This paper focuses on the ways in which speakers make reference to themselves, to one another, and to objects in the everyday settings of talk. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, it proposes an approach to language based on the concepts of communicative practice, deictic field, and socially constituted objects of reference. Found in all human languages, deictics are expressions like English "this," "that," "here," and "there" whose meanings depend strictly on the occasions of their use. This paper critically examines current approaches to deixis, proposes an alternative framework based on the sociological concept of field, and applies this framework to deictic practice in Yucatec Maya. Drawing on the work of Buhler, Goffman, and Bourdieu, it adapts the field concept to the semiotic structure of deixis. The result is an analysis of deictic practice as an emergent construal of socially embedded deictic fields involving practical equivalences, counterpart relations among objects, and rules of thumb.

My dissertation describes the ethical practices and discourses that structure face-to-face interaction among rural Muslims in the mountainous areas of the Dhofar region of the Sultanate of Oman. I locate this ethics within communicative practices of concealment and circumspection that operate on the spatial arrangements of interlocutors. As a matter of the practice of Islam, attention to how one is spatially accessible to an interlocutor is informed, on one hand, by an ethical injunction for the individual to disinvest from this world (dunya) and consider the afterlife (āxira), and on the other by the necessity of social interaction: the contact with others that hospitality and sociability entail is also desired, ubiquitous, and provisioned by God. The communicative practices I detail -- ways of moving the body, sitting, displaying and concealing affect, as well as forms of talk -- constitute an 'ethical stance' on social relations and push past gendered questions of modesty to describe a spiritual discernment about spatial relations that links concealment in social space with responsibility, self-evaluation, and contemplation of (āxira). This dissertation is based on two years of fieldwork conducted in a mountain homestead, living with speakers of Śẖerēt Modern South Arabian, an unwritten minority language related to Arabic. I focus on the homestead as the main site of sociable interaction, and the primary space in which Islam is lived and instructed for this community. I do so in two parts. Part One lays out the built and social dimensions and everyday activities that constitute the 'domestic' where this ethics is practiced. Part Two qualifies and locates semiotic practices of concealment in sociable interaction, as well as the corporeal, contemplative, and corrective forms of attention to one's own and others' conduct that point to and shape the problem of being around others. Part One describes the topography and routes of transit in the region, the built space of homesteads, and patterns and genres of daily activity and sociability, as well as kinship, in order to qualify and establish hospitality interaction and the structuration of domestic space as the dominant framings for sociality. I locate interactional conduct as construing and managing specific relations of exposure between people, applying analytics of 'accessibility' to identify the structured channels by which these relations are understood. I argue that spatial relations of exposure in terms of visibility, kinship and acquaintance, surveillance, and shared networks trace gendered differences in the experience and structure of contexts within which ethical concealment is practiced. Part Two details the normative practices of withdrawal and circumspection that enact this ethics of concealment. One chapter focuses on hospitality interactions with guests, seating plans, gaze, and paths for walking through and around hospitality interactions. Another chapter relates the covering of male and female bodies to the practice of 'acting comfortable' by which affect, personal information, and deixis are concealed, smoothed over, and unmoored from present circumstances in order to create an appearance that is both affable and impersonal. These normative communicative practices work to conceal, modulating accessibility in space as an ethical question of interpersonal exposure. The final two chapters raise the question of the danger and consequentiality of exposure. A chapter details the sensation of xizzet, a feeling of shame and shyness, that constitutes a corporeal discernment about spatial relations, in the terms laid out above. The final chapter relates conversations about eschatology, responsibility, and receiving others that construct this ethics of accessibility as an ambivalent stance, where selves are both attendant to the social world, yet must seek a subjective position outside of it.

This dissertation examines the social and interactional foundations of a grammatical divergence between Tactile American Sign Language (TASL) and Visual American Sign Language (VASL) in the Seattle DeafBlind community. I argue that as a result of the pro-tactile movement, structures of interaction have been reconfigured and a new language has begun to emerge. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research, more than 190 hours of videorecordings of interaction and language use, 50 interviews with members of the community, and more than 14 years of involvement in a range of capacities, I analyze this social transformation and its effect on the semiotic organization of TASL.

I identify two processes as requisite for the emergence of TASL: deictic integration and embedding in the social field. Deictic integration involves the coordination of grammatical systems with modes of access and orientation that are reciprocal across a group of language-users. Embedding in the social field involves: (1) the legitimation of the language for taking up valued social roles, along with the embodied knowledge necessary for doing so, and (2) authorization of some language-users to evaluate linguistic forms and communicative practices as correct or not.

