Erin Debenport

ACLS/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
University of California, Los Angeles
Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture
erin@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests

Current Projects

Selected Publications

Dissertation:

"Listen so you can live life the way it's supposed to be lived”: Paradoxes of text, secrecy, and language at a New Mexico Pueblo

Abstract:

This dissertation examines dictionary creation and emergent literacy at San Antonio Pueblo, an indigenous community in North Central New Mexico, and how local ideologies privileging secrecy are reconfigured during the process of creating a Tiwa dictionary, the first text produced as part of the community’s language revitalization program. The decision to create written materials in this historically oral language is seemingly at odds with the linguistically and culturally “conservative” reputation many tribes in the Southwest share (Kroskrity 1993, 1998, 2000), and the importance placed on controlling both intra- and intercommunity circulation of cultural knowledge at San Antonio Pueblo. Example sentences constructed for each entry diverge from the Western tradition in lexicography which conceptualizes such sentences as tools useful for disambiguating the sense of individual lexical items (Jackson 2002:26), and instead center on imparting necessary cultural information, imploring readers to “Listen so you can live life the way it’s supposed to be lived,” as one such sentence explicitly instructs. Thus, the dictionary emerges as a paradoxical object: seen as a tool necessary for preserving the ancestral language, but potentially at odds with locally-held beliefs regarding secrecy; at once a neutral reference work and a potential place for creatively including salient cultural information.

The two research questions at the center of this project are situated against this particular instance of textual production at San Antonio Pueblo. The first area of inquiry examines the nature of dictionaries as texts. If texts articulate the social conditions of their production and projected futures, what kinds of understandings about how texts work apply to dictionaries? The second aim of the proposed study concerns how example sentences are functioning within this document, and how language ideologies regarding secrecy and literacy are being re-imagined during the creation of dictionary example sentences. Employing ethnographic fieldwork, comparative lexicography, and grammatical and stylistic analyses of dictionary example sentences and lengthier texts in Tiwa, I show that the paradox of Pueblo literacy is actually a reflection of local ideals regarding propriety and indirectness, and that the apparent contradiction surrounding dictionary creation and the decision to write the Tiwa language is a reflection of the often unexpected uses of texts that occur in contexts of language revitalization and emergent literacy. Literacy is at once discussed as a “last resort” during a time of great anxiety about language loss and embodying authentic Indian identities at San Antonio Pueblo, but also emerges as a technology of perfectibility, another way to perpetually correct texts and behavior while marking certain information as significant in the process.

Additionally, my analysis shows that multiple lexicographies exist, and, like literacy, dictionaries must be examined ethnographically to elucidate issues including intended audience, goals, and the conditions of production. At San Antonio Pueblo, what is often thought of as a neutral type of reference work is being used to convey sensitive cultural knowledge. Also, by condensing entries, dictionary authors are emphasizing the relative importance of example material, elevating the indexical values associated with preferred grammatical and generic structures. Dictionary authors focus on the past and local technologies to emphasize preferred ways of being and speaking for future language learners, presenting the dictionary as an interactional text and transforming the lexicon from a potential place for language learning into a means of achieving realized, ongoing discourse. In Pueblo contexts, group belonging and political authority are produced by limiting access to cultural information while simultaneously modeling a culturally appropriate indirect stance. Like strategies of perfectibility, marking information as “secret” serves to emphasize its relative importance while also asserting the right to control cultural knowledge, including indigenous language materials. Thus, secrecy, in any context, depends on the dissemination as well as the suppression of information to accomplish various kinds of social work. This simultaneity mirrors the logic of the text itself, which relies on a degree of shared knowledge to communicate the salience of the cultural information contained in the dictionary.


Current Projects:

The potential complexity of "universal ownership": Cultural property, textual circulation, and linguistic fieldwork
to appear in a special issue entitled "Ethical dimensions of language documentation" in the journal Language and Communication