Nodal frontlines and multisidedness. Contemporary multilingualism scholarship and beyond

ABSTRACT

At an overarching level this paper attempts to draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars gazes are constituted. Drawing on what we call a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP), that sees the entanglements of two clusters – the first of which comprises contemporary ways of reading anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonial thinkers with offerings of Southern perspectives, and a second where contemporary theories about language and communication that considers their cultural and social dimensions, this paper calls for a mobile global-centric gazing. More specifically this paper actualises ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism, looking at its different possible beings and becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. We do this by first presenting a brief review about recent discussions related to the concept of repertoires in the field of multilingualism and pathways that can move these debates in different directions. After this, we present possible ways to go beyond the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, by considering contemporary challenges in the knowledge production enterprise.

KEYWORDS:

• Second Wave of Southern Perspectives
• multisidedness
• multilingualism
• semiotic repertoires
• enregisterment
• chaining

The idea that European whites could colonise the rest of the world was based on the premise that there was an enlightened humanity that had to meet the obscured humanity, bringing it into this incredible light. This call to the bosom of civilisation has always been justified by the notion that there is a way of being here on Earth, a certain truth, or a conception of truth, that guided many of the choices made at different periods in history.

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some collaborations between thinkers with different views originating in different cultures allow a critique of this idea. Are we really only one humanity? (Krenak, 2019, p. 8, our translation)

Introducing a multisided mobile gaze

Frontline scholarship draws attention to the cumulative nature of the epistemological enterprise and builds upon the taken-for-granted nature of both (i) an accumulation of knowledge, often in terms of a linear progression or Kuhn’s paradigmatic moves, and (ii) a universalistic stance wherein knowing and knowledge are assumed or understood as being monolithic. These assumptions emerge from knowledge regimes that spur developments in the so-called ‘natural sciences’ as they developed since the eighteenth century in the European context. Despite such a dominant linear idea of progression and knowing, diverse views of knowledge production – like ones based in Indian schools of philosophy or South American indigenous ways of conceptualising knowledge – have existed in parallel. These types of Southern philosophies disturb such linearity and monolithic universal ideas, which is why we – in line with the opening quote¹ – argue for a multisided mobile gazing in the knowledge production enterprise.

For instance, Gandhi’s focus on the non-uni-sidedness of things derived through the notion of anekantavada is relevant for our purposes here (Peetush, 2016). From such a gaze, we can ask, what the meaning of conducting frontline scholarship is in the human/social/educational sciences (henceforth human sciences) today. What claims to creating knowledge in general and to universal knowledge production more specifically exist and are embedded in and are (re)produced in the epistemological enterprise represented by special issues like the present one in the human sciences? Whose gaze or gazes are taken as the natural order of things – i.e. as one or more hegemonic order of things – in such frontline knowledge production? What epistemological stances and/or advancements are being silenced or amplified and by whom in such knowledge creation? What is the role of different (physical and symbolic) loci of enunciation in contemporary knowledge creation processes?

These types of questions have been emerging from implicit or explicit ideas within anticolonial, post-colonial, decolonial, southern and related framings in relation to knowledge production as a critique of the modern science Western/Northern paradigm.² We highlight the significance of this theoretical cluster in terms of how these different framings open up possibilities for calling attention to specific new modes of knowledge production. The entanglements of these in contemporary human science reflections are brought together with a second theoretical cluster made up of contemporary readings of dialogical and sociocultural framings on issues of language and communication, that we refer to as a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (henceforth SWaSP).³ Thus, instead of dealing with theories in either of the clusters individually, we draw upon the entanglements of the two clusters in our thinking. The ontoepistemological framings that can be seen as emerging from SWaSP calls for the need for a mobile global-centric gazing (see particularly Bagga-Gupta, 2017a, in press a) wherein reflexivity constitutes both the source and the outcome of pluriversal, multisided understandings. Despite the different orientations, propositions and histories of anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial and southern theories, and those related to language and communication broadly, the entanglements of these two clusters that contribute to SWaSP framings open up to diverse new approaches in the human sciences.

