Resent-From: "Douglas J. Glick" <dglick@stny.rr.com>
From: "Douglas J. Glick" <dglick@stny.rr.com>
Date: January 22, 2005 3:22:59 AM EST
Resent-To: John Hagan <jhagan@binghamton.edu>
To: "Glick Douglas J." <dglick@binghamton.edu>
Subject: Language-Culture: Agha (reviewing Bucholtz) (Modified by 
Douglas J. Glick)

> ÊIdeologies and practices of identity
>  Asif Agha
>  University of Pennsylvania
>
>  [Comments on Bucholz, ïWord up: Social meanings of slang
>  in California youth culture]
>
>  Mary BucholzÍs elegant paper raises several interesting issues 
> regarding the formulation and deployment of signs of social identity. 
> An unusual feature of the paper is the comparative treatment of two 
> very different schemes of identity reckoning in a single ethnographic 
> context: the sign-values attached to place (i.e. the locale where one 
> ïhangs outÍ in the schoolyard) and to the uses of slang (i.e. register 
> variation in speech). Since both cases involve an ideological 
> dimension, the comparative frame of the paper raises some general 
> issues:
>  á In what sense do these ideologies formulate signs of social 
> identity?
> á How are these ideologies identified in actual data?
> á What is the evidence that the ideologies are socially shared?
> á What is the semiotic basis for distinguishing ïideologyÍ from 
> ïpracticeÍ?
>  IÍd like to comment on each of these issues in turn, starting with 
> the first.
>
> Social identity
> In what sense do these ideologies formulate signs of social identity? 
> In each case the ideology treats particular forms of behavior„habits 
> of hanging out, habits of utterance„as conveying information about the 
> actor who performs the behavior in the instance. Both ideologies thus 
> evaluate forms of behavior as indexicals of actor type. In the case of 
> slang the criterial signs are linguistic forms; we are thus inclined 
> to call this case a ïlanguage ideologyÍ. In the other case the 
> criterial signs are facts of habitual presence (ïhanging outÍ) in 
> certain schoolyard spaces; in this case we are dealing with „what we 
> might as well call„a ïgeosocial ideologyÍ of personhood.
>  In both cases the ideology links performable behaviors to social 
> personae. Some of the personae discussed in the paper involve matters 
> of group-relative status (cf. "social position," p. 26); these are 
> analyzable in terms of demographic variables, e.g., age-set, 
> ethnicity, gender, regional affiliation. Others involve matters of 
> interactional stance, e.g., speakerÍs coolness, or emergent alignments 
> between speaker/addressee; these have a more indirect relationship to 
> social-demographic categories of personhood.
>  Now, whether the "identity" effect is construed as a matter of 
> group-membership or of interactional stance the effect is always 
> marked by patterns of actor-focal indexicals in interaction. 
> Ideologies of identity do often essentialize some among the behaviors 
> performed by social actors as indexicals of group membership; but this 
> is not necessary. The ideology of ïcoolnessÍ, for example, centers on 
> matters of individual essence, not group-affiliation.
>  Yet even when a behavioral sign is ideologically associated with 
> fixed social categories of personhood, the persona indexed by the sign 
> is only ïreadableÍ under conditions of co-occurrence with other signs; 
> any such effect is therefore limitlessly defeasible or modifiable by 
> co-textual accompaniment by other signs (see pp. 8-9 below). Signs of 
> identity appear much more bounded and discrete in the data of 
> decontextualized reportage than they do under conditions of 
> performance.
>  We are now talking about two entirely different perspectives on signs 
> of identity: an ideological perspective and a performative 
> perspective. The discussion of slang in the paper allows us to see the 
> difference between the two rather sharply. But before I turn to slang, 
> let me take up the next two questions about ideology mentioned 
> above„the question of identifiability and of sharedness (see 
> above)„for the geosocial ideology first.
