Rosaleen Howard, born in Cheltenham, UK, in 1950. Ph.D. from St Andrews University. Associate Professor at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool.
Fellow (1 September 2003 – 30 June 2004)
CULTURAL IDEOLOGIES OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE ANDES
During my year at NIAS, I have worked on six chapters of a seven-chapter manuscript on the topic of ideologies of language and cultural identity in the Andes. My main task has been to apply the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis, inspired by a Foucauldian conception of discourse (eg. van Dijk, Fairclough), to a corpus of interview data compiled during fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. The book engages with critical sociolinguistic theory relating to language politics and language ideologies, in addition to drawing on social anthropological theory relevant for the study of identity (eg. Bourdieu and Barth). Key concepts arising in postcolonial theory, such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘transculturation’, are also incorporated. There have been two principle outcomes of this project: (i) to develop a comparative study between three Andean countries where Spanish and Quechua exist in competition, and which are usually studied separately; (ii) to identify the ambivalence and tension in Andean people’s discourse on cultural identity, and the ideological roots of such ambivalence. It is hoped that this research will be of academic interest and of applied use in the countries studied. For this reason, the initial publication will be in Spanish in Peru.