Indexicality 1
Practice, as repetition, is instrumental to a second semiotic process associated with identity: indexicality. Indexicality is the semiotic operation of juxtaposition, whereby one entity or event points to another. The basic insight, first developed by semiotician Charles Peirce, is that some signs, which he called indices, function via repeated and non-accidental cooccurrence: smoke is an index of fire, clouds of rain. This process of extracting meaning from juxtaposed events or entities has been generalized for the analysis of the social and ideological realm by Michael Silverstein (e.g., 1985).
The fullest treatment of indexicality in relation to identity is Elinor Ochs's (1992) exposition of the linguistic indexing of gender. Ochs notes that linguistic structures become associated with social categories not directly but indirectly, through a chain of semiotic associations. An example of this phenomenon is the process by which certain sentence-final particles in Japanese have come to be thought of by Japanese speakers as ''women's language.'' Some particles, Ochs observes, are used to mitigate the force of an utterance; this linguistic form is therefore directly associated not with an identity category but with a stance, an orientation to the ongoing interaction. However, because the speakers who tend to take up this ''deferential'' stance are usually female, the same linguistic form has become indirectly associated with women, and this connection is now so widely recognized that the intermediate step from stance to identity has become obscured. The direct indexical relationship is still readily recoverable in actual linguistic practice, since speakers of Japanese and other languages said to have ''gender-exclusive'' forms can in fact draw on the linguistic elements associated with the other gender to index particular interactional stances (Trechter 1999). Thus so-called women's language is often used by men in order to convey a general interactional stance that has no necessary association with femininity.
This ambiguity between direct and indirect indexicality is an important source for establishing and justifying power inequities between groups. Hill (1995) argues that Anglo-Americans who do not speak Spanish may use ''mock Spanish'' forms like No problemo (cf. Spanish No problema) in their speech to directly index a jocular stance, but because it is ungrammatical the same form may indirectly index an identity that covertly defines itself over and against Spanish speakers (on this point, see further below). In both of these examples, the accretion of social meanings through repeated occurrence, together with the denotational meaning of these linguistic forms, results in the formation of social stereotypes based on language: the demure middle-class Japanese woman, the laid-back Mexican. Such stereotypes are not neutral but highly politicized. Attention to the semiotic processes through which language enters into power relations has become one of the most productive areas of research in linguistic anthropology via the study of language ideologies (Kroskrity, this volume). This issue is also closely tied to identity, for beliefs about language are also often beliefs about speakers.
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