@article{Ethnography:2615,
      recid = {2615},
      author = {McElgunn, Hannah Renee},
      title = {Language at the Center of the Universe: An Ethnography of  the Hopi Language},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      pages = {243},
      abstract = {Broadly speaking, this dissertation explores the politics  of circulation that mediate ongoing forms of settler  colonial and Indigenous dialogism. In particular, it  focuses on the circulation of the Hopi language, a  Uto-Aztecan language spoken primarily on the Hopi  Reservation in Arizona, or, as many tribal members call  this territory, the center of the universe. Although spoken  primarily in this one locale, the language has become a  contested object that draws into relation a wide variety of  people who purport to preserve or revitalize it in  different ways. These people are: the staff of the Hopi  Cultural Preservation Office; Hopi language teachers and  their students at Hopi; and finally, linguists,  anthropologists, and archivists at and especially beyond  Hopi. 

Through attention to formal grammatical patterning  and denotation, to textual structure, and to dialogic  histories, this dissertation characterizes the different  claims these actors make to the Hopi language, showing how  they embed it in different regimes of intertextuality. Such  regimes draw upon and create divergent ideologies about  ownership and relationality, language, and knowledge. 

The  practices through which some members of collecting and  scholarly communities strive to keep Indigenous languages  vital are predicated on the idea of knowledge as a public  good, something ideally available to all and belonging to  all. For such persons, the continued spread and  dissemination of the language is a form of positive growth.  Yet, this can be experienced as a form of depletion or even  theft by some Hopi tribal members. Without putting an end  to all circulation, tribal members strive keep  instantiations of the language tethered to Hopi as a social  formation, so that if and as they circulate, they are never  completely excised from this contextual surround, but  always remain indexically connected to it. This a semiotics  of dynamic connection; less one of pointing back or  returning towards an original source, than one of pointing  towards an emergent locus, the here-and-now.

In the face  of different kinds of extraction and recontextualization,  Hopi tribal members entail this kind of dynamic connection  by making claims upon the language that often involve  imposing a limit. These limits are outward facing, imposed  on others, but they are just as often inward facing,  imposed on the very selves making the claims. Perhaps  paradoxically, the process of negotiating limits is  productive of an expansive, ever-unfolding social  collective. 

This dissertation offers a critical approach  to Indigenous language revitalization as a social practice,  furthers the linguistic anthropological theorization of  intertextuality, and contributes to theorizing the concepts  of recognition and refusal or limits by approaching them  semiotically.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2615},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2615},
}