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Sociolinguistics and cultural studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interactionBen Rampton aa Thames Valley University,
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To cite this article: Ben Rampton (1999): Sociolinguistics and cultural studies: New ethnicities, liminality and interaction, Social Semiotics, 9:3, 355-373
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Social Semiotics, Vol 9, No. 3, 1999 355
Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies: NewEthnicities, Liminality and InteractionBEN RAMPTON
With the emergence of 'new ethnicities' as its central empirical focus, this paper explores therelationship between sociolinguistic discourse analysis on the one hand, and research onyouth in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology on the other. After a brief sketch ofsome major trends in the study of youth, the paper focuses on recent European work oninter-ethnic processes among young people in urban neighbourhoods, and it notes the wayin which major themes in the theorisation of late modernity have been brought to bear ondescriptions of multiracial youth. From among these, it selects 'liminality', a notion that hasbeen used to characterise youth cultural phenomena at a number of fairly macro levels ofsocial organisation, and it then shifts attention to the details of interactional discourse,arguing that there are also conspicuous moments of liminality within the interaction order.Through the analysis of a short piece of recorded talk, this paper illustrates the way in whichinteraction can host the emergence of new ethnicities, and it concludes with some generalobservations about the contribution of sociolinguistic discourse analysis to studies of urbanyouth culture (sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, new ethnicities, urban youth culture,liminality).
In recent years., the study of urban youth has connected with theories of latemodernity and foregrounded processes of ethnic mixing and hybridisation. A lot ofattention has been given to the ways in which young people trangress and reworkdominant orders of race hierarchy and division., and cultural analysts and ethnogra-phers have often focused on language and discourse to illustrate this. However,although these accounts are often insightful, they can be impressionistic by sociolin-guistic standards, and there is still plenty of scope for analysis of how the linguistic,discursive and cultural dimensions of action interrelate in the moments whenadolescents seem to be disrupting or escaping from established structures. Would aclose and systematic socio-linguistic analysis show that beneath the surface, therewas actually a high degree of conformist stability in the fine grain of everydayconduct? Would a detailed account of verbal interaction testify to creative trans-gression as a major feature in young people's lives in urban neighbourhoods, orwould it instead reveal a level of conventional patterning which contradicted moremacroscopic interpretations, suggesting in turn that scholars may have been misledby a few spectacular cases, or by the rhetorical tropes of cultural theory?
To address these questions, this paper draws on detailed sociolinguistic research
1035-0330/99/030355-19 © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd1035-0330/99/030355-19 © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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356 B. Rampton
on young people in multilingual friendship groups^ focusing on the ways in whichadolescents of African Caribbean and Anglo descent used Panjabi, Anglos andAsians used English-based Creole^ and all three used a type of stylised IndianEnglish (Rampton 1995a)«,1'2 "Language crossing'3 of this kind is a practice that bothlocal participants and cultural analysts quite commonly interpret as an emblem ofthe emergence of new solidarities counterposed to dominant patterns of racedivision (Hewitt 1986; Gilroy 1987: Chapter 5; Hebdige 1987: 149-152; Jones1988; Aalund 1992: 74-75; Kotsinas 1992; Back 1996), and in what follows^ I shalltake language crossing as useful empirical terrain for analysis of whether and how theminutae of everyday adolescent practice can in fact play host to the broader themesfiguring prominently in recent cultural analyses* More specifically-̂ I will look atmicro-interaction as a site for the operation of 'liminality*.
To set this account in a wider context3 however^ it is worth beginning with a briefoutline of three significant tendencies in the relatively recent study of youth*
Social Creativity^ Youth Culture and Late Modernity
During the 1970s and early 1980s3 research on youth culture laid a great deal ofemphasis on what it saw as attempts to resist or escape from the oppressive structureof socio-economic class* The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud-ies interpreted the distinctive activities and 'focal concerns' of youth as a form ofideological contestation and considerable importance was attached to the symbolicsignificance of style3 dress3 argot3 ritual, activity and music3 which were seen asmeans for at least partially interrupting^ adapting and resisting (but finally comingto terms with) the possibilities and meanings that youth were offered by thedominant society* Culture was examined as a political activity closely linked to theconflict of social interests^ and an attempt was made to develop modes of analysiswhich could show how the creativity of active human agents fitted in with the largerprocesses through which social hierarchy was reproduced*
There has of course3 been fian entire industry of critique' of CCCS work (Wulff1995: 4; also Rampton 1995a: 134-135) and3 more recently«, with worse economicconditions and a spate of restrictive government policy initiatives directed at youngpeople post-163 a second approach to youth has asserted itself. This conceives ofitself as a change from
studying youth as self-contained instigators of change to examining the rolethey have come to play as the unprecedented target of official attention* „*The coming of YTS has served to extend the period of 6youth3 and hasinstitutionalised it as an age-phase . . . I t has provided jobs for a new rangeof welfare professionals to guide3 assess and monitor the progress of youngpeople in different institutional environments* Consequently^ the idea ofwhat 'youth5 is needs to be revised* Rather than being trend setters3 theyhave become to some objects of pity and concern* (Wallace & Cross 1990:23 7; see also3 for example^ Bates & Riseborough 1993*)
In this line of enquiry3 the preoccupations of youth are analysed in terms of survival
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Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies 357
and fitting in, rather than creativity and breaking out, and there is much moreattention given to work, training and post-school education than to recreation»
A third strand in the analysis of youth—the one most relevant to the presentpaper—has historical links with the firsts but differs from earlier work in at least tworespects: first3 theories of late modernity have had a major impact; and second, thefocus of attention has shifted from white working-class youth to black youth andmultiracial neighbourhoods» These differences are worth taking in turn.
