实践和语言转换的语言人类学外文文献

Book review A Linguistic Anthropology of Practice and Language Shift Arvan tika Albanian and Greek in Contact Lukas Tsitsipis Oxford University Press New York 1998 Language contact is not a very popular topic among theoretical linguists Their fi eld is still dominated by structuralist assumptions about languages as coherent and autonomous systems in which outside interference has little or no substantial role to play hence variation and contact are often assigned a secondary and derivative status almost as a matter of defi nition Linguistic and other forms of contact are not a major focus of research in linguistic studies on Greece and other parts of the Balkans either Thus Horrocks s comprehensive historical overview of the Greek language 1997 devotes only marginal attention to contact phenomena like Asia Minor Greek and the famous Balkan Sprachbund which has supplied Modern Greek with so many structural features distinguishing it from classical varieties and it wholly fails to mention the pockets of Albanian and Macedonian speakers in present day Greece and contact induced varieties like Kormakiti Greek This downplaying of contact phenomena in part refl ects the political processes of nation building in the region but it also refl ects romantic ideologies about pure language varieties and about Greece and the Greek language as the cradle of European civilization Both belong to the complex interaction between Greek political aspirations and European classical and anthropological scholarship cf Herzfeld 1987 The appearance of Tsitsipis s monograph on Greek Albanian language contact is therefore a very welcome event which is moreover not only theoretically but also politically signifi cant Politically since as the author observes Greek hegemonic discourse hardly acknowledges the fact that the country has any minorities at all apart from the Turkish minority in Western Thrace which is defi ned in religious rather than linguistic terms Theoretically because the author takes issue with structuralist approaches to language contact that try to establish systematic correlations between linguistic and sociocultural variables As an alternative he proposes a practice based approach that incorporates such pragmatic and sociopolitical factors as language ideologies and the role of the nation state and its institutions in shaping linguistic practices This approach continues where earlier attempts like Thomason and Kaufman 1988 left off the latter argued that there are no linguistic but only social constraints on the results of language contact Tsitsipis s is a so called practice based approach of the sort elaborated by in particular Bourdieu 1991 Such approaches have become popular in anthropological linguistics but have yet to make signifi cant inroads onto theoretical linguistic territory Tsitsipis also provides a refreshing alternative to and indeed a thematization of the age old tendency among descriptive linguists to search for the purest and most uncontaminated Journal of Pragmatics 39 2007 624 627 0378 2166 see front matter 2006 Published by Elsevier B V doi 10 1016 j pragma 2006 09 008 varieties of the languages they are seeking to describe He rightly castigates this nostalgic ideology for its hidden and highly questionable assumptions about cultural authenticity and purity The focus of his book is on two communities of speakers and varieties of the Albanian minority language spoken in contemporary Greece Arvanitika is the grecifi ed local folk expression for the varieties of Tosk or Southern Albanian spoken on Greek territory Its speakers are careful to distinguish it from Shqip the term used for the language spoken in Albania and Kosovo Here discursive and sociopolitical practices are systematically linked Over the past decades these communities have undergone a rapid though by no means uniform loss or shift of language The two local communities of Arvanitika speakers live respectively in an isolated mountainous area of Biotia and in the more accessible and prosperous town of Spata in Attica Tsitsipis tries to establish a connection between the very signifi cant differences in social economic incorporation into modern Greece and the equally signifi cant differing degrees of language shift of these two communities Although Tsitsipis warns against monocausal explanations one central factor in his account of this rapid language shift is the emergence of Greek territorial national consciousness as the hegemonic ideology and with it the emergence of a hegemonic national language in the nineteenth century The Arvanitika speech community is not only a numerical minority he stresses but also a politically subordinate group Tsitsipis characterizes this subordination in broadly Gramscian terms distinguishing it from both domination and oppression in a constellation where modern Greek is hegemonic Arvanitika is perceived as a low status variety In the more aggressively nationalistic 1930s however a more confrontational form of heteroglossia developed in Bakhtin s 1981 sense of a non harmonious coexistence of languages in which one code is seen through the eyes of the inimical other including discrimination and other forms of exclusion of linguistic minorities Chapter 2 elaborates on this idea of Arvanitika as a subordinate and heteroglossic language variety both at