Introduction: acts of alterity

Adi Hastings et al. — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:46:59 PST

Many contemporary analyses of language and identity focus on the acts of speakers expressing or voicing some self. Such an approach reductively aligns speakers, performances, voices, and selves. This introductory essay argues that identity has become an unanalyzed first principle of linguistic analysis that has occluded or absorbed other equally important aspects of linguistic practice, including performances of alterity. The essay relativizes performances of identity by placing them along a broader continuum between performances of identity and performances of alterity, focusing concretely on how the notions of voice and exemplary figures lay the ground for a linguistic anthropological analysis of language and difference.

Licked by the Mother Tongue: Imagining Everyday Sanskrit at Home and in the World

Adi Hastings — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:36:29 PST

This paper examines the ways in which Sanskrit revivalists in contemporary India imagine social contexts for the production and reproduction of Sanskrit speech. In contrast to the received view of Sanskrit as being a ritual language par excellence, opposed at every step to the domestic sphere and everyday life, Sanskrit revivalists treat Sanskrit as a “mother tongue,” figuring the home as the primary site for the creation of an “everyday Sanskrit” world and the mother as the primary agent of this process of Sanskritizing the domestic sphere. “Domesticating Sanskrit,” the process of bringing the elevated ritual language down into everyday life, at the very same time “Sanskritizes the domestic,” that is, ritually transforms or elevates the home into a “Sanskrit home.” Moving outward from the Sanskritized domestic sphere, activists also imagine other contexts in which one could use Sanskrit, which nonetheless conforms to a notion of a Sanskrit interiority or domesticity.