technologies, and the like must disappear; of the stuff that circulates,
some features become figures and others part of the background,
some get referentially coded while others are lodged in non-referential
features. Reception, of course, further complicates this process, as
some people who get interpellated down the line know enough of
the indexical histories to infer elements that have been erased while
others are unable to decode even foregrounded elements.
Work in anthropology, science-technology-society (STS) studies,
and other areas on circulation thus suggests a number of points. First,
scholars often seem to imbibe a sort of naïve neoliberal Darwinism
of cultural forms and objects, including languages, narratives, and
texts—the sense that people always want them to move as far, as fast,
as freely, and as long as possible, which Greg Urban (2001) refers to
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
288 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
Recirculating Ethnopoetics
Whence ethnopoetics? In a word, its study has long revealed the com-
plexities of how processes of indexical embedding and making mobile
are both invested in narratives. Exploring these processes in a richly
ethnographic modality, the three articles in this section critique ways
that received, generally implicit models of circulation impede our
understanding of how narratives, texts, and languages circulate. They
go on to suggest how narratives and translated sermons and language
revitalization projects involve complex intersections between compet-
ing models and practices. My goal here is to draw attention to the
insights they offer into broader questions of circulation and mobility,
thereby hoping to increase their value for linguistic anthropologists
and their ability to contribute to ways that other anthropologists and
social scientists discuss these issues.
Sean Patrick O’Neill usefully repositions the translation of narra-
tives from Northwestern California into the context of relations be-
tween Native American nations. His article seems to suggest that some
of the most famous work in the Americanist tradition was informed by
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 289
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
290 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 291
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
292 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 293
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
294 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 295
Conclusion
One of my favorite narratives is a Hopi Coyote story told by Helen
Sekaquaptewa (1978) to her grandchildren, filmed by Larry Evers,
which has been analyzed by David Shaul (2002) and Andrew Wiget
(1987). Observing the birds from a distance, Coyote tries to get close
enough to turn them into “a snack.” He watches them winnow grass
seeds, blow away the husks, and then fly above Old Oraibi. Trying to
beguile the birds, Coyote is himself beguiled as he learns their song:
Pota, pota, pota,
pota, pota, pota,
yowa’ini, yowa’ini,
ph, ph, ph, ph.
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
296 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
Adorning him with their own feathers, the birds then lure Coyote into
flying up with them higher and higher, at which point they take back
their feathers one by one. He falls to his death.
This narrative suggests what ethnopoetics can offer to the study
of circulation and mobility—and also constitutes a cautionary tale.
Sekaquaptewa masterfully models the circulation of cultural forms
here in multiple ways simultaneously. In showing us how Coyote
learned the bird’s song, she is also modeling how her grandchildren
can learn both song and story. Here models of circulation imbue
cultural features with mobility in particularly forceful ways, draw-
ing bodies and voices as well as heads and ears into the process. As
Carr and Meek and the elders with whom they worked observed, this
process operates as much in performances as in circulating texts.
Sekaquaptewa’s use of her own voice, face, head, and hands points to
the crucial role of intersubjectivity as she moves frequently between
a variety of positionalities—a narrator who draws her grandchildren
into becoming co-performers as much as an actor who assumes the
shifting spatial-temporal-behavioral-linguistic positionalities of Coyote
and the birds. The expressive potential of features of the narrative are
doubled through use of cante fable (a mixed genre, to use Bakhtin’s
1986 term), enabling Sekaquaptewa to infuse the story with drama,
bring her characters to life, expose their ethical and subjective com-
plexities, imbue them with possibilities for ethical reflection, and
juxtapose a world in which birds can speak and coyotes can fly with
the contemporary world confronted by Hopi children.
A different sort of model of circulation is also apparent here, one
whose production involved the participation of not only producer
Larry Evers but Sekaquaptewa’s son Emory—a lawyer, judge, jeweler,
University of Arizona faculty member, editor of a Hopi dictionary,
and principal consultant on the film project. Originally a video tape,
the recording now circulates via the Internet, and English speakers
can read the subtitles and learn the song, like Sekaquaptewa’s grand-
children, progressively through the four repetitions. We thereby seem
to enter directly into the experience of the mobility of culture. The
performativity attached to the circulation of a hybrid cultural form,
a song embedded within a story, relying (as O’Neill might have pre-
dicted) on semantically empty vocables, seems to imbue it with such
mobility that it can cross species and engender remarkable forms of
physical mobility—a coyote can learn to fly. And this multi-species
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 297
University of California
Berkeley
Notes
1. The term was proposed by Star and Griesemer (1989).
References Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina
Sbisà. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other
Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, 60–102. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.
Bauman, Richard. 1977. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
———. 2008. “The Philology of the Vernacular.” Journal of Folklore Research 45
(1): 29–36.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. “Poetics and Performance as
Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 19:59–88.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited and with Introduction by Hannah
Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken.
Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Blommaert, Jan, and Jef Verschueren. 1998. Debating Diversity: Analysing the Dis-
course of Tolerance. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond
and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification
and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
298 Journal of Folklore Research Vol. 50, Nos. 1–3
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Briggs Contested Mobilities 299
Ong, Aihwa, and Stephen J. Collier, eds. 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Poli-
tics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Petryna, Adriana, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. 2006. Global Phar-
maceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Riles, Annelise, ed. 2006. Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, eds. 1998. Lan-
guage Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sekaquaptewa, Helen. 1978. “Iisaw: Hopi Coyote Stories.” Produced by Larry
Evers. Video, 17:47. Words and Place: Native Literature from the American
Southwest 4. http://parentseyes.arizona.edu/wordsandplace/sekaquaptewa
.html.
Shaul, David Leedom. 2002. Hopi Traditional Literature. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
Silverstein, Michael. 1993. “Metapragmatic Discourse and Metapragmatic Func-
tion.” In Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, edited by John
A. Lucy, 33–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Kalim H. 2005. “Language Ideology and Hegemony in the Kumeyaay
Nation: Returning the Linguistic Gaze.” Master’s thesis, University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples. London: Zed.
Spitulnik, Debra. 2002. “Mobile Machines and Fluid Audiences: Rethinking Re-
ception through Zambian Radio Culture.” In Media Worlds: Anthropology on
New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin,
337–54. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Star, Susan Leigh, and James Griesemer. 1989. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Transla-
tions,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Mu-
seum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420.
Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.
Wiget, Andrew. 1987. “Telling the Tale: A Performance Analysis of a Hopi Coyote
Story.” In Recovering the Word, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat,
297–336. Berkeley: University of California Press.
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
EDITED BY ESTELLE R. JORGENSEN
Philosophy of Music Education Review features
philosophical research in music education. It includes
articles that address philosophical or theoretical issues,
reform initiatives, philosophical writings, theories,
the nature and scope of education and its goals and
purposes, and cross-disciplinary dialogue relevant to the
interests of music educators.
PUBLISHED SEMIANNUALLY
eISSN 1543-3412
pISSN 1063-5734
Available in electronic, combined electronic & print,
and print formats
SUBSCRIBE http://www.jstor.org/r/iupress
For more information on Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
This content downloaded from 189.254.225.158 on Fri, 09 Jun 2017 17:05:42 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms