Circulating Among the Language Panels in New Orleans

Mark Allen Peterson
Miami University

Circulation is the keyword of this year’s meeting, and it appears in the title of several of the more than forty panels devoted to language at the meetings in New Orleans next month.

There are eight language panels on Wednesday beginning at noon with “Time and Language among the Maya.” At 2:00 pm the “Diaphonous Medium: A Semiotics of Hiding and Suggestion” is scheduled.

Two panels are scheduled for 4:00 pm: “Anthropologies of the Voice” and “Chronotopes and Morality.” Another two are scheduled at 6:00 pm: “Circulation and Communicability” and “Language, Ideology and Identity.” At 8:00 pm those looking for a language panel can choose between “Language Socialization in Institutional Contexts” or “Oratorical Practice: Voice, Politics, Poetics.”

There are also two interesting non-SLA language panels Wednesday: “(Re)Circulating Language Ideologies,” sponsored by the Council on Anthropology and Education at 2:00 pm, and “Circulating Ideologies about the Spanish Language,” sponsored by the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology at 8:00 pm.

Thursday’s language sessions open at 8:00 am with four concurrent sessions: “Circulation of Media Texts: Mediazation, Reflexivity, and Intertextuality”; “Multimodality and Stance in the Circulation of Directive Response Trajectories in the Family: A Cross Cultural Perspective”; “Minority Language, Ideology and Identity”; and “Language Genres and Contemporary Religion.”

Also of interest to linguists is the 8:00 am panel “Latinos Challenging Deficit Discourses: Circulating Language, Literacies and Practices with Digital Technologies,” sponsored by the Council on Anthropology and Education.

At 10:15 am one can choose between “Inhabited Spaces and Distances: Acadian and Cajun Circulations” or “’Circulate-Able Selves’: Introductions as Social and Political Discourse Genres.”

Three concurrent sessions begin at 1:45 pm including “Performing the Mediterranean: Migration, Race and Identity Among Shores,” “Narrative Flow from Place to Place in Time: In Memory of Ron Scollon,” and “Sung Performance and the Circulation of Linguistic Forms.” A linguistic anthropology summary paper is offered as part of “Current Issues in Anthropology: Five-Field Update,” sponsored by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges.

During the 4:00 pm slot are the panels “Interpellation Across Borders” and “Narrative, Knowledge and Subjectivity.” The SLA Executive Board meets at 4:15 pm.

All three SLA invited sessions fall on Friday. “Louisiana Language Activism and Practice” is at 8:00 am, organized by Shana Walton and Amanda LaFleur. The second, “Intersubjectivity: Cultural Limits, Extensions and Construals,” organized by Eve Danziger, is at 1:45 pm, and “Materialization: Gesture and Embodiment in the Semiotics of Emergence,” organized by Michael Lempert, is at 4:00 pm.

There are many other Friday sessions, such as “Rethinking Dualisms, Oppositions, and Contradictions in Conversation,” and “Politics of Dialect,” at 8:00 am followed by “Language-ing the Global Laborforce: Political Economies of Language and Migration” at 10:15 am, and the Music and Sound Interest Group Meeting at noon. 
 At 1:45 pm there are the two sessions “Re-Assembling Circulation for Publics and Imaginaries” and “Camera Excreta: Mediatized Abjection and Racialized Recontextualization.”

There is a 3:30 pm panel entitled “Crossing Mesoamerican Boundaries: The Linguistic, Ethnographic, and Practical Contributions of Robert M. Laughlin,” sponsored by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. If you attend that, however, you will miss the SLA panel “Territorialization of Language: Discourse, Policy, and Practice.”

The SLA Business Meeting will be held at 6:15 pm, followed by the traditional cash bar reception at 7:00 pm.

“Circulating Materialities of Contracting (“Endangered”) Languages” opens the Saturday sessions at 8:00 am. It is followed at 10:15 am by “Multilingual Practices, Stance, and language Ideology in Children’s Peer and Sibling-Kin Group Interactions” and “Representing Resilience and Resistance in the Context of Sexual Assault.”

There are two panels at 1:45 pm: “Circulated Stances and the Role of Ethnography” and “The Tales We (and They) Tell: Stories in Circulation and the Regimentation of Genre.” Two more at 4:00 pm are “Diglossia Revisited: Language Boundaries and the Sociohistorical Emergence of Meaning” and “Circulating Discourses of Past and Present: Linguistic Anthropology and History.”

On Sunday at 8:00 am we have two sessions, “Circulating Discourses of Past and Present II: History, Literacy and Identity” and “Media and Multi-Modality.” The meetings end with two 10:15 am sessions:“Border Significance: Trangressive Semiotics and Signs of the Multiplicity of Force Relations” and “Remembering Willard Walker: Anthropologist, Linguist, Native Americanist and Conservationist.”

Please send your comments, contributions, news, announcements and movie ideas to Jim Stanlaw or Mark Allen Peterson.