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4 Field Colloquium Series: “Lingwashing vs Listening: Promise, Peril, and Structural Oblivion in White South African Linguistic Nationalism”

Janet McIntosh
Friday, January 27, 2017
3:00-5:00 PM
411 West Hall Map
Our 4 Field Colloquium series presents speakers from the four fields of anthropology on new and topical interests in the field.


In recent years a growing number of urban, liberal South African whites have expressed a wish to learn an indigenous language such as isiXhosa or isiZulu, often out of anxiety that their linguistic limitations have become embarrassing, even disabling, to their national belonging. Their efforts have been met with mingled enthusiasm and skepticism. I discuss some semiotic dimensions, promises, and perils of white South African language learning efforts, including shifting perceptions of click phonemes; the discomfiting vulnerabilities that may arise in white speakers; charges that white linguistic efforts may be an effort to paint over deeper social offenses (“lingwashing”); and the struggle for some whites to grasp the difference between speaking a language and closing deeper gaps in understanding.

Janet McIntosh is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She is author of The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast (Duke University Press, 2009; winner of the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion) and Unsettled: Denial and Belonging among White Kenyans (University of California Press, 2016).
Building: West Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: AEM Featured, Anthropology
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Department of Anthropology