Zane Goebel

While much scholarship has been devoted to the interplay between language, identity and social relationships, we know less about how this plays out interactionally in diverse transient settings. Based on research in Indonesia, this book examines how talk plays an important role in mediating social relations in two urban spaces where linguistic and cultural diversity is the norm and where distinctions between newcomers and old timers changes regularly. How do people who do not share expectations about how they should behave build new expectations through participating in conversation? Starting from a view of language-society dynamics as enregisterment, Zane Goebel uses interactional sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication to explore how language is used in this contact setting to build and present identities, expectations and social relations. It will be welcomed by researchers and students working in the fields of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, the anthropology of migration and Asian studies.

Neighborhood Talk in Indonesia

Language, Migration, and Identity

"This book examines the discursive connections between global flows of ideologies about leadership and good governance, how these ideologies are localized in Indonesia, and how all of this relates to changing political, bureaucratic, and market regimes between 1998 and 2004. It starts with a speech given by the head of the International Monetary Fund about the importance of good governance. It then traces the uptake of shibboleths of this speech within Indonesian government policy documents, within the Indonesian mass-media, and in the everyday talk that occurred in a government office in Indonesia during my five months of fieldwork in that office between August 2003 and January 2004. The book makes the case that in order to formulate nuanced interpretations of connection and processes of localization, researchers need to engage in a type of reflexivity that involves a constant movement between data from different timespaces. Such a practice, it is argued, adds to our understanding of how and why both researchers and those researched come to believe and present themselves in specific ways. In doing so, the book extends contemporary conceptual work in the broad areas of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as it relates to notions of scale, connection, chronotope, leadership talk, and personhood, while sketching how this conceptual work can be operationalized methodologically"--

Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia

Global Leadership Talk

Scholars of language ideology have encouraged us to reflect on and explore where social categories come from, how they have been reproduced, and whether and to what extent they are relevant to everyday interactional practices. Taking up on these issues, this book focuses on how ethnicity has been semiotically constructed, valued, and reproduced in Indonesia since Dutch colonial times, and how this category is drawn upon in everyday talk. In doing so, this book also seeks to engage with scholarship on superdiversity while highlighting some points of engagement with work on ideas about community. The book draws upon a broad range of scholarship on Indonesia, recordings of Indonesian television from the mid-1990s onwards, and recordings of the talk of Indonesian students living in Japan. It is argued that some of the main mechanisms for the reproduction and revaluation of ethnicity and its links with linguistic form include waves of technological innovations that bring people into contact (e.g. changes in transportation infrastructure, introduction of print media, television, radio, the internet, etc.), and the increasing use of one-to-many participation frameworks such as school classrooms and the mass media. In examining the talk of sojourning Indonesians the book goes on to explore how ideologies about ethnicity are used to establish and maintain convivial social relations while in Japan. Maintaining such relationships is not a trivial thing and it is argued that the pursuit of conviviality is an important practice because of its relationship with broader concerns about eking out a living.

Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad

Language and Superdiversity

Howard Manns

Deborah Cole

Written by a wide range of highly regarded scholars and exciting junior ones, this book critiques and operationalizes contemporary thinking in the rapidly expanding field of linguistic anthropology. It does so using case studies of actual everyday language practices from an extremely understudied yet incredibly important area of the Global South: Indonesia. In doing so, it provides a rich set of studies that model and explain complex linguistic anthropological analysis in engaging and easily understood ways. As a book that is both accessible for undergraduate students and enlightening for graduate students through to senior professors, this book problematizes a wide range of assumptions. The diversity of settings and methodologies used in this book surpass many recent collections that attempt to address issues surrounding contemporary processes of diversification given rapid ongoing social change. In focusing on the trees, so to speak, the collection as a whole also enables readers to see the forest. This approach provides a rare insight into relationships between everyday language practices, social change, and the ever-present and ongoing processes of nation-building.

Zane Goebel

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