Social Persona Research Articles

What a Desirable Woman Is Like: Hsia Moon and the Cultural Agenda of Leftist Film Companies in Hong Kong, 1951–1966

Hsia Moon (Xia Meng) was a famous leftist film star in postwar Hong Kong, whose social persona was tailored for specific cultural purposes under the prevailing star system. Her early cinematic roles generally portrayed exemplars of women’s empowerment, as derived from the programmatic ideas of the New Culture Movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. But from 1958 onward, Hsia Moon’s characters began to transform in a more traditional and family-oriented direction. In her film Garden of Repose (1964), for example, the female protagonist voluntarily retreats into the family space, offering a quite different answer to the question of women’s liberation. While this story, one among many, threatened to undermine Chinese women’s painstaking struggle for individual freedom that had been in train for many decades, Hsia Moon’s well-maintained social persona justified the harmonious landscape of family life and conjugal relations, redefining women’s family-oriented position as a kind of “Chineseness.” This Chineseness was not limited to the artistic level. Rather, it was a sociocultural representation of leftist filmmakers’ nostalgic memory of their distant homeland, that is, Mainland China itself. And at another level, Chineseness also embodied the Chinese Communist Party’s desire to maintain cultural ties with British-controlled Hong Kong through the political metaphor of a “big family,” which in China’s prescribed hierarchical order alluded to the state. In this sense, Hsia Moon and her characters provided an alternative option to women’s empowerment within the master narrative of the nation-state and the cinematic star system helped shape that narrative.

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This article explores rhotacisation in Beijing Mandarin and its use in the popular 2015 Chinese web series Counterattack! (Nìxí zhi Àishàng Qíngdí), notable for its viral success in China despite overt homosexual representation. Research on sociolinguistic variation among professionals in Beijing has identified Beijing rhotacisation (the r-colouring of syllable codas) as indexing a local male persona historically linked to fluidity of conversation: the ‘Smooth Operator’. The current analysis builds on this claim to suggest that rhotacisation may also be used to evaluate and display sexual knowledge. The use of rhotacisation in Counterattack! stylistically incorporates ‘Smooth Operator’-imbued meanings of conversational dexterity into a new social persona: the ‘Sexual Modern’. The analysis suggests that this variable – previously discussed as indexing a local urban masculinity – has now also become indexical of sexual modernity.

Performance and Professional Identity Construal in Inter-industry Networking Using Four Identity Categories

‘What do you do?’ is a stereotypical networking question. How professionals answer acquaintancing questions like this when first meeting sheds light on how identity is construed. Using data from a naturally occurring networking event for elite professional services in Hong Kong, this paper uses a close study of interaction and follow-up interviews to identify and examine proximal networking mechanisms and processes. Consistently, participants used some amalgam of emblems, things that convey a social persona, from four different categories: industry (e.g., finance), professional role (e.g., FX trader), organizational affiliation (e.g., Morgan Stanley), and hierarchical position (e.g., associate). These generate evaluations of projected/absent instrumental gain, holistic eliteness, ‘interestingness’, and social proficiency (based on how they are deployed), resulting in symbolic capital transforming into (un)realized and projectible material outcomes. Theoretically, these findings contribute to our understanding of networking mechanisms. Practically, they can improve self-presentation, inform organizations of exclusionary effects, and enhance networking strategies.

The Burdened Body: Byzantine Enkolpia and the Weight of the Sacred

Abstract Few products of human artistry seem as insistently concerned with self-representation as jewelry. In Georg Simmel’s classic formulation, articles of personal adornment work to enhance an individual’s social persona by magnifying their Ausstrahlung. While medieval Christian devotional jewels were well-equipped to operate in this manner, their true significance lay elsewhere. Objects such as pectoral crosses, reliquary rings, rosaries, and prayer nuts were designed not so much to mediate between self and society, but rather to stage and facilitate an encounter of the self with itself. Focusing on Byzantine devotional neck pendants, or enkolpia, this essay considers how religiously significant wearables participated in introspective spiritual practices aimed at forming and reforming the Christian subject. The essay, more specifically, attends to the enkolpion as an instrument of self-imposed discipline and explores how the corporeal experience of carrying this object and feeling its weight, however minimal, on the body contributed to the wearer’s cultivation of inner vigilance.

