Work on globalization has been concentrated on typical sites where features and phenomena are abundantly available: the huge contemporary metropolis with its explosive and conspicuous diversity in people and languages, its hyper-mobility and constant ux. Less typical places -peri-urban and rural areas, peripheral areas of countries, peripheral zones of the world, peripheral institutional zones where minorities are relegated -have been less quickly absorbed into current scholarship. Yet, upon closer inspection, there is no reason to exclude these 'margins' from analyses of globalization processes and of their sociolinguistic implications. Globalization is a transformation of the entire world system, and it does not only a ect the metropolitan centers of the world but also its most remote margins. Thus, we are bound to encounter globalization e ects, also in highly unexpected places. A survey of these rei cations of globalization at the margins will be the topic of this paper. We shall suggest a speci c angle from which such forms of globalization in the margin can be most usefully addressed and we do so by drawing from examples taken from new media and communication technologies, from new forms of economic activity and, last but not least, from the perspective of legitimacy in the contentious struggle between commodication of language and the semiotic construction of authenticity.

This paper provides an ethnographic understanding of harmony as language policy in China, grounded in a historical analysis of 'harmony' (和 he) as a distinct traditional Chinese (Confucian) ideal that gradually finds its new expressions through the policy of Harmonious Society (和谐社会hexie shehui) in contemporary China. The paper focuses on language practices surrounding 'harmony' emerging from the Internet, a discursive space and site that is both highly diverse and heavily contested with respect to policing processes, and notably so in the context of the PRC for its stringent measurement of censorship and sensitization of language use. It is shown that although the state is arguably the strongest stakeholder in implementing the policy of harmony, the actual processes of harmonization online develop in detailed, multidirectional and unpredictable rather than abstract, linear or monofocal ways. The paper offers a descriptive analysis of the field of Internet memes that critique and subvert the policies of harmonization. This includes new meanings for words (e.g. 'harmony' as euphemism for censorship) and puns around the acoustic image of hexie and other censorable words, resulting in the circulation and bricolage of myths and songs revolving around 'river crab' (hexie) and 'grass mud horse' (caonima) as placeholders of dissent, which feed back into offline popular (and critical) culture. The paper concludes with a discussion of the politics of harmony, pointing at the increasingly polycentric realities clashing with the modernist monocentric ideal of the state project of harmony, and with arguments for an ethnographically based understanding and inspection of language policy as an instrument for shaping sociolinguistic life.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract