I guess a little speculation about the future
Actually, it may even be anxiety about the future. Um, I'd sorta had this germ of an idea as I was doing some for-school writing last week, but a combination of a lot of words submitted for credit and a lot of other stuff going on has left me without enough sort of standing-in-the-shower thinking time (my most productive 12-15 minutes of the day) to really close the ideas out and get them ready for writing in this space about. As you may have notice, I had some really random stuff kind of spill out over the past couple weeks, some of which I'm kind of afraid to re-read because I don't want to know whether it makes sense or not. Thus, I feel sorta late, and I still don't feel like I have my shit together enough to write for the pleasure of it, but I may as well clear the docket and deal with some of the cooler stuff that's coming up (i.e. coming home for break, holidays, the end of the term, hopefully some cooking). So.
I wrote this paper last week for a US-Latin American relations course that was about contemporary political responses of indigenous people in Bolivia to the state ideology of mestizaje (like 'mixing' or 'hybridity'). It was actually kind of personally interesting, because US history doesn't exactly deal with multiracial people (at least 2/3 of us are under the age of 18, as I recall), but different constructions of multiraciality have been explored in Latin America for a couple hundred years. In fact, the historic Great States of Mesoamerica (Incan, Maya, Aztec) were not ethnically homogeneous, as a result of conquest, tributary relationships, centralization of authority, and so forth. Efforts were made in the 1950s and 60s--when many countries were finally emerging from colonial social structures that had endured past independence--to construct a 'raza cosmica,' a pan-American (minus US and Canada) identity that relied on a shared heritage of racial mixing and ambiguity. The next couple decades demonstrated that the white ruling class managed to manipulate this rhetoric into a perpetuation of the same oppressions, and a second wave of activism began in the 70s and 80s in Bolivia, Ecuador, and other places like Chiapas to assert indigenous difference, to deconstruct the assimilative framework of mestizaje and assert their own culture(s). In doing so, however, political expediency caused the Andean Aymara nationalists in Bolivia to construct their own version of what it meant to be a member of their ethnic group which oversimplified the cultural diversity/hybridity/mixing that had historically occurred there. Two thoughts I had while writing the paper:
While the (mixed-race) romantic in me wishes the solution were somehow to 'fix' the mestizaje ideal of a globalized multiethnic heritage as the national character, it's not clear where to go from here. At any rate, reading about how other states had approached the issue of lacking a clear racial plurality (even though power was far from equitably shared) gave me some hope that the US will be addressing exactly these kinds of issues in the future.
I used, at various points in the paper, 'person', 'persons', 'people', and 'peoples'. The language which decided that this was a good idea, grammatically, was not centrally planned. Whereas you hear about how France has a language board that attempts to replace cognates of foreign words with "French-sounding" analogues, and how some Micronesian linguistic communities have had panels of experts trying to decide the appropriate names for new technologies, English is defined in a bottom-up sort of way. The OED, which the little elitist in me considers the most authoritative dictionary, has defined its mission as the recording of English usage, not as a prescription for how it ought to be used (I would link the NY Times article, but it's too old and is now locked with TimesSelect, but if you have a subscription, the title is "Cyber-Neologoliferation"). That's cool, I guess, knowing that, for example, by writing this thing and calling it a 'blog', when the term appears in OED, this source was part of the impetus for the addition. On the other hand, the person/people thing got confusing. On probably the third different form, I decided that trying to explain the semantic difference between "person" and "people" as compared with "people" versus "peoples" would be a real pain. And then I realized that if I got that teaching English in Korea job I've applied for, this is exactly the sort of thing I would be expected to do. And that simultaneously, I would be expected to keep a classroom full of middle-schoolers disciplined and attentive. I have several friends who are really excited about going into teaching as early as next year; while I've thought about it before (on numerous occasions), it scares me. It's a lot of responsibility, and I definitely would not be able to cope with students not respecting me, even as I remember all the teachers I've had and didn't really respect. Ick. That's the speculation about the future, I guess... the same sort of linguistic oddity that amused us to no end when I was abroad (see archives from Sept/Oct/Nov 2005, which make me happy and nostalgic all at once) now looms over me with excruciating certainty--it may soon be my job to elucidate the very things we found so charmingly hard to describe.
I wrote this paper last week for a US-Latin American relations course that was about contemporary political responses of indigenous people in Bolivia to the state ideology of mestizaje (like 'mixing' or 'hybridity'). It was actually kind of personally interesting, because US history doesn't exactly deal with multiracial people (at least 2/3 of us are under the age of 18, as I recall), but different constructions of multiraciality have been explored in Latin America for a couple hundred years. In fact, the historic Great States of Mesoamerica (Incan, Maya, Aztec) were not ethnically homogeneous, as a result of conquest, tributary relationships, centralization of authority, and so forth. Efforts were made in the 1950s and 60s--when many countries were finally emerging from colonial social structures that had endured past independence--to construct a 'raza cosmica,' a pan-American (minus US and Canada) identity that relied on a shared heritage of racial mixing and ambiguity. The next couple decades demonstrated that the white ruling class managed to manipulate this rhetoric into a perpetuation of the same oppressions, and a second wave of activism began in the 70s and 80s in Bolivia, Ecuador, and other places like Chiapas to assert indigenous difference, to deconstruct the assimilative framework of mestizaje and assert their own culture(s). In doing so, however, political expediency caused the Andean Aymara nationalists in Bolivia to construct their own version of what it meant to be a member of their ethnic group which oversimplified the cultural diversity/hybridity/mixing that had historically occurred there. Two thoughts I had while writing the paper:
While the (mixed-race) romantic in me wishes the solution were somehow to 'fix' the mestizaje ideal of a globalized multiethnic heritage as the national character, it's not clear where to go from here. At any rate, reading about how other states had approached the issue of lacking a clear racial plurality (even though power was far from equitably shared) gave me some hope that the US will be addressing exactly these kinds of issues in the future.
I used, at various points in the paper, 'person', 'persons', 'people', and 'peoples'. The language which decided that this was a good idea, grammatically, was not centrally planned. Whereas you hear about how France has a language board that attempts to replace cognates of foreign words with "French-sounding" analogues, and how some Micronesian linguistic communities have had panels of experts trying to decide the appropriate names for new technologies, English is defined in a bottom-up sort of way. The OED, which the little elitist in me considers the most authoritative dictionary, has defined its mission as the recording of English usage, not as a prescription for how it ought to be used (I would link the NY Times article, but it's too old and is now locked with TimesSelect, but if you have a subscription, the title is "Cyber-Neologoliferation"). That's cool, I guess, knowing that, for example, by writing this thing and calling it a 'blog', when the term appears in OED, this source was part of the impetus for the addition. On the other hand, the person/people thing got confusing. On probably the third different form, I decided that trying to explain the semantic difference between "person" and "people" as compared with "people" versus "peoples" would be a real pain. And then I realized that if I got that teaching English in Korea job I've applied for, this is exactly the sort of thing I would be expected to do. And that simultaneously, I would be expected to keep a classroom full of middle-schoolers disciplined and attentive. I have several friends who are really excited about going into teaching as early as next year; while I've thought about it before (on numerous occasions), it scares me. It's a lot of responsibility, and I definitely would not be able to cope with students not respecting me, even as I remember all the teachers I've had and didn't really respect. Ick. That's the speculation about the future, I guess... the same sort of linguistic oddity that amused us to no end when I was abroad (see archives from Sept/Oct/Nov 2005, which make me happy and nostalgic all at once) now looms over me with excruciating certainty--it may soon be my job to elucidate the very things we found so charmingly hard to describe.
posted by sam at
5:01 PM
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