Chapter 8: Hey, Take it Easy:Language Performance and Ideology in Oaxaca, Mexico

This paper examines how social relations are structured and negotiated by and through language ideologies. By carefully examining a single text—a narrative description of an encounter on a soccer pitch in Oaxaca, Mexico—I will illustrate how people draw on and resist language ideologies as a way of positioning and legitimising themselves vis-à-vis others. These positions, what Sapir (1929) above calls the “language habits of our community [that] predispose certain choices of interpretation” (p. 69 as cited in Whorf, 1956) are our linguistic habitus (Bourdieu, 1977b). To make this case, I frame my discussion of language ideology within the Marxist tradition of ideology as a coordinated system of (distorted?) beliefs and ideas serving as a medium of the production of human subjects (Eagleton, 1991; Williams, 1977), as well as within a post-structuralist view of language use as situated practice (both constrained by and constituting language ideologies) and performance, and as a site of contested identity politics (Bourdieu, 1977a, 1977b; Butler, 1993, 2000; Pennycook, 2004).