>
> Schoolyard space
> ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ What is the empirical evidence by which we identify the 
> geosocial ideology? The evidence consists largely of maps drawn by 
> students. The maps constitute a metapragmatic discourse linking facts 
> of habitual presence in specific schoolyard spaces to facts of group 
> affiliation. The link is formulated very explicitly by writing 
> ethnonyms (Asian Gastas, AfAm, Asst White People, etc.) next to 
> place-descriptors (steps, hill, blocks) within the maps themselves. So 
> the metapragmatic discourse formulates geosocial equivalences by 
> linking ethnonyms to toponyms.
>  ÊWhat is the evidence that the ideology thus identified is socially 
> shared? The main evidence is that maps drawn by two different social 
> categories of respondents„John Doe (African American) and Mark 
> (EuroAmerican)„formulate comparable geosocial equivalences (viz., 
> steps=Euro Americans, blocks=Asian Americans, hill=African Americans). 
> The ideologies can be shown to be shared insofar as the content of 
> these metapragmatic discourses„especially maps (2a) and (3)„have 
> similarities, one with another. The residue„the differences left over„ 
> are emblematic of "different subject positions" (p. 8) within the 
> ideological order.
>  In other words, just as the evidence for the existence of the 
> ideology is the data of metapragmatic discourse, the evidence for the 
> sharedness of the ideology is the degree to which the metapragmatic 
> discourses produced by different informants have commonalties of 
> content. Thus the analysis of several aspects of the ideology (its 
> existence, its locatability, its degree of sharedness, its variation 
> by subject position) depends upon the analysis of metapragmatic 
> discourses (their production, their producers, their content, 
> replicability of content across a population).
>  Let us now consider the case of slang.
>
> Slang
> First, some initial remarks about slang as a register. I have argued 
> elsewhere (Agha 1996, 1999) that a lexical register is comprised of 
> much more than a linguistic repertoire: that the traditional view 
> which seeks to reduce a register to a linguistic repertoire fails to 
> explain how the repertoire is distinguishable from the rest of the 
> language in the first place; that the identifiability of a lexical 
> register requires appeal to native metapragmatic discourse as a 
> criterion; and that once we consider such data we see that a register 
> is a discursive formation involving not only lexical repertoires but 
> metapragmatic stereotypes of personhood, activity, and social 
> relations which, once linked ideologically to lexemes, become 
> performable through the use of such forms.
>  In the case of slang the importance of metapragmatic criteria is 
> particularly plain„ indeed, inescapable„since the repertories of slang 
> are among the most rapidly changing of any linguistic registerÍs (see, 
> e.g., Eble 1996). In fact, in the case of age-graded slangs both the 
> registerÍs repertoires and its users change at an extremely rapid 
> pace: the repertoires change through lexical innovation, the users 
> simply by growing out of the age-set. Hence the continuity over time 
> of slang as a cultural formation depends much more on the persistence 
> of ideologies of language than on a fixed repertoire or a fixed group 
> of users.Ê
>  Such ideologies„which typify slang as a sub-standard variety of the 
> language, associated with informal, casual interactions, and with 
> particular types of speaker„are themselves replicated across a 
> population through normative metadiscursive institutions such as 
> prescriptive schooling, lexicography and the like. Given such 
> replication by institutions the ideology can acquire a greater 
> historical continuity and demographic spread than do the lexical 
> repertoires that count as slang forms for a given generation. The 
> ironic result is that different generations of adult speakers may 
> readily share a common attitude about youth slang (and its users) 
> without ever having known (or used) the same slang wordsÊ (let alone 
> the words currently employed in the slang).
>  ÊBucholzÍs paper shows that even within youth communities variations 
> in slang repertoire are linked to social classifications of speaker. 
> Once speech is personified in this way the deployment of particular 
> slang repertoires makes possible both the performance of normative 
> identities and the tropic manipulation of speaker persona through 
> various types of displaced usages, such as the performance of role 
> fragments, voicing phenomena, and tropes of irony and sarcasm. The 
> account employs three main kinds of metadiscursive data.
>
>  (1) Explicitly metadiscursive data
>  The first type involves speech-speaker correlations evidenced by 
> overtly metadiscursive conversations, i.e., conversations which take 
> slang lexemes, glosses, usage, etc., as overt topics of discussion. 
