Publications (10) View all
-
Article: Reduplication and Reciprocity in Imagining Community: The Play of Tropes in a Rural Bangladeshi Moot
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: The trope of the "body politic" is reproduced in a Bengali popular court, or moot, not only through explicit submetaphors of that master metaphor but through a grammatical example of what Peirce called diagrammatic iconism. The iconism of reduplicated verbs with reciprocal meaning became pivotal in the metacommunicative negotiation of the agenda of a rural Bangladeshi moot. Such forms of iconicity analyzed here play traceable roles in particular imaginations of community and give us an opportunity to explore the accessibility of those imaginations to discursive consciousness. The article concludes that the tropes most powerfully shaping the discourse of the moot are those least accessible to metapragmatic consciousness, those that rhetorically contribute to the veiling of their own rhetoricity.Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 06/2008; 6(2):188 - 222. · 1.39 Impact Factor -
Article: Speaking of Feelings
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective. Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka. eds. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. 421 pp.Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Zoltan Kövecses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 223 pp.The Navigation of Feeling:. Framework for the History of Emotions. William Reddy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 308 pp.American Anthropologist 01/2008; 105(4):852 - 855. · 1.49 Impact Factor -
Article: Communicating Multiple Identities in Muslim Communities: An Introduction
Ethos 01/2008; 26(2):115 - 119. · 0.95 Impact Factor -
Article: The Kalimah In the Kaleidophone: Ranges of Multivocallty in Bangladeshi Muslim's Discourses
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Bengali Muslims have long debated the place of religion, ideology, literary heritage, ethnicity, and various nationalisms in their identity. Contemporary identity ferment is exemplified in each of five examples of discourse explored herein. Replaying these voices "kaleidophonically" uncovers the vital, resistant, "fundamentally liberating" character of multivocality in Bengali Muslims' discourse, particularly in codeswitching, reported speech, and pronoun play. Although each of the voices acknowledges the kalimah of Islam, their multivocality belies simple formulations of identity. The translinguistics of Bakhtin informs the analysis of how linguistic play works to reconstitute what it is to be Bengali and Muslim.Ethos 01/2008; 26(2):229 - 257. · 0.95 Impact Factor -
Article: “I can't tell you all my troubles”: conflict, resistance, and metacommunication in Bangladeshi illness interactions
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Transcripts of interactions between patients, kin, and healers open up the lives of fourrogi (“sick ones” or “patients”) in Matlab, Bangladesh. I compare the pattern of domination and resistance in those interactions with Western biomedical encounters. Patients in Matlab express dissatisfaction with the power relations of family or medicine through low-level means that do not enter discursive consciousness. By indirectly calling attention to the suppression of their voices, patients' metacomplaints—a species of metacommunication evident in two of the interactions—entail an incipient cultural criticism.American Ethnologist 10/1995; 22(4):927 - 952. · 1.41 Impact Factor
