Words and Stones - Daniel Lefkowitz

"Unicorns are powerful social symbols, even if we can never pet them" (Lefkowitz 114).

Lefkowitz, Daniel. Words and Stones: The Politics of Language and Identity in Israel. New York: Oxford, 2004.

Lefkowitz represents historical recursiveness in discourse as a spiral that accounts for both hegemonic and resistant practices.  With this spiral, he accounts for three important aspects of sociolinguistic symbols on pg. 6:

• The meaning of a symbol may change over time.
• The meaning of a symbol may differ for various socially positioned speakers.
• The meaning of a symbol at any particular time recalls earlier and differently positioned meanings.

Through his ethnographic study drawing on sociolinguistics, interpretive anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, he shows how three main social groups "compete for the emergent Israeli identity" and identifies these groups as Palestinian Arabs, Mizrahim, and Ashkenazim (16).  He also makes an important distinction between identity and discourses of identity on pg. 88:

• identity: process - abstract, provisional, internal, and individual
• discourses of identity: project - concrete, durable, overt, public

In terms of social identity, language has two key contributions he identifies on pg. 12:

• Speakers use language to create - as well as reflect - their social identities.
• Language-use constitutes social action, which has material consequences for social relations.

By operating within a discursive frame of national instead of class-based (against national ideology) or racial (taboo) discourse, Palestinian Israelis as well as differences between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews become invisible. He uses Bauman & Briggs to talk about "text" as dynamic process on pg. 98:

• recontextualization: performing a canonical text (script) in social interaction; dialogical application
• entextualization: textualizing unscripted performance through semiotic techniques; structuring symbols
• narrative: culturally valued ways of relating objective events; embedding speech in cultural discourses, pragmatic interaction, and affective relations

This book deals with negotiation of language and identity in ways that are complimentary to translingual ideologies, but brings an interdisciplinary approach from Anthropology.  The recognition of symbolic competition and power indexing connects to Voloshinov's ideas of the "multi-accented sign."  He also draws on Geertz, Bourdieu, Jakobsen, Bakhtin, Anderson among others to show how discourse ethnography reveals status hierarchies.  Interestingly, he also discusses positionality of the researcher and participants, especially for conducting interviews using national assistants as a modification of Labov's sociolinguistic interview.

 Figure 1.1 "The Discourse Spiral" from this book on pg. 6 with a flattened third dimension of social position

Figure 3.1 "The Space of Israeli Identity" from this book on pg. 89 showing the hierarchy of indexed power as identities are structured discursively

#language #negotiation #identity #empire #discourse #researchmethods #semiotics #narrative