A central dimension of a SWaSP framing includes a non-universal and non-linear knowledge-creation stance and wherein identified northern hegemonies are not seen as place-bound framings that need dislodging by a marginalised southern truth. This means (among other things) that scholars’ positionalities, including zir⁴ mobile gaze (Bagga-Gupta, 2017a, in press a, b, c) need reflexive framings such that they are ratified through their experiences and engagement with knowledge and knowing. We actualise these issues through a SWaSP framing by dwelling upon ontoepistemological trajectories that feed into the scholarship about multilingualism. This means for instance that dialoguing with the scholarship about multilingualism from a global-centric, rather than a place-based northern- or southern-centric gaze constitutes a multisided mobile gaze, i.e. a way to look at multiple possible becomings through which social practices glossed as multilingualism can be conceptualised. These, we argue, constitute nodal frontlines rather than a, or the frontline. Nodal frontlines and multisidedness draw attention to emerging trends in the humanities where alternative ways of doing science reconfigure epistemological traditions and research methodologies, the role of intellectuals and their engagement with the current conditions of the world, including ways in which scholars’ gazes are constituted.

A SWaSP framing thus draws attention to the socialisation patterns within the research trajectories in which scholars aligned to a given theoretical cluster related to the domains of language and identity find themselves situated in or make a claim to belong to. This means, amongst other things, that the circulation of key texts and key scholars across what is framed as the south/east/rest and north/west demands a careful scrutiny at how gazes are enabled/disrupted/aligned and how researchers position themselves in the complex dynamics of centre and margins. As Rodríguez (2018) and other black feminists highlight, scholars of colour, and in particular women of colour have met with epistemic violence wherein their academic contributions to science are ignored and not nurtured due to the politics of censorship and silence that sustains the Ivory Tower. This is why, both research and scholars’ positionalities need illumination in terms of a multisided mobile gaze that acknowledges a multiplicity of points view in the production of knowledge. This is aligned with Santos discussions regarding what southern epistemologies consists of: ‘evaluating the relative reasonableness and adequateness of the different kinds of knowledge in light of the social struggles in which the relevant epistemic community is involved’ (2018, p. 39).

SWaSP framings furthermore imply that knowledge production needs to be seen as a situated enterprise mediated by the constraints of the times that scholars live in, but also by their more specific contexts, purposes, interests and unidimensional or multidisciplinary alignments, including the singular/multiple academic environments that zir has been socialised into. This points to the epistemic multisidedness that exists in any academic domain across times and spaces. These processes of knowledge production have existed, continue to exist and will – most likely – remain the same in the future. However, there is – as we have already highlighted – an implicit and explicit erasure of the multisidedness of things whereby knowledge production becomes reduced to a unitary imagined epistemological frontline – a ‘single academic story’ (see Bagga-Gupta, 2018; see also Rodríguez, 2018). A SWaSP stance draws attention to the importance of making visible and questioning why knowledge – in particular that related to language and communication – is produced in a specific way at a specific time and in specific settings, bringing to the forefront questions about who is producing what types of knowledge when, where, why and for/with whom (see Bagga-Gupta, in press a, b, 2017b, 2017c, see also, Carneiro & Silva, 2020).

Despite its key relevance across time-spaces and the growing awareness about these issues among scholars situated in multiple academic domains, engaging in this enterprise is far from simple. There exists, for instance as Blommaert (2020) and others point out, a growing awareness today about an international academic industrial culture, in which a managerial perspective is seen as becoming the main normative orientation, instead of an academic collegiate culture that is understood as having flourished in the past. However, it is, in our view, simplistic to see the new millennium as the main or the most important vantage point for understanding epistemic practice. While the present is the most connected with our lived experiences, diversities of academic cultures were very different in the past and will continue to be very distinct in the future. This means that the dynamics of knowledge production can be a blind spot for scholars, not just because it constitutes a marginal topic of research, but also because it gets filtered through a gaze where some scholars experiences are naturalised and privileged. This once again points to the importance of highlighting scholarly positionalities in the epistemological enterprise. Furthermore, local and situated gazes and views can indeed provide interesting windows to understand changes being articulated by scholars with different experiences. This means, for instance, that our gaze with regards to the more recent shifts vis-à-vis an international academic industrial culture pointed to above differ, not only because our positionalities differ from that of others who may have been accorded more mainstream positions in comparison to others and us, but also in terms of our own participation that enables looking at how the broad field of the language sciences (henceforth LS) has changed globally in the new millennium.

