Editor's introduction

The United States is a carceral society. This is a well-known fact, which has received renewed currency in light of the 2016 presidential election, and debate over the impact of the Clinton-era crime bill. Most of the scholarly writing on this issue is in areas such as criminology, employing quantitative and aggregative methods. Here, Susan Dewey and Rhett Epler undertake a survey of recent ethnographic literature on incarcerated women, including work by such women themselves. Ethnography, including auto-ethnography, makes the lives of these women legible to those of us on the outside, shedding light on the cultures that arise in these extraordinary circumstances. One thing that we see quite clearly is the intersectionality of different subaltern and minority statuses: race and sexual orientation, as well as femininity itself. One thing that is clear in most of these cases is that prison was a nearly pre-ordained outcome of lives lived in uncertain, impoverished, and violent circumstances. One female inmate stated simply that prison was the safest place she had ever lived.

Also under consideration are carceral institutions other than prisons, especially clinics and “halfway houses.” These represent an attempt to provide women a means of re-entering society successfully. Notably, both of the essay’s authors have experience working in such a setting. The literature under consideration offers a range of perspectives on such institutions, including quite critical ones. Of course, we do not expect ethnographies to offer ready-made policy recommendations. Nonetheless, with such a large portion of the U.S. population experiencing some form of incarceration or supervision, ethnography is the best tool to understand what is happening from various perspectives, most importantly that of the inmates themselves.

***

Language loss is the characteristic experience of indigenous people as they become absorbed by settler colonial states. By the early 1980s, when I began fieldwork in British Columbia, it was a fait accompli, owing to several generations having gone through residential schools, with their ban on native language and their forcing of English on indigenous students. And yet there were still native speakers among the older community members, especially those who avoided residential schools for whatever reason. Language revival was the overarching goal of Native communities such as Bella Bella, where I worked. The preservation of traditional cultural knowledge and ethnohistory were both also seen as priorities, but language was paramount based on the reasonable Whorfian supposition that a worldview is encoded in language. I was a mere adjunct to that project, but was privileged to work with the Dutch-Canadian linguist Dr. John Rath, who produced a dictionary, as well as pedagogic materials for the community (Rath 1981). I helped specifically by making recordings and transcriptions in the Heiltsuk language, which added to the corpus of documented language use.

Here, Saul Schwartz and Lise M. Dobrin examine a spate of recent literature on language revitalization and the ideology, and indeed “culture,” underlying it. The response to language loss includes both documentation—what Rath with some assistance from me engaged in—and “revitalization”—with its connotations of a broad cultural and religious movement. The latter can be accomplished by greatly increasing the number of native speakers and broadening the contexts in which the language is used, which necessarily means adapting it to new domains, such as business and science.

This new literature, coming mostly from practitioners of language revival, critically examines the ideological structures shared by practitioners and community members. For instance, the “official language model,” that is, the equation of language with nation, and its claim to sovereignty, may be traced to standardization of national languages in Europe beginning in the 18th century, and can even be seen as a type of hegemony. However, the authors argue that this model may or may not be appropriate to specific communities. Another interesting ideological structure is the retreat of indigenous language into the realm of esoteric cultural knowledge and ritual, becoming in the process a kind of cultural capital controlled by elders. This may prevent the training of new speakers and the extension of the language into quotidian domains.

In the end, as the authors argue, language revitalization may be seen as a subset of cultural revitalization. Many of the same issues and questions arise: What are the expectations of the community members? Is it a full resurrection of a dead or moribund language? Or is it a cathartic “letting go”? Is the close identification of language with cultural heritage and identity justified, or may this itself be viewed as a type of cultural hegemony, a product of official multicultural-multilinguistic ideologies? One clear conclusion from this body of literature, and the author’s incisive discussion of it, is that there are many different contexts for language revival, which can be arrayed not so much along a single axis of success or failure, but display many varieties and dimensions.