Anthropology

This article describes a controversy that emerged around a language maintenance program with which the author was involved on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona. It argues that the controversy had its source in conflicts between two language ideologies, each informing a different pedagogical model within the local speech community. One had its locus in the educational institutions, and the other was more broadly dispersed throughout families and homes, extending to other contexts of everyday life in which Apache standards of communicative competence set the tone for interactions. The article argues that language education programs were perceived by some as threatening to replace Apache pedagogical practices and to undermine relations of authority between younger and older Apache generations. It concludes that language maintenance cannot be narrowly construed as such, but must take into account local meanings of the problems of language loss and survival in the formulation of solutions.

This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use English-language mass media discourse to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation, usually with humorous effect. It is argued that these names do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the deployment of media discourse according to locally defined speech genres and language ideology to comment on social changes brought about by the new housing developments. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant
society, these names are acts of community self-definition that confound mainstream expectations for place names generally, and for Native American place names in particular. They celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Use of these names constitutes the reservation as an interpretive community in which participation is defined not along nationalist models of citizenship, but in terms of locally established idioms of sociality. (Discourse and place, genre, intertextuality,
mass media, Western Apache, place names, Native American,
narrative, joking, verbal play)*

In this article we examine claims made by some Apache religious specialists that Apaches, in their ceremonies and stories, have always had the Bible and that the Judeo-Christian Bible is an authentic part of the Apache way of life. We show that the Apache discourse of Biblical authenticity does not threaten to replace Apache “tradition” as much as destabilize mainstream Western understandings of what the Bible is, and what alienable and inalienable cultural property is. In the process of developing this argument we discuss some of the limits of heritage and cultural preservation efforts and propose new forms of collaboration between anthropologists and the indigenous communities with whom they work.

This article examines contrasting entextualizations of the Bible across conflicting Traditionalist and Evangelical Christian identities on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona. On the one hand, each makes use of Apache language idioms and genre precedents to underwrite their respective claims to authentic Apache identities. On the other hand, each selects different components of that loosely shared repertoire of discursive precedents in their entextualizations of the Bible in order to articulate contrasting transformative projects for their community as well as to assert the contemporary relevance of their voices
within differently imagined global orders. This analysis constitutes the local speech community as a locus of ethnolinguistic inquiry in which relations to encompassing social
orders are mediated in part by the circulation of texts. In this process conventions and precedents serve as a reservoir of resources mobilized for use in competing strategies advanced by differently affiliated actors in dialogue with one another. In this way multiplicity and dynamism as a characteristic of local communities is defined as a crucial dimension of local–global discursive processes.

Intertextuality and misunderstanding This special issue investigates the interplay of intertextuality and misunderstanding in the mediation of social realities. The notion of intertextuality, that any given text is accorded meaning through its relations to other texts, draws our analytic attention to semiotic configurations (words, reported speech, sayings, stories, television shows, etc.) that extend with some attributed interpretive and formal coherence across successive contexts of use. Our concern with misunderstanding, on the other hand, brings to the foreground the heterogeneity of social identities, competencies, institutions and communities that both inform and result from acts of communication. Bringing together misunderstanding and intertextuality allows the contributors to this volume to highlight an apparent paradox concerning texts in their use as ostensibly common reference points by heterogeneous actors. On the one hand, texts are attributed with coherent and implicitly shared meaning. On the other hand, any given text is also necessarily variable through successive uses. Their paradoxical, double-faced status allows texts to play a key role in mediating divergent subject positions, social identities and communities. By considering misunderstanding in relation to textuality we draw attention to the underlying relativity of any textual meaning and the heteroglossia of successive voicings of ostensibly repeated or recirculated texts (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). What emerges from the articles in this volume is a look at the variable and negotiated quality of textual meaning and form at the juncture of social identities, institutions and communities; and conversely, the uses made of textuality in coordinating and articulating social difference.

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We explicate a Western Apache oratorial idiom, reflected upon as bá’hadziih, ‘speak for them’ as a complex intersubjective strategy for the negotiation of varying figurations of otherness. Bá’hadziih operates, we will argue, by limiting the otherness of an opposed family or clan by means of appeals to a temporalizing sociality. By way of establishing the ethnographic context of bá’hadziih we will also show how its action entails and is loosely entailed by different ways of speaking associated with bígon´łzih, or ‘knowing’ and the
moral boundaries of families. We will conclude that bá’hadziih deploys and obviates otherness by recasting it within what we define as an emergent, subjunctive sociality.

