As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic ...
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OUPblog » Sociology


Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics?

Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics?

As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened.

Troubled by the often-misinformed efforts to make institutional change that we saw around us, we wanted to take action that was both specific to our disciplinary context and wide-reaching in its effects. We started with an article in the flagship linguistics journal, Language, calling for the centering of racial justice within the discipline. That article was the lead piece in the journal’s Perspectives section and was accompanied by a range of responses from linguists worldwide, which we responded to in turn.

We wrote with the hope that institutional change could start from the individual and (especially) collective actions of linguists. We were also motivated by the hope that the discipline our students will enter will be radically different from the one that we have spent our careers within. This hope fueled our work for the next several years, as we collaborated with linguists within and beyond linguistics departments and throughout the academy to create concrete, specific, and action-centered models for how to do the work necessary to transform the discipline. The results of this intensive collaborative process are two companion volumes, Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, and their websites, which provide additional information and resources. 

Some linguists, particularly those for whom linguistics is structured and whom it best serves, may be asking themselves, “What’s so bad about linguistics in its current form?” Many linguists we interacted with as we embarked on this project were defensive, baffled, or even outright hostile. Fortunately, many others were curious and eager to learn how the discipline could do better and what they could do to help. Most importantly, the people for whom we do this work—those who have been made to feel unwelcome in linguistics and who have been shut out, pushed out, or relegated to the disciplinary margins, as well as those who have succeeded despite rather than because of linguistics-as-usual—understood and welcomed our project. Many of these current, former, and would-be linguists have been engaged in like-minded efforts of their own.

Some critics see our work as “politicizing” linguistics. But these commenters miss the point that linguistics (and academia) has always been political. The discipline has its roots in empire and the colonizing practices of categorizing and classifying languages in order to control those who use them. As the discipline has taken shape over the centuries to the present day, linguistics has become a field limited by its own exclusionary practices and ideologies—a field that, in our view, is simply too small. In Decolonizing Linguistics and Inclusion in Linguistics, we envision and work to build a linguistics that is capacious and welcoming, particularly to those whose lived experiences give them fresh and much-needed insights into the kinds of questions linguistics should be asking, the kinds of methods it should be using, and the kinds of real-world impacts it should be making.

Inclusion in linguistics

Most linguists are familiar with the concept of inclusion through institutional discourse in academia and elsewhere, particularly the acronym DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) or its many variants. Too often, however, inclusion is used to mean recruiting members of formerly excluded groups into often hostile institutions, without making significant changes to the workings of the institutions themselves. True inclusion is not a matter of making space within existing institutions for new people to do the same old thing. Instead, true inclusion requires the transformation not only of who is in institutional spaces but what they do, how, and why. Transformation demands that we ask ourselves who is and isn’t present in linguistics, whether they have full and equitable access, and whether the community of linguists will value their full humanity, rather than treating them merely as sources of linguistic data or as token representatives and spokespersons for the groups to which they belong.

Inclusion in Linguistics offers abundant examples of how linguists can and already are creating genuine inclusion within the discipline. The authors challenge limited notions of who gets to be included, calling attention to a wide range of groups who remain marginalized on the basis of race and ethnicity, gender identity, disability, geography, language, class and caste, and more. The authors issue a powerful call for a linguistics that does not simply make space for but purposefully centers those who have been excluded. We collectively urge linguists to think bigger, to abandon long-cherished ideological investments in what is and isn’t legitimate within linguistics, and to build a discipline that doesn’t hide in the ivory tower but engages with the world and makes it a better place.

Decolonizing linguistics

Compared to inclusion, decolonization may be a less familiar concept to many linguists. Some academics in the US may have first encountered the idea, along with related concepts like settler colonialism, through student activism on their campus in recent years and months. (In fact, the New York Times recently published an explainer on the term settler colonialism, assuming—no doubt correctly—that its predominantly white, liberal, and highly educated readership is not well versed in decolonial theory and activism.)

