CALA 2019 - 2019 Conference on Asian Linguistic Anthropology

Themes
Revitalization
New mobilities, new textual modes, and new technologies have pervaded Asian regions, affecting communication, structuring the lifeworlds (lived environments), and re-authoring altering identities. As such, language has seen mediation to develop new yet evolving forms. While these changes have become significant, reflexive efforts to cultural origins have also become central to global flows. These efforts have been labeled revivalist, both in widespread languages, and in minority languages. Furthermore, central to work on these languages, are frameworks of Anthropology, without which, our understandings of the political, cultural and linguistic elements would scarcely present themselves epistemically.
Representation
The effects of Colonialism in and of Asia, crossing into a current era of Post Colonialism, and finding junctures with the intensified global flows of the now, encourage the production of ideas and ideologies of representation of self and other, as well as ideologies of social and cultural performativities. This leads to pursuits of representation. Pervasive throughout the twentieth century, was Western dominance, a hegemony now countered by post structuralist notions of global identity, thus decentering the West, and ‘recentering’ the East. Language and identity thus emerge as constructs central to the understandings of these recenterings, and understood not least through a Linguistic Anthropology. Here, Asian languages and identities have become an increasingly concentrated nexus for new forms of globalization.