Week 4—Words that can hurt: Slurs, insults, and everyday racism in language

Week 4—Words that can hurt: Slurs, insults, and everyday racism in language

Main reading: Hill (2011b)

Other reading: Hill (1998); Hill (2011a); Jakobson (1960); Woolard (1998); Zuckerman (2016)

In some ways, the indexicality of an utterance is already a familiar concept. We know that a lot of what a person says needs to understood relative to a “context,” particular where that person stands in space, in time, and in society. We also know that what people say, whether they mean it or not, can have another effect on us. We know it’s there, but sometimes that indexical meaning is just ignored—or denied. When was the last time you heard someone say

• “I didn’t mean it that way.”
• “It’s just a joke.”
• “You’re being too sensitive.”

What’s happening when someone tries to shape the pragmatics of an utterance by offering a metapragmatic description (or instruction) about it?

In many cases, people in one speech community will see the indexical meaning of speech acts differently. How do we talk about this kind of dynamic in interactions and in society at large?

Hill’s work on “everyday language of white racism” is a good chance to take stock of what we have seen so far and start putting things together. I suggest taking this week to edit the class wiki and formulate an overall statement of what we think about the social study of language and what questions we have.

References

Hill, Jane H. 1998. “Language, Race, and White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 680–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680.

———. 2011a. “Language in White Racism: An Overview.” In The Everyday Language of White Racism, 31–48. Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732.

———. 2011b. “The Social Life of Slurs.” In The Everyday Language of White Racism, 49–49. Malden, Mass.: John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732.

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://monoskop.org/images/8/84/Jakobson_Roman_1960_Closing_statement_Linguistics_and_Poetics.pdf.

Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. “Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zuckerman, Charles H. P. 2016. “Phatic Violence? Gambling and the Arts of Distraction in Laos.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26 (3): 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12137.