With the above as a point of departure, reflexivity, an important tenet of SWaSP framings and as the source and as the reason for specific ontoepistemological understandings, colours all the sections of this paper. In the rest of this paper, we dialogue with the scholarship about multilingualism from a gaze where we look at different possible becomings that enable a variety of ways of conceptualising multilingual practices. Section 2 presents a snapshot on the concept of repertoires in sociolinguistic thinking and Section 3 attempts to reframe the present special issue beyond a universal gaze in the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. In the final section (4) we attempt to reconnect this scholarship with a broader understanding about what it means to be human.

Notes on repertoires in sociolinguistic thinking across time

Taking a multisided mobile gaze as a point of departure, we situate the concept of repertoire in its emergence in the ‘ethnography of speaking’ (Bauman & Sherzer, 1975), a field that emerged in the 1960s. At that point in time, this field attempted to bridge the gap between the more traditional area of linguistic anthropology (whose primary concern at that time was descriptions of indigenous language grammars) and interests in different forms of social life in the area of ethnography. Lodged between them was ‘speaking’, that Hymes used as a short-form to explicate the ways in which language is used in social contexts, the meanings attached to them, as well as the regulations of their usage.⁵ It is in this broader context that the concept of repertoire emerged in terms of a question related to situations where multiple ‘codes’ were being deployed. Recognised for the most as classical, studies by Gumperz and Wilson (1971) and Blom and Gumperz (1972), for instance, focused on not just relationships between different resources used by interlocutors or languagers, but primarily how the means of specific contextualisation cues in the use of these resources indicated changes in the communicative situation itself. Heller and McElhinny (2017) importantly indicate the hegemonic epistemological work that Gumperz and his contemporaries carried out in India. In addition to the erasure of local expertise that Heller and McElhinny point towards, the paucity of local knowledges, including that of named-languages of India, draw attention to problematic hegemonic stances in this scholarship. Heller and McElhinny also draw attention to the issue of sexual harrasment raised by Hymes female colleagues and students during his tenure as dean at the University of Pennsylvania. In light of our discussion here, such issues are salient given their contributions to the silencing of voices and stances that otherwise could have flourished in the field of sociolinguistics.

Having said this, despite the fact that the concept repertoire at that time was primarily connected with linguistic resources, it was also concerned with the broader idea of means of speaking (Hymes, 1974); the latter was understood as including the acts, genres and frames that are part of how language is used in social interaction. From an analytical point of view what these resources had in common is their encoded use for specific situations and their role in people’s social lives. Despite the limited focus on the cultural uses and non-uses of verbal/oral/spoken language, the central dimension of the ethnography of speaking was understanding communicative practices, i.e. illuminating how meaning-making is organised in everyday life. So, its epistemological project primarily looked at what resources were being used, when, why, in what form, by whom, considering that the specificities of communicative situations are unique, unpredictable and unfolding.

This tradition of looking at language-use also contributed to a concern regarding framing in the field of linguistic anthropology. Related to the implicit devices that regulate language-use, framing was concerned with metacommunication i.e. an explicit marking of why language is used in a specific manner in a specific situation. From these developments emerged studies concerned with ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994) that focused on the role of language in regimentation purposes, as well as concerns regarding metapragmatics that points to the multiple layers in which the pragmatics of language-use is regulated by different normativities or orders of indexicality (Silverstein, 1993, 2003). The field of linguistic anthropology moved on to other concerns where the central focus became understanding how signs indexicalize meaning, i.e. how signs point to specific meanings, and how this can be understood from different theoretical points of view (see for instance, Duranti, 1997, 2004).

