
Series
Volume 3
Studies in Linguistic Anthropology
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Language and Political Subjectivity
Stancemaking, Power and Politics in Chile and Venezuela
Miki Makihara and Juan Luis Rodríguez
210 pages, 7 ills., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-83695-035-6 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (July 2025)
eISBN 978-1-83695-033-2 eBook Not Yet Published
Reviews
“This is an exciting and important book. The analyses draw on a unique and interesting set of texts that powerfully demonstrate the usefulness of stancemaking for understanding political discourse.” • Rusty Barrett, University of Kentucky
Description
Politics and power are understood as interconnected yet opposed forms of agency that do not exist without each other and depend on transgressions and the upholding of social boundaries. Language and Political Subjectivity is an ethnographic and historical piece of research that considers how Indigenous and diasporic communities, with their political subjectivities, expand over significant sociohistorical changes, debates, and struggles in the transformation of Chilean democracy and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. It offers an innovative approach to stancemaking as a rhetorical semiotic process that produces truth, beliefs, and certainties about social realities and relations.
Miki Makihara is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the co-editor of Consequences of Contact (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Juan L. Rodríguez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta (Bloomsbury, 2021).