This article elaborates upon Dell Hymes’s contributions to
dialogic anthropology by comparing two accounts of Apache lives, one spoken by Lawrence Mithlo to Harry Hoijer and published in a 1938 text collection, and another spoken by Eva Lupe to the author in 1996. First, I show that neither account is cast by its speaker as neutral information; rather, both are extensions of an oratorical genre labeled bá’hadziih, through which the speaker presents a group with which she identifies to an audience that includes those figured
as other. Through bá’hadziih the speaker attempts to transform the relationship between her own group and the addressed others by first invoking what she anticipates to be the image held of her group from the other’s point of view and then posing terms for its transformation. I show that a parallel strategy is also evident in a short creation narrative performed by Mithlo for Hoijer. I show that the ethnological framework within which Hoijer casts Mithlo’s performances
interposes a colonial lens that misrecognizes, with unintended
irony, what Mithlo frames as misunderstandings on the part of White
people as straightforward statements of fact. By contrast, considerations of genre and addressivity introduced via Hymes’s ethnography of communication and ethnopoetics enable a latter-day
recognition of the terms of mediation utilized by persons like Mithlo and Lupe to address researchers in ethnographic dialogues. A commentary to this essay by Richard Bauman appears later in this special issue.

A queer archaeology is often equated to looking for ancient homosexuality.  As a challenge to heteronormative practice, queer theory, instead, provides a framework for engaging with all aspects of identity formation and the processes and behaviors that mediate it.  This article examines how queer theory can inform discussions of  archaeological identity, first with respect to its place in broader feminist and archaeological literature; second in its correspondence to theoretical models of identity formation and the construction of difference; and finally in its applicability to models of ancient Maya social organization and commoner identity.

For the ancient Maya, social organization remains largely understood as a two class system — that of commoner and elite.  While these categories reflect the extreme ends of known social strata, they inadequately characterize the reality of day-to day interactions.  This has led to tacit assumptions that commoners did not participate in or comprehend the political and social complexity of the world around them. This paper examines how occupants of a Late Classic Maya neighborhood employed ritual and public practices as a means of social differentiation.

Excavations at the Northeast Group, part of the ancient Maya site of Chan, Belize, identified considerable diversity between households, suggesting that occupants shaped status and identity through the control and centralization of ritual. Understanding how people distinguished themselves within the context of a neighborhood provides direct evidence of class complexity, challenging traditional models of commoner behavior and more importantly the role they played in ancient Maya society as a whole.

Maya archaeology continues to be defined by a schism between ‘politic/s and state’ and ‘everyday life and ordinary people.’ The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct this dichotomy by considering the intellectual history and theoretical perspectives that continue to reify these boundaries and its connections to modern neoliberal discourses.  How we conceive of the state - of what it is, and how it interacts with the rest of society - is at the heart of neo-evolutionary models of state formation; these impact our understanding of how ancient Maya society operated and the ways in which power, politics and class function. Archaeological fascination with elites and rulers, both in scholarly and public circles, creates a narrative focused on individual achievement, a quest for wealth and material access; values lauded by the neoliberal state.  Alternative readings of complexity illustrate that everyday life of ordinary people is nuanced, intentional, and inherently political. Such work forces us to reconsider this dichotomy and recognize it as a dialectical and mutually constitutive process.

A rchaeologists have increasingly recognized the need to diversify our discipline, yet there is still little discussion of the heteronormative assumptions that linger in research, fieldwork, and classrooms-assumptions that affect both archaeological perspectives and the composition of its practitioners. The contributors to this special issue of The SAA Archaeological Record explore what it means to be a queer archaeologist, the limitations that queer archaeologists face, and the possibilities of building more inclusive spaces. In 2014, the Society for American Archaeology approved the formation of the Queer Archaeology Interest Group (QAIG). QAIG reflects not only a growing interest in queer theory and sexuality studies, but also the need to recognize, support, and mentor Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI) archaeologists, students, and communities. This issue is a direct outgrowth of the conversations and discussions of a small collection of QAIG officers and members over the last two years. Contributors to this volume expand on these conversations and discuss the queering of archaeology-from examinations of sex, gender, and sexuality in the past to discussions of the role that these categories play in archaeological work, practice, and education.