My research has been guided by an interest in the relation between language and the ethnographic description of social life, particularly authority and its various  institutional forms: ritual, clinical, classrooms, and courtrooms. Drawing on extensive audio and videotaped recordings collected as part of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, and analyzed in their social, cultural and historical context, I ask the following questions: how can we describe how people use language to represent their social lives to one another? Specifically, how do they use language to construct authoritative representations in classrooms, clinics, and courtrooms? How have these representations changed over time? Why and with what consequences?

1.  I first developed an interest in these questions as part of my ethnographic and linguistic research on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, begun in 1978. My first book, Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), investigated how the Weyewa highlanders of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba used a lively, and richly poetic form of couplet speech (tenda) to construct and establish ceremonial authority of the course of an elaborate series of misfortune rituals. The book argues that the process of "entextualization" (or "inscription" [li'i]) guiding this series of events is not only a formal linguistic process, but also a social and institutional one, in which ritual ideologies are articulated in de-contextualized, and more authoritative terms.

2. In 1988, however, I began to find evidence that the central authority once held by ritual speakers was rapidly eroding. Children no longer learned to speak it, and massive conversions to Christianity were underway.  In a second book Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia  (Cambridge University Press, 1998),  I argued that one cannot simply view these linguistic changes as passive reflections of external forces of material development,  modernization or coercion, forces with which Sumbanese somehow calmly complied. One must look instead at the vibrant ways in which Weyewa attitudes, beliefs and perception towards their own language have shifted. I argue that these changes did not begin in the late 1980's but had their roots much earlier, with the arrival of Dutch administrators and missionaries in the late 19th century. This provided the conditions for dynamic, ideological processes described in the chapters that follow: 1) dispersal from centers of ceremonial authority; 2) the marginalization of 'anger;' 3) the expansion of the spectator/audience role; 4) the narrowing of practices of verbal reference; 5) the radical erasure of the diversity of a ritual speech field of practices and modes of learning.
     Following the fortunes of a special style of speech has broad benefits for the study of language change.  By focussing on something self-consciously "special" and ideologically marked off from the ordinary ways of talking syntactically and pragmatically, ritual speech offers a privileged place from which to witness the operation of ideology as it organizes the language shifts associated with modernization and development; in the case of West Sumba, from center to margin, trunk to tip, whole to part, from speaker to spectator. These processes show how the very definition of what a language is, where and when it is spoken, how it functions, how it is organized, are all crucially mediated by language ideologies. Although the process of language change has been assumed to be a relatively unconscious process of "drift", not subject to "secondary rationalization" (as Boas once put it), the active and demonstrable role that these relatively conscious attitudes towards liturgical languages has played suggests that language ideologies have a profound impact on the nature and direction of linguistic change. In short, it has major implications for long held views about how languages change.

3. Psychiatric discourse. From 1999-2001, I extended my interests in language and authority in clinical, educational and legal contexts in the U.S. and Indonesia. Drawing on the resources provided by an NSF funded laboratory for advanced video analysis of discourse, I now have several simultaneously active projects underway involving collaborative research with colleagues in fields of law, psychiatry and high school science pedagogy, proposals that include ample support for graduate students.  For example, together with a clinical psychiatrist (Dr. Joyce Chung) at Georgetown University, I worked on an NIH-funded project devoted to investigating the role of verbal interaction in the efficacy of treatments for depression among an under-served population of low income, African American women in the Washington DC area. With the help of a team of anthropology graduate and undergraduate students funded by the grant, we developed a unique database of transcribed, videotaped interviews that documented the entire 4 to 6 month course of treatment. These data provided the basis for systematic analysis of changes in the use of the speech as the treatment progresses, changes we suspect are linked in crucial ways to the efficacy of the treatment on the one hand, and to shifts in explanatory models of illness and its institutional context on the other.
 

4. Science classroom study. Since 2001, I've been examining how children use language to construct scientific authority in middle school classrooms. This study is a video ethnography of diverse learners in suburban Washington D.C. as they experience highly rated science curriculum units. Focusing on the use of scientific terminology, literacy practices and object manipulation, we compare the ways in which different curriculum units affect the students' patterns of participation. Results from the study will contribute not only to debates about equity in US education, but also the role of verbal interaction in the reproduction of scientific knowledge. To learn more about this $5.2 million NSF-funded project, visit http://www.gwu.edu/~scale-up. Since 2002, I've been collaborating with Gail Viechnicki, and since 2006 with Laura Wright, on the ethnographic and linguistic analysis of middle school science discourse.

5. Linguistic Piety in Central Java. As part of my interest in authoritative discourses, beginning in the fall of 2010 I will be studying Javanese and Arabic in order to gather data on the ways in which Javanese express and interpret piety through language. With the support of a Fulbright grant, I plan to go to Jogjakarta in February of 2011 for five months to research this topic. Since I will be examining how children learn piety through the use of the Arabic script, this is connected to my interests in sacred scripts and ideologies of literacy in island Southeast Asia.  A paper delivered in Tokyo on December 16-19, 2003 can be found at Insular Southeast Asian Scripts

Joel Kuipers' Curriculum Vitae