-Sarah Muir & Courtney Handman
Four times a year, Anthropology News puts out calls for submissions on a particular theme. The current theme of “in/visibility” prompted an incredible amount of interest from linguistic anthropologists working on an array of topics and in a wide range of fieldsites. With all of this interest, we wanted to create a space beyond SLA’s short column in Anthropology News to showcase this work.
For the authors whose work we have collected together in a special section of the SLA blog, the theme of in/visibility not only raises productive theoretical questions for linguistic anthropology, but it also poses methodological and ethical challenges for our research. Some of the posts explore in/visibility as something that people agentively cultivate while others interrogate and respond to processes of in/visibilization. Some modes of in/visibility emerge out of folk categories and practices while other modes of in/visibility pertain to scholarly interests. And, while invisibility especially is often understood to be a problem it can also, at times, be an actively sought tactic or simply a welcome reprieve from unwanted attention.
We thank our authors — Joe Wilson, Danny Begg, Tony Webster, and Lise Dobrin & Don Kulick — for sharing their work with us for this collection. We also thank SLA Blog Editors Cat Tebaldi and Shannon Ward for letting us use this space to present these pieces together.
In the coming weeks you will be able to continue reading about the anthropology of in/visibility, including Aidah Aljuran’s story of Isma‘ili practices of invisibility in Sunni Saudi Arabia featured in the SLA column, in Anthropology News.
In/Visibility in Linguistic Anthropology Series:
Pay No Attention to Those Engineers Behind the Curtain: The Hidden Infrastructure that Runs AI — Joseph Wilson
“Nobody wants Their Doomscroll to be Interrupted”: Struggling for Visibility against Algorithmic Suppression — Danny Begg
A Navajo Poetry of Place — Anthony K. Webster
They Don’t See a Problem, We Don’t See the Desire for Connection: Indifference to Language Loss in Papua New Guinea and Its Challenge for Research — Lise M. Dobrin and Don Kulick