While some have argued that the term repertoire, despite its centrality in sociolinguistic thinking has not been a focus of attention in itself since its inception in the ethnography of communication (see Blommaert & Backus, 2013), others have pointed to specific ways of approaching it recently based upon different research interests (see Busch, 2012). An example of the latter can be found in Carneiro (2014) who focuses on the sociolinguistic dynamics of Timor-Leste and reports on how different registers constitute repertoires in multilingual settings, including their role in the constitution of its political economy. Rymes (2010, 2014) expanded the concept to communicative repertoire, refocusing its centrality from societal to individual dimensions, suggesting that it is something that an individual acquires along zir socialisation trajectory, and that it includes gestures, dress, posture, mass media elements, etc. that may or may not be enregistered. Pennycook and Otsuji (2015) and Canagarajah (2018) further expanded it to spatial repertoires by drawing attention to the multiple (semiotic) resources that are part of communication in specific settings and that are constitutive of communicative routines.

A similar expansive direction of this trajectory can be noted in a special issue of this journal (IJM) in 2017. Here Kusters, Spotti, Swanwick and Tapio (2017) propose semiotic repertoires as a way to bridge studies of multilingualism and multimodality; while attention is drawn towards the use of signed and verbal/spoken/oral languages, spatial environments and resources are also considered important in peoples meaning-making processes. These rest on important debates about gesture and space in communication. Kusters et al. (2017) also highlight a concern with the hierarchising of communicative resources and the result of people’s lack of accessibility to different types of resources. Following Busch (2012), they discuss how the presence or absence of desired communicative resources can play a role in processes of subjectivation and identity construction, including how this relates to understanding emotional and embodied dimensions of repertoires. We argue that while these offerings are in line with perspectives of linguistic anthropology in the important role of context in the meaning-making of language-in-action, this recent expansion to semiotic repertoires needs to be understood as a political gesture that has sought to bring to the forefront traditions in sociolinguistics that can be augmented by studies concerned with and boxed around signed languages.

The developments outlined in this brief expose build upon and intersect with the parallel growing concerns regarding critiques towards the taken-for-grantedness of the boundary-marked nature of named-languages and the lack of consideration regarding semiotic resources that are always at play in the situated spaces of communicative practices (see for instance, Bagga-Gupta, 2018, 2017b; Bagga-Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, 2019, 2018). In parallel to these developments, digitalisation processes have led to an increasing interest wherein the entanglements of the digital-analogue have been upfronted, for instance, digital-analogue communicative repertories across timespaces (Messina Dahlberg & Bagga-Gupta, 2013, 2015, 2016). Of relevance here is that Bagga-Gupta and her colleagues expand the critiques of the boundary-marked nature of named-languages also to named-modalities – oral/verbal/spoken, written and signed – since the turn of the century. The significance of this discussion can be augmented through some SWaSP tenets. First, it points towards independent lines of thinking – some of which interest and others that don’t. This highlights instances of approaching nodal frontlines and multisidedness of knowledge and knowing. Second, these parallel streams of thinking, including the mainstream scholarship in sociolinguistics, goes beyond disciplinary areas of expertise given that these are always temporary in the scientific enterprise. Third, this brief overview approaches the centrality of human meaning-making or communication, rather than different named-languages or modalities (like oral, written or signed communication) per se, etc. Thus, it becomes relevant to highlight that the need for bridging the demarcated knowledge areas of multilingualism and multimodality, particularly in relation to spoken/oral and signed communication, but also written communication developed and lived a different parallel trajectory in other non-mainstreamed areas within LS, for instance, in the field of deaf studies and deaf education, on the one hand, and literacy studies, including new literacy studies on the other hand. In this regards, a focus on the digital constitutes yet another demarcated scholarly domain of relevance to multilingual and multimodal scholarship.