With organismic totalities no longer seen as appropriate metaphors for the analysisof late modern societies (Bauman 1992: Chapter 9), the idea of unified cultures,either ethnic or generational is now widely regarded as an unwarranted reification;culture is seen as a heterogeneous and dynamic set of resources for the situatedprojection and active construction of self-identity; and, rather than consistency, theonus is on contingency and flexibility* These changes in the assumptions aboutculture and identity combine with new characterisations of contemporary life.Migration tourism, international commerce and global communications turn juxta-position movement and hybrid mixing into central experiences, and the role andsignificance of nation-states becomes increasingly unclear, too restricted for supra-national organisations and diaspora networks3 too large to connect with the localneighbourhoods where crucial negotiations of the meaning of global flows take place(cf. for example, Hannerz 1989, 1990; Appadurai 1990; Bauman 1992).
All of these themes seem to coalesce in multiracial youth culture, which oftenseems to be one of the best places to tune into the most crucial processes in latemodernity. Whereas studies of minority youth in the 1960s, 1970s and much of the1980s emphasised the confusion and/or conflict putatively generated by their havingto try to survive 'between two cultures' (for example, Taylor 1981; Taylor &Hegarty 1985; Aalund 1992: 764), this view is now taken to be unduly essentialist.Indeed, whether they reject or embrace them with virulence, exclusive and hier-archic discourses of nation now no longer seem to be taken for granted amongyouth; ethnicity has been denaturalised/destabilised; and consumption and culturalbricolage have become primary means for identity construction. In all, it seems asthough some of the most important experiments in living with difference are takingplace among young people in urban areas, and although the picture is patchy anduneven, it seems to be here that we can now detect the emergence of a complex butvital neighbourhood cosmopolitanism.
This third approach to youth represents a confluence of cultural studies andanthropology, and at a theoretical level, figures such as Hall, Gilroy and Hannerzplay an important role (Gilroy 1987; Hall 1988; Hannerz 1989, 1990). However,there is now also a growing body of more descriptive work looking at these processesempirically in England, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe (Hewitt 1986, 1992;Gilroy 1987; Palmgren et al 1992; Back 1995, 1996; Gillespie 1995; Aalund &Granqvist 1995; Amit-Talai & Wulff 1995; Sharma et al 1996).
My own research takes the work of Hewitt and Gilroy as major points oforientation, but it is differs from most of the other work in this area in its fairlydetailed attention to interactional discourse. Of course, as elsewhere in the socialsciences, discourse is commonly recognised at a theoretical level as an absolutely
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358 B. Rampton
crucial site for contemporary social and cultural processes (cf. for example, Donald& Rattansi 1992; Hall 1996; for critiques, Werbner & Modood 1997), but althoughthey are often very revealing, analyses of talk among youth tend to be broadly drawn(for example, Cohen 1992; Back 1992).5 Hewitt is the obvious exception to thispattern, although even here, analysis involves the larger categories offered in theethnography of communication (Hymes 1972) more than the delicate terms devel-oped either in conversation analysis, or in Erving Goffman's explorations of theinteraction order* In fact, following a by now fairly well-trodden path in sociolinguis-tics (for example Hymes 1977; Woolard 1985; Gal 1989), I would like to take oneof the themes that recurs in these cultural analyses, and explore what quite fine-grained sociolinguistic discourse analysis can contribute to our understanding it»The particular idea I would like to focus on is 'liminality', and this has beendiscussed in a number of ways.
Varieties of Liminality
The notion of 'liminality5 originates in anthropological studies of initiation rites intribal and agrarian societies. These rites have three phases: separation in whichinitiands leave their childhood life behind; transition; and then incorporation, inwhich they are returned to new, relatively stable and well-defined positions insociety, now a stage further on in life's cycle. 'liminality5 refers to the transitionalmiddle phase, and in it, according to Victor Turner.,
the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort ofsocial limbo which has few ... of the attributes of either the preceding orsubsequent social statuses or cultural states ... In liminality, [everyday]social relations may be discontinued, former rights and obligations aresuspended, the social order may seem to have been turned upside down.(Turner 1974, 1982: 24, 27.)
With this account in place. Turner then develops the idea into a form that fits moreeasily with the kinds of practice common in industrial societies, and he calls these'liminoid5 (£~oid5 meaning 'like3, Resembling5, but not identical). The distinctionbetween liminal and liminoid can be hard to draw, but while, for example, liminalpractices tend to contribute to the smooth functioning of social systems, liminoidpractices are often creative, containing social critiques and exposing wrongs inmainstream structures and organisation (Turner 1982: 45). Similarly, liminalitytends to involve symbols with common intellectual and emotional meaning for allmembers of the group, while 'liminoid phenomena tend to be more idiosyncratic,quirky, and to be generated by specific named individuals and in particular groups3
(1974, 1982: 54).6
There are two general points worth emphasising here.First, varieties of liminality, it seems, can be found at many different levels of
structuring. The cultural regularities comprising the flow of orderly social life rangefrom micro to macro—the network of at least partially intersubjective categoriesserving at the base of social organisation is both large and small (see for example.
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Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies 359
Sapir 1949: 104; Heritage 1984: Chapter 7)—and so transition breaches.» interrup-tions and escapes from these can also be long or short., major or minor; and, in fact,a very wide range of events and activities can and have been described as liminal orliminoid (see later and for example., Turner (1974, 1982) on leisure time in general,or Rothenbuhler (1988) on mass strikes).
