Political Language and Performance

The involvement of humans with the world is essentially manifested in our being constantly engaged in performing actions, evaluating the potential results or regretting the actual outcomes of our own or other people’s deeds, assuming or disclaiming responsibility for the acts that we actually perform or imagine to perform, debating whether to act or refrain from action or act in a certain way or another. Language plays a key role in structuring and mediating humans’ political agency and moral reasoning. However, while language is often understood as a mere device for the transmission of information, the term “politics” often evokes in our minds large-scale processes involving local institutions, national governments, or international agencies. This course would like to challenge these traditional representations of both language and politics and provide an understanding of how the micropolitical usages of language lie at the heart of human sociality. Through a series of readings and practical exercises, we will see how the way that we say something is often just as (or even more) important than what we actually say. We will discover how language is inherently political and how politics entails an important performative and aesthetic component. Throughout the semester, we will explore how, in our everyday lives, we are often (although not always completely consciously) involved in subtle and complex political dynamics concerning our own and/or our interlocutors’ “identity” and footing. We will seek to understand how speakers construct credibility and assertiveness while communicating among themselves and how they manage issues of agreement, affiliation, and disalignment in the moral domain of everyday conversation and political speechmaking. At the same time, we will examine how political discourse—both in the United States and in more “exotic” contexts—constitutes a form of verbal art that entails different aesthetics of persuasion and reproduces different moral philosophies and cultural values. Students will be involved in conducting original research, either individually or in small groups, about the ethnography of everyday speech and political discourse in settings of their choice. Through selected readings on linguistic construction of identity and the presentation of the political self, political performances and audience reactions, stance-taking, the construction of credibility and assertiveness, evidence and responsibility, vernacular moral and political philosophies, indexicality, reported speech, and heteroglossia, students will achieve a deeper appreciation of how speakers use language, as well as other semiotic resources (i.e., space, nonverbal behavior, cosmetics, and clothing), to construct meaning. Previous course work in anthropology or permission of the instructor is required.