Language as a political tool?

[Guijarro]

Born in Caracas (Venezuela) from an Andalusian father and a mother who was daughter of Canary Islands emigrants, and living in Spain ever since, with long periods of my life in France, Scotland, Germany, and Switzerland, Mallorca, and Galizia, I have always been at a loss as to what the hell I am supposed to consider myself.

Apparently, other people have it even more complicated, as the lady who writes the following paper, in which she stresses: Before beginning grad school, I used the words “nation,” “state” and “country” interchangeably, e.g., the United Nations is comprised of member states, with countries elected to councils. The terms, I learned now, were discrete. A nation was a cultural and linguistic entity, a state a political and geopolitical one. The idea of the modern nation-state — a sovereign state governing a cultural nation — was just that: an idea, 350 years old and showing its age.

You may have never felt the problem, but IS THERE A PROBLEM, really, apart from red-tape drawbacks and, above all, political myths? The article is worth reading and pondering about. The more so when you live in a Peninsula, like I do, where people speak different languages all over the place (Castilian, Portuguese, Galizian, Basque, Catalan, Asturianu, Chapurreau, ... and some similar smaller ones).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/taiye-selasi-when-we-speak-of-nationality-what-do-we-mean.html?smid=fb-share

[Daniel]

But I wonder-- all terms exist because we use them and believe they have meanings. Often those meanings are indeed incoherent, but we still use them. So the power/significance of the words is due to the usage. It's fine to question them. But in the end, what matters isn't how they're defined or why, but just the fact that people do use them. So because people use these words, they're defined that way. They mean, in the broadly relevant social and political sense, whatever people think they mean. Anything more technical than that misses the point and misses any potential problems with their use.

So clearly there can be problems with these definitions, but they're problems because of cultural attitudes, not because of words. The borders exist only because we believe they do (and some people who believe they do will use military powers to enforce them). That may be a good thing or a bad thing. (I can certainly think of arguments for both sides of that.)


Also, for what it's worth, aren't we, as linguists, almost beyond this by default in a way? We think about peoples based on their linguistic identities, often within the context of political borders. Of course that ends up being problematic in another way, assuming that languages and dialects can be effectively separated and that linguistic similarity implies cultural/identity similarity. But in terms of at least having a fluid sense of borders, I think we do approach the topic that way. And many non-linguists do not even think about that. There's also bilingualism that isn't easily paralleled politically.

[Guijarro]

You are mostly right in your comments. To me words are like lexical pointers with which we signal given conceptual spaces. But what space are we really pointing to when using those fully symbolically loaded terms, I wonder? The one where our prejudices live? Why and how are you and I different because we were born in different places? We are different, naturally, but for other more fundamental reasons than our chance place of birth. Why do we (i.e., Spaniards) bring back to Spain missionaries affected by ebola, and couldn't care less when people not born in this country are infected?

Is it the words that make up the concept? Or is it that we have perverse concepts (racist, sexist, etc.) that we point to with very shaky accuracy with unclear terms in order to make them important and, as such, to preserve our prejudices?

I cannot answer these questions, I'm afraid. But I don't like the feeling I get when facing the problem.

[Daniel]

Indeed.

We are different, naturally, but for other more fundamental reasons than our chance place of birth.

But that's science, not perception. The world works by perception. And our lexical pointers then point to this perception.

So based on our language use, based on our society, we are different explicitly because we live in different places. Some more, we might say, enlightened individuals may be aware of this and not take it very seriously, but the only reason the problem exists is simply because it exists.

This all comes down to categorization. Who are you? You're a man, you're an adult, you're Spanish (and several other labels), and you're a linguist. Those categories only exist because we adhere to them and believe in them as a society. Some aren't very problematic (like "linguist") but others may be. There's no scientific reason for any of those categories (although they may help scientists to describe phenomena in concrete rather than gradient distributions).

[Guijarro]

It all comes to the basic question:

What comes first, the hen or the egg?
What comes first, the concept or the pointer (the label)?

I am no psychologist, thank God, but maybe there are inborn prejudices which build our conceptual elements giving them a likely substance. In my frame, where LANGUAGE 1 is the tool by which we organize the world according to our human inheritance and our place in society, abstracting away reality into general mental elements, the intuition is that these trends came first, we then pointed to them, and finally we learned to make them explicit in our acts of communication using a linguistic  material (i.e., LANGUAGE 3) which helps us in so doing.

But you are right altogether: we, then, use those concepts as realities and live with them, whether we are aware or not. There's no escaping. That's what depresses me sometimes, as in this nationality conundrum, and, as you may remember, in our sexist approach to other human beings.

As we say in Spanish: Sólo me queda derecho al pataleo (Roughly: The possibility to complain is my only escape left)

[Daniel]

"My only recourse is complaint." -- I like it. Bit pessimistic, but I like it.

[Guijarro]

Yours is a better translation than mine!