Intertextuality and Misunderstanding 2010 Language and Communication

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Editorial

Intertextuality and misunderstanding

This special issue investigates the interplay of intertextuality and misunderstanding in the mediation of social realities.

The notion of intertextuality, that any given text is accorded meaning through its relations to other texts, draws our analytic

attention to semiotic configurations (words, reported speech, sayings, stories, television shows, etc.) that extend with some

attributed interpretive and formal coherence across successive contexts of use. Our concern with misunderstanding, on the

other hand, brings to the foreground the heterogeneity of social identities, competencies, institutions and communities that

both inform and result from acts of communication. Bringing together misunderstanding and intertextuality allows the con-

tributors to this volume to highlight an apparent paradox concerning texts in their use as ostensibly common referencepoints by heterogeneous actors. On the one hand, texts are attributed with coherent and implicitly shared meaning. On

the other hand, any given text is also necessarily variable through successive uses. Their paradoxical, double-faced status

allows texts to play a key role in mediating divergent subject positions, social identities and communities. By considering

misunderstanding in relation to textuality we draw attention to the underlying relativity of any textual meaning and the

heteroglossia of successive voicings of ostensibly repeated or recirculated texts (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272). What emerges from

the articles in this volume is a look at the variable and negotiated quality of textual meaning and form at the juncture of

social identities, institutions and communities; and conversely, the uses made of textuality in coordinating and articulating

social difference.

1. Ethnographic approach to intertextuality

All of the contributions to this volume draw upon a body of work within linguistic anthropology that locates textuality in

the discursive practices of communities and as an important consideration in the play of language in semiosis and social life.Hanks (1989, p. 95),for example, defines text in the following fashion: ...text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any

configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users. He goes on to define textuality as ...the

quality of coherence or connectivity that characterizes text. In this definition, the constitution of a text is located in the

coherence attributed to it by a community of users. By subordinating specific requirements of form to ongoing interpretive

concerns among communities of users, Hanks opens the textual unit of analysis to a wide range of symbolic phenomena:

oral texts, written texts, mass mediated texts, visual texts, texts ranging in length and formal complexity from novels to slo-

gans and single lexemes.

Situating textuality in the discursive practices of communities refocuses analytic attention from texts as achieved sta-

tuses to processes of entextualization. Texts, as bounded, replicable, ostensibly stable objects, must be created and deployed

in the flux and flow of ongoing discourse. Entextualization is a process through which stretches of discourse are marked off

as separable (decontextualizable) from their discursive surround, and thus recontextualizable in a new event or utterance

(Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Bauman and Briggs, 1990). The entextualized semiotic form can be as apparently simple as

a single word or gesture or as complex as a television serial or the Bible, because the field of analysis necessarily includesnot only the textual form (however this is defined) but also the social field in which it is produced and charged with

meaning.

Processes of entextualization produce the double-faced quality of texts. In order for a text to operate as such, to be uti-

lized and recognized as in some sense the same as previous instances; it must be accorded some degree of continuous

meaning across instances of use. However, in order to be recontextualizable, a text must also be amenable to alterations

in meaning, to appropriations by new people for new purposes. Texts must be both full enough of specific meaning to be

recognizable and distinctive, but empty and flexible enough to be amenable to new contextualizations.

The texts treated by the contributors to this volume include a broad range of text types and semiotic forms. Trix ad-

dresses a national Turkish television serial responded to and reinterpreted among different publics in Istanbul. M.E. Nevins

treats divergent ways the Christian Bible, as text and as a charged textual symbol, is taken up among competing Evangelical

and Traditionalist religious identities on the Fort Apache reservation as they orient to local precedents on the one hand, and

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Language & Communication 30 (2010) 16

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engage with more extended publics on the other. Howard and Lipinoga address their analysis to parentteacher conferences

involving recent Mexican immigrant parents in a kindergarten classroom in the United States. They treat these interviews as

text-trajectories: institutionally scripted, repeated sequences of spoken and written actions. Urciuoli treats institutionally

entextualized terms such as diversity that circulate across administrative, faculty and student contexts at a liberal arts col-

lege. And T. Nevins describes textual strategies in the production of knowledge of persons (including the ethnographer) fig-

ured as other, and in the interrogation of his research purpose, deployed by his consultants during fieldwork encounters.