Second, it is easy to see, I think, that the notion of liminality collocates with anumber of other themes that recur in discussion both of late modernity in general,and of multiracial youth in particular: potentiality and subjectivity-in-process;boundaries, transition and transgression; borderlands and marginality; ambivalence,hybridity and structural indeterminacy (c£ Grossberg 1996: 89-92; also for exam-ple, Hannerz 1990; Fornas 1992: 13, 17; Ehn 1992: 140; Amit-Talai & Wulff 1995:225; Bhabha 1996).
Along with the rest of these themes, however, talk of liminality (or filiminoidity?)faces the general question identified by Grossberg: all right, the focus is on releasefrom dominant structures, but is the identity of this all and only negative? Within thedenial of mainstream category systems, are there not alternative patterns andconventions with a positivity of their own (cf. Grossberg 1996: 92)? Are there notforms and conventions inside the borderlands, inside liminality, and if there are, whatdo they look like?
These are important questions for obvious reasons» You need to look insideliminality in order to gauge something of the character of the experience itself, andto see how far these periods of release are actually being used to establish alternativenorms and practices, moving beyond subversion to claim independence or victoryover the structures they oppose. Departures from routine life can3 after all, involveelements to fear and object to rather than to celebrate,7 and if there are structureswithin structures, how much freedom, potentiality, instability and dynamism canyou really attribute to breaches at any one level? Participants in a leisure activity maywell orient actively to not being at work and to domestic pressures being suspended,but might it not be that they are simply either being released into a new set ofbinding imperatives, or remaining within an old one—breaking out from theirprofessional duties but staying locked within the 'prison house5 of language?
The importance of these questions has, in fact, generally been recognised inethnographies of multiracial youth culture» They often begin both with a commit-ment to documenting the situated activities of everyday life and with a sense thatstrong local loyalties provide an important base for adolescent experiments withethnicity (for example, Aalund 1992: 92; Rogilds 1992: 156; Amit-Talai & Wulff1995: 227; Back 1996), and there have been a number of quite detailed accounts ofthe conventions and practices emerging in the breach of social structuring at anumber of different levels.
At the most general level, adolescence is itself often described as a filiminal5 phase(Hewitt 1992: 35; Wulff 1995: 1), and there are quite full accounts of the ritualpractices which youngsters develop to bring order and definition to their indetermi-nate position as neither children nor adults (cf. James 1986, 1995). At a differentlevel. Back talks of 'liminal ethnicities3 suspending the divisions between black andwhite youth in South London in the late 1980s, and as well as outlining the 'racial
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360 B. Rampton
absolutes' lined up against them (1996: 249), he describes the shared linguistic andinteractional practices, the processes of identification, and circumambient discoursesthat help to sustain them (1996). Dances and sound-system events are majorsources of support for these new ethnicities, and these too can be seen as liminal, inGilroy's ternis, "an alternative public sphere" sdispers[ing] and suspending] thetemporal and spatial order of the dominant culture" (Gilroy 1987: 210-216; Jones1988: 35, 44; Back 1995:144-148; Sharma 1996; Banerjea & Banerjea 1996; alsoRampton 1995a: 233-236). Here again, there are extensive discussions of theactivities, musics, discourses and moral, aesthetic and political sensibilities devel-oped within these periods of release from the pressures of mundane life (Gilroy1987: Chapter 5; Back 1996: Chapter 8), and indeed in my own work, I have alsorelated the notion of liminality to games and to male-female encounters in earlyadolescence (Rampton 1995a: Chapters 6*7, 13 & 10*8; on the latter, also forexample, Foley 1990: 33, 70, 95; Gillespie 1995: 41).
There has, then, been quite a lot of research on what youngsters do inside liminalframes of one size or another, and a lot of this reaches quite far down into detailsof the language and discourse that these frames give rise to (e.g* James, Gilroy,Back) „ Even so, in one crucial respect, talk and interaction are still massivelyunderexplored in the study of multiracial youth* A lot of scholars have minedinteractional and speech data in order to identify what people say and do once somekind of liminal state has been declared, and language and discourse are commonlyseen as a means for realising and maintaining the liminal spirit of adolescence, ofleisure time, of a dance or of a game* But what scholars in anthropology, sociologyand cultural studies have (quite understandably) missed, is that interaction is itselfa constant flow of structured practices that can be breached and interrupted, andbecause of this, day-to-day life presents dozens and dozens of small-scale opportuni-ties for minor adventures into liminality—opportunities, indeed, for the reworking ofoppressive relations which liminality is seen to permite In other words, even thoughthere may be some theoretical recognition of the possibility (cf. for example, Hall1996: 4), empirical research on new ethnicities has not generally gone very far downthe macro-micro scale of social structuring. Beneath (or maybe within) the institu-tional organisation of both official and vernacular culture, Goffman?s interactionorder itself provides a wealth of possibilities for the kinds of social creativity thatstudents of late modem ethnic processes find most interesting, and it is here, I think,that sociolinguistic research on interactional discourse can offer something useful.
At this point, it is worth discussing the issue of liminality in interaction in a bitmore detail*
Liminality in Interactional Discourse
The notion of liminality certainly is not new to the study of discourse and interac-tion. Drawing on Goffinan (1959) and Raymond Firth (1972), John Laver arguedin 1975 that the "stereotyped phrases **«, [the] commonplace remarks about theweather, and [the] small talk5 characteristic of greetings and partings could be"usefully described as a ceremony functioning as a rite of passage, easing and signally
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Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies 361
the transitions to and from conversational interactions5 (1975: 2183 234)3 and infact, Goffman's work takes much further the idea of people developing special kindsof behaviour to cope with the uncertainty of transition. "When individuals come intoone another's immediate presence/ says Goffman3 "territories of the self bring to thescene a vast filigree of trip wires which individuals are uniquely equipped to trip5
(1971: 106), and people are generally very mindful of Virtual offence53 of the
ever-present risk of 'overstepping the mark53 of blundering insensitively through our
continuously tended demarcations of the self. In pragmatics3 this worry aboutactions directed towards others being seen as either unwanted withdrawal orintrusion has been extensively elaborated in Brown and Levinson's theory ofpoliteness (1987), but for present purposes3 it is worth elaborating a bit more onGoffman's view of ritual as a way of dealing with these uncertainties.
Goffman regards ritual as a central dimension in all talk and interaction (1981),but in moments of heightened uncertainty., the call to show respect for social orderis intensified and people generally respond by intensifying the ritual dimensions oftheir conduct (Goffman 19673 1971). To do so3 they tend to briefly shift away fromthe (appropriately modulated) production of propositional utterances geared totruth and falsity, and instead turn up the ritual dimension through a range ofinherited symbolic formulae—farewell and greeting routines^ apologies^ thanks3
expletives3 expressions of dismay or surprise., even proverbs (Drew & Holt 19883
Luger 1983). By invoking well-established material authored by tradition3 theydisplay an orientation to wider social collectivities capable of overriding the tempo-rary disturbance immediately on hand. Very often3 these ritual actions are conver-gent, providing the participants with some common ground on which to(re) establish synchronised affiliative action3 drawing on a shared cultural inherit-ance3 affirming dominant social orders. But they can just as well be differentiating3
creating a sense of distance between (some of the) participants (cf. Goodwin 1990:Section 3). Furthermore3 as studies of ritual post-Durkheim have emphasised(Lukes 1975; Alexander 1988)3 rituals in stratified plural societies can also becounterposed to dominant values and beliefs5 and it is this potential for bothinterpersonal divergence and social/political dissidence that opens the interactionorder to the kinds of social creativity attended to in more macro-cultural accountsof multi-racial youth.
The idea3 then3 is that just as there are periods of indeterminacy and transition inthe life cycle (adolescence)., in just the same way that ein town halls and municipalbuildings in the inner city ... the spatial and temporal order of the dominant culture5
can be suspended and dispersed eas the sound system wires are strung up and thelights go down5 (Gilroy 1987: 210), so too in interaction are there plenty ofmoments of heightened indeterminacy3 a succession of small challenges to theparticipants5 concern with getting intact from what they are doing now to the actionsand activities coming next. In these often tiny periods of disruption to the routineflow of respectful conduct, the prospect opens up of 'social relations ... [being]discontinued., former rights and obligations ... [being] suspended3 the social order ...[being] turned upside down5 (Turner 1982: 273 cited in the previous section)3 andI would like to illustrate this with a little data of my own.
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362 B. Ramplón
As I have already mentioned^ my research focused on language crossing'—the useof Creole by youngsters of Anglo and Asian descent, the use of Panjabi byyoungsters of Anglo and African Caribbean descent^ and the use of Indian Englishby all three* These three kinds of crossing are all evidenced in the following extract^which usefiilly illustrates some of the characteristics that recurred again and again inmy corpus of observations^ interviews and radio-microphone recordings of informalrecreation (transcription conventions are given in the Appendix).
Extract 1
Participants. Asif (15 years old3 male3 Pakistani descent) 3 Kazim (15 years old3 male5
Pakistani descent) 3 Alan (15 years old3 male., Anglo descent).» Ben (the researcher/author, 30 + years old3 male., Anglo descent)*
Setting. 1987* Having recorded these three friends with radio-microphones duringtheir informal recreation3 Ben is trying to get some feedback on extracts from therecordings» But the boys are in high spirits^ Asif and Alan have just been talkingplayground Panjabi into the microphone from close up3 and Ben is now trying toreestablish their commitment to the listening activity* [11.15; A Ex 133 P Ex 156;FBS8: 272.]
right shall I- - shall we shall we stop thereno
on carry ondo another extract(.) I" then you have to give me more =
_ carry on= attention gents
2 Kazim:
4 Asif:5 Ben:6 Alan:7 Ben:8 Asif: ((D) yeh
((D)(00)
11 Ben:
16 Alan:
alrightalright
_yehmore attention
((in Indian English)): I AM VERY[ai <em veri son ben d3a:d]
((in Indian English)): ATTENTIF[sthenJcKn
"((laughter))right well you can-we cn-
LBENJAADEMINwe can continue but we er must concentrate amore
_yeh
21Alan:Asif
alright((in Indian English)):
(go on) then
[könsostf etifi veri GLJ(\
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Sociolinguistics and Cultural Studies 363
22 Ben: okay right23 ((giggles dying down))24 Kazim ((in Indian English)): what a stupid ( )
[vAd 3 stupid ]25 Ben ((returning the microphone to what he considers to be a better
position to catch all the speakers)): concentrate a little bit-26 Alan: alright then27 Kazim ((in Creole)): stop movin dat ting aroun
[dae? trrj oiaun]28 Ben: WELL YOU stop moving it around and then I'll won't
ight.stop moving dat ting aroun
29 need to (.) i30 Kazim ((in Creole)):
[d^? trrj 9jaun]31 Ben: right okay32 Kazim: BEN JAAD33 Alan: ((laughs))34 Ben: what are you doing35 Alan: ben jaa36 Ben:
ad.well leave ( ) alone
37 Kazim: IT'S HIM that ben jaad over there38 Ben: right((Ben continues his efforts to reinstitute the listening activity))
There are two general issues that I would like to address here. First3 the preciseinteractional siting of these switches3 particularly with regard to Creole and stylisedAsian English: in what ways do these uses of Creole and Asian English constitute oroccur within some kind of interactional liminality? Second., the processes of symbolicevocation involved in these switches away from ordinary vernacular English: is thereanything we can say about how alternative identities are actually forged in momentswhen normal social relations are suspended?
Ritual and c Remedial Interchanges5
Starting on the first issue3 it is obvious that the extract as a whole involves a periodof some uncertainty about the official activity that the participants are supposed tobe engaged in. My aim in asking these boys to listen to carefully selected extractsfrom my recordings of them was to get them to clarify what had been going on3 tocomment on striking bits of language use and so forth. The boys were very willingto give up their lunch break to do this., but it was very hard to keep them focused.,I was starting to feel a bit compromised3 and in line 1,1 was coming close to a finalbid to get them back £on task5.
The episode itself, then3 could be characterised as a struggle between two differentdefinitions of the situation (very approximately^ my research-oriented Retrospective-participant-commentary-on-extracts-of-recorded-data' versus their chavins-a-good-
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364 B. Rampion
time-listening-to-BenVtapes3). But within this higher level indeterminacy^ the pre-cise occasions in which the boys actually opted to switch language varieties are alsosignificant*
With all of the boys apparently keen to carry on5 in lines 5 and 7,1 laid down theconditions for continuing with the listening activity^ and I also implied that the boyshad made it pretty difficult hitherto and that it would be their own fault if westopped. Asif and Alan appear to accept the conditions«, and then a small sequenceof ritual remediation in stylised Asian English begins: Kazim apologises in line 12;Asif declares his allegiance in lines 13 and 21 to the kind of behaviour I was askingfor (in lines 5 and 7, 17 and 18); and Kazim seems to take my perspective in line24?s muttered disapproval» But of course^ none of this can be taken at face value.According to Goffman (1971), in apologies people split themselves into two parts—-the self that was guilty in the past, and now the new self that recognises the offenceand disavows the self of old* But where you might normally expect people apologis-ing for noisy disorder to signal the split by switching into relatively quiet3 serious3
sincere voices^ in this episode the boys apologise for messing around by moving intoa conspicuously false accent3 accompanying it with an equally contradictory loud-ness and hilarity.
In fact a moment later., just as I seem to be signalling 'back-to-business5 byrepositioning the microphone^ the boot moves to the other foot (so to speak)., Kazimswitches into Creole in line 27 and himself directs a 'prime5 towards me3 this timeconstructing my activity as an impropriety. Rather than a remedial sequence., thisleads to a short 'run-in*3 in which I account for my action by laying the offence withhim3 a move which he ignores by simply repeating his directive* I do not then takeissue with this3 but instead continue my efforts to reinstate the listening activity withsome optimistic boundary markers (sright3 okay3 right5«, lines 293 31 and 38). Theyrespond with £ben jaad5., a nickname for me in multiracial Panjabi, opaque to me atthe time3 but which I later learn is an interlanguage8 invention falling ambiguouslybetween [ben jar], meaning 'Ben., friend', and [pen tjod]3 'sister fucker'*
There is of course quite a lot more that could be said about this episode3 but themain structural point to make is that the boys switch into Asian English., Creole andPanjabi just at the moments when transgression and impropriety are made the focalissues* As I have already mentioned«, our sense of the common moral order ofeveryday life is temporarily jeopardised when infractions arise (cf. Garfinkel 1967)«,and more than simply seeking to repair whatever has been damaged or disrupted., welook for signs of where the actor stands more generally in relation to social rules andthe order we approve (Goffman 1971: 98). In the episode presented3 imputedtransgressions called for a display of participants3 wider regard for social norms andsanctions, but the boys refused this prompt and instead responded by switchingaway from the ordinary voices that might have authenticated their professed align-ment with the proprieties I was hoping fon
In fact, there are grounds for suggesting that by switching into the particularspeech varieties that they actually selected—Asian English«, Creole and Panjabi—theboys were doing rather more than simply withholding support for the norms anddecorum I was appealing to. By selecting these particular varieties*, the boys symbol-
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ically activated well-established domains of meaning in which a white man's moraljudgement might actually lose much of its legitimacy* By switching to Asian Englishin a sequence where they were bowing to my calls to order, the boys conjured astereotype of Asian £babus deference which is historically ensconced in white Britishracism and which can be depended on to embarrass a white liberal conscience. Theeffect here was to index race stratification as a potentially relevant issue in ourencounter, and this strategic racialisation was carried further in the switch to Creole.»a code associated with the rejection of illegitimate white power« The switch intomultiracial playground Panjabi worked on a slightly different tack: one of its effectswould seem to be to evoke a world of jocular peer group recreation., in which theoptimum role for a monolingual adult would be that of a benign but gullibleonlooker; another could be to maintain the ties with Alan, who was white like mebut who was also a regular participant in multiethic playground Panjabi.
This episode provides a glimpse, then, of how the interaction order itself providesa number of valuable sites both for the suspension of dominant orders and for theinvocation of alternatives (cf. Rampton (1995a) for extensive documentation ofothers). However, there is also another point to be made about the way in which theboys seemed to position themselves in relation to the symbolic voices they adopted,and this will allow us to elaborate a little on the way that interaction hosts thedynamic identity processes that cultural theorists and ethnographers of youth haveemphasised*
Double-voicing and the Dynamics of Identity
With the boys3 stylised Asian English, there was a fairly clear break between thedeferential words uttered through the ebabu3 persona on the one hand, and, on theother, the commitment to enjoyment on their own terms that they display muchmore generally through, for example, laughter, noise and nick-naming. In contrast,with Kazim's Creole., it is not at all clear that he does not mean what he says: thereare no other accompanying cues to suggest he is joking, and the switch starts asequence in which dispute is much more explicit than before (following Kazim3sbald imperative in line 27, there is a 'return and exchange3 move with a justificationfrom me (lines 28-29; cf. Goodwin 1990: 152-153, 163-165), and then some^recycling3 from Kazim (line 30; Goodwin 1990: 158)).
The difference illustrated here fitted with a very general pattern in my data: whenadolescents used Asian English, there was nearly always a wide gap between self andvoice; when they crossed into Creole, the gap substantially diminished* Both of thesepatterns seemed to fit with local adolescent views of the different social worldsindexed by each of these language varieties*
From interviews and other data., it was clear that, as well as its links with the babustereotypes Asian English was associated both with adults who had come to Englandfrom India and Pakistan (towards whom informants often expressed solidary senti-ments) and with recently arrived Bangladeshi peers (towards whom they weregenerally hostile: cf. Rampton (1988, 1995: Chapter 2.4) on the ambiguous andtroublesome connotations of Asian English). In all of its connotations, Asian English
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stood for a stage of historical transition that most adolescents now felt they wereleaving behind, and in one way or another, it consistently symbolised distance fromthe main currents of adolescent life. The gap between speaker and voice illustratedin the feigned deference in Extract 1 was just one interactional correlate of this.There was another in the way that stylised Asian English was used to criticiseagemates, and when Asian English was used to criticise a peer, either seriously or injoking, it was used as a ssay-for' (Goffman 1974: 535), a voice not being claimed aspart of the speaker's own identity but one that was relevant to the person beingtargeted. As such, it seemed to achieve its effect as a negative sanction by threaten-ing the recipient with regression, symbolically isolating them on a path of historicaldevelopment now abandoned by adolescents who had arrived at an endpoint theynow took for granted.
In contrast to the retrospective time frame conjured by Asian English, Creolestood for an excitement and excellence in vernacular youth culture which manyyoungsters aspired to, and it was even described as 'future language'. In line withthis, when it was used in interaction, Creole tended to lend emphasis to evaluationsthat synchronised with the identities that speakers maintained in their ordinaryspeech. Its use lent power to the speaker, and indeed when directed towardsdeviance., it often expressed approval.
These processes can in fact be articulated in the terms of Bakhtin's now veryfamiliar theory of double-voicing9—Bakhtin's idea of Vari-directional double-lan-guaging' can be applied to the self-voice opposition running through the many usesof stylised Asian English., while his £uni-directional double-languaging' describes themuch closer self-voice identification in Creole.
And so to summarise. Interaction not only affords points of indeterminacy whichbecome showcase moments for the symbolic display of one's social allegiance; it alsoinvolves a dynamics of self-projection which can be studied as a microscopiccounterpart to the notions of directional transition found in more macroscopicaccounts of liminal and new ethnicities. As has already been mentioned., the originalnotion of liminality involves a process of leaving one status and moving into anotherone, and when Back talks about iiminal ethnicities', he uses the terms Vacating' and'inhabiting' to describe the way white adolescents distance themselves from conceptsof white Englishness and move closer to black culture. But plainly, these processesdo not only occur over biographical time. They can be seen at work in intertextualityitself, and we can trace the movements of identity either with Bakhtin's ideas, orwith Goffman's more elaborate notions of animator, author, principal and figure.
I would like to finish with a few more general remarks about a sociolinguisticcontribution to the cultural analysis of new ethnicities.
Sociolingeistics and the Cultural Analysis of New Ethnicities
Broadly-based sociolinguistic discourse analysis brings into view a level of socialorganisation that has not been extensively analysed in studies of youth culture, butin a number of respects, its findings echo concepts current both in cultural analysesof art, film and music (for example, Gilroy 1987; Hall 1988; Mercer 1994) and in
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ethnographies of ordinary vernacular life (Gillespie 1995; Back 1996: 3-5). How-ever, is there anything particularly distinctive that this kind of analysis can usefullycontribute to the study of new ethnic formations?
Earlier^ I tried to show how liminality stretches right down into the fine details ofinteractions to the point where you can see participants trying to make some kind ofintersubjective sense of their worlds from one moment to the next3 and wheresomething like ambivalence can be observed as a participant experience (cf. Ramp-ton 1995a: 903 3193 1996). With more macro accounts3 terms like 'contradiction',"ambivalence3 and liminality sometimes seem to reflect the analyst's uncertaintyrather than that of their informants3 and without a detailed grounding in discoursedata., it can be hard to know how far a notion like liminality reflects processes thatreally lie beyond the rhetoric of analysis. So3 at the very least, one can say that thereis a useful validity check in keeping as close as possible to people's sense-makingprocedures in action.
Analysing micro-interaction also often means looking at phenomena that recurquite frequently3 in specific contexts that are themselves available for close inspec-tion. This was certainly the case with language crossing (where analysis had recourseto more than 450 instances)., and there were at least two significant consequences forthe emerging characterisation on interethnic processes.
First, it was clear that the crossing occurring in liminal moments was very varied.Some of the time3 it might be a matter of play., subversion and deceit, but at othermomentSj it could be much more seriously oriented to moral community, a trace ineveryday conduct of the collective effervescence experienced3 for example, in blackor Asian dance events.10 In tum3 this evidence of variation prevented too muchinterpretive dependence on notions of carnival that have been very influentialelsewhere (Bakhtin 1968; Gardiner 1992)—while the kinds of crossing exemplifiedin Extract 1 suggested a parallel, there were other kinds (such as white girls3 Panjabicrossover in the context of bhangra) where key elements of the carnivalesque wereabsent (cf. Rampton 1995a: 313-315).
Second3 through the use of radio-microphone recordings3 the naturalistic study ofmomentary actions usually generates a lot of contextual data on ordinary conductoriented to routine regulative norms3 and so when exceptional acts occur, there is noexcuse for analytic neglect of the surrounding realities that they deviate from. Thisis relevant to growing concern about 'hybridity talk3 in the discussion of multiracialyouth culture (Shamna et al 1996; Sharnia 1996)., where there is a temptationsimply to celebrate creativity and syncretism without detailed and comprehensivereference to encompassing contexts of inequality3 a temptation facilitated., forexample3 in the interpretation of isolated artistic performance texts (cf. Bauman1986). There is, of course3 no circumventing the difficulties involved in connectinginteraction to larger patterns of stratification (Cohen 1992)3 but if the data situateliminal acts within the flow of events and actions both before and afterwards^ thenthere is scope for examining those acts as micropolitical interventions in specificsocial relations there-and-then. As well as being empirically quite well-grounded3 theupshot is likely to be a rather differentiated account of the political significance offace-to-face activity^ as can be seen in the patterns to emerge in my own data. On
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368 B. Rampton
some occasions, stylised Asian English seemed probing or subversive, particularlywhen directed at white adults (who in turn could take it as threatening, embarrassingor simply inconsequential). But, on others, it constituted a crude form of racismitself» particularly when directed towards Bangladeshi peers.11
Of course, as well as helping to avoid some potential pitfalls in the analysis of newethnicities, broadly based sociolinguistic discourse analysis may also qualify orcontradict ideas formulated in cultural theory or ethnography. Elsewhere, I haveused Goffman's notions of self-talk, face-work and access ritual to question Hewitt'ssuggestion that some white adolescents use Creole in a completely unconstrainedway in the privacy of close friendship with black peers (Hewitt 1986: 187; Rampton1995a: Chapter 8.1), but close attention to the characteristics of the interactionorder can also be relevant in other settings.
Discussing an ethnically mixed district south of Stockholm, for example, Ehnsuggests that there is little evidence either of Swedes picking up non-Swedishcultural influences, or of c "creolised" culture in the activities, experiences andvalues of young people5 (1992: 142). Instead, he suggests that, on the whole,
Ethnicity and multiculturalism are operationalised through other waysamong young people. One way is through a de-emphasising of ethnicdifferences and another is through the creation of culturally 'neutral',"bridging3 areas of interaction. (Ehn 1992: 142.)
Obviously, there can be very important differences in the inter-ethnic processes atwork among young people in different regions, and the leading role played by blackAmerican and Caribbean culture in Britain may find no parallel in Sweden (Aalund1992; Ehn 1992). Even so, Ehn relies on interview discussions and rather dismissesit when the 'Swedes and other northern Europeans mention a few expletives inTurkish, Greek or Arabic5 (1992: 142). As well as neglecting Kotsinas5 work onlinguistic creolisation in multiracial areas (for example Kotsinas 1988, 1992), thisoverlooks the fact that there is a good deal of interactional subtlety and culturalcompetence involved in who swears how, where, when, to and with whom.
However perhaps the most important contribution of this kind of analysis lies inan extra flexibility it brings to the study of new ethnic processes. At the outset of thispaper, I briefly mentioned a division between studies emphasising creativity amongyouth and studies stressing conformity, and I suggested that this seemed to coincidewith researchers being interested in different institutional settings—one group con-centrating on relatively open, recreational settings such as clubs, dances, streets andplaygrounds, the other looking at more controlled environments like classrooms orworkplaces. There can be no doubt that there are significant differences in the spacefor innovation that these 'formai' and 'informal' venues allow, but these differencescertainly are not absolute and there are obviously plenty of small acts of creativedeviation in a constrained event like a lesson.
For researchers, the problem is that it is hard to be confident about dedicatingoneself to the analysis of innovation in an unpropitious setting like a classroom ifone is not tuned to the intricate systematics involved in Goffman's 'impressionmanagement, territories, performance teams, performance lines and loyalty, rituals
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of degradation^ character contests^ face work3 underiife«, collusion.» role distancing3
and frames5 (Foley 1990: 191, 192; also de Certeau 1984). So3 hitherto, the studyof new ethnicities and youth has neglected the crucial question of how the mixedidentities developed in recreation intersect with the cultural and sociolinguisticidentities promoted at work, school and college (Donald & Rattansi 1992: 40-41).
Sociolinguistic discourse analysis can help start to repair this neglect. The combi-nation of Goffman, Bakhtin, Conversation Analysis and the Ethnography of Com-munication12 provides a chance to explore the detailed contingencies that shape andconstrain contact and hybridisation as a situated processes in a range of settings, andit offers the prospect of uncovering symbolic practices with an intricate patterningthat we could not possibly anticipate. With a clear view of how interaction itselfprovides sites and processes for the symbolic exploration of social categorisation, wecan now try to look at formal institutional settings where there may not be anycanonical genres dedicated to the spectacular enunciation of new ethnicities, butwhere these new ethnic processes may be just as insistent and may have effects thatare just as decisive*
For sociolinguistics itself, there are very significant benefits coming from thisconnection with cultural theory and the study of new ethnicities: a much fullertheoretical discourse for considering the social; other ways of conceptualising ethnicprocesses; social and political relevance; fresh light on mainline topics like code-switching, intercultural communication, second-language learning, politeness, styleand language change.13 There is now a great deal of sociolinguistic research whichis methodologically both broad and supple enough to permit this linkage—the tasknow is to try to bring it to fruition.
Thames Valley University
Notes
[1] I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council to the Leverhulme Trust andto the British Association for Applied Linguistics for financial support for the empiricalresearch that this paper draws on.
[2] My research used the methods of the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1972) andinteractional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982), and it involved 2 years of fieldwork with 23young people, 11-13 years old, of Indian, Pakistani, African Caribbean and Anglo descentin 1984, and approximately 64 youngsters, 14-16 years old, in 1987. Data collectionfocused mainly on a youth club, and on lunch and breaktime recreation at schools, and itincluded radio-microphone recording (approximately 145 hours), participant observation,interviewing and retrospective participant commentary on extracts of recorded interaction.The analysis was based on about 68 incidents of Panjabi crossing, about 160 exchangesinvolving stylised Indian English, and more than 250 episodes in which a Creole influencewas clearly detectable in the speech of white or Asian youngsters.
[3] Language crossing can be defined as switching into a language or dialect that is notgenerally thought to belong to you. Crossing involves a distinct sense of movement acrosssocial or ethnic boundaries and whenever it occurs, it raises questions of legitimacy that inone way or another, people need to deal with—by joining in, by laughing, by studiouslyignoring it, by commenting on it, etc.
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[4] Indeed, formulations like these still have currency in national politics.[5] There is obviously now a significant tradition of very systematic discourse analysis in social
psychology, where race relations is also often a major concern (cf, for example, Wetherall& Potter 1992). However rather than providing ethnographically sensitive accounts of theemergence of new ethnicities, the emphasis tends to be on the production of racist discoursein interviews.
[6] For a fuller discussion in the context of my own research., see Rampton (1995a: Chapter7.9).
[7] Taking carnival as an instance of release from the dominant social order, it is worthremembering that while Bakhtin embraces carnival laughter as invariably healthy andsubversive, historically it has also involved racism and persecution (Gardiner 1992: 182).
[8] 'Interlanguage' is a term used in the study of second language learning. It refers to thegrammatical systems that language learners construct which often contain innovativestructures that appear in neither the learner's first language nor in the language they arelearning.
[9] With double-voicing, speakers use someone else's discourse (or language) for their ownpurposes,
inserting a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has ... anintention of its own. Such a discourse ... must be seen as belonging tosomeone else. In one discourse, two semantic intention appear, two voices.(Bakhtin 1984: 189.)
Bakhtin describes several kinds of double-voicing, and one of these is described as 'uni-direc-tional'. With uni-directional double-voicing, the speaker uses someone else's discourse 'inthe direction of its own particular intentions' (Bakhtin 1984: 193). Speakers themselves goalong with the momentum of the second voice, although it generally retains an element ofotherness which makes the appropriation conditional and introduces some reservation intothe speaker's use of it. But at the same time, the boundary between the speaker and the voicethey are adopting can diminish, to the extent that there is a 'fusion of voices'. When thathappens, discourse ceases to be double-voiced, and instead becomes 'direct, unmediateddiscourse' (199). The opposite of uni-directional double-voicing is varidirectional double-voicing, in which the speaker 'again speaks in someone else's discourse, but ... introducesinto that discourse a semantic intention directly opposed to the original one'. In vari-direc-tional double-voicing, the two voices are much more clearly demarcated, and they are notonly distant, but also opposed (193).
On Bakhtin's notion of double-voicing in sociolinguistics, see for example, Hill & Hill(1986), Cazden (1989), Fairclough (1992), and Rampton (1995a: Chapters 8.5 and 11.1).In cultural studies, see for example, Mercer (1994: 62) and Bhabha (1996: 57).
[10] On this very general difference, cf. Hewitt (1986) and Rampton (1995a: Chapter 10.6 and10.9); for resumes of some of the variation in my own data3 see for example, Rampton(1995a: 6.5, 6.6, 8.5).
[11] Again, for a much fuller account of the micro-political trajectories of SAE, Creole andPanjabi crossing, see Rampton (1995a, 1996).
[12] My own preference is for a synthesis that comes close to Gumperz's Interactional Sociolin-guistics (1982; cf. Rampton 1995a: Chapter 1.5).
[13] For some discussion of some mainstream sociolinguistic themes, cf. Rampton (1995a,b,1998).
Aalund A 1992 'Immigrant youth—transcultural identities', in C Palmgren, K Lovgren & G Bolin(eds) Ethnicity in Youth Culture Stockholm Youth Culture at Stockholm University 73-94.
Aalund A & R Granqvist (eds) 1995 Negotiating Identities Amsterdam Rodopi.
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Appendix
Transcription Conventions
bold = Creole or Indian English
[ ] = phonetic transcription
(.) = pause of less than a second
= overlapping speech
CAPITALS = loud
1. = quietly
(( )) = 'stage directions'
( ) = speech not clear
(go on) = speech not clear, but analyst guess
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