We chose the title Decolonizing Linguistics to invoke the long and ongoing history of linguists’ global academic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people and the discipline-based extraction of their languages for professional and economic gain. Contributors identify some of the forms of colonialism that linguistics has taken and continues to take. We emphasize the importance of Black-centered and Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies in undoing colonizing structures. We also highlight community-driven collaborative projects that provide a comprehensive picture of the powerful social and scholarly impacts of an unsettled, decolonized linguistics.

Both volumes offer specific roadmaps and pathways for how to advance social justice, through programs, partnerships, curricula, and other initiatives. Our work is a necessary first step toward institutional and disciplinary change: a linguistics built by, around, and for groups that have confronted colonization, oppression, and exclusion—that is, precisely the people whose languages so often fascinate linguists—is also a linguistics that prioritizes the new ideas and practices that these groups bring to the discipline and recognizes these new directions as precisely where linguistics needs to go.

We do not consider Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics as definitive statements but rather as an invitation for others to join us in ongoing conversations. We invite linguistics scholars and students, educators and higher education leaders, around the world to engage with the ideas in both volumes with an eye toward what you can do in your own local context, what we have inevitably left out, and how you might build on, adapt, and push us forward to create the kind of inclusive, decolonized, and socially just linguistics that you would like to be part of.

Featured image by Fons Heijnsbroek, abstract-art via Unsplash.

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Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’

Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity. Left behind for 20 years while Odysseus spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and then a further ten years on his meandering journey home to Ithaca, Penelope is faced with multiple challenges in her husband’s absence. Her story, although it comes from a millennia-old tale set in a mythical past, echoes some of the experiences undergone by military spouses in contemporary society. We can also find in Homer’s Penelope an ancient archetype for the idealised image of the ‘model military wife’ which still persists in the modern world.

In her husband’s absence, the Odyssey’s Penelope is faced with a whole array of emotional and practical struggles, many of which modern-day military spouses might recognise. The poet describes how she has trouble sleeping, worries crowding her mind as she lies in bed at night (Odyssey 19.513-17), and frequently throughout the poem she is to be found weeping, overwhelmed by the grief and stress of her situation. This mythical waiting wife has no idea whether her husband is alive or dead—he is what we might describe today as ‘missing in action’—and if or when he might return home to her. Modern military spouses often talk about the dread of the ‘knock on the door’ bringing bad news while their partner is in a war zone: Penelope too is simultaneously desperate for news of Odysseus but living in constant fear of what that news might reveal. At the same time, she must deal with the day-to-day responsibilities of being home alone: parenting the child, Telemachus, who was a baby when Odysseus left for Troy, and managing the household alone. In this patriarchal ancient society, the absence of the male head of the royal household is felt especially strongly. Nonetheless, there are parallels here with contemporary situations; when a partner is away on active duty, their spouse must often take on domestic responsibilities which would ordinarily be shared.

‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse, via Wikimedia Commons.

Penelope’s already difficult situation is exacerbated by the presence of 108 suitors, who are vying for her hand in marriage—a marriage which would also grant them Odysseus’ kingly power, his possessions, and his estate. It is her response to this situation which cemented her reputation for fidelity in the ancient world; that response also enables her to demonstrate her resourcefulness. In her hope that Odysseus will eventually return, and in order to buy time, Penelope deploys what in the ancient world is a typically feminine stratagem: she tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry once she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What her suitors don’t know is that she is unpicking each day’s weaving in secret every night. The shroud trick not only keeps Penelope occupied during much of Odysseus’ absence, but it also represents a life which has been placed on hold while he is away. Both the notion of ‘keeping busy’ as a coping strategy and the feeling of being unable to move forward with their own lives—with career plans or education, for example—while awaiting the return of a serving partner are recurring elements of the first-hand accounts of modern-day waiting wives.

Yet it is not merely some of the day-to-day elements of Penelope’s life that might feel familiar to contemporary military spouses. There is a broader sense in which this ‘myth’ of the model military wife is fundamental to upholding the patriarchal structures which still endure in some military institutions. In modern UK and US contexts, the armed forces still rely heavily on the support of the spouses of personnel. Those spouses are still overwhelmingly female, despite the fact that women and same-sex couples are now eligible for military service. The feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe, in her 2000 book Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, set out a lengthy list—which still holds up almost 25 years after first publication—of the ideal characteristics of today’s ‘model military wife.’ This is someone who, among other things, is unfailingly supportive and content for all aspects of her life to be subordinated to her husband’s military role, and who, like Penelope, is both faithful and resourceful in coping alone for long periods of time while her partner is away on deployment.

