Contact discourse

Abstract

Starting from the idea that all social life is characterized by contact between those who do not have the same trajectories of socialization, this article draws on insights from work on narrative, normativity, and social value to examine how contact is discursively policed. Building on scholarship on diversity talk and translingualism I propose the concept contact discourse to refer to the discursive work that constructs and evaluates those who inhabit contact zones. While both streams of scholarship cover the discursive policing of social life to greater and lesser extents, they cover very different participation and authorization frameworks. Contact discourse and the three associated terms—models of contact, contact commentary, and contact talk—highlight the importance of participation and authorization frameworks for understanding the policing of social life in contact zones. My empirical focus is on discursive data from television, social media, interviews, and everyday talk. (Contact, discourse, diversity talk, normativization, translingualism, value)*

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…Browne Ribeiro (2019) explores these kinds of encounters as multiple temporalities that arise along with the shifting political‐economic conditions of a municipality in the Brazilian Amazon: one set of globalizing practices pulling residents (and the anthropologist) into highly standardized clock time and another into a different—but not necessarily contradictory—direction toward community work. Goebel (2019) calls such encounters “contact discourse” and then develops a typology.…”

Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay‐speaking archipelago

“…Mindful of the ever‐present specter of comparisons (Anderson, 1998; Rizal, [1887] 2006), my conclusion draws out some comparative dynamics, asking, with an eye to Sabah's “politics of location” (Rich, 2001; see also Al‐Bulushi et al, 2020), how the particulars presented here exceed regnant typification schemas, models, discourses, images, habits, or ideologies proffered by American(ist) anthropology. Having drawn attention to bordering practices (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) and contact discourse (Goebel, 2019; see also Goebel et al, 2019) at the porous, archipelagic interface of three island nations in the Malay‐speaking archipelago, I ask what provincializing or parochializing angles of vision the present study might offer on American(ist) anthropology's own hemispheric parochialism.…”

“…The problem of "too much" (Reyes, 2017) returns us to the valence and tacit normative gauge of kelebihang as an adversely affecting excess in certain configurations. As linguistic and ideological grounds for the exteriorization of social anxiety amid Sabah's "sense of gloom," metasemiotic formulations of excess are immanent to the denotational patterning of Malay talk, while also imposed, as it were, from above, proffered by bureaucrats (Tan Sri Simon Sipaun), political activists (Mutalib MD), and migrants themselves (Haji Joman) across one-to-many participation frameworks (Goebel, 2019) that transcend international border regimes. | 153…”