2. Textuality and misunderstanding

Textuality, as a marked off, replicable, reflected upon mode of language provides points of focus for social coordination

and affiliation, but also disaffiliation, contestation and differentiation. So, rather than serving as the agreed upon content of

intersubjective understanding, texts are perhaps better described as pivots through which different subjectivities, social

identities and communities enact, negotiate or invent their relationships, often with considerable gaps in respective inter-

pretive outcomes.

Working definitions of misunderstanding vary through the articles in this volume. On the one hand, misunderstanding is

treated as a metadiscursive attribution specific to Western-style contractual models of communication (e.g.Rosaldo, 1982).

Misunderstanding as such is defined contrastively against another metadiscursive attribution specific to that semiotic ide-

ology: the notion of intersubjective understanding (problematized by Bailey (2004), T. Nevins (this issue), and recently

through ethnographic contrast byRobbins and Rumsey (2008)). Attributions of understanding and misunderstanding com-

prise part of the ideological backdrop to the institutional discourse treated by Urciuoli and Howard and Lipinoga, respec-

tively, and in the public discourse treated by Trix. By contrast, misunderstanding and understanding in this sense serves

as an epistemological foil in T. Nevins treatment of ethnographic encounters. He notes that misunderstanding and under-

standing as figured in Western-style contractual notions of social relationship were not the predominant framing concern of

his closest consultants. Rather, disjunctures from conventional communicative expectations were figured in terms of local

idioms of sociality, including different models of what constitutes knowledge of other persons, and different entailments for

the deployment of texts in acts of repair.

Many of the papers in this volume also make use of a more generic notion of misunderstanding, as an implication of het-

erogeneity. Underlying heterogeneity of subject positions, social identities, institutional domains, communicative compe-

tencies and communities implies diversity of interpretations for any act of communication that extends across such

differences. Text, as semiotic form that circulates beyond a given contextualization, is a mode of language deployed across

such divides. So, just as conversational strategies play a role in coordinating direct interpersonal interactions; entextualiza-

tions, as circulating public words (Urban, 2001), play a role in the coordination of communities. There are intrinsic ambigu-

ities in the creation and reception of textsand these serve as a constant unmarked backdrop against which entextualization

and recontextualization take place. The metadiscursive attribution of intrinsic textual identity (against the necessary heter-

ogeneity of actual recontextualizations) is achieved through coordinating the production and the interpretation of texts

through fairly stable, institutionalized social conventions. The contributors to this volume ground their discussion of how

textual coordination is conventionalized in terms of work on discourse genres (Bauman, 2004; Bauman and Briggs, 1990;

Hanks, 1987), register (Agha, 2007), and pretexuality (Maryns and Blommaert, 2002). Conventionalization is not the only

process at work, however, and some of our contributors point to metaphor and innovation (Wagner, 1981; Ricoeur,

2003) as equally important aspects of entextualization and contextualization.

3. The individual contributions

Mass media texts, in the form of print media, television, movies, music, etc. are one means by which smaller scale

communities coordinate within larger scale communities. Through consuming and recirculating media forms associated

with national or international scale contexts, people orient to imagined communities (Anderson, 1991). Mass media texts,

to the extent that they form a stock of recognizable semiotic forms that people ostensibly hold in common, provide the

means through which people perform relationships to larger communities in everyday talk. This role is particularly com-

plex at junctures between minority communities and the majority publics that they are simultaneously incorporated and

differentiated within. Two of the papers in this volume are addressed to the circulation and recontextualization of mass

media texts at the juncture of minority identified communities (Silverstein, 1998) and encompassing social and political

formations.

Frances Trix describes the responses of members of a Balkan immigrant association in Istanbul to the use of their stig-

matized dialect and portrayal as villagers in a popular Turkish television serial. The immigrants responded critically not only

to the way their history, dialect and identity were portrayed in the series, but also to the way idioms from their dialect as

portrayed in the series were taken up and recirculated in face to face interactions between strangers on the street in Istanbul.