Moreover, the model military wife is expected to do all of this without complaint. The focus of policy-makers, media reporting, and the military itself, still rests predominantly on combatants themselves. The voices of those whose lives are also profoundly affected by their partners’ career choice are often silenced. Similarly, in the Odyssey Penelope is given little room to share her experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent in the poem than when the couple are finally reunited. Here only four lines (Odyssey 23.302-5) are set aside to summarise Penelope’s story; by comparison, despite the fact that the majority of the poem’s 12,000 lines describe Odysseus’ exploits, 32 lines (Odyssey 23.310-41)—eight times as much space—are devoted to recalling his adventures. If at times the warrior’s wife takes up less space, both in Homer’s poetry and in the minds of the public today, that should merely make us more determined to give her more of our attention.

Featured image: ‘Penelope and the Suitors’ (1912) by John William Waterhouse via Wikimedia Commons

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A spotlight on Native American language and religion [podcast]

A spotlight on Native American language and religion [podcast]

The October release of Martin Scorsese’s latest film Killers of the Flower Moon has thrust the sordid history of America’s treatment of its indigenous peoples back into the public eye.

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, the last for 2023, inspired by the themes in Killers of the Flower Moon, and in celebration of National Native American Heritage Month in the United States, we spotlight two aspects of Native American culture that transcend tribe and nation and have been the recent focus of OUP scholars: language and religious beliefs.

For our first interview, we were joined by Rosemarie Ostler, author of The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, to speak about the Native American English dialect, how English became more widely spoken amongst Native Americans, and current programs to preserve Native American languages. We then spoke with Gregory Shushan, author of Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions about near-death experiences, Native American myths, shamanism, and religious revitalization movements across indigenous cultures in North America.

Check out Episode 89 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

You can read the chapter “Ethnic Dialects” from Rosemarie Ostler’s book, The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, which presents the evolution of American English not as a dry collection of linguistic facts, but as an ever-changing story that’s part of the country’s larger cultural and political history.

Read the chapter exploring near-death experiences (NDEs) in “North America” from Gregory Shushan’s book, Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religionswhich examines the role culture plays in how people experience and interpret NDEs, and reveals how afterlife beliefs often originate in such extraordinary experiences.

You may also be interested in the chapter “Possession and dispossession: religion in Native America”, from Timothy Beal’s Religion in America: A Very Short Introduction.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous languages, keep an eye out for Lyle Campbell’s upcoming title, The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: History and Classificationand Nicholas Limerick’s Recognizing Indigenous Languages: Double Binds of State Policy and Teaching Kichwa in Ecuador.

Featured image: Arapaho Ghost Dance, 1900, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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Why global museums amassed the ancestral dead, starting in Peru

Why global museums amassed the ancestral dead, starting in Peru

It is a time of worldwide reckoning for museums that display or contain ancestral dead.

Although scrutiny of looted art dates to Britain’s 1816 inquest over the Parthenon marbles, it has taken far longer for museums of anatomy, anthropology, and natural history to address their “specimens” of peoples killed, disinterred, and dissected in colonial contexts. The dam broke in the 1980s, when Native North Americans pressed the U.S. Congress to pass two acts that required museums receiving federal funding to notify descendants of the ancestors in their collections and attempt their “repatriation.” Museums exploited the laws’ loopholes leading descendants and decolonizing nations around the world to press for wider returns. In 2020, the global George Floyd protests extended to the museums and monuments that had their origins in scientific racism, settler colonialism, and the afterlives of slavery. Here in Pennsylvania, where I write, Finding Ceremony is working for the descendant-controlled rehumanization and return of the skulls of black Philadelphians collected by the white supremacist Samuel George Morton, today possessed by the University of Pennsylvania.

