Awards
- Winner of Winner of the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize..
- Winner of Winner of the Ramon Llull International Prize Winner of the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize.
Overview
Winner of the Ramon Llull International Prize Winner of the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book PrizeA vibrant and surprisingly powerful civic and political movement for an independent Catalonia has brought renewed urgency to questions about what it means, personally and politically, to speak or not to speak Catalan and to claim Catalan identity. In this book, Kathryn Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and uses it to illuminate the politics of language in Spain and Catalonia, where Catalan jostles with Castilian for legitimacy. Longitudinal research across decades of political autonomy contextualizes this ethnographic study of the social meaning of Catalan in the 21st century. Part I lays out the ideologies of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, and naturalism that typically underpin linguistic authority in the modern western world, and gives an overview of a shift in the ideological grounding of linguistic authority in contemporary Catalonia. Part II examines discourses in the media surrounding three public linguistic controversies: an immigrant president's linguistic competence, a municipal festival, and an international book fair. Part III explores individuals' linguistic practices and views, drawing on classroom ethnographies and interviews with two generations of young people from the same high school. The book argues that there is an ongoing shift at both public and personal levels away from the ethnolinguistic authenticity that powered relations in the early transition to political autonomy, and toward new discourses of anonymity, rooted cosmopolitanism, and authenticity understood as a project rather than a matter of origins and essence. This shift is reflected in the current sovereignty movement.
Full Product Details
Author: Kathryn A. Woolard (Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 15.50cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 23.40cm
Weight: 0.522kg
ISBN: 9780190258627
ISBN 10: 0190258624
Pages: 390
Publication Date: 04 August 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
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.
Reviews
Woolard's study provides a rich seam of analysis to consider the changing dynamics of status, role and perception of Catalonia's two languages: Catalan and Castilian. --Andrew Dowling, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
""This book is remarkable for its clarity of theory, the crystalline writing style, the beautiful use of vast amounts of quite different sorts of evidence, the way it draws the reader in with humor and irony and the careful politics of analysis. These qualities, I have found, make it an exemplary resource for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. I love to teach this book because it teaches all the right things."" -- Susan Gal, Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago ""Reading Singular and Plural is a singular opportunity to follow a historical trajectory of the politics of a minority language over three decades of research that couples the study of public language, policy, and practice ... with compelling accounts of the lived experience of language in the lives of speakers over time. ... I am absolutely sure that it will become a foundational text for future research in many currents of scholarship focused on bilingual practices and politics in situations of contact and conflict....this complex, nuanced, and analytically sophisticated account of continuity and change in the political landscape of Catalan is rendered in clear and elegant style; it is simply a pleasure to read on every level."" -- Anthropology News ""This book conveys a (professional) lifetime of research on the politics of language in Catalonia as well as [Woolard's] specific way of deploying the model of 'linguistic ideologies' that she and her colleagues developed through a number of seminal works in the early 1990s. ...The review of [the] language debates is impressive: extensive, detailed and up to date virtually until the book was printed. ... The result is a nuanced critique of processes that are complex and contradictory, with a wealth of information that has no equal on the matter (including in publications in Catalan or Spanish)."" -- Journal of Sociolinguistics ""Woolard's study provides a rich seam of analysis to consider the changing dynamics of status, role and perception of Catalonia's two languages: Catalan and Castilian."" --Andrew Dowling, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
This book is remarkable for its clarity of theory, the crystalline writing style, the beautiful use of vast amounts of quite different sorts of evidence, the way it draws the reader in with humor and irony and the careful politics of analysis. These qualities, I have found, make it an exemplary resource for both graduate and undergraduate teaching. I love to teach this book because it teaches all the right things. -- Susan Gal, Mae and Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago Reading Singular and Plural is a singular opportunity to follow a historical trajectory of the politics of a minority language over three decades of research that couples the study of public language, policy, and practice ... with compelling accounts of the lived experience of language in the lives of speakers over time. ... I am absolutely sure that it will become a foundational text for future research in many currents of scholarship focused on bilingual practices and politics in situations of contact and conflict....this complex, nuanced, and analytically sophisticated account of continuity and change in the political landscape of Catalan is rendered in clear and elegant style; it is simply a pleasure to read on every level. -- Anthropology News This book conveys a (professional) lifetime of research on the politics of language in Catalonia as well as [Woolard's] specific way of deploying the model of 'linguistic ideologies' that she and her colleagues developed through a number of seminal works in the early 1990s. ...The review of [the] language debates is impressive: extensive, detailed and up to date virtually until the book was printed. ... The result is a nuanced critique of processes that are complex and contradictory, with a wealth of information that has no equal on the matter (including in publications in Catalan or Spanish). -- Journal of Sociolinguistics Woolard's study provides a rich seam of analysis to consider the changing dynamics of status, role and perception of Catalonia's two languages: Catalan and Castilian. --Andrew Dowling, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
Author Information
Kathryn Woolard is a linguistic anthropologist and a professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Woolard is author of Double Talk: Bilingualism and the Politics of Ethnicity in Catalonia (Stanford 1989, reissued 2015) and co-editor of Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (Oxford, 1998) and Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (St. Jerome 2001; Routledge 2014). She is past president of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
