Doctoral Dissertation Research: Listen So You Can Live Life the Way it's Supposed to be Lived: Paradoxes of Secrecy, Dictionary and Text at a New Mexico Pueblo

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The research supported by this Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant examines dictionary creation and emergent literacy in a New Mexico Pueblo community, and how local ideologies privileging secrecy are reconfigured during the process of creating a dictionary, the first text produced as part of the community's language revitalization program. The decision to create written materials in this historically oral language is seemingly at odds with the linguistically and culturally conservative reputation many tribes in the US Southwest share and the local importance placed on controlling both intra- and intercommunity circulation of cultural knowledge. Example sentences constructed for each entry diverge from the Western tradition in lexicography which conceptualizes such sentences as tools useful for disambiguating lexical items, and instead center on imparting necessary cultural information, imploring readers to "Listen so you can live life the way it's supposed to be lived," as one such sentence explicitly instructs. Thus, the dictionary emerges as a paradoxical object: seen as a tool necessary for preserving the ancestral language, but potentially at odds with locally-held beliefs regarding secrecy; at once a neutral reference work and a potential place for creatively including salient cultural information. The two research questions at the center of this project are situated against this instance of textual production. The first area of inquiry examines the nature of dictionaries as texts. If texts articulate the social conditions of their production and projected futures, what kinds of understandings about how texts work apply to dictionaries? The second aim of the proposed study concerns how example sentences are functioning within this document, and how language ideologies privileging secrecy are being re-imagined during the creation of example sentences. Employing ethnographic fieldwork, comparative lexicography, and linguistic analysis, this dissertation informs conceptions of secrecy and emergent literacy, studies of the grammar of Kiowa-Tanoan languages, and examinations of prevalent discourses involving language revitalization. This award is co-funded by the Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology Programs in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.