Why, though, did museums and scholars systematically amass the dead to begin with? In the early nineteenth century, prominent anatomists like Johannes Friedrich Blumenbach collected skulls but were satisfied with exemplifying their physical differences via the discussion of single types (a “Tungusae” skull to represent the “Mongolian” or “yellow race,” for example). A century later, institutions sought as many crania as they could. To explain that difference, historians and critics of bio-racism observe that the nineteenth century was European colonialism’s high watermark, and that anatomists like Morton used the settler violence and disinterment that it caused to prove the unprovable—that the collection and measurement of more and more crania could establish the existence of separate and unequal races.

But the specific story of the collection of Andean ancestors charts a different origin for this global process, and it asks us to think with more nuance regarding what to do with the museums it created. Using scholarly publications from the sixteenth to twentieth century, and the correspondence and fieldnotes of anatomists and anthropologists in at least 26 museums and archives in Peru, the United States, Spain, and Great Britain, Empires of the Dead offers four new ways of thinking about that story, and why it matters.

1. The European collection and display of the non-European dead began in sixteenth century Peru, inspiring the global invention of “mummies.”

Although Europeans examined the Indigenous dead since Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, it was Spain’s encounter with Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, that led to the invention to “ancient” and racialized human remains as a scientific category. In Tawantinsuyu, Spaniards met the Incas’ own hierarchy of sacred and well-preserved ancestors and in 1559 tried to conquer them by displaying them as objects of anatomical knowledge. Besides illustrating how the collections of other peoples’ ancestors has always been about violence and science, this early museumification of Inca and Andean ancestors had global consequences. By the eighteenth century, European scholars conjectured that the Incas, and not just the ancient Egyptians, made “mummies,” and that the Americas’ racialized past might be studied using Peru’s pre-colonial dead.

2. South American patriots encouraged the Andean dead’s collection and study for their own scientific and nationalist reasons.

This “mummification” of the Andean past mattered to Peru. In 1821, shortly after declaring Peru’s Independence, the South American patriot José de San Martín sent King George IV of England an “Inca mummy,” hoping it would enter the British Museum. Over the next century, thousands of “ancient Peruvian” mummies and skulls followed, in part because republican Peruvian scholars and collectors studied the Andean dead in the belief that they embodied the new nation’s “ancient” sovereignty and science of embalming. Although the Peruvian state tried to halt the export of “antiquities” from 1822, human remains were largely exempt, reflecting a wider disdain for the ancestors of Peru’s living Andean peoples. Only in 1929 did the Peruvian state declare that its ownership and protection of “artifacts” extended to Andean ancestors.

3. The largest single population in America’s museums is the pre-colonial Andean dead, and it facilitated the collection of other groups worldwide.

This is in part why there are more Andean remains in American museums than any other single “racial” group. Taking advantage of Peruvian scholarship and looting, foreign anatomists and early anthropologists moved to amassing large and more statistically useful series. Samuel George Morton was central to this process. For his seminal Crania Americana (1839), he measured more Andean skulls than any other American group; when he died, “ancient Peruvians” were his largest population. To debate Morton, other scholars and museums collected them as well. The largest population today at the Smithsonian are the 4,851 individuals from “Peru,” as I recently wrote in the Washington Post. This process benefitted from European colonialism but transformed it scientifically. American anthropology’s Andean core justified the collection of similarly large groups of other Indigenous peoples.

4. Peruvian scholars and Andean communities have also used the collection of ancestors to contest scientific racism.

Inca and Andean peoples survived colonialism and independence, however, and have long engaged in their own anti­-colonial collection and reinterpretation of the dead. From the seventeenth century to the present, Andean scholars have insisted that the dead represent ancestry, not idolatry, and care, not race. Some communities honor the pre-colonial dead to this day, seeing them as an essential part of society. Still other Andean individuals have tried to steer anthropological collection to anti-racist ends. My book closes with Julio César Tello (1880-1947), considered “America’s First Indigenous Archaeologist,” who proved Andean skill at cranial trepanation—the world’s oldest surgery, it has been suggested—in part by selling his collection of his Andean skulls to Harvard. Tello built Peru’s first three anthropological museums, each centered around the other “scientific ancestors” he excavated.