(Un)doing regimentation in reflexive practices: on-site processes of sociolinguistic differentiation – a commentary

Abstract This article discusses Volume 42(6) where the editors (Gilles Merminod and Raymund Vitorio) push for a metapragmatic approach to reflexive practices of sociolinguistic differentiation. With reference to my own trajectory, I review this lens as suitable to accounting for how people affectively take part in the making of difference and similarities between signs, social situations and positions in daily meaning-making practices and the larger inequalities that these practices may contribute to sustain and interrogate. In doing so, I focus on story-telling templates in professional communication, citizenship narratives in research interviews, English-oriented forms of self-evaluation in the workplace and ritualised instances of self-presentation in interaction and evaluations of others’ self-presentation in networking events as indexical signs that articulate a range of moralised meanings and categories of “ideal” versus “non-ideal” social persona upon which arrangements of social life and work get (re)instituted. I also discuss the socioeconomic hierarchies and forms of distinction that such arrangements (re)produce in different settings. Finally, I suggest further epistemological avenues for research exploring linkages across events and for following more closely the consequences that such events have for certain people, with attention to existing disciplinary synergies (and social theories) within and beyond the language disciplines.

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT1). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.

Sex identification of a Late Iron Age sword and mirror cist burial from Hillside Farm, Bryher, Isles of Scilly, England

A burial dating to the 1st century BCE was found in 1999 in the Isles of Scilly, south-west England. As well as being the most richly furnished burial in the region, it has grave goods considered to have oppositional gender associations: martial items (sword, shield) plus a bronze mirror. The inability to determine sex from the poorly surviving skeletal remains, using morphological or the available genomic methods at the time of its discovery, has been recognised as a key difficulty in the interpretation of this significant burial for Iron Age studies. Here, we apply high throughput DNA sequencing and analysis of dental enamel peptides to the highly degraded human remains in efforts to determine sex. The former effectively showed that no useable aDNA survived in the remains; the latter identified the sex as female with ca. 96% probability. This demonstrates the value of dental enamel peptide analysis for establishing the sex of ancient remains in circumstances where survival of skeletal remains is marginal and when diagenesis has effectively eliminated aDNA. Understanding symbolism in ancient burial rites, and hence making inferences concerning the social identities of the deceased is very difficult. These difficulties are not resolvable by biomolecular analyses. However, the sex identified from the proteomic work adds to the reconstruction of the biological identity of the interred individual, and helps to provide a firmer basis upon which debates concerning her social identity can be conducted. We discuss the funerary treatment of the interred individual in terms of her possible social persona, especially the meaning of the martial items for her potential role in Iron Age warfare.

Sociolinguistic perception of lexical and syntactic variation among Persian-English bilinguals

This study examines the relationship between sociolinguistic perception and Persian language variation. Prior work has shown that preconceived notions about how speakers use language and what kind of language they produce can affect listeners’ perceptions (D’Onofrio 2016; Hansen Edwards et al. 2019; Mack & Munson 2012; Niedzielski 1999). However, many questions remain unanswered regarding how social meaning is applied in contact situations, especially among self-identified native and heritage speakers. Within Persian language studies, some work has observed linguistic practices among both native and non-native speakers, finding that both vary significantly in their production patterns of certain syntactic and lexical features (Megerdoomian 2020). I ask whether Persian-English bilinguals associate non-standard forms with certain social personae categorized by linguistic background. Sixteen bilingual Persian-English speakers participated in an online survey with the task of matching standard and non-standard written productions to a pre-defined linguistic persona. Results so far suggest that Persian-English bilinguals actively construct associations between language use and speaker personae, with specific grammatical categories appearing more likely to index a non-native speaking identity. This brings up further questions about how bilinguals navigate sociolinguistic ideologies tied to speaker identity, and how heritage speakers and learners approach these notions. This study adds to the growing literature on bilingualism and sociolinguistic perception, with implications for critical discussions surrounding the various ideologies that place communities of multilingual speakers into strict social categories.

