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Cultural Boundaries: The Signs of Power, the Power of Signs

Prospectus

Much of contemporary social theory addresses the articulation of signs, including language and other expressive forms, with power (Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Bakhtin and Gramsci). However, analyses of the dialectic between signs and power often elide the issue of boundaries. A reconsideration of boundaries, such as those within or between nations or regions, must address the extent to which previous scholarship has envisioned them, unproblematically, as the realm of play between signs and power. The 1997-98 Ethnohistory Workshop will probe the connection between boundary construction and the establishment and maintenance of power relations. Such an inquiry must begin by pondering whether signs are external to, or constitutive of boundaries--whether signs cluster, like barnacles, around extant boundaries, or refract, and thereby create, boundaries.

There is a substantial literature on "ethnic groups and boundaries," among which are Fredrik Barth's work of the same name (1969) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). While Anderson has argued for the role of print media in enabling the "imagining" of nations by their citizenry, both authors underplay the dialectic between signs and power. Barth privileges social relations, with signs at boundaries of contact emerging merely as signs of difference--a difference whose implications for power inequity remain vague. Many recent critiques of functionalism assume power to be endemic to a presupposed set of social relations, and construe difference as a resistance to that power. However, difference itself may be deliberately constructed, not to resist, but rather to engender, power. In Anderson's work, print media enable people to imagine themselves part of a homogenous, spatiotemporal framework, known as a community. We will consider the crucial question of whether such imagining simultaneously constructs a boundary, an inside and outside, the successful negotiation of which belongs to the powerful. Moreover, we will consider whether unifying phenomena, such as print mediation, themselves result in divisions and power asymmetries--in Anderson's case between literate and illiterate--internal to the very communities they purportedly engender.

The 1997-98 Ethnohistory Series will not only yield greater insight into the links between signs, power, and boundaries as they are currently construed, but also, and perhaps more importantly, call into question some of our suppositions about boundaries, their genesis, and our perception.

Speakers, 1997-1998

Fall 1997

September 18, 1997: Rita Barnard, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Paper title: "Inside, Outside, Inside: Prison, Poetry, and the South African Nation"

October 16, 1997: Susan Gal, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago
Paper title: "Making Boundaries: How Language Ideologies Construct Difference"

November 7, 1997: Louise Burkhart, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York at Albany and Sabine MacCormick, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University
Paper title: "The Kislak Conference: Returning the Gaze: New World Representations of Old World Concepts"

Spring 1998

January 22, 1998: Gary Tomlinson, Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania
Paper Title: "Vico's Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno)Musicology"

February 12, 1998: Fernando Coronil, Department of Anthropology and History, University of Michigan
Paper Title: "Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela"

March 19, 1998: Michael Hanchard, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Paper Title: "Jody: Blackness, Gender, and U.S. Popular Culture"

April 16, 1998: Richard Bauman, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University
Paper Title: "Mediational Performance, Traditionalization, and the Authorization of Discourse"