The result of these four new ways into this history?

The collection of ancestral remains worldwide is indeed a product of European colonialism. But it is also the result of the centuries-old challenge of non-colonial ways of interpreting the dead: as embodiments of history, sovereignty, science, and the sacred that are not so easily deactivated by being placed in a museum.

For that reason, the world’s museums must listen to the descendant peoples seeking their ancestors’ return. But it also explains why Peruvians, for example, have not sought the mass return of “ancient Peruvians” as they did the return of the Machu Picchu collection from Yale, as I detailed in my first book, Cradle of Gold. Since the sixteenth century, “ancient Peruvians” have made the Andes a beachhead onto a more global anthropology and history. Some Peruvians and descendant communities will undoubtedly call for the return of ancestors made to fight that battle and should be supported in those efforts. But others may conceivably call for their retention in the many places Andean peoples have migrated to and worked to call home. In those cases, and possibly others, the restitution of ancestral remains may require something even more basic than repatriation or return, which museums have sometimes used to wash their hands of the colonial past. It may demand revelation and representation of the ways that other peoples’ ancestors continue to move and make us.

Feature image: Machu Picchu in Mist by Pedro Lastra. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Infrastructure, public policy, and the Anthropocene [podcast]

Infrastructure, public policy, and the Anthropocene [podcast]

On today’s episode of The Oxford Comment, we discuss the state of human infrastructure in the Anthropocene with a particular focus on how research can best be used to inform public policy.  

First, we welcomed Patrick Harris, co-editor-in-chief of the new transdisciplinary journal, Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, to speak about the aims and scopes of OOIH, how OOIH is poised to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, and the kind of research the editors are seeking. We then interviewed Jonathan Pickering, co-author of The Politics of the Anthropocene, the winner of the 2019 Clay Morgan Award Committee for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. We spoke with him about how the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene has affected our core infrastructure systems and how good governance can help us mitigate the many challenges we’ll face in the future.

Check out Episode 88 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

Recommended reading

Upon the initial launch of Oxford Open Infrastructure and Health, co-editors Evelyne de Leeuw and Patrick Harris penned this blog post on the OUPblog, introducing the journal and detailing how OOIH will provide a link between infrastructure and both (inter)planetary and human health.

OOIH’s opening editorial, also written by the co-editors, elaborates on their vision for OOIH, provided greater context for the intersection between infrastructure and well-being, and presented the foundations of what future research published by the journal will need to include.

Human activities have a decisive causal influence on the Earth system, but to date the responses of the social sciences to the challenge have been inadequate. It is necessary to do better. Delve into the scholarship of our guest, Jonathan Pickering, and his co-author John S. Dryzek as they unravel the good, the bad, and the inescapable of our new epoch in this chapter from their book, The Politics of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene will not recede, and the central question of environmental management will be whether we can develop ways to reflexively and sustainably manage ecosystems, habitats, and human needs. This chapter examines four possible normative underpinnings for such management, from The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory.

The Anthropocene has emerged as a powerful new narrative of the relationship between humans and nature. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction draws on the work of geologists, geographers, environmental scientists, archaeologists, and humanities scholars to explain the science and wider implications of the Anthropocene. This chapter explores why we should accept that a new chapter of Earth history might indeed be unfolding, with humans playing a leading role.

This response to the editors’ essay by Phil McManus offered a clarification on what is termed infrastructure, and examined the history of urbanist programs as a means to inform today’s relationship between health and infrastructure as their intersection is more clearly defined.

The Anthropocene is not only a geological event but also a political, philosophical, and theological one. This chapter, from Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, proposes that key to its undoing is decolonization, including of lands, waters, minds, and spirit, by drawing upon unjustly discredited knowledges, including Indigenous ontological conceptions of spiritual meanings that recognize the awareness and being of all terrestrial life, the inherent value of matter and the agency of Nature-Earth.

Explore the following Open Access articles from our journals:

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