This leads to a reflection about a few challenges in relation to the trajectory of the concept repertoire that should be tackled in how it is appropriated in mainstream epistemologies, despite its original sense as the central ‘bridging’ dimension in the ethnography of speaking and its more encompassing gaze of going beyond ‘oral speaking’ (see above): first, it mistakenly continues to be haunted (in some scholarship) by a problematic stance that inadvertently separates individual repertoires from community repertoires (see for instance, Pennycook, 2018), and second, some of these circulations unfortunately relegates written and signed communication on the one hand, and digital and analogue communication on the other hand to different areas of expertise (see for instance, Bagga-Gupta, 2017b, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Bagga-Gupta et al., 2019). We consider such divisions problematic since languaging and semioticizing are intrinsic dimensions of social life that get relegated to the background, and the spaces where they play out (for instance, analogue and digital) are not hermetically sealed. Another issue that haunts the concept is the idea of repertoire as an inventory of forms and countable things. This issue does not seriously take into account the ways through which the terms historical trajectory and its relationship to the role of language broadly (i.e. communication in constructing social relations) has been theorised in the fields of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

Another stance of the mainstream character of these discussions lies in the vocabularies that are being offered in attempts to go beyond understandings of language. However, while terms like multimodality, translanguaging, metrolingualism, polylingual languaging and others purport to question the bounded nature of language, these concepts become positioned (ironically) in relation to modern hegemonic mainstream language ideologies that themselves objectify and count languages. While these vocabularies and ideologies are widely spread in the broad field of LS, efforts for deconstructing the bounded nature of named-languages call attention to both a serious study of historical framings and specific languaging contexts across global spaces.

Concepts concerned with language and the construction of named-languages and named-modalities or the bounding of specific resources with names are ideologically framed. They are rebuilt based on the social realities of historically shaped contexts, even when we consider the major power of colonial linguistics in shaping what we understand as language and named-languages. The point that is relevant here is that the ways in which the term repertoire is approached currently needs to avoid both repeating the history of expanding countable fixed resources, and of maintaining an objectified view of communicative resources in the background. Such naturalised biases can be misleading in relation to analytical tasks that a semiotic and sensory turn (Chumley, 2017; Howes, 2019) embedded in exploring semiotic repertoires should entail. Herein dimensions of qualia – the ways in which sensorial experiences are experienced, evaluated and become conventionalised – transpire and become part of communicative repertoires.

Thus, when repertoires are at stake, two ongoing processes need attention: one related to the use of multiple multimodal and multissemiotic resources in a very broad sense in communicative practices, including the complex sensorial and emotional dimensions connected with them, and the other related to the regimentation of the uses of these resources that guides how they are going to be interpreted. This means that when the focus is on the ‘how’ of the organisation of a repertoire as a set of forms or things, the specific pragmatic values associated with them and the social domains in which they take place need explicit consideration (Agha, 2004). Furthermore, metapragmatic models, which typify and value these forms and things, including the ways in which these models are disseminated across populations and across time need attention. This takes us to the issue of enregisterment processes i.e. ‘processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population’ (Agha, 2007, p. 81).

Framing this special issue beyond multilingualism scholarship

Is it possible to say that languaging (including, semioticizing) clothed in Agha’s (2004) framing is organised as an infinite bundle of different registers that can be frozen and described in stable forms only at any given moment? The individual papers in this special issue can contribute to a reflection about this question and point to the need for a more nuanced gaze that goes beyond a focus on repertoires, looking at the indexicality of entangled resources and how these are part of enregisterment processes. The data the individual studies engage with enable a connection with such dynamic semiotical work that transpires in different settings at any specific moment.

Different communicative processes are displayed by the authors of the individual studies. For instance, in the construction of the register of deaf cosmopolitanism (Kuster and Moriarty), communicative resources like International Sign Language, American Sign Language and local/national languages and signs are illustrated as assembled (or not assembled) with distinct indexicalities in specific settings. The family interactions across borders of deaf/hearing worlds, in Iquitos, in Goico’s study, also points to the ways specific resources get enregistered in specific family settings, including the use of unregistered signs that become semiotically meaningful in the communicatively shaped historical trajectories of families. Tagg and Moriarty’s study of digital-analogue communication presents signs that most probably won’t become enregistered in univocal ways, given that they are organised according to highly situated metapragmatics and orders of indexicality, which are also mediated by specific relationships of kinship and proximity. The ways in which signs of affection and emotions, entangled with specific settings can mediate communication, constitutes dimensions also in two studies: Boldt and Valente, and Canagarajah. Both display – in different ways – how enregistered resources become and don’t become meaningful in interaction and how specific genres related to academic meetings, get configured and which emotional, sensorial and social features constitute them. The importance of the analysis of genre configurations (Hanks, 1996) is most evident in Stone and Koehring’s study that presents television weather forecasting, a highly codified form of communication. The significance of genres that arise in the use of the language portraits methodology wherein diverse communicative resources are drawn upon, including an important concern with emotional dimensions that shape attachment or rejection of the use of specific repertoires is presented in Busch’s study.