the macrolevel of discursive practices of communication and at the microlevel of conversation thedistinctionbetweenthesetwolevels maynotbeasclear cutasTsitsipis makesit out to be but his explicit argument that face to face conversation is not simply the basic form or explanatory rock bottom of linguistic communication is certainly valuable and important for theoretical discussions Arvanitika speakers he argues have internalized the hegemonic Hellenizing discourse of Greek culture as a millennial and continuous tradition and of the Greek languageastheoldestandmostprestigiouscodearound Thus thesubordinatestatusofArvanitika is the result of a semi conscious formation of a specifi c linguistic habitus though Tsitsipis also emphasizes the role of deliberate and organized processes of nation building and the concomitant policies of language planning The language shift to Greek has accelerated since the 1950s he argues and results less from anydeliberate nationalisticpolicyofforced assimilation than from the rapid social and economic changesthecountryhasundergone includingthemechanization ofagriculture urbanization the expansion of the centralized bureaucracyand the improvement of education and communication especially increasingly rapid spread of literacy in Greek in the countryside Tsitsipis is here careful to avoid overemphasizing a reductionist vision that opposes the socioeconomic base to the linguistic and ideological superstructures Whereas chapter 3 still focuses on the structural aspects of Arvanitika chapters 4 and 5 zoom in on the practice aspects of language contact as spoken by respectively fl uent and terminal speakers Here Tsitipissomewhatoveremphasizeshisdiscussionintermsofspeaker sstrategies goals and intentions at the expense of Bourdieu s characterization of the habitus as the generator Book review625 of semi conscious and rarely wholly deliberative social and linguistic action Chapter 6 fi nally traces developments in Arvanitika language ideology as results of practical processes of subordinationand heteroglossia Once more Tsitsipis distances himself here from the classical Marxist view of superstructural ideologies as at the receiving end and sketches ways in which ideologies and beliefs may be constitutive of linguistic and other social realities cf Bourdieu 1991 Thus his argument comes close to the Gramscian notion of hegemonic culture and ideology as itself a causal factor But the ideologies involved here function at quite different levels locally at the level of the state and in education and research In other words ideology is a variable responding to rather than mechanically determined by socio economic structural changes Michael Herzfeld s ethnographies of modern Greece 1987 a o would have provided highly relevant concepts and materials here but they are oddly absent from Tsitsipis s discussion Likewise a question that does not receive detailed attention but would undoubtedly have enriched the argument is that of the shifting linguistic practices as gendered but perhaps one should not expect too much at once from a book that breaks new ground on so many points The author is clearly groping for a new approach to linguistic practices the concepts and methods of which are still very much in the process of establishing themselves This partly explains the at times somewhat eclectic employment of related but quite distinct concepts borrowed from authors like Gramsci Bakhtin and Bourdieu key notions like linguistic habitus hegemony and heteroglossia are juxtaposed rather than tied together into a single tightly knit framework If it did not sound paternalistic one might be tempted to say that methodologically the book is almost as multilingual polyphonic and heteroglossic as the linguistic practices it sets out to describe A more substantial matter is whether this framework is itself free from ideology and if not whetherthatmatters Theanswertobothquestionsseemstobe no Regardingtheformer thereare occasional lapses into problematically ideological positions thus Tsitsipis appears to assume or projectcontemporarypoliticalstateboundariesasananalyticalframework Asaresult theopening sentence of the book states that Arvanitika has been spoken in Greece for more than four centuries and that Albanian is spoken in Albania proper p 8 even though neither state has been in existence for anywhere near four centuries Rather both states and indeed the national identities in terms of which they legitimize themselves are the result of quite recent contingent contradictory and indeed violent processes of identitarian nation state formation out of a linguistically ethnically and religiously mixed and multilingual Balkan or more precisely out of the reforming Ottoman empire Regarding the second question it may be observed that the long standing view of ideology as a mere distortion of social reality is nowadays no longer as popular as it used to be Specifi cally more genealogically oriented approaches tend to de emphasize the opposition between distorting orfalse ideologyandobjectivelytruescientifi cdiscourse andtofocusontheformsof power that are constitutive of both Inotherwords Tsitsipis srupturewithstructuralist andspecifi callypolitical economy modes of explanation is not yet complete but given the dominance of structuralist approaches in linguistics it is not even certain whe