The idea of language ideology has matured to the point where it can be used to frame research agendas well beyond that of defining and defending the concept itself. Consequences of contact does a splendid job of demonstrating the promise of this approach, offering insights into social and cultural transformation where multiple languages and language ideologies are in play. The volume originated in a session of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, but unlike many such collections, this one has clearly benefited from real interaction among the contributors. Recurring references to (among others) Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Michael Silverstein, Kathyrn Woolard, as well as to senior editor, Bambi Scheiffelin, and postscript author, Joseph Errington, also indicate the contributors are working within a cohesive intellectual field. The result, despite the book’s ethnographic breadth (four chapters on Melanesia, three on Polynesia, and one on an American missionary group), and disciplinary reach (at least two of the authors were trained as cultural, not linguistic, anthropologists), is a coherent, fully realized work.
In addition to the introduction and postscript, there are eight case studies, of uniformly high quality (whose authors, it is a delight to see, are drawn from the whole range of scholarly age grades, from graduate student to professor emerita). These include Christine Jourdan on the urban self on the Solomons, Miki Makihara on purism in Rapa Nui political oratory, Kathleen Riley on “mixed language” in the Marquesas, Rupert Stasch on Korowai perceptions of the otherness of Indonesian in Papua, and Susan Philips on changing representations of Tongan honorifics over two centuries. The chapters on Papua New Guinea (PNG) are especially well integrated; all bear profoundly on how language ideologies and practices associated with Christianity are (and are not) transforming subjectivities. These are by Joel Robbins on Urapmin Pentecostals and spirit mediums, Schieffelin on Bosavi difficulties dealing with reflexive language and inner speech in Bible translation, and Courtney Handman on the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators in PNG.
Among the major themes developed in the editors’ introduction are the high degree of linguistic self-consciousness and politicization that colonial situations typically produce; the deep impact of literacy and of text-oriented ideologies; the importance of attending to relations between individual experiences of language and larger structures; and – a theme especially well developed in this volume – the centrality of language and language ideologies to constructions of self and of intersubjectivity. Because attention to language ideology helps bring out the role of social process and individual agency in linguistic change, Makihara & Schieffelin maintain that research oriented to language ideology works against any view that globalization has homogenizing effects, a point Errington also emphasizes in his thoughtful postscript.
The cases are united by two broad empirical characterizations, location in the Pacific, and the historical experience of “contact.” The former can be seen as a precondition for the latter, since the island world of the Pacific may be one of the few regions where the idea of contact (rather than, say, linguistic diversity and competition), and its implicit counterpart, some “precontact” situation, still have purchase among anthropologists. Although island models once tended to focus on a sharply defined moment of contact, these cases show several dimensions of contrast among their respective histories. The range of time depth is impressive, from Tonga, where sources go back to the 18th century, to Korowai, whose direct engagement with people from afar seems quite fresh. Several other poles of variation are apparent too. One is whether people emphasize continuity with their past (a subtext common to many of these cases) or stress those linguistic features they take to mark the rupture between benighted past and enlightened modernity (strong with Urapmin, hinted at among some others). Another is the nature of relevant power relations and especially the stakes in language politics, which include land, votes, cultural recognition, tourist dollars, and the soul’s salvation. Whereas, for instance, people on Rapa Nui are working to distinguish themselves from the Chileans, Marquesans seek alliances with the French metropole to resist Tahitian hegemony. In both cases, linguistic results run counter to common predictions of simplification and ossification: The threatened language of Rapa Nui is developing new registers and purist ideology is not undermining syncretism, and in the Marquesas the covert status increasingly accorded “impure” speech is beginning to grant young speakers a new sense of linguistic competence.
Another pole of variation is the structural position, motives, and methods of the major actors. These include governments both local and distant, employers, missionaries, urban residents (who, as Jourdan writes of the Solomon Islands, have to negotiate otherness daily), political orators (Makihara), and more ambiguously located figures such as the Breton bishop who projected his own experiences as a minority language speaker onto the Marquesan situation (Riley). These cases take us well beyond the classic “man arriving in a boat” models of contact, encompassing outmigration, internal rural-urban migration (circular and otherwise), return migration, intra-Polynesian domination, settler colonialism (not always from “the West”), foreign enclaves, and tourism.
Some intriguing questions arise from reading these cases in conjunction with one another. One concerns agency. Most of the authors stress self-consciousness, intentionality, and strategy. (Two partial exceptions are Schieffelin, who reveals unintended and largely unnoticed consequences of language change, and Philips, who asserts that Tongans’ shared practical ability to use honorifics is at odds with their disagreement about what exactly they index. In this light, it is perhaps no accident that Schieffelin makes some of the most productive use of closely analyzed transcripts, and Philips’s materials bridge an especially marked divide between explicit metalanguage and actual language use.) Typical is Jourdan’s comment that “Honiarans make use of the different varieties of language they know to index their position in the urban world” (p. 34). This relatively instrumental relation to language seems to depend on modes of self-consciousness whose conditions of possibility and full ramifications call for more exploration.
Another question arises from the many references to indexicality. Indexical reference is characteristically underspecified. In Honiara, for instance, linguistic choices can index gender, interactive context, age, social class, and urban/rural identity; in old Tonga they also included divine and human status. So given all these possibilities, how are indexicals disambiguated so they can be purposefully manipulated? It is no discredit to the authors to say the leads they offer could be developed even further. For instance, in Rapa Nui, the very legibility of indexicals of linguistic purity seems to depend on new political institutions, an emerging democratic ethos, and the public performances to which they have given rise. Here is a good start in laying out some preconditions for the sort of objectification that makes conscious linguistic strategies possible.
This leads to a third issue, a tension in the concept of language ideology itself: Is it a matter of explicit representations or tacit presuppositions revealed only under analysis? At one end of the spectrum we have Handman’s fascinating account of the ways in which the Summer Institute of Linguistics draws on academic theories of language, culture, and psychology (including those of Edward Sapir). Yet for all the attention to speaker agency the language ideology approach promises, there is often something that escapes language users’ awareness and demands the outside observer’s perspective. A processual account of relations between these poles of awareness, although implicit in many of the cases, could still yield more fruit. Several chapters also mention that the same individuals can work with quite different language ideologies in different contexts. One might ask why this doesn’t weaken the explanatory power of the idea of language ideology by requiring a further level of analysis to account for people’s ability to move among those alternatives: On what ideological grounds do they choose one language ideology or another, or does this take us somewhere beyond ideology?
Finally, there is the very scope of the idea of language ideology. All these cases demonstrate an interest in social consequences well beyond language alone. For any given language ideology, what other members belong to the set in which language is included? Whereas in the Marquesas language goes with dance, song, and tattooing, in Rapa Nui it goes with land rights, and for Korowai, with distinct human kinds, localities, and world views. The multilingualism of the precolonial Solomons was produced by norms of reciprocity that covered the exchange of both words and goods. Similarly, Robbins argues that changes in Urapmin ideologies of exchange had direct consequences for ideologies of language. What, then, justifies drawing the line at language ideologies, rather than, say, a more encompassing concept like semiotic ideologies? Much of the value of this book lies in opening up such questions, and providing evidence and analysis rich enough to indicate where the answers may lie. And those answers may involve more than just the familiar political strategies and social strivings; marvelously, Stasch reports that Korowai say a language can be “delicious” (113), and Jourdan remarks “multilingualism brings about a form of exhilaration” (45).