Multilingual children’s imaginative worlds and their language use: A chronotopic analysis

Aims and objectives:This study applies the notion of chronotope as an analytical tool to explore the role of globalization, immigration, and transnationalism in shaping multilingual children’s awareness and use of semiotic resources in changing social contexts.Design/methodology/approach:This study is a part of an ongoing collaborative autoethnography (CAE), in which the data come from the second author’s cross-cultural transnational family and are shared with the first author for a collaborative interpretation and analysis.Data and analysis:Data were collected through recording the observations of language practices of a nine-year-old girl in a transnational family, including her plays on her own or with her peers in and outside the home. An ethnographically grounded discourse-analytic approach was employed in analyzing the data.Findings/conclusions:Despite rich linguistic and cultural repertoire, the child situated English on a higher scale level in a hierarchically layered system, and she found imaginative play as a space in which she could explore not only linguistic repertoire but also certain cultural chronotopes. She also demonstrated her awareness of and skills in drawing on variation within the English language to index certain social personae.Originality:The originality of the study lies, first, in the uniqueness of the case being in an Indian-Iranian multilingual transnational family and, second, in the unique methodology—using chronotopes as a theoretical and analytic tool to analyze audio-recorded interactions in a multilingual child’s imaginative plays.Significance/implications:The study has implications for our understanding of how children pick up indexical meanings of linguistic choices and reproduce them in their imaginative worlds. It also sheds light on how language ideologies and practices reproduced by children may result in hierarchization and power difference between linguistic varieties.

Revitalisering van het mijnverleden in Heerlen door hybride taalculturele praktijken

Revitalisation of Heerlen’s coal mining past through languagecultural practices
 This paper examines how inhabitants of Heerlen relate to the coal mining past of this city through a variety of languagecultural practices that cut across diverse media forms and genres, both textual (poems, rap songs), visual (portrait photography, material commodities), and digital (posts on Facebook, YouTube videos). Through these practices people in Heerlen express, repeat, and renew their individual and collective memories of Heerlen as the centre of the former Eastern Mining District in the twentieth century. We argue that Heerlen is undergoing a process of revitalisation that creates social personae, embedded locally, which are labelled tuupisch (typical). From a normative perspective, performances of identity and memory attributed and/or imagined as linked to this tuup (type) are often parodic and hybrid in character. Through an analysis of various examples, the paper demonstrates the critical potential of such hybrid languagecultural practices to contest dominant perspectives on the city’s mining heritage, to renegotiate place-based identities, and to establish new forms of cultural memory

Exploring affect, identity, and populism in and around Todd Phillips’ Joker

Cultural identity has become a fluid concept in which several positionalities converge; most of them are influenced greatly by popular culture, causing a constant individual negotiation between their real lives and the image on the screen. In 2019, Todd Phillips’s Joker achieved worldwide success not only at the box ofce but also in critical appraisal. Unlike previous representations of this villain as a disruptive social persona, Joker showed the main character as a political fgure that gives agency and voice to the people who are socially repressed. The impact of this representation transcended Anglo cultures to the extent of symbolizing a populist uprising and a growing antigovernment sentiment. Nevertheless, this fgure’s appropriation brings twoproblematic ideological standpoints to the goal these groups aim: violence as the only alternative to restoring equality in society and color blindness that silences the struggles that cultures face depending on their context.

The Case of Joseph’s Coat: Giving Gifts to Children in the Hebrew Bible

Joseph’s coat is one of the most recognizable garments in the Hebrew Bible. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss theorizes that a gift contains part of the giver’s social persona, thus requiring a counter-gift to be given. Drawing on Mauss’s work as a heuristic category, this study investigates the economy of gifts and counter-gifts in the Hebrew Bible using Joseph’s coat as a case study. Joseph’s age at the time he receives the gift and the seeming lack of a counter-gift form the two main questions that this study investigates. To answer these questions requires determining who made the coat, a question best answered through an archaeological analysis of how textiles were created in ancient Israel. The paper concludes that an ancient audience would have understood both Jacob and Rachel to be makers of the gift, and therefore the (expected) recipients of a counter-gift. The end of the Joseph Novella suggests that this expectation was met after a period of delay, during which time Joseph grew into adulthood and rose to a position where he could properly return a gift on par with the special coat.

First names and sociolinguistic enregisterment: Digital tropes of linguistic mobility

In this paper, I examine a specific linguistic practice in the use of first names for stylistic moves of exclusion, namely the attribution of fictitious first names to individuals or groups. I argue that these symbolic acts of naming are instrumental in moves of inclusion and exclusion. I present evidence for this linguistic practice by analyzing the persona Lisa in German student discourse. Based on data from social media platforms, as well as observation data, Lisa emerges as a young, shallow female persona perceived as entitled and annoying. In her incarnation as Lisa aus Australien (Lisa from Australia), Lisa is a gap year returnee who self-styles as mobile and linguistically fluid. I analyze the mediated material that goes into the construction of the social persona of Lisa, and I discuss some of the implications of this kind of social commentary on linguistic mobility. In particular, I argue that the fine detail of the parody – including its gendered trope of the shallow girl – enables the voicing of purist and territorial stances which are at odds with contemporary ideals of cosmopolitanism and mobility, and which point to uneasy debates about eliteness.

