The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "Voicing Secrets and Hiding the Evident: The Language of Invisibility in the Pueblo Borderlands"

For indigenous people in the Pueblo borderlands—the region stretching from the U.S. Mexico border along the Rio Grande river and the historic Camino Real road to Central New Mexico—the ability to control the use of Native languages and other types of specialized knowledge has remained important amidst the presence of new linguistic and cultural practices. Building on my prior work on secrecy, in this talk I explore how concealment must be studied in tandem with exposure and revelation, both within this region and beyond. I present three ethnolinguistic examples from Southern-Tiwa speaking Pueblos, moving geographically southward from cases illustrating the tight control of information to those where wide circulation is sought: obscuring language data from San Ramón Pueblo in published materials, a whistleblowing facebook page from Isleta Pueblo that exposes community secrets, and the efforts of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo to raise their public profile in the service of sovereignty, cultural revitalization, and economic development. The central conclusion arising from this research is that linguistic acts of revelation and concealment both reflect and shape social life. This means that exposures and secrets—both strategic and unintentional—are everyday forms of knowledge production that are fundamental to contemporary sociality, ways of using language that are necessary components for identity construction, political action, and the exertion of power.

The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series presents speakers on current topics in the field of anthropology.