Language, Ideology, and Political Economy

After sharply defining and contrasting an "analytic-scientific" and an "emotional-ethical" approach and their interrelations, this article goes on to explore some possible interconnections among the three main phenomena, before discussing each in more detail. The first is political economy in several important senses; germane problems are noted that deal with (ethno) quantification and the innovative individual. The second phenomenon is ideology, in three senses: (1) notional ideology, (2) ideology for maintaining or changing a sociopolitical order, and (3) ideology for masking a structure of domination. The third phenomenon is language, again in various senses, but particularly as (1) a symbolism with a structure analogous in some ways to that of economics, and (2) a mediator between ideology and political economy; considerable attention is given to the political-economic functions of language figures such as irony and synecdoche. A fourth, analytically crucial kind of ideology, "linguacultural ideology," fills in the foregoing structure. Alternative logics, alternative combinations of variables, and alternative complementary theories are suggested throughout, particularly in the final section.     

Ethnicity,region and nation: Valencian identity and the Spanish nation-state

In the exploration of the relationships between ethnicity, national identity, and symbolic building of the region, this article deals with a key issue: the achievements and limitations of the assimilation of culturally heterogeneous populations by European nation-states. The modern Spanish national identity (at times shown as purely political) has included and still includes cultural elements (above all, the spread of the Spanish language). This meant that the ethnicity of the Valencians (a population with autonomous political structures until their violent destruction in 1707) had to be redefined as a regional identity in order to avoid coming into conflict with national identity. This re-working excluded the Catalan language, spoken by most of the inhabitants of the region, from the political sphere. In the long term, this cultural characteristic became stigmatized, which favoured its undercommunication to the extent that a process of language shift was initiated. This case study highlights the historical analysis of ethnic identity and the instability of its integration into national structures.     

Nationalism,nation and territory: Jacint Verdaguer and the Catalan Renaixença

This paper seeks to explain the historic importance to Catalan nationalism of the nineteenth-century poet and priest, Jacint Verdaguer. In order to do so, rather than focus on his contribution – and that of the wider cultural revival, the Renaixença – to the development of the Catalan language as the basis for national political mobilization, this paper argues that we cannot fully understand Verdaguer's importance without reference to his role in constructing a geographical narrative linking nation and territory. At the same time, given that national meanings are always contested, the paper proposes a dialectical approach to nationalism that situates the work of writers within the context of power struggles between social groups. Consequently, Veradguer's centrality to Catalan nationalism is ultimately explained by his role in producing a geographical narrative capable of attracting important sectors of rural Catalonia to the hegemonic project of the industrial bourgeoisie.     

Ideology and nationalism: The Finnish move to independence, 1809–1918

Sociologists often dismiss the emergence of unique nationalist identities as reflections of changing structural elements, namely the political and economic. In this article I view nationalism as a socially created and sustained ideological discourse. From this orientation, the importance of attending to cultural or symbolic constructions within nationalist movements becomes more pronounced. Thompson's (1987) re‐orien‐tational conceptions of ideology are used as an interpretative frame to analyse the construction of nineteenth‐century Finnish nationalism. Through this theoretical focus on language, the Kalevala, a book of Finnish folk poems, can be seen as a socio‐historical phenomenon amidst human conflict. This collection of poems provided the necessary discourse used to disrupt the previous Swedish cultural and emergent Russian political dominance. Symbolizing the invented culture, the Kalevala served as the basis for popular Finnishness, as well as politically mobilizing critical ideological assertions. The creation, transmission, and contestation of social meaning, through the use of language and material culture, specifically embodied in the Kalevala, is traced throughout the Finnish struggle for independence.     

Political Regimes,Political Ideology,and Self-Rated Health in Europe: A Multilevel Analysis

Background

Studies on political ideology and health have found associations between individual ideology and health as well as between ecological measures of political ideology and health. Individual ideology and aggregate measures such as political regimes, however, were never examined simultaneously.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using adjusted logistic multilevel models to analyze data on individuals from 29 European countries and Israel, we found that individual ideology and political regime are independently associated with self-rated health. Individuals with rightwing ideologies report better health than leftwing individuals. Respondents from Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics report poorer health than individuals from social democratic, liberal, Christian conservative, and former Mediterranean dictatorship countries. In contrast to individual ideology and political regimes, country level aggregations of individual ideology are not related to reporting poor health.

Conclusions/Significance

This study shows that although both individual political ideology and contextual political regime are independently associated with individuals'' self-rated health, individual political ideology appears to be more strongly associated with self-rated health than political regime.     