What is interesting about this is, first, how a national television broadcast appropriates the history and dialect of Balkan

immigrants in order to tell a story of national belonging through the projection of a shared orientation to a nostalgic past.

A second point of interest is how the larger public seized upon the greeting and leave-taking idioms portrayed in the show

and recirculated them in face to face everyday interactions (Spitulnik, 1993, 1997). Trix explains that the selection of thesetexts for recirculation is not at all random, but motivated by the implication of other contemporary greetings and leave-tak-

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ing formula in a polarizing politics of religious identity. A third point of interest is in the complex responses to the series

from members of an immigrant association. Within the community a wide range of objections were raised to the shows

portrayal of immigrant identity and to the manner in which their formally stigmatized dialect was being circulated by mem-

bers of the general public in everyday conversation. Of these objections, a subset strategically addressed to issues of authen-

ticity and accuracy were aired in public forums addressed to wider audiences such as the associated website, and at

televised performance events. And this brings us to the fourth point of interest, which is the uptake in mainstream media

outlets of the immigrant associations attempts to recontextualize the television show for the general public.

Trix builds upon previous work in the linguistic ethnography of mass media ( Spitulnik, 1997) in that her analysis is di-

rected not only to direct consumption of mass mediated texts, but also the recirculation and recontextualization of media

discourse in everyday talk. Both are treated as central to the process of constituting larger scale communities, including na-

tional publics. She also draws on work in linguistic anthropology to understand why particular texts are selected for recon-

textualization in everyday talk (M.E.Nevins, 2008). What she adds, by taking misunderstanding as a point of departure, is

attention to the differential reception of mass media texts in heterogeneous communities, and the limits and possibilities for

dialectically negotiating the terms in which larger scale communities are constituted. Different opportunities are afforded by

minority community members assessment of what kinds of claims to authority and legitimacy are likely to be recognized

within the mainstream public (another complex set of intertextual relations) and by the use of mass media outlets in which

members of minority communities are in a position to author the terms of their self-representation. In particular, Trix shows

how the minority community built on their already established media outlets and calendar of public events from which to

launch and publicize their public interaction with the television series.

M.E. Nevins treatment of entextualizations of the Bible across conflicting religious identities on the White Mountain

Apache reservation offers another examination of the uses made of mass mediated texts at the juncture of minority and

more encompassing communities. However, in this case analytic focus is upon divergent entextualizations of the Bible

across competing identities within that minority community. As in the case of the Rumeli immigrants described by Trix,

a minority identified language variety, Western Apache, and issues associated with it, are in play. Nevins describes contem-

porary Apache Traditionalism and Apache Independent Christian Churches as two indigenous, but mutually antagonistic,

grassroots religious movements. Both identify as Christian, and lay claim to the global authority of Bible, but each disputes

the others claims. Both utilize Apache language, including religious and moral idioms and locally developed discourse gen-

res, to entextualize the Bible. However, each selects different elements of a loosely shared common repertoire for that

purpose.

A key point of contention between the two movements is the relationship drawn by each between the memorized oral

texts of Traditionalist ceremonies and the Bible. Traditionalists assert equivalences and identities between the two. For

them, the Bible is entextualized in Traditionalist ceremony. Apache Independent Christians, on the other hand, regard Tra-

ditionalist ceremony as incompatible with the Bible, and historically superceded by it. They locate authority in written cop-

ies of the Bible circulated through their churches and homes from more extended (protestant evangelical) communities.

However, in everyday talk among church members, and in church services, they make extensive use of Apache language idi-

oms to re-entextualize quotes from the print Bible with their own voices and make use of contrastive allusions to Tradition-

alist ceremony to recontextualize that quoted speech to local meanings and concerns.

M.E. Nevins study builds on previous work on the recirculation and recontextualization of mass media, and upon studies

of the complex intertextuality of religious discourse in colonial and post-colonial discursive configurations ( Keane, 2007;

Hanks, 1987, 2000; Cruikshank, 1998). The focus on misunderstanding and conflict brings attention to the internal hetero-

geneity and dynamism of minority indigenous communities. Perhaps ironically, it is arguably the effects of textuality that

often obscure heterogeneity as people seem to be claiming the same kind of affiliation with the same symbolically

authoritative text, in the case of the Bible, or textual buzz-word in the case of loaded terms like Heritage or Language.