A salient dimension in all these studies is the effect of a general feature of communication and what Tapio (2019, p. 134) refers to as the juggling between modes and affordances in communication used by deaf and hearing ‘visually oriented’ people (Bagga-Gupta, 2004). The metaphor that Tapio engages with – and which some of the individual studies in this special issue engage with – derives from the scholarship tradition that discusses the concept ‘chaining’.⁶ Chaining (that has also been described as linking, bridging, sandwitching) consists of the patterned ways in which potential communicative resources across named-modalities and named-languages are interlinked in mundane meaning-making processes of communication in and across analogue and analogue-digital situated-distributed settings. This scholarly tradition that emerges in the 1990s in at least two different scholarly clusters – in the USA and Scandinavia – highlights an important interactional resource engaged in communicative spaces marked by visual orientation, i.e. where the visuality of signed, written communication is primary.⁷ This research emerges in teams where deaf and hearing scholars are members and users of different named-languages (signed, written, spoken) across geopolitical spaces. The meaning-making potential of languaging where more than one named-language (signed, written, spoken), modalities (oral, written, signed), tool-usage, among other resources across analogue-digital spaces have also been explored and discussed in the mainstream LS scholarship (see for instance, Bagga-Gupta, 2018; Bagga-Gupta & Rao, 2018; Bagga-Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, 2018; Gynne, 2016; Messina Dahlberg, 2015).

Chaining processes indicate ‘how’ remodalizations and resemiotizations play out, i.e. their entanglements in communication (Scollon, 2008) and point to their relevance in building meaning-making routines, which are connected to enregisterment processes. These processes, wherein different resources (multilinguistic, multimodal and multissemiotic, including those available in specific settings i.e. tools, objects and other spatial resources) are engaged with based on their affordances at specific moments. Such chained entanglements become even more evident in contemporary communication across analogue-digital settings. Going beyond sectorism in the LS scholarship, such non-mainstream frontlines, in particular in the area of multilingual scholarship, attest to the need for recognising the multisidedness of the epistemological enterprise wherein the significance of nodal frontlines, rather than a or the frontline, needs to be recognised.

Considering the political advancement vis-à-vis the discussion proposed in the special issue of IJM in 2017, and with the above as background, we pose the following queries to this 2021 special issue:

• How does this special issue move the debates regarding repertoire forward? and more pertinently,

• What do enregisterment processes, including the meaning-making potentials mapped in the chaining scholarship, contribute towards discussions about semiotic repertoires?

• How can the concept be refined as an important tool that can potentially move the field of the sociolinguistics of multilingualism forward – and beyond a universal multilingual gaze?

We envisage two potential pathways. If semiotic repertoires are merely a set of resources that describe contingent interactions, it is a useful concept, akin to the common-sense meaning of the word repertoire as an inventory, even if this does not contribute to advancing the field forward. However, embedded in the concept exists a more long-term potential if it is seriously understood in terms of unstable assemblages of human and non-human signs, tools, objects and spatial resources in different enregisterment processes that are situated in specific moments within specific communities of practices and practioners/languagers. In the latter, these could – taking inspiration from Busch’s study – be seen as portraits of communication practices, in situated settings with specific embedded metapragmatics and language ideologies, which indicate how a range of resources can become potentially enregistered and part of meaning-making processes for different contingent subjects that assume distinct identities in different communities of practices and practioners/languagers.

From such a stance (and without seeing science as a monologising enterprise), it becomes important to consider how communicative practices play out – i.e. their temporary chained nature – and peoples’ understandings of what is salient in these. The relationship between indexes and meaning is key in such a stance (Urban, 2006), given that all resources that potentially contribute to meaning-making are not enregistered (Rymes, 2014), and all enregisterment processes don’t lead to specific forms of temporary stable registers. In such a reading, this 2021 special issue makes an attempt that is interesting: it offers a hint of the directionality that the concept can move in, i.e. looking at enregisterment processes, where chaining dimensions are considered, in the configuration of communicative practices.

To summarise, taking onboard conceptualizations offered by Agha (2007) and the chaining scholarship (see Tapio, 2019 for a recent study; Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2002, 2004 for earlier studies) that bridges the meaning-making potentials of communication across multiple communicative resources (including named-languages, named-modalities, specific tools, objects, spatial resources, etc.) has the advantage of framing social practices through perspectives that attempt to illuminate languaging (including dimensions of semioticizing) as situated-distributed meaning-making practices. However, the issue here is not to substitute one framework by another, but acknowledge the limits of concepts and their usage, and consider the concept of repertoire to pinpoint its place in sociolinguistic thought. From such a stance, semiotic repertoires can be seen (among other ways of conceptualising human communication and meaning-making) as a set of different types of resources, with specific ranges, that are chained and drawn together temporarily as a part of enregisterment processes. It is possible to make sense of them only as far as what they indexicalize, i.e. their metapragmatics and metasemiosis, which are framed by broader language ideologies, and are part of broader political economies (for an illustration, see Carneiro, 2014).

Having said this, it is important also to consider that the organisation of the field of scholarship in linguistic anthropology enables the existence of multiple concurrent theoretical models depending on different ontological worlds that are focused upon. This means that multiple epistemological ways of understanding languaging exist and need visibility if different saliences in communicative practices are to be acknowledged. We furthermore suggest that other ways of enriching a multisided stance, include working with concepts like genres (Hanks, 1996) and participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2007). Gazing broadly, would also enable recognising different developments in the intersections between language, culture and society in other epistemological traditions that emerge from the east/south/rest. Thus, questions that can be reiterated include: What constitutes an advancement in the human sciences in specific areas? How do we understand advances in scientific knowledge production from a non-universal gaze?

While theories can be general and can contribute to illuminating dimensions of the human condition, a problem emerges when such general, all-encompassing theorizations take on a universalisation hue and are seen as the best way or from the only gaze possible for understanding potentialities of being and becoming in different realities (see Bagga-Gupta & Messina Dahlberg, in press). Following from our opening quote, the colonial European model had at its core one way to be human and this is constitutive of the ideologies that lie at the crux of the modern epistemological enterprise (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). Such problematic and instrumental universal gazing allows progress to be naturalised in terms of unidirectionality and linearity where processes of overcoming shortcomings or making science better constitute the agenda.

Reconceptualizing ways to understand humaning

The multiple complex ways of the scientific enterprise go beyond unitary lines of development. In other words, there have always existed different ways of knowing and knowledge production and advancements. Recent discussions regarding the very doing of being human i.e. human as a verb (Ingold, 2015), and the multiple ways of humaning further heightens this issue. Such reflections produced in the complex racialized context of South Africa can illustrate our point here:

Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others. To humanise is to impose to the world a pre-conceived meaning of the human (Ingold, 2015, pp. 115–120) There is no way of humaning. There is no perfect way to go about it. Humaning is a social and cultural practice which we constantly hone. Humaning as praxis is historically and contextually specific (Erasmus, 2018, p. XXII).

Given the multiple ways of humaning, reinforces the idea of diverse ways of understanding how social practices play out, are routinised and their multiple directions depending on a scholar’s social trajectory. Perhaps limitations in the LS scholarship relates to precluding a more comprehensive and global approach (that goes beyond tokenism) to illuminating the many legitimate ways of humaning. Returning to our opening quote, Krenak's query about many humanities is here read as highlighting the different ways of humaning that have been eclipsed in the knowledge production and their circulations. While it is important to broaden epistemological horizons by scrutinising which directions of knowledge production are relevant as an advancement, it is pertinent to pay close attention to the different ways of doing this, the different pathways that make (in)visible different epistemic issues, including being sensitive to hegemonies of knowledge circulations themselves.

