Pragmatics - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2003

In this paper, I will examine one aspect of a Gramscian notion of hegemony, one which focusses on the way in which hegemony is about “collectively attaining a single cultural “climate””, at least in part through language. This assumes discursive struggle in which some views end up marginalizing others. I will examine this struggle in terms of some of the ways in which the trajectories of actors and of discourses are connected, such that discursive resources are (or are not) available to actors with different positions with respect to unequally distributed symbolic and material resources, and are used in practice in ways which make sense given the sets of interests these actors have. This attempt at operationalizing an ethnography of hegemony is based on an analysis of discursive shift in between ethnonational forms of hegemonic discourse and practice being challenged by commodification, economic networking, and multiple affiliations, under conditions of economic shift from primary and secondary resource economies to tertiary ones, and of the re- shaping of the State’s relationship to civil society and the private sector. It has specifically to do with current shifts in ideas about what constitutes the category francophone in Canada, or put differently, what it might mean to do being “francophone”. In particular, I will examine the ways in which the institutionalized structures related to that categorization have been called into question by ongoing political economic change, and how actors involved in those structures act in, on and through the process of change to produce new ways of doing la francophonie, at least on the local level.

This paper explores grassroots historiographical writing from Congo in the context of globalization. The authors are both sub-elite writers, producing text for First-World readers, and they spend enormous efforts at producing a generically regimented text, based on borrowed models of text and textuality that are seen to offer spaces for identity-construction. Performing such models of text and textuality is a construction of Self vis-à-vis history. But in order to understand such moves into identity-constructing spaces, we need to take account of different economies of meanings and signs. The identity construction only works in one particular economy of meanings and signs, but loses ‘meaning’ as soon as it is being inserted into other economies. The shift from one frame into another involves relocations of referential and indexical meanings attached to signs, a phenomenon of semiotic mobility that needs to be addressed sociolinguistically. Detached from their local semiotic environment, such texts become ‘orthopractic’: Performances of shape detached from locally valid indexicalities.

Focusing on issues of class identity, this paper explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and Raymond Williams’ view of hegemony as “relations of domination and subordination… [that saturate] the whole process of living…: Our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world” (1977: 109-110). It assesses the kinds of insight afforded in both variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, and then turns to an analysis of London adolescents putting on exaggerated ‘posh’ and ‘Cockney’ accents in situated interaction. Underpinning the contingencies of particular instances, there was a set of well-established dualisms shaped in relations of class inequality (high vs low, mind vs body, reason vs emotion), and the resonance and reach of these was attested both in corporeal performance and in the fantastical grotesque. Can theories of interactional ‘identity projection’ do justice to this, or can sociolinguistics accommodate the cultural analyst’s wider concern for ‘subjectivity’? The paper looks at ways of drawing these perspectives together, and concludes with an emphatic rejection of claims that in late modernity, class identities are losing their significance.

Engaging Raymond Williams’ argument (1977: 112) that “[a] lived hegemony is always a process ... [that] can never be singular,” this paper examines contrary tendencies toward domination and autonomy in national debates about education, classroom-based reading practices, and students’ formation of literate identities. In particular, I explore the dynamics of inequality and reflexivity through an ethnographic-and-discursive analysis of a US urban middle school undergoing pedagogical reform. The school presents a balance, roughly 50/50, of students living in poverty and not living in poverty and from majority and non-majority ethnoracial backgrounds. Because of statewide pressures to “improve test scores,” the school has agreed to an ambitious English Language Arts curriculum initiative which encourages reflexive self-guidance among teachers and students. The paper presents analyses of public debates about literacy and of classroom interactional dynamics as well as case studies of ‘struggling readers,’ that is, young adolescent deemed unsuccessful at school literacy. The analysis of literacy debates focuses on the displacement of class and race “effects” in discussions of pedagogical reform. The classroom analyses focus on conditions of pedagogical inclusion and exclusion and the apparent role of class, race, and gender in such conditions. The case studies focus on the articulation of school and non-school literate identities and the role of class, race, and gender in those identities and their articulation.

In this paper, the idea of ethnograpies of hegemony is taken up as a reflexive orientation in research which addresses the complexity of forms of domination in late modern society also by trying to come to terms with the situatednes of interactionally-established interview data. Following a number of methodological remarks on the establishment of a ‘native point of view’ as well as a number of observations on the data trajectories (tribulations and triangulations) which mark this particular discursive ethnography, the analysis goes on to concentrate on the ways in which case categorisation is ‘spoken’ through social class in one particular account of child protection. As an exercise in ‘classifying the classifiers’ (Bourdieu 1992: 242) 2, the analysis highlights how professional and private talk about social problems is implicated in class-based subjectivities and involves (displaced) representations of class? However, much depends here on what we mean by ‘class’ when referring to a contemporary context such as the Flemish/Belgian field of child protection. If hegemony then counts as a historicising interpretative move which highlights the interwovenness of domain - and profession-based discourses of social problems with discourses of class and the contextualisation of particular sense-making repertoires, then it is just as much about the situational contingencies under which class and domination becomes speakable in a particular way. This, I suggest, is where ethnography becomes all-important - as an investigative strategy and as an epistemology of dialogic engagement with social theory and contemporary analyses of the late modern world.