> Interestingly, although slang is an overt topic in these cases, much 
> of the actual discussion focuses thematically not on lexical forms but 
> on the social personae associated with these forms.
>  In some of the cases a particular persona is indexically inhabited by 
> a speaker through a particular usage, then commented upon by 
> interlocutors.Ê In (1), for example, where Priscilla has been talking 
> about the use of marijuana, her use of ïstonedÍ marks a shift from 
> standard English to slang. Her interlocutors comment ironically on her 
> usage and present contemporary slang alternatives to ïstonedÍ; the 
> interaction has turned now to the negotiation of speaker persona and 
> group-relative (including generational) identity. This case involves 
> naturally occurring metadiscursive activity. In the cases discussed on 
> pages 12-13, in contrast, the metadiscursive data is elicited by the 
> analyst; here, Bucholz is able to control for demographic category of 
> respondent, a technique that reveals asymmetries of competence over 
> slang repertoires across a population of speakers, such variation 
> itself comprising a system of second-order indexicals of speaker 
> identity (Silverstein 1996).
>  Yet though the two cases differ in whether the data is naturally 
> occurring or elicited, they are similar in that the association 
> between speech difference and speaker difference is established 
> analytically by appeal to explicit metadiscourses about slang.
>
>  (2) Implicit correlations
>  The second main type of data involves implicit correlations of speech 
> and speaker type. In these cases the skewing of usage within naturally 
> occurring text corpora itself implies something about the type of 
> speaker who uses these forms. Thus the fact that ïhellaÍ/ÍheckaÍ is 
> used by a range of speaker types [examples (2)-(3)] constitutes the 
> main evidence that the form is not linked to a specific ethnic/gender 
> group, but is a Bay Area "regional marker" (p. 16). In contrast, the 
> skewing of the uses of ïpatnaÍ (p. 17) suggests that the term is 
> strongly associated with African American speakers.
>  Here, slang is not an overt topic of discussion. The utterances in 
> question are only implicitly metapragmatic in import: they perform 
> rather than describe links between speech variants and speaker types. 
> The patterns of skewing within text corpora suggest that these 
> correlations may be regular. Yet by themselves such data are merely 
> suggestive. They require some sort of emic confirmation. A partial 
> confirmation is presented by the data of tropes.
>  Ê(3) Interactional tropes
>  The third type of data involves interactional tropes of various 
> kinds. The construal of these tropes (as described by Bucholz) 
> presupposes the stereotypic values linked to lexemes such as ïpatnaÍ. 
> Yet the construal of these usages as tropes is based on textualized 
> effects, i.e., on the co-occurrence of criterial lexemes with other 
> signs whose effects are not wholly congruent with the personae linked 
> to lexical forms. Thus when Jay uses the term ïpatnaÍ in (7c) the 
> co(n)textually readable fact that he is not African American calls 
> attention to the possibility that he may be likening himself to an 
> associated persona such as that of a hip-hopper.
>  Such a construal is a text-level effect since it depends on 
> accompanying signs co-textually conveying information about JayÍs 
> ethnic identity. In this case several facts about both interlocutors 
> are known to us: that both are EuroAmericans, that Charlie is a 
> ïstonerÍ and Jay a ïhip-hopperÍ; we also know that both have just 
> agreed (7c, lines 1-7) that the term ïbloodÍ sometimes slips out in 
> their speech, even though, as Bucholz observes, the term may be 
> "off-limit to white speakers" (p. 21). Under these textual conditions 
> the fact that Charlie goes on to offer racially neutral slang terms 
> for ïpersonÍ (i.e., ïmanÍ, ïdudeÍ), while Jay offers ïpatnaÍ, may 
> suggest that each is staking out a different "identity claim" for 
> himself. Hence the semiotic basis of this hypothesis is a pattern of 
> text played out across several interactional turns; none of the 
> individual turn contributions in (7c) suffice to make clear any 
> identity claims as such.
