ALFA DE CRONBACH PARA CADA DIMENSION

2.1.1 Practice

In its focus on language representation and use in a variety of settings, from interaction to entextualized artistic performances to written discourse, this project aligns with work in linguistic anthropology that understands language as social practice (e.g., Bourdieu 1991; Giddens 1984; de Certeau 1984; Ortner 1984; Eckert & McConnell- Ginet 1992; Hanks 1996; Bucholtz 1999; Heller 2007). Recalling Geertz’s description of language as “symbolic action” (1973:10), such a perspective sees humans as social actors embedded in political and symbolic contexts. As Hanks (1996) explains, “however else one chooses to define ‘practice,’ it is the point at which three things converge: the law of system, the quick of activity, and the reflective gaze of value” (11). A view of language as practice thus sees formal systems, social action, and their representational ideologies to be intrinsically interwoven—mutually reinforcing, but also continuously introducing new points of tension.

A focus on language as practice directs attention not only to what language “means” but what it “does,” as well on, in Ortner (1984)’s terms, “the doer of all that doing: agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject” (Ortner 1984: 144). When

conceptualizing the relationship between individuals and the institutions in which they are intersectionally embedded, one important consideration involves the degree to which individual social actors are understood as being able to affect change. Different theorists have accorded to individual actors different amounts of agency, or the power—even if at

least partly unintentional—to bring about change in the world (Ahearn 2001). While Bourdieu’s work on the structuring role played by the French national education system (with Passeron, 1977 and 1979) is valuable for directing attention to how institutions often re-inscribe linguistic and socioeconomic inequality on the bodies of those within them, the approach taken in this dissertation is more strongly informed by the work of de Certeau (1984) and Giddens (1984; see also Heller 2007), who allow more room for agentive resistance. As such, while I attend to Gallo’s representation in official discourses, I recognize that these are not uniform, and I do not assume that French (or Breton) governmental institutions fully determine the possibilities afforded to Gallo speakers. Rather, a structuration perspective understands particular acts of language as constituting possible sites of (partial) agency, within institutional structures that enable and constrain action while still remaining permeable to influence from those acts. Following practice theory, an understanding of the situatedness of Gallo teachers, for example, would involve not only their position in the ideological matrix of the national French education system and in the climate of regional language advocacy, but also how those structural positions are reinforced or contested in moment-to-moment negotiations with students about the social meaning of Gallo.

2.1.2 Performance

A view of language as practice also entails understanding it as “performance,” thus countering a key distinction in modern linguistic theory between “competence,” as linguists’ true object of study, and “performance,” as a mere artifact of competence (Chomsky 1965). Chomsky’s distinction, a reconceptualization of Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, was challenged early by scholars such as Hymes (1972), who

recognized that performance was inseparable from competence and proposed the concept of “communicative competence.”

A performance perspective considers linguistic forms not as defining, or

distinctive, features of a language but instead as stylistic “resources” available alongside other semiotic features for speakers to employ in patterned, socially meaningful ways. During performances, performers draw on such stylistic resources to “voice” (Bakhtin 1981, Hill 1995) personas. The notion of voicing was originally articulated by Bakhtin as part of his theoretical work on the novel—authors positioned their characters in culturally meaningful categories by having them speak in certain “voices,” creating a heteroglossic, interrelated constellation of subjects through their prose—but over the past few decades, scholars such as Agha (2005), Bauman and Briggs (1990), Chun (2009), Hill (1995), and Silverstein (2005), among others, have applied this literary theory to diverse arenas of symbolic practice, including verbal performance.

Adopting this view, Bauman (2004) takes performance to be a mode of speech that “rests on an assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of

communicative virtuosity” (9). The central importance of performance to an

understanding how performances become entrenched in social life has perhaps been most strongly advocated through the work of Bauman and Briggs. In their seminal review, Bauman and Briggs (1990) argue that one advantage of focusing on poetics and performance is that “performances move the use of heterogeneous stylistic resources, context-sensitive meanings, and conflicting ideologies into a reflexive arena where they can be examined critically” (60). This reflexivity makes performance a productive site for researcher to explore the intertextual links and gaps which arise when different

interpretive frames, such as what Gallo signifies with respect to place and time, encounter one another. Importantly, it also affords performers themselves a space in which they can engage in ideological commentary as social action.

As recognized by Bauman, performance is a highly entextualized mode of speech and thus “bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its co-text), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent (semantically

intelligible)” (4). In effect, Bauman says, entextualized discourse is treated “as an object…extractable from its context of production” (4). This extraction process renders the text more prone to circulation in space and time, and to re-insertion in new contexts. It also brings to the forefront a concern with genre, or “a constellation of systematically related, co-occurrent formal features and structures that serves as a conventionalized orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse” (3). Hanks (1996) ties the notion of genre to Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, claiming that genres are neither “rigid formal types” nor “formless, purely momentary conjectures” but instead, “schemes for practice” inscribed on the body (246). Importantly, the orienting framework of genre includes not only expectations for vocabulary or text structure, but also expectations for modes of consumption, conventional participant roles, and relationships of alignment. Such concepts are discussed in the following subsection.

While genres have traditionally been discussed in terms of formal features, then, Hanks (1996) brings attention to the useful insight that what most readily encourages observers to decide something is “a performance” is not any intrinsic evaluation of artfulness or virtuosity, but rather a particular change in footing (Goffman 1981) between the speaker and his or her discourse. This makes performance “a mode of action, not a

kind of text” (Hanks 1996: 190). Similarly, a “breakthrough into performance” (Hymes 1975) is not something an observer can identify by counting the distribution of particular forms (although these can be a consequence of such a breakthrough), but by

understanding it as “an indexical reframing of the utterance relevant to its immediate context” (Hanks 1996:191). While most of the texts identified as performances in this dissertation are keyed by the formal arrangement of participants assembled for an explicit artful purpose (e.g., performers on stage, audience sitting facing the performers),

moments of other interactional and interview discourse can also be interpreted according to a performance framework.

