Brooks Hall, 203

I am a linguistic anthropologist interested in the points of overlap between language, emotion, identity, and social power. I look at how people express emotion (linguistically), how these emotional expressions pattern along lines of cultural identity (gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, etc), and how these patterns fit into a society’s social hierarchy. My approach is to examine discourse – how people get and give messages, whether talking face-to-face, or viewing a film, or engaging with the internet – to try to understand how social structures are created and reinforced – or opposed and transformed. So, my research interests could be stated as: Social Dialectology (or how significant segments of society actually use language); Language Ideology (or how we’re taught to evaluate how people use language and the power/status/identity consequences of those evaluations); and Mediation (or how representations of languages and their speakers are structured).

Israel was the site of my first formal research project. I spent two years living in Haifa observing Jewish and Palestinian Israelis as they used language (talking, reading, listening to TV/ radio, etc.) to negotiate what it meant to be “Israeli.” I was particularly drawn to how Israelis used intonation (the patterned rise and fall of pitch in speech) while speaking Hebrew. In my book Words and Stones I describe how members of the two subordinate ethnic/class groups in Israel, Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs, used non-standard pitch patterns (or tunes, and especially the tunes that ended phrases) to contest, or symbolically resist, the dominance of mainstream ideas of ‘Israeliness’. Intonation was especially interesting because people (in Israel, as elsewhere) use it so much to express emotion.