UCLA

The goal of this research is to contribute to academic conversations that rethink how we can identify and represent group interests and motivations without minimizing group-internal diversities of individual perspective and experience. This topic is vital to linguistic study of minority groups, especially Indigenous communities that are often uncritically portrayed as static, monolithic, or “removed” from the contemporary world. This linguistic anthropology research revisits the concept of “ideological clarification” in the case of an organization of Ryukyuan language activists called Okinawa Hands-On that operates out of Okinawa Prefecture in Japan. Through an analysis of texts produced and presented by this organization at a “cultural lecture,” I formulate the concept of multiplicities to suggest a view of ideological clarification as fragmented, iterative and revisable. I emphasize the theoretical application/approach of (inter)textuality as a means of identifying the various indexical practices (e.g. valorizing Ryukyuan languages through appeals to historical “diversity”) that are differentially applied by activists involved in the “same” goal of ideological clarification.