Do "Language Rights" Serve Indigenous Interests? Some Hopi and Other Queries

While valuable, the discourse of language rights neglects language use in cultural, social, and historical contexts. This article examines some implications of that neglect, especially vis-a-vis small-scale, indigenous, "oral" societies. Drawing principally on Hopi examples, I argue that language rights discourse rests on a reflexivization of language and culture enhanced by globalism. Now reified, language becomes an allegory of ethnic identity. Preexisting sociolinguistic sensibilities get repositioned, for example, in Native Americancommunities in which language has hitherto been deployed as a technique of privacy and sovereignty, language rights ideology islogocentric and presumes a democratic, secular space of language use, conflicting with both privacy and performativity in Native linguisticvalues. And some linguistic usage reinforces social inequality, both transnationally and group-internally: Here, language rights contradict other human rights. Language rights discourse also requires anthropology to rethink its recent antipathy to the culture concept and to treat language and culture objectively. [Keywords: language rights, sociolinguistic values, sovereignty, logocentrism, globalism]     

Linguistic Traces of a Scientific Fraud: The Case of Diederik Stapel

When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N  =  24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N  =  25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapel''s fraudulent papers contained linguistic changes in science-related discourse dimensions, including more terms pertaining to methods, investigation, and certainty than his genuine papers. His writing style also matched patterns in other deceptive language, including fewer adjectives in fraudulent publications relative to genuine publications. Using differences in language dimensions we were able to classify Stapel''s publications with above chance accuracy. Beyond these discourse dimensions, Stapel included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data than genuine data, although other evidentiary claims (e.g., number of references and experiments) did not differ across the two article types. This research supports recent findings that language cues vary systematically with deception, and that deception can be revealed in fraudulent scientific discourse.     

Creating the Appearance of Consensus in Mende Political Discourse

The language and logic of consensus as a discourse and political strategy are analyzed with the case of a Mende lineage meeting in Sierra Leone. A methodology of collecting local, private, and skeptical exegesis of public discourse leads to theoretical questions related to the use of language and secrecy to orchestrate a public consensual order while concealing alternative orders of opposition.     

Discourse-Centered Approach to Language and Culture

The Sapir- Whorf hypothesis, as usually formulated, searches for isomorphisms between grammar and culture and views language as either providing the means for thought and perception, or, in its stronger form, conditioning thought, perception, and world view. In this article I consider discourse to be the concrete expression of language-culture relationships. It is discourse that creates, recreates, focuses, modifies, and transmits both culture and language and their intersection, and it is especially in verbally artistic and playful discourse, such as poetry, magic, verbal dueling, and political rhetoric, that the resources provided by grammar, as well as cultural meanings and symbols, are activated to their fullest potential and the essence of language-culture relationships becomes salient.     

Religious Aspects of the Social Organization of a Castilian Village

The functional context of local religious practices within the structure of formal Catholicism in Spain has received little attention. Close examination of the ceremonial life of a Castilian village, and of the attitudes accompanying ceremonial and nonceremonial events, points to the existence of a complex of political and economic activities that are the chief objects of ritual sanctification and the arena in which religious sanctions function to maintain social control in the community. A survey of the ethnographic literature indicates that religious ceremonial may function in similar contexts in extended areas of the Iberian peninsula. The Castilian case and the available comparative data point to the crucial role of local religious traditions in strengthening territorial ties and in helping to define and integrate some of the fundamental units of the social structure.     

Ambiguous Transparency: Resumé Fetishism in a Slovak Workshop

This article considers how curricula vitae (C. V.s) reflect and contribute to the social and political conditions of their production. Working with observations of a 2001 workshop in Slovakia on how to write a new style of C. V. and with the related style of life chronicles from personnel files in socialist Czechoslovakia, I argue that this genre's social effects in different economic orders might arise from how authors couple or decouple the referent of a text to other actors in time and space. One ideology that I observed in the workshop encouraged shifts in notions of evidence. Such shifts, I argue, might be furthering the ideological work of creating new forms of personhood and inequality that underlie Slovakia's ‘transition’ to capitalism. Post-socialist C.V.s and socialist life chronicles appear to rise out of different graphic ideologies that govern how actors see themselves as social subjects.     

Prehistory, Identity, and Archaeological Representation in Nordic Museums

In this article, I examine the variable representation of Saami (Lapp) prehistory in several Nordic museums. The analysis is situated at the intersection of (1) the examination of the ideology of archaeological practice, (2) the discourse about creation of indigenous identity, and (3) the visual culture of museum exhibitions. I describe and analyze displays about archaeology and prehistory from seven museums in Sweden, Finland, and Norway. The presentation of Saami prehistory differs significantly between majority community museums and those run by Saami communities. These presentations reflect ideologies implicated in building indigenous, nationalist, and pannational identities as well as in establishing legitimacy of Saami claims to land and heritage. Representations of the past are inevitably political because they are about linking people, place, and legitimacy. Ambiguities in these uses of prehistory are discussed, as is the globalizing role of the European Union.     