The intense Apache language discursive innovation evident in the two religious movements, in contrast with the rather tepid

and ambivalent response garnered by Apache language education in the schools (M.E. Nevins, 2004), points to the produc-

tivity of oppositions among local leadership, and of competing claims to sources of textual authority with global reach, to the

ongoing relevance of indigenous-identified languages.

Howard and Lipinoga also address the role of textuality in mediating the juncture between minority communities and

encompassing socio-political orders, but from a different standpoint. Howard and Lipinoga describe an institutional encoun-

ter which is ostensibly about sharing information, but which is really a prescripted interaction in which one party has much

greater knowledge and control over the progression and outcome of events than their counterpart. The institutional events

they describe are annual parentteacher conferences between English language speaking kindergarten teachers and recent

Mexican immigrant parents in an elementary school in the United States. They explore the role of textual procedures in the

reproduction of inequality that are articulated in these meetings, despite intentions to the contrary. Textuality comes into

play in two senses. First, one party, the kindergarten teacher, approaches the event as a text to be enacted. That is, she treats

it as a prescripted succession of obligatory steps that it is her responsibility to walk parents through. The other party, the

immigrant parents, are not privy to the details of the teachers agenda and often bring different expectations, some of which

come from their previous experience with Mexican schools, to the encounter. Misunderstanding and missed opportunities to

learn from one another are often the result. Howard and Lipinoga draw uponMaryns and Blommaerts (2002)notion of pre-

textuality and pretextual gaps to describe the differential effectiveness of the communicative resources that each partybrings to the encounter.

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Howard and Lipinoga show that because parents and teachers are likely to misread the teachers invitations for their in-

put, and because teachers are likely to misread parents attempts to shape the interaction, parents have few opportunities to

have meaningful input into how they and their child are evaluated and understood by the agents of the institution. Howard

and Lipinoga stress that these pretextual inequalities are largely invisible and out of awareness. Parents, school administra-

tors and teachers were observed to make efforts, such as employing bilingual translators, to accommodate what all per-

ceived as special needs of Spanish-dominant immigrant families. Howard and Lipinoga argue that bringing attention to

unintentional sources of miscommunication allows for the possibility of overcoming them. However, aspects of their anal-

ysis point to the fact that pretextual inequalities between parents and teachers are built into the structure of educational

institutions but pose particular, usually unexamined, challenges for recent immigrants.

One of the pretextual factors Howard and Lipinoga identify as posing problems for immigrant parents was the use by

teachers of a professional register. This introduced terms that to the parents were of uncertain reference, and an air of imper-

sonal authority that discouraged parents from offering up their opinion, in part because they could not couch it in terms that

sounded similarly impersonal and authoritative. If the interview is a sort of prescripted entextualized discursive form, then

the teachers professional register comprises the preferred style for composing that text. In the case of the immigrant par-

ents, the unfamiliarity of the linguistic forms and usage patterns chosen by the teacher constrained their participation. The

alignment of the teachers professional register with the institutional structures all around them in the classroom made it

difficult for parents, or for the bilingual translators when they are present, to transform that scripted sequence into a con-

versation with teachers couched in other terms.

Register also figures importantly in Urciuolis nuanced analysis of the manner in which the term diversity circulates and

is strategically deployed across institutional domains in a northeastern liberal arts college. Urciuoli demonstrates that

diversity is circulated, not as a coherent idea, but as an entextualized semantic form whose referent is dynamically unsta-

ble. The terms use is differently enregistered, with different indexical associations, in each particular institutional domain in

which it is employed. Institutional domains of use range from academic administration, non-academic administration,

across individual academic departments, and across student organizations.

She finds that enregisterments of diversity are fairly coherent across the various administrative discourses, and that

these uses (especially those of non-academic administrative discourse of the college) are coherent with parallel uses of

the term in corporate business administration discourse, in that all are informed by what she terms a neoliberal concept

of the person. By contrast diversity is more elaborately and consistently defined in relation to other concepts within a given

academic discipline; but enregistered incongruently across disciplines, and between academic discourses and administrative

discourses.