In this dissertation, I track these processes among DeafBlind people and I show how they are leading to new mechanisms for referring to the immediate environment and tracking referents across a stream of discourse (Chapter 7), new rules for the formation of lexical signs (Chapter 8), and a new system for generating semiotically complex signs, which incorporate both linguistic and non-linguistic elements (Chapter 9). In order to understand the social and interactional foundations of these emergent systems, I examine the history of two institutions around which the Seattle DeafBlind community was built (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I show how social roles, given by the history of those institutions, were reconfigured by DeafBlind leaders and how this led to changes in modes of access and orientation (Chapters 5 and 6). I argue that as relations between linguistic, deictic, and social phenomena grew tighter and more restricted, a new tactile language began to emerge. I therefore apprehend language emergence not as a process of liberation or abstraction from context, but as a process of contextual integration (Chapter 1).

This dissertation centers on two sites in deaf Nepal to examine how the relationship between communication and sociality is constituted, negotiated, and discussed in circumstances when language cannot be taken for granted.

The decades following the founding of Nepal's first deaf school in 1966 have witnessed the simultaneous emergence and dissemination of "deaf society" and the communicative practices now known as Nepali Sign Language (NSL). Despite growing numbers of deaf-run organizations and educational facilities for the deaf, NSL signers still constitute a very small percentage of all deaf Nepalis. This dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork with both NSL signers and with deaf people who communicate using what NSL signers call "natural sign," a limited repertoire of signs shared by deaf and hearing people.

The first part of the dissertation focuses on NSL signers in Kathmandu. Drawing on participant-observation and video-recorded speeches, interviews, and conversations, I show that older NSL signers remember - and take credit for - the emergence of NSL as an historical event, that younger NSL signers recall acquiring it in childhood or even adulthood, and that NSL signers of all ages also regularly use natural sign to communicate with hearing people and deaf people who do not know NSL. Shaped by this particular sociolinguistic field, I argue, NSL signers both value NSL and recognize that communication is possible in its absence. Yet the latter, deaf discourses reveal, is characterized by interactional vulnerability, as hearing people in particular may treat deaf people as unintelligible.

The second part of the dissertation concentrates on my research in Maunabudhuk and Bodhe Village Development Committees (eastern Nepal) with participants in an NSL class for adults. Through participant-observation and video-recordings of interactions, I analyze signers' extant everyday communicative practices with each other, with hearing family members and neighbors, and with the deaf NSL teacher. I show that interactions in "local sign," as Nepali speakers in the area say, are characterized by a high degree of conventionality, as well as by a patchwork of understanding and not-understanding. In the final chapter I track how hearing participants in signed conversations display and enact shifting orientations that both reflect and affect the possibilities and limitations of unfolding interactions. Echoing NSL signers' own critique of deaf-hearing relationships, I demonstrate that the production of deaf people as intelligible signers requires willing addressees.

The dissertation makes five inter-related contributions to research at the intersection of linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, sign language linguistics, and Deaf Studies. First, it offers detailed ethnographic descriptions of deaf society in Kathmandu and of deaf villagers in eastern Nepal. Second, it provides fine-grained analyses of interactional practices among deaf and hearing local signers and between deaf local signers and an NSL signer. Third, it demonstrates that natural and local signing practices exceed scholarly categories of signed communication. Fourth, it reveals how communication, particularly when the linguistic system is lean and unevenly shared, is fundamentally ethical in nature. Finally, it brings together academic and deaf NSL signers' own theories to analyze the ethics of communication.

Using the Practice Theory Approach to Language, this dissertation examines how social actors use communicative practices within activities to constitute a communicative context that I call the American English Stuttering Speech Community (AESSC). Building on previous linguistic research on stuttering and sociological research on collectives of persons-who-stutter, I expand upon and diverge from many of the available analytical models and conceptual frameworks. Contrary to previous work in linguistics and speech pathology that locates stuttering as a disability, I argue for conceptualizing stuttering as sociolinguistic variation (i.e., linguistic behavior partly driven by social context). Moreover, I extend previous ethnographic research in sociology that positions collectives of persons-who-stutter (PWS) as "self-help groups." I reposition these collectives as part of a broader "speech community," which entails participation in particular discursive activities in addition to sharing linguistic form. The dissertation, thus, analyzes the AESSC as a communicative context established by numerous groups over time that (1) organize around stuttering as a kind of linguistic variation and (2) develop speech genres and activities that reconfigure the interactional identities of "speaker" and "hearer," and other facets of social organization.

To develop this argument, I analyze data from audio-visual recordings and transcripts of face-to-face, naturally-occurring interactions of meetings from three California chapters in the "Stuttering Organization of America" (SOA, pseudonym). My dissertation is structured in the following manner. Chapter One introduces the research question, analytical framework, and relevant background literature used in the study. Building off a previously unexplored hypothesis by Landar (1961), Chapter Two argues for a linguistic analysis of stuttering forms as variational duplication and uses field recordings of naturally-occurring interaction. This chapter also presents a formal definition of stuttering as variation, with a specific focus on American Stuttering English (ASE). Chapters Three and Four analyze two routine genres in SOA as socioculturally-situated activities that are interdiscursive with and provide new perspectives on prior types of speech events. "Introductions" (Chapter Three) allow ASE speakers to re-negotiate the act of saying one's name, construct a self within interaction that signals the stance "I am more than my speech," or complex personhood, and constitute interactants as members of the community. The "talking circle" (Chapter Four) analysis demonstrates how interactants use verbal art (e.g., narrative) as performance to implicitly recreate aesthetics of good/bad speech, jointly negotiate evaluations of one's linguistic style, and, indirectly, produce an alternative linguistic market that recognizes ASE speakers as effective public speakers. Finally, I analyze how social actors, through media literacy practices within face-to-face and computer-mediated discourse practices, negotiate different alignments towards each other, their speech, and representations of their speech through mainstream media genres (e.g., jokes and human-interest stories featured in films and electronic media). Chapter Six summarizes the findings and suggests the theoretical, conceptual and methodological implications of the work.

In sum, using the AESSC as a case study, the dissertation contributes insights to linguistic anthropology. This study analyzes how persons, in a particular sociohistorical context, jointly accomplish (a) the construction of linguistic forms and their multiple meanings; (b) the discursive activities of which these forms are a part of; and (c) the identities and collectives that these activities constitute.

My dissertation, The Aftermath of Empire: Memory, History, and Time in Adjara, Georgia analyzes the forms that historical memory takes in everyday cultural practices in Adjara, an autonomous region of the Republic of Georgia. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I focus on the legacy of this region’s history as a frontier province of the Ottoman Empire. I argue that, for a deeper understanding of Georgia and the larger Caucasus region, it is crucial to analyze Adjara and Georgia as inheritors to an Ottoman imperial past, and to content with how Georgian Muslims see themselves as stewards of this tradition, reinventing and reengaging it for the unfolding post-Soviet, post-Rose Revolution historico-political present.

Chapter One, “Absences, Gaps, and Desire: Batumi’s Imperial Frontier,” tells the hazy story of Ottoman Adjara, its port capital Batumi, and its place within the empire as a frontier land abutting the Russian and Persian Empires. I discuss Adjara’s place within the eastern Black Sea region centered around Trabzon, as a site of banditry and smuggling, exile and transience. I discuss the “reunification” of Ottoman Georgia with the rest of the Georgia under the Tsar in 1878, and related assimilation projects of Tbilisi-based Georgian intelligentsia. Finally, I write analyze Batumi today as “post-modern” dystopian resort city of fantasy, desire, and escape, but also an everyday urban center for Adjarian villagers. I end with the story of becoming fooled by my own desire for a field, and the entrapment and extortion I suffered as a result.

Chapter Two, “Accounting for Origins: Names, Narratives, and Ancestors,” analyzes family lines and narratives of origin as told in a village in Khulo, Adjara. I explore the evidentiary status of a select few of these narratives, elaborating on the dual system of naming that exists in Adjara: one family name that derives from an Ottoman-era ancestor and suffixed with the Turkish ‘—oghli’ meaning ‘sons of,’ and one Georgian family name, gvari, adopted by a section of a village, thus indicating geographic provenance rather than kin. I discuss the multi-layeredness of kinship, residence, and hospitality in cementing a sociality across historical ruptures through narratives of origins and ancestors.

Chapter Three, “Funerals, Traces, Transitions: Transhumance from Here to There,” analyzes the relationship between kinship, memory, and land in the village in Khulo, Adjara. I discuss seasonal labor movements in Adjara between city and mountains, as contrasted with the anchoring role of villages and, in particular, of gravesites. Gravesites act as anchors to land and belonging, as well as portals to the past, transforming the landscape into an archive of local memory. I end this chapter with an ethnographic account of a funeral, exploring the ways that death and burial concretize the relationship between inheritance, kinship, and land, establishing the power of the grave as a temporal anchor, a portal to other times.

In the final Chapter Four, “Time and the End: The Nexus of History and the Divine,” I give an account of a sermon on the end times in a Quran school in Khulo, Adjara. I ask how the discussion of knowledge of the divine in this sermon outlines a way of understanding the nexus of historical time and divine time in this particular site marked by historical rupture and co-existing temporalities. I explore how the use of linguistic markers of reported speech and evidentiary status during the sermon figures for the temporal relationship between historical time and divine time in Khulo. I discuss the contested translation of the Quran into Georgian, analyzing a misunderstanding that arises as emblematic of the multiply enfolded positionalities of Georgian Muslims that they attempt to commensurate in this post-Ottoman, post-Soviet time of a newly unfolding present.

Through an analysis of slam poetry performance in Madagascar, where poets are encouraged to express themselves freely but also to “manage” this freedom, this dissertation illuminates how speakers determine what kinds of speech are possible and appropriate in various contexts, how they perform authority, and how they anticipate and manage the consequences of their speech. Slam—a performance poetry competition created in Chicago in the 1980s—has become a popular literary and social movement around the world, but in Madagascar it has flourished in a context that includes pre-colonial genres of verbal art that are central to everyday life and to politics. In many of these genres, and especially in kabary—a form of oratory that ceremonializes major social and political events—public speech has long been reserved for elder men. Slam’s insistence on “free expression” thus constitutes a radical break from long-standing notions of the social roles and risks associated with public speech. As slam poets and audiences navigate the terrain of “managed freedom” in live events as well as videos that circulate online, they forge an entirely novel mode of authoritative public discourse on the slam stage and the Facebook page in a plurilingual and rapidly urbanizing postcolonial context.

This research, based on a total of twenty-two months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in multiple cities across Madagascar and in Paris, France, advances scholarly debates on performance, aesthetics, media, embodiment, and politics. It is also a timely intervention into the fierce debates currently raging around the possibilities and limitations of liberal framings of “free speech.” This dissertation treats the concept of free speech as historically and contextually specific rather than abstract and generalizable, and illuminates how speakers balance liberal discourses of individual freedoms with notions of responsibility and accountability, dialogic authority, and embodied relationality.

Most previous work examining co-speech gestures (the spontaneous bodily movements and configurations we engage in during speaking) has emphasized the importance of their most salient or energetically expressive moments, known as gesture 'strokes' (Kendon 1980). In contrast, in this dissertation I explore the potential functions of intervals of gestural stasis, or gesture 'holds', in which the hands or body maintain particular configurations across variable spans of time, interwoven with the stream of speech. Through the embodiment of a constant form within continuously evolving face-to-face interactions, holds make possible a unique and understudied array of functions relating to the maintenance of ideas and contexts across time.

Chapter 1 introduces the corpus of videotaped dyadic conversations from which all of the examples are drawn, discusses the history of the concepts of 'stroke' and 'hold', and illustrates the structural possibilities for the timing of holds with respect to co-expressive speech: they bear content that is not just simultaneous with, but also 'retrospective' and/or 'prospective' of, portions of the full composite utterances in which they occur.

Chapter 2 illustrates that holds lasting across pauses and disfluencies support continued expressiveness and interpretability, alternately presaging new content that will also be part of a fluent resumption, or maintaining retrospective links to prior content that can contextualize the resumption.

Chapter 3 discusses the frequent expressive complementarity of co-timed speech and gesture, as it relates to the debate on speech-gesture synchrony, and further demonstrates that preliminary commitments to utterances are often partially fulfilled from the earliest moments because of gestural cues that are interpretable at all points of their lifecycles, including preparatory phases.

Chapter 4 discusses the implications for attention and memory of gesture holds acting as temporary cognitive artifacts, forming 'bridges' across interruptions and competing representations by interlocutors, thereby functioning retrospectively as 'recall cues' to previous moments of the interaction.

Chapter 5 focuses on instances of gesture holds combined with listener-directed gaze that are maintained across turn transitions, then released, allowing speakers to 'hand off' control while enforcing a context for the next turn.

Chapter 6 synthesizes the preceding chapters and suggests directions for future research.