Despite the diverse histories of the traditions of semiotic and linguistic analysis since the twentieth century, a main concern of the sociolinguistics of multilingualism – which gains projection with studies in the ethnography of communication – was, as we have pointed out, oral/verbal/spoken language, and to some extent written language. This has inadvertently restrained epistemological horizons in LS in relation to more holistic understandings of human communication and has given rise to sub-areas that have existed – and exist – as silos with specific alignments/biases in their respective approaches, even if they attempt to consider language-use-in-context. Thus, for instance, LS scholarship continues to thrive in areas that are demarcated in terms of multiple named-languages (bilingualism, SLA, TESOL, foreign language studies, home language studies, etc.), written language (literacy and new literacy studies, multilingual literacies), signed language (deaf studies, signed language studies, deaf education, etc.), digital communication (multimodality, CALL, etc.) etc.

This highlights that the recent semiotic turn in LS and anthropological studies (Chumley, 2017), which includes by extension a multisensorial turn (Howes, 2019) needs to be considered carefully by the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. Where do such ‘advancements’ take the field in its thinking about language and what contributions can they make to thinking about how scientific thought can be organised, differently? Reflexively this leads to considering how these meaning-making processes are part of the construction of specific ontological worlds (Kohn, 2015) that call for the building of new epistemological tools that can have different extensions, but that can also be diverse and unique to specific contexts. Framed differently, humaning is always situated and distributed.

Contributions towards a decolonised knowing and knowledge – from a SWaSP framing – would in this way mean that the sociolinguistics of multilingualism, instead of being dominated by centripetal forces, from the – until now – main centres of knowledge production, needs to acknowledge its hegemonic historically shaped contours and contribute to the promotion of different approaches, with different gazes i.e. of different nodal frontlines and multisidedness. It is in this manner that Ingold (2015) and Erasmus (2018) enable understandings of how ‘to human’ can be done in multiple ways, not just in languaging, in semioticizing, in communicating, but in thinking and producing knowledge as well. This includes also the hegemonies of the languaging of knowledge production and circulations.

As Mol suggests, ‘if reality is done, if it is historically, culturally and materially located, then it is also multiple’ (2002, p. 75). This means that looking at reality in its situatedness, distributedness and circulations allows not just understanding its characteristics and possible ways of becoming, but also the different ways in which it is specifically regimented and made in the way it is made in scholarship. If life and the times we are living in are uncertain then the task of science and knowledge creation is better served in understanding and producing knowledge that, modestly teaches us how to deal with uncertainties. If we cannot predict the future, the enterprise of science can be helpful in the understanding of its different becomings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here it can be noted that a number of scholars highlight the economic dimensions that naturalise the hegemonies of European pushed colonialism and racism as the naturalised order of things (see for instance, Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Krenak’s point of different humanities needs to be read in terms of pointing to hegemonies of such naturalizations – this is developed in our paper, in particular in terms of ‘humaning’ (see the final section).

2 The following can be named to highlight the epistemological heritage of this critique: Bhabha, Comaroff and Comaroff, Fanon, Grosfoguel, Kilomba, Mignolo, Santos, Spivak.

3 For more on SWaSP, see Bagga-Gupta (2017a, in press a, b, c).

4 Instead of her/his/their/they, we use the gender-neutral term zir unless the context calls for otherwise.

5 Linell (2009) and others have been critical to discussing these issues in terms of language-use, since that implies that language is outside of its users. The terms languaging and languagers attempt to go beyond this type of dichotomy.

6 See for instance, Bagga-Gupta (1999, 2002, 2012), Erting et al. (2002), Hansen (2005), Humphries and MacDougall (1999), Padden (1996).

7 Mouthings i.e. visually available articulations on the mouth of oral/spoken/verbal language-use is also described as a resource in visually oriented communication.