Awards
- Winner of 2017 Sapir Book Award, Honorable Mention Award.
- Winner of ^B2017 Sapir Book Award, Honorable Mention Award^R.
Overview
Linguistic Rivalries weaves together anthropological accounts of diaspora, nation, and empire to explore and analyze the multi-faceted processes of globalization characterizing the migration and social integration experiences of Tamil-speaking immigrants and refugees from India and Sri Lanka to Montréal, Québec in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In Montréal, a city with more trilingual speakers than in any other North American city, Tamil migrants draw on their multilingual repertoires to navigate longstanding linguistic rivalries between anglophone and francophone, and Indian and Sri Lankan nationalist leaders by arguing that Indians speak ""Spoken Tamil"" and Sri Lankans speak ""Written Tamil"" as their respective heritage languages. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and linguistic methods to compare and contrast the communicative practices and language ideologies of Tamil heritage language learning in Hindu temples, Catholic churches, public schools, and community centers, this book demonstrates how processes of sociolinguistic differentiation are mediated by ethnonational, religious, class, racial, and caste hierarchies. Indian Tamils showcase their use of the ""cosmopolitan"" sounds and scripts of colloquial varieties of Tamil to enhance their geographic and social mobilities, whereas Sri Lankan Tamils, dispossessed of their homes by civil war, instead emphasize the ""primordialist"" sounds and scripts of a pure ""literary"" Tamil to rebuild their homeland and launch a ""global"" critique of racism and environmental destruction from the diaspora. This book uses the ethnographic and archival study of Tamil mobility and immobility to expose the mutual constitution of elite and non-elite global modernities, defined as language ideological projects in which migrants objectify dimensions of time and space through scalar metaphors.
Full Product Details
Author: Sonia N. Das (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, New York University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 23.10cm
, Height: 1.30cm
, Length: 15.50cm
Weight: 0.431kg
ISBN: 9780190461782
ISBN 10: 0190461780
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 24 November 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Author Information
Sonia N. Das is Assistant Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan and B.A. in Anthropology and B.S. in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia, taught at a high school in Louisiana, and has published in top anthropology journals in French and English.