A multiplicity of identities: The intersections of cranial vault modification, paleodiet, and sex in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

AbstractObjectivesIntentional cranial modification and diet serve as markers of identity. Here, we explore the intersection between the body and social persona in the San Pedro oases through the complex relationship(s) between these markers and other aspects of society and the individual.MethodsSkeletal remains of 1190 individuals were analyzed for evidence of intentional head shaping and classed as unmodified, tabular, or annular. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of bone (n = 203) focused on the contribution of C3plants, C4/CAM plants, beans, and terrestrial animal meat per the Bayesian model, FRUITS. Strontium isotope data from dental enamel was considered for more detailed analyses.ResultsCranial modification was present in 520 individuals (43.7%;N = 1190). Modification was significantly more common among females (χ2 = 7.403,p = 0.007). There was no significant difference in presence or type between periods. Average values for the four modeled food groupings differ significantly. There is a significant difference in consumption of C4/CAM plants by those individuals with modified heads consuming more (26.5 ± 9.9% vs. 23.6 ± 9.4%, Wilcoxon signed‐rank test,p < 0.05). In the Middle Period sample, males consume significantly more C4/CAM plants (p < 0.05) and females more C3plants (p < 0.01). Four of those with outlier C4values were analyzed for strontium, yielding values outside the “local” range.ConclusionsAs head shaping is permanently imposed in infancy while dietary patterns are the consequence of ongoing choices and constraints in the social and ecological environment, these markers of identity are not parallel. The numerous points of intersection between these markers and other aspects of identity are highlighted.

U Ok Hun?: The digital commodification of white woman style

AbstractSociolinguistic research has increasingly explored the ways in which semiotic features are variably recruited to stylistically perform enregistered social personae. In this paper, I add to this body of work by exploring the emergence of a stereotypically feminine style and persona that is widespread in British social media. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of non‐standard spellings (e.g., <dallyn> darling, <gawjus> gorgeous), discourse features (e.g., hun, babe, u ok hun?), and characterological tropes (e.g., the life motto ‘live, love, laugh’) as indexical representations of a particular type of classed, gendered, and ethnic identity in a corpus of Instagram memes. I demonstrate that these features have become enregistered as a characterological figure of a British working‐class White woman—the Hun—that is stylistically deployed as a digital commodity register. Concluding, I emphasise the need for research to engage more fully with stylisation and commodification in social and digital media interaction.

Negotiating identities

AbstractThis study examines processes through which social personae are conveyed by male Japanese students at a public university in Yokohama. Focusing on the frame-setting function of first person pronominals (FPPs) in contexts where there is no intra/inter speaker variation in the choice of FPP, this paper analyzes how speakers manage identity-associated discursive alignments related to a shared Okinawa prefecture background. The common experience of being from Okinawa prefecture and attending university far from home is the primary reason that these speakers are close friends. However, analysis reveals speakers’ continual and active contention and re-formulation of this shared ‘Okinawan-ness’ and the personae to which it is linked. In particular, FPPs are implicated in speakers’ discussion of heterogeneity and/or local differences with respect to their Okinawa prefecture background. Strategic use of FPPs thus emerges as a salient tactic for speakers’ active negotiation of conversation relevant personae categories even in interactional contexts without variation.

Social and Ecological Factors Affect Long-Term Resilience of Voyaging Canoes in Pre-contact Eastern Polynesia: A Multiproxy Approach From the ArchaeoEcology Project

