Suchergebnisse

Sociolinguists as sociologists -- Durkheim's social fact -- Sociolinguistics and the social fact: avec Durkheim -- What Durkheim could not have known: après Durkheim -- The sociological re-imagination

Ethnography must be seen as a full theoretical system, not just as a method. In this book, a range of authors are examined, whose work was either instrumental in creating this theoretical system, or might productively be used in developing it further. Authors discussed include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice. Taking Émile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkheimian social world in which we currently live. This new social world operates 'offline' as well as 'online' and is characterized by 'vernacular globalization', Arjun Appadurai's term to summarise the ways that larger processes of modernity are locally performed through new electronic media. Blommaert extrapolates from this rich concept to consider how our communication practices might offer a template for thinking about how we operate socially. Above all, he explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and social practice In Durkheim and the Internet, Blommaert proposes new theories of social norms, social action, identity, social groups, integration, social structure and power, all of them animated by a deep understanding of language and social interaction. In drawing on Durkheim and other classical sociologists including Simmel and Goffman, this book is relevant to students and researchers working in sociolinguistics as well as offering a wealth of new insights to scholars in the fields of digital and online communications, social media, sociology, and digital anthropology.

This book persuasively argues the case that ethnography must be viewed as a full theoretical system, rather than just as a research method. Blommaert traces the influence of his reading of classic works about ethnography on his thinking, and discusses a range of authors who have influenced the development of a theoretical system of ethnography, or whose work might be productively used to develop it further. Authors examined include Hymes, Scollon, Kress, Bourdieu, Bakhtin and Lefebvre. This book will be required reading for students and scholars involved in ethnographic research, or those interested in the theory of ethnography.

Tanzania is often seen as an exceptional case of successful language planning in Africa, with Swahili being spread to all corners of the country. Yet, this objective success has always been accompanied by a culture of complaints proclaiming its utter failure. State Ideology and Language in Tanzania sets out to explore this paradox through a richly documented historical, sociolinguistic and anthropological approach covering the story of Swahili from the early days of independence until today. Focusing on the ways in which Swahili was swept up in the 'Ujamaa revolution' - the transition to socialism led by president Nyerere - Jan Blommaert demonstrates how the language became an emblem not just of the Tanzanian 'cultural' nation, but above all of the 'political' nation. Using Swahili meant the acceptance of socialism, and the spread of Swahili across the country should equal the spread of Ujamaa socialism. When this did not happen, the verdict of failure was proclaimed on Swahili, which did not prevent the language from becoming one of the most widely used and dynamic languages on the continent. This book is a thoroughly revised version of the 1999 edition, which was welcomed at the time as a classic. It now extends the period of coverage to 2012 and includes an entirely new chapter on current developments, making this updated edition an essential read for students and scholars in language, linguistics and African Studies.

ABSTRACT In his contribution to the Special Issue "Digital and semiotic mechanisms of contemporary populisms", Jan Blommaert offers a communicability model which accounts for political discourse (and others) in the post-digital era we live. He starts by arguing that the idea of the public (a homogeneous entity) that was very popular in the 20th century sociological imagination of how propaganda worked in "manufacturing consent" can no longer be used to explain the fragmented audiences of our post-digital era. The author illuminates his argument by resorting to the circulation of political tweets/retweets as texts in our algorithmic-oriented world. Such a circulation aims at niched audiences. In the last section, the author argues that discourse analysts need to operate from this communicability model if they are to understand the cruciality of political discourse in our contemporary social lives.

Recent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field increasingly away from linear models toward complex models. The complexity of timespace as an aspect of what is called context is of key importance in this development, and this article engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this: chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history that organize the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn, can be seen as the scope of communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.