The relative coherence of diversity across administrative discourses and its relative incongruity across academic dis-

courses has a number of consequences. First, the referential ambiguity and incongruity of the term across domains of use

conditions its deployment as a shifter, an expression of relations between participants in a communication, rather than

a referring term with stable meaning everyone shares. Everyone can be for diversity, even when it is not at all clear that

everyone attaches the same meanings and entailments to the term. Second, administrators promulgating discourses of insti-

tutional advancement have an interest in foregrounding neoliberal definitions of diversity, i.e. as a countable attribute of

individuals and institutions and as a marketing strategy to potential students. However, diversity as defined in some social

science disciplines in relation to ongoing processes of social inequality is a less congenial and coherent match.

And third, because diversity is enregistered more coherently across administrative discourses than across academic dis-

ciplines, and because administrators are in the position of issuing directives promoting diversity, and faculty chairs are often

in the position of receiving and carrying out these directives, faculty have fewer opportunities than administrators to shape

how diversity is defined and promoted in the college. In this way entextualization of terms circulated with incongruent

meanings across institutional domains is part of a larger process of discursive change and the growing hegemony of neolib-

eral discourses in higher education.

In the final contribution, Thomas Nevins addresses the terms in which his presence and purpose in the Fort Apache res-

ervation community was interrogated, and his otherness figured and negotiated, by his closest consultants. He traces the

dissonant semiotic practices and attendant socialities that framed the dialogues constitutive of his ethnography. It is a staple

of ethnographic representation to describe the productivity of misunderstandings to the emergence of knowledge of cul-

ture for the ethnographer, allowing her to become aware of conventional differences between herself and her subjects, a

first step in describing the latters conventions. He argues that miscommunication is indeed a productive aspect of ethno-

graphic encounters, but for different reasons. Rather than focusing on communicative gaps as providing the first step in

the ethnographers construction of a facsimile representation of the conventional knowledge, or competence (Hymes,

1972; Briggs, 1984; Moore, 2009), held by the ethnographic subject, he shifts focus to dissonance in ethnographic encoun-

ters as opening a space of innovation in which the otherness of the ethnographer, as well as the nature of his or her research

purpose, is figured and negotiated by consultants.

T. Nevins draws attention to the creation of knowledge of the ethnographer by consultants, occasioned by ruptures posed

by the ethnographers presence to consultants conventional communicative expectations. In such cases, difference was

commented upon, marked and encapsulated in a short statement, which he terms a micro-text (Hello Pilgrims this issue,

comes to mind). These initially emerge in the course of events as ad hoc comments upon experiences with others, and be-

come progressively entextualized and recirculated in successive conversations, weeks, months and years later, often provok-ing laughter and indexing a track record of past disjunctures that comprise emerging terms of context-specific sociality with



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Nevins, M.E., 2004. Learning to listen: confronting two meanings of language loss in the contemporary White Mountain Apache speech community. Journalof Linguistic Anthropology 14, 269288.

Nevins, M.E., 2008. They live in Lonesome Dove: Media and contemporary Western Apache place-naming practices. Language in Society 37, 191215.Ricoeur, P., 2003. The Rule of Metaphor, third ed. Routledge Press, London & New York.Robbins, J., Rumsey, A., 2008. Introduction: cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. American Anthropologist 81 (2), 407420.Rosaldo, M., 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11 (2), 203237.Silverstein, M., 1998. Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401426.Silverstein, M., Urban, G., 1996. The natural history of discourse. In: Silverstein, M., Urban, G. (Eds.), Natural histories of discourse. The University of Chicago

Press, Chicago, pp. 117.Spitulnik, D., 1993. Anthropology and mass media. Annual Review of Anthropology 22, 293315.

Spitulnik, D., 1997. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6, 161187.Urban, G., 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.Wagner, R., 1981. The Invention of Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

M. Eleanor Nevins

Anthropology Department,

University of Nevada Reno,

1664 No. Virginia MS0096, Reno,

NV 89557-0096, United States

E-mail address: [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

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Intertextuality and Misunderstanding 2010 Language and Communication