While Eastern Polynesian archaeologists rarely recover archaeological remains of canoes (va‘a), ethnohistoric texts document how such vessels played a central role in the daily lives of commoners and chiefs alike. Here, we refocus discussions of va‘a in Polynesian societies through synthesizing proxy information (archaeological data, evidence from ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources, ecological modeling, human-centered interaction networks) on canoe use in the Society Islands of French Polynesia. While all communities who initially settled Eastern Polynesia archipelagoes must have done so with large double-hulled canoes, their use was absent in some societies by the time of European contact. We question why some Eastern Polynesian societies retained the use of large ocean-going canoes, while others did not. For high island archipelagoes like the Society Islands, sources document how large double-hulled canoes facilitated and supported elite intra-archipelago voyaging, warfare, and exchange with near and remote hinterlands up until European contact in the mid-eighteenth century. While smaller canoes were used by commoners on a daily basis for subsistence fishing and island-wide transport, larger ocean-going canoes were strictly the purview of high-ranking elites. Our human-centered interaction network models help us to identify how social processes put constraints on the manufacture and continued use of large ocean-going va‘a in Eastern Polynesian contexts. We deploy such data to outline steps in the production, use, and re-use of canoes. We employ network science to better understand the relationships between animal and plant species used by the Mā‘ohi in canoe manufacture, quantifying the number of resources used, the number of social personae involved, and the amount of labor/energy involved in their manufacture. Finally, we use Mo‘orea settlement pattern data, as well as landscape and elevation data, to visually model the extent to which local ecologies or habitats constrained access to long-lived hard wood trees, key raw materials in the construction of ocean-going vessels. We consider the additional variables of soil pH and tree regrowth rates in our modeling of the ecological limits of preferred va‘a species. We then query differential patterns of continued use of ocean-going vessels in two Eastern Polynesian archipelagoes: the Gambier archipelago and the Society Islands. Utilizing these multiple sources of data, we return to the age-old question of what roles social and natural processes played in the resiliency of the socio-political systems of Polynesian chiefdoms. We view ocean-going canoes as critical social tools in terms of resilience, as use of these water craft reduced island isolation and allowed for contact with near, and sometimes far, neighbors who served as critical buffering agents, particularly in times of ecological crises, such as drought, famine, or tsunamis.

Creating Connected Identities Among Japanese Company Employees: Learning to be Members of Department Store Work Communities

This paper looks at the meanings, values, and idioms associated with work for members of Japanese permanent employment jobs in a sector of society where this has not previously been well explored - large-retailing organizations. It discusses the boundary markers that distinguish members from outsiders and marginals, and explains the ambiguous identities of part-timers and "helper clerks." The initial year in a Japanese permanent employment job is presented as an intense training period and also a liminal period involving the creation of new social persona and their aggregation into corporate work communities. The paper shows how new department store employees are socialized through training programs, company retreats, and other practices, then discusses the ongoing channeling of employee identities into structured networks of senpai-khai (senior-junior) and entry-year cohort relationships. It also discusses cases of "individualists" who do not fit easily into the company as community ideology. Based on research conducted from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, the paper provides a comparative update to earlier ethnographies of Japanese work in the permanent employment System.

Discourse functions and pitch patterns of the Japanese interactional particleyoin student-professor conversation

AbstractUntil recently Japanese interactional particles have largely been investigated in various social contexts without paying much attention to intonation. Building on Shimotani (2006) that examined discourse functions and the intonation yo in informal talk among friends, the current study intends to contribute to interactional particle research by analyzingyoin six sets of one-to-one student-professor conversations. The findings demonstrate that the students and professors exhibited different pitch patterns ofyo. Students tended to useyowith a falling pitch [+fall] when performingpre-story-telling,and frequently used then-desu-yoconstruction. The professor, on the other hand, often usedyo[−fall] when providing opinions or advice. These results will be discussed from Ochs’ social constructive discourse approach perspective. The present study concludes that both discourse functions and pitch patterns in interactional particles are important linguistic resources used to construct speakers’ social personae and stance-building. As such, pedagogical implications will be provided.

A Promise of Unconditional Acceptance: Conversion to Christianity and the struggle for being in Sinja, Nepal

Over the last few decades, Nepal’s Christian population has flourished even in quite remote contexts such as the Sinja Valley, in the north-western district of Jumla. The reasons why people are drawn towards Evangelical Christianity in particular are primarily existential and are intimately related to the problematic situations they are confronted with in their lives, which are rooted in turn in a very specific understanding of personhood. Among local Hindus, the lack of a unitary principle comparable to the Christian soul has important consequences. Far from being a permanent achievement, personhood needs to be constantly actualised in relational interaction with other people, through appropriate actions that match one’s social persona. This can cause a lot of tension, particularly when what happens in someone’s life hinders the fulfilment of social expectations. What seems to make Christianity appealing in Sinja is that, in this religion, one’s self is given a priori by God, thereby ensuring that everyone is of equal worth within the congregation. This promise of unconditional acceptance fosters a state of rediscovered existential peacefulness that many converts describe as the key outcome of their radical choice – a choice that is often facilitated by the occurrence of miracles. At the same time, conversion to Pentecostal Christianity also introduces unprecedented challenges, preventing us from viewing conversion as a simplistic, one-dimensional transition.