>  At the same time the fact that Jay switches to creaky voice when 
> uttering ïpatnaÍ (7c, lines 19-20) brings into play other indexical 
> partials as well, suggesting for example that he is voicing the 
> utterance from a position somewhat distinct from his own. Hence JayÍs 
> usage is somewhat layered in terms of competing performed effects. But 
> this inference is, again, motivated not by the slang lexeme alone but 
> by its place in a pattern of discursive text: it is the suprasegmental 
> contrast that implicitly frames the use of ïpatnaÍ as a potential 
> instance of voicing (in the Bakhtinian, not the phonetic sense!).
>  Similarly, NormanÍs use of the term ïpatnaÍ for Al in (8) appears to 
> perform an ironic interactional stance; but the stance is readable 
> only by appeal to co-occurring semiotic material (cf. BucholzÍs 
> discussion of the marked use of ïgotÍ and ïbeÍ, p. 22). Here, the text 
> pattern calls into question the denotational appropriateness of 
> ïpatnaÍ for the person in question, namely Al, who is not African 
> American but aspires to hip-hop culture.
>  Note that the construal of these tropes (at least as Bucholz presents 
> them) depends on the stereotypic association of ïpatnaÍ with African 
> American speakers and their activities. In this sense the 
> interactional tropes in (7c) and (8) confirm the hypothesis based on 
> the data of implicit correlations in (4), even though the effects 
> actually performed in the two cases are not the same.
>
>  The ideology-practice continuum
>  In the case of slang, all three types of data„the explicitly 
> metadiscursive discussions, the implicit correlations, the 
> interactional tropes„contribute to our understanding of both ideology 
> and practice, though in different ways, and to different degrees.
>  The explicit discussions are much more transparently ideological 
> since they overtly articulate links between speech and speaker persona 
> (though from different subject positions). In contrast, the implicit 
> correlations evidenced in text corpora call into play (and the 
> interactional tropes appear to manipulate) ideological stances which 
> they do not overtly describe. These are cases of interactional 
> practices which play upon values articulated within the ideological 
> order.
>  The terms ïideologyÍ and ïpracticeÍ are sometimes viewed as competing 
> theoretical constructs in the linguistic anthropology literature 
> today, even as the boundary between them grows increasingly blurred. 
> It is unclear that any hard and fastÊ line can now be drawn. Here 
> however is a proposal that may account for some of the more common 
> uses of these terms.
>  At its most distinctive the term ïideologyÍ is used for the explicit 
> content of metapragmatic discourses, and the term ï(meaningful) 
> practiceÍ for the implicit aspects of (e.g., presuppositions of) 
> patterns of semiotic activity. (When we speak of tacit ideologies, on 
> the other hand, we are often interested in the distorting 
> presuppositions of particular practices; here however the boundary is 
> less clear). Similarly, claims about the sociocentric aspects of these 
> constructs rest on the replicability of semiotic data: Claims for the 
> ïsharedness of ideologyÍ are often based on the comparability of 
> content of metapragmatic discourses produced by different members of 
> aÊ population (cf. pp. 3-4 above); and the claim that some activity is 
> a ïsocial practiceÍ often rests on whether the activity at issue is 
> genrefied, habitual, routinized, etc., over a population of 
> individuals. Since many types of data can be evaluated from either 
> perspective, claims about ïideologyÍ and ïpracticeÍ often involve 
> complementary perspectives on the significance of social behavior.
>  In any event, this is a set of issues that BucholzÍs paper opens up 
> in a very interesting and provocative way. I hope these cursory 
> remarks will open up the possibility of a fuller discussion of the 
> various issues involved.
>
>  References
>
>  Agha, Asif. 1996. Stereotypes and registers of honorific language. 
> Language in Society, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 151-194.
>  Agha, Asif. 1999. Register. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 
> 9, nos. 1-2, Special Issue: Language matters in anthropology: A 
> lexicon for the millennium. Reprinted in Key Terms in Language and 
> Culture, A. Duranti, ed., 2000, Oxford: Blackwell.
>  Eble, Connie. 1996. Slang and sociability: In-group language among 
> college students. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
>  Silverstein, Michael. 1996. Indexical order and the dialectics of 
> sociolinguistic life. In R. Ide et al., eds., SALSA 3.266-95Ê
>