Graduate student Erik Lee Skjon, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Silverstein, will investigate a seeming paradox in the spatial articulation of ethnolinguistic identity in Africa. Although ethnolinguistic identity is most salient in African urban contexts, its most intense political manifestations occur in regionalist conflicts. The researcher proposes that these twin facts are related. He hypothesizes that: (1), the lingua-cultural region serves as the principal spatial ground through which African ethnolinguistic identity is objectified and recognized; and (2), this ground depends crucially on practices that unify centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness with regional networks and histories.
Research will be conducted in Mozambique, where the problematic of ethno-regionalism has played a determinant role in its 15-year civil war and postwar politics. The researcher will compare three kinds of regional network in the Shanka-Makhuwa dialect region of Cabo Delgado province. Each network connects various Shankan locales to the provincial capital and is inhabited exclusively by Shanka-speaking subjects: semi-formal trade guilds; spirit possession associations; and Ikirimu dance troupes.
The researcher will employ discourse and semiotic analysis to investigate how and to what extent Shankan subjects construe their region and ethnic identity to be dialectically related, one presupposing the other, in these networks. This will be achieved by documenting the embodied practices, discourse genres, and oral histories particular to each network, and then analyzing select pragmatic, referential, and formal correlates hypothesized to be generic to a region-identity dialectic: that is, ones that affiliate interconnected locales to a common sense of region, and orient their subjects to regional centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness.
The research is important because it may go beyond this particular case study to uncover the common linguistic and cultural elements underlying and motivating Africa's ethno-regionalist politics. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a graduate student.
