ReflectionsRéflections

Crisis on the terrain of language[Record]

  • Monica Heller

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This text emerged out of a series of events to which I was invited. The first occurred in October 2022, when I was invited by the Anthropology section of the New York Academy of Sciences to participate in their annual themed talk series. In these series, representatives of the North American tradition of four-field anthropology are asked to address a common theme; here, I was asked as a linguistic anthropologist to address the theme of “crisis.” That experience stayed with me, given the increasing prominence of crises and feelings and discourses of crisis, even more strongly perhaps with us as I write at the end of 2023. Certainly, it was foremost on my mind when I was awarded an honorary doctorate in February 2023 by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and asked to address an audience at the ceremony composed of academic administrators and academics from the humanities and education; in many ways, I took my job to be to speak to what scholars of language(s) and scholars who work with language(s) might have to say about the prevalent sense not simply of crisis, but of its manifestation in an unease about how to understand what might count as true, or at least true enough to be taken seriously. That honorary doctorate emerged out of decades of conversation with Catalan scholars about the links between my own work in francophone Canada and theirs in Catalunya about language, nation and State, and in particular about the role of language in the making of social difference and social inequality, and—perhaps most importantly, about how and why social, economic and political struggles take place on the terrain of language. In fact, in many ways, I had first visited Barcelona in the late 1970s, when I myself was a graduate student and a stagiaire—an intern—in the sociolinguistic research service of the Office de la langue française in Québec. This agency, now the Office québécois de la langue française, was a hub of activity around minority language policy and planning, with antennae out for similar things happening elsewhere. The links between Catalunya and Québec were evident, and there was a great deal of sharing of ideas and analyses between the two (for example, the concepts of normativizació and normalizació as key dimensions of minority language nation-building show up clearly in Québec language policy and legislation from the 1960s to today). Both Québec and Catalunya were at that time in the midst of political crises connected to the legitimacy of the state of which they were a part, and, I would argue now, more broadly connected to a post-World War II crisis of the state in which the meaning and promises of liberal democracy played a key role. Indeed, when I first stepped into the streets of Barcelona, I felt I was back in Montréal (albeit with better weather). Every interaction was just as fraught with the question of what language to speak. Tensions between French and English (or, more exactly, minoritized French speakers and dominant English speakers) had their (however inexact) counterpart in tensions between speakers of Catalan and speakers of Castilian. I was impressed, though, with the taxi drivers’ solution of hanging a Lliure/Libre sign out; in Montréal you had to wait until you figured out what radio station the driver was playing before taking a stab at opening your mouth. It is not surprising then that I found in Barcelona a network of scholars with whom I could get right into the meat of the matter, and with whom I shared a passion for understanding and explaining what we were living, in …

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