Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students

Primary Theme: Ethics

(4-1235) Risk, Revelation, and the Truth

The papers in “Risk, Revelation, and the Truth” investigate the ways that social risk is both mitigated and produced through the pragmatics of revelation, especially as revelations are characterized as the “truth.” Emphasizing the ultimate uncertainty of the effects of utterances, or messages, or “acts” (broadly construed), the papers aim to further theorize the relation between the management of information (and its potential for circulation) and the management of interaction (and its potential for failure or contamination). Emphasizing risky discourse genres and media such as confession, gossip, secrecy, as well as non-denotational communicative practices, the papers draw upon broader anthropological treatments of effacement and disclosure, passing and exposure, containment and circulation. The perennial problem of the “truth” provides a powerful methodological way to examine the risk of revelation, because of the multiple, co-present, but often fundamentally different degrees of semiotic determinacy that interact—and even compete—in communicative interaction.
These papers trace and analyze revelations, exposures, and disclosures across communicative genres (e.g., pirated video cassettes, press releases, celebrity “call out” blogs, and group prayers), national contexts (Korea, Peru, Mexico, and the United States), and virtual spaces and the associated (counter)publics the interpellate (e.g., facebook users, news audiences, blog readers, groups of television viewers, and congregants). Throughout, the authors consider the different and shifting stakes and risks for those who expose or are themselves exposed, asking how subjectivities and group boundaries are reflected in and constituted by acts that rupture the security of semiotic enclosures. Here, enduring understandings of “truth” as rooted in intentionality and verifiability appear alongside ethnographic cases that show truth also to be what remains in the wake of revelation.

Organizer(s)

• Erin Debenport

  Assistant Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

• Nicholas Harkness

  Harvard University

Chair(s)

• Erin Debenport

  Assistant Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

• Nicholas Harkness

  Harvