Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 606

Part of Session 142: Deconstructing the urban-rural dichotomy (Other abstracts in this session)

An Ecolinguistic Overcoming of the Rural-Urban Separation: the Multidimensional Landscape of the Valley of Mexico's Indigenous Communities.

Authors: Zunino, Francesca
Submitted by: Zunino, Francesca (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy, Italy)

The bilingual, multidimensional interrelations between the “traditionally rural” and the “new urban” identities and productive spaces of the predominantly Mazahuas and Nahuas indigenous communities in the Valley of Mexico’s megacity represent a creative example of these two spheres’ artificial separation’s overcoming. The “rural-urban” conventional ideological polarity can be analyzed as part of the Whorfian Standard Average European languages “cultural prerequisites” (Silverstein, 1977), “metaphors we die by” (Romaine, 1996; Goatly, 1996), and “false dichotomies” (Harré et al., 1999:117), disconnecting humans from the environment. The “Nature-Man/Culture” hiatus, one of these binary “core contradictions of our social praxis” (Bang & Døør, 1993), is a “pervasive … powerful and Westernised separation …, a boundary …” (Döring et Al., 2008:11) including explicit and implicit dichotomies and binomial metaphors as the “rural-urban”, “natural-supernatural”, “wilderness-peopled”, “powerful-vulnerable”, “anthropocentric-non anthropocentric”, etc. Thus, this predominant Eurocentrism has defined a competitive, fragmented universe representing a reductionist, reifying, quantifiable reality, contrasting with other languages’ holistic cosmovisions. It also diverges from contemporary linguistic research that reflects the world’s dynamic, hybrid complexity through systemic thinking and cross-disciplinary Gestaltic cooperation.

Therefore, “the very boundary between nature and culture is a linguistic construct” (Mühlhäusler, 2003:27), and it is decisive that social actors verbally-actively reconstruct the “urbanrural”, “naturalcultural” (Döring & Zunino, in press) integrated socio-ecosystemic interface. This can be appreciated examining the multidimensional linguistic, environmental “symbiotic interaction context” (Ávila, 2005:20) of many indigenous communities, both original and migrant, permanently urbanized and commuting, in Mexico City’s and its Valley’s metropolitan area. Despite the historical and modern forced castilianization, other integrationist policies and racist discourses (van Dijk, 2003), and also through intergroup solidarity and social movements for land and status maintenance , these indigenous communities are creating a dynamic “naturalcultural” stance. Their megalopolis-countryside frontier blurs into a constructive ecolinguistic landscape of urban agricultural-herbalist sustainable knowledge and practices, socio-economic interactions and cultural visibility, resourceful diglossia and bilingualism (with crosslinguistic influences and transfers mostly between Spanish and Nahuatl/Mazahuan), where the two languages, identities and environments extraordinarily converge and exchange inclusive outcomes.

References.

Ávila, H. (ed.) (2005) Lo Urbano-Rural, ¿Nuevas Expresiones Territoriales? Cuernavaca: UNAM

Bang, J.C., & Døør, J. (1993) Eco-linguistics: a Framework. In AILA ‘93 (pp. 31-60). Online, http://www.jcbang.dk/main/ecolinguistics/Ecoling_AFramework1993.pdf

Döring, M., Penz, H. & Trampe, W. (eds.) (2008) Language, Signs and Nature. Tübingen: Stauffenburg

Döring, M. & Zunino, F. NatureCultures in Old and New Worlds. In S.V. Steffensen & A. Fill (eds.) Language Sciences, Special Issue (in press)

Goatly, A. (1996) Green Grammar and Grammatical Metaphor, or Language and Myth of Power, or Metaphors we Die by. Journal of Pragmatics (25):537-560

Harré, R., Brockmeier, J. & Mühlhäusler, P. (1999) Greenspeak. London: Sage

Mühlhäusler, P. (2003) Language of Environment, Environment of Language. London: Battlebridge

Romaine, S. (1996) War and Peace in the Global Greenhouse: Metaphors we Die by. Metaphoric and Symbolic Activity (11), 3:175-194

Silverstein, M. (1977) Cultural Prerequisites to Grammatical Analysis. In M. Saville-Troike (ed.) Linguistics and Anthropology (pp. 139-151). Georgetown: University Press

Van Dijk, T. (2003) Dominación Étnica y Racismo Discursivo en España y América Latina. Barcelona: Gedisa

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

An Ecolinguistic Overcoming of the Rural-Urban Separation: the Multidimensional Landscape of the Valley of Mexico's Indigenous Communities.