The dog that didn’t bark: on the effect of the Great Recession on the surge of secessionism

This paper explores the relationship between the economic turmoil generated by the Great Recession and the increase of secessionism. Some authors have stressed that the Great Recession triggered changes in territorial preferences and, in the context of a conflict between the centre and the periphery, fuelled secessionism as a radical shift of the institutional setup. Nevertheless, other researchers have remarked that a recession may enhance the status quo bias and decrease the likelihood of changes. Our paper aims at contributing to this debate by analysing the case of Catalonia. We use an aggregate and an individual-level empirical design to explore the relationship between the deterioration of the economic situation and the increase of preferences for secession among the Catalan population. The findings from the analysis of our empirical models do not support the hypothesis that the effects of the Great Recession had any significant impact on political preferences in Catalonia.     

Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology

Two seemingly disparate areas of English language structure—the grammar of reported speech and of textual cohesion—are functionally related in that both entail a distinction between "wording" and "meaning." This is consistent with the Western ideological disjunction between language and reality, talk and action. Neither these language structures nor this linguistic ideology are found among the Ngarinyin people of northwestern Australia, suggesting a Whorfian hypothesis about their possible interrelationship.     

Online Islamophobia and the politics of fear: manufacturing the green scare

Negative attitudes and explicit racism against Muslims are increasingly visible in public discourse throughout Europe. Right-wing populist parties have strengthened their positions by focusing on the ‘Islamic threat’ to the West. Concurrently, the Internet has facilitated a space where racist attitudes towards Muslims are easily disseminated into the public debate, fuelling animosity against European Muslims. This paper explores part of the online Islamophobic network and scrutinizes the discursive strategies deployed by three ‘prominent’ online actors. By combining social network analysis and critical discourse analysis, the study shows that Islamophobic web pages constitute a dynamic network with ties to different political and geographical milieus. They create a seemingly mainstream political position by framing racist standpoints as a defence of Western values and freedom of speech. The study also shows that Islamophobic discourse is strengthened by xenophobic currents within mass media, and by the legitimization of intellectuals and political actors.     

Nationalism as ideological interpellation: The case of Ulster Loyalism

This article aims to explore nationalism, generally, and Ulster Loyalism, specifically, through the use of discourse theory and the Althusserian concept of ideology as interpellation. It suggests that nationalism is best understood as a particular discursive articulation that constructs subjects as being of a particular nation and thereby having certain characteristics and political needs and interests. This entails a larger definition of nationalism which encompasses some phenomena not generally taken to be nationalistic. The method is illustrated by a study of some aspects of the ideological discourse of Ulster Loyalism showing this, contrary to some accounts, to be a kind of nationalism. In the nationalist articulation of Loyalism, religion, democracy and identity are linked together making a unified ideological discourse based around a sense of specificity and difference to Irish nationalism and Roman Catholicism. Special attention is paid to the role of democracy within Loyalist discourse, in particular, and in nationalist discourse generally. The article suggests that this way of thinking about nationalism can avoid functionalist and teleological analyses, allowing us to focus on the specific ways in which a nationalism operates and to stress the centrality of politics in the process.     

Two escape routes from the paradigm of monistic authenticity: post-imperialist and federal perspectives on plural and complex identities

Despite a recent explosion of works emphasizing the increasingly plural and complex character of identity, political and social elites' interpretations of identities have continued to be dominated by the paradigm of monistic authenticity. In the face of this resilience, theorists must say more about the formation, meaning and implications of plural and complex identities. They must provide social and political actors with a credible alternative language to make sense of the actual or potential plurality of their allegiances. This article aims at contributing to the task by relying on the complementary merits of two traditions that used to ignore each other: post-imperialism and federalism. First, we suggest that post-imperialism may provide a language for redefining communities and individual-community relationships in a pluralist way. Second, we argue that the language of federalism has a high – and neglected – potential to answer the political and normative questions raised by post-imperialism.     

Sex,drugs and moral goals: reproductive strategies and views about recreational drugs

Humans, unlike most other species, show intense interest in the activities of conspecifics, even when the activities in question pose no obvious fitness threat or opportunity. Here, we investigate one content domain in which people show substantial interest, the use of drugs for non-medical purposes. Drawing from two subject populations—one undergraduate and one Internet-based—we look at the relationships among (i) abstract political commitments; (ii) attitudes about sexuality; and (iii) views surrounding recreational drugs. Whereas some theories suggest that drug views are best understood as the result of abstract political ideology, we suggest that these views can be better understood in the context of reproductive strategy. We show that, as predicted by a strategic construal, drug attitudes are best predicted by sexual items rather than abstract political commitments and, further, that the relationship between factors such as political ideology and drugs, while positive, are reduced to zero or nearly zero when items assessing sexuality are controlled for. We conclude that considering morality from the standpoint of strategic interests is a potentially useful way to understand why humans care about third party behaviour.