2.1.3 Indexicality, stance, identity and participant roles

Through practice and performance, social actors presuppose and create

connections between linguistic forms and social meanings. Explorations of this semiotic process by linguistic anthropologists have drawn on the writings of philosopher of

language Charles Peirce, who defined indexes as having an “existential relation” (Duranti 1997) between a sign and its meaning, and so distinct from signs that seemed purely arbitrary (he calls these symbols) and others that more directly resemble some aspects of their referent (icons). The role that indexes play in social meaning, as they “point to”

associative chains of meaning, has been much explored in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (a partial list: Ochs 1992; Silverstein 1976, 2003; Eckert 2008; Hanks 1996; Johnstone, Andrus & Danielson 2006). The qualities that have been identified as being “pointed to” through linguistic forms include social categories, such as gender, age, or ethnicity, but also relationships such as power differentials or intimacy as well as stances such as alignment with or against institutions (Eckert 1989) or laid-back

detachment (Kiesling 2009). Metapragmatic regimes often naturalize one type of indexed meaning for another (Silverstein 2003).

While indexical links potentially produce broadly circulating language ideologies (discussed below), indexical processes necessarily occur in specific moments of

interaction as social actors take stances, orienting to objects, persons and concepts against which are contextualized the forms used in discourse. Du Bois (2007) defines stance as follows:

a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the

sociocultural field. (163)

Stances may be affective and/or epistemic, evaluative and/or alignment-related. While stance may seem most intuitive at an immediate emergent level (interlocutors taking up stances of alignment or disalignment with respect to each other as they discuss a

particular matter, or a speaker expressing positive or negative affect, or certainty or uncertainty, toward that matter), they enter into identity-based, macrosocial and ideological negotiations as well. For example, while moment-to-moment classroom interactions (and the participant roles and stances embedded therein) shape how students and teachers define their social roles as language learners and users, larger-scale

processes such as historical philosophies of education also enter into these definitions (Wortham 2006).

Stance is thus intrinsically involved in positionality, as “the taking up of particular kinds of stances is habitually and conventionally associated with particular subject

relationships (including relations of power)” (Jaffe 2009a:4). Identity in particular, defined as “the social positioning of the self and other” (Bucholtz & Hall 2005:586), has been of great interest to some scholars, even if identityas a theoretical construct has been problematized in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. As prefigured by

Foucault’s (1979) discussion of the subject as produced and Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of voicing, recent approaches understand identity as social practice, emerging through processes and tactics of intersubjectivity (Bucholtz and Hall 2004, 2005), rather than an intrinsic quality of individuals. Agha (2007b) has provided a further critique of many scholars’ discussion of identity as a static attribute of individuals: such approaches tend to privilege discrete moments of discursive categorization, whether by speaker or by researcher, rather than tracing how chains of indexical assessments (Silverstein 2003, 2011; Agha 2007a) accrue and are challenged over the course of multiple and

overlapping speech events. In addition, identity configurations are negotiated among participants (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004) and emergent across scales of time, from momentary stances to centuries-long social movements (Wortham 2006). As successive negotiations occur, language tokens get circulated—and often recontextualized in the process, as indexical meaning both regiments and shifts.

Finally, through performance, on stage and in everyday life, participants inhabit subject positions that are often called participant roles (e.g., Goffman 1981; Hanks 1996; Irvine 1996). Irvine (1996) contests the way participant roles were seen in “the classic linguistic model of the communicative act” (131), which she glosses as “the isolated sentence tossed (like a football) by an anonymous Speaker, whose qualifications for play are specified only as “competence,” to an even more anonymous Hearer who supposedly

catches it” (131). The most-discussed approach to nuancing participant roles is Goffman’s (1981) analysis of production formats, which breaks the canonical role of Speaker into roles like author, animator and principal, and the role of Hearer into ratified participant or overhearer, among others. The centrality of the roles played by participants of various sorts to the communicative endeavor has been explored by C. Goodwin (e.g., 1986) and M. H. Goodwin (e.g., 2006).

Goffman’s conceptual vocabulary uses many terms from the repertoire of theater (role, stage…); perhaps appropriately, much of the discussion of participant roles in this dissertation concerns staged performances. Gallo cultural festivals—which give pride of place to Gallo theater and storytelling—are an important site for the articulation of Gallo culture. As Pagliai (2000) notes, performed identities emerge through interaction between performer and public, so performance can illuminate the complexity of identification processes, as ideologies and practices both inform each other and diverge from one moment to the next—a central interest of practice theory. Jaffe (2009a) sees performance as an important site for stance display: “Stance is implied/presupposed in performance, and performances also coimplicate audience(s); thus stance is at work in the discursive positioning of performers to audiences and audiences to other audiences” (12). This dissertation thus explores how artistic performance serves as a way of modeling particular stances and roles. Through verbal interaction with the audience, as well as nominating them as participants through gesture and gaze (Briggs 1988; Goodwin & Goodwin 2004), performers positioned their publics as people with the authority to evaluate Gallo forms. In this way, as Jaffe (2009a) has said, “audiences—and ‘publics’— can be imagined and idealized in performance” (12). While of course such acts of

positioning are subject to contestation or refusal, examples will show that in many cases, audience members ratified their being positioned as local Gallo experts, supplying vocabulary items upon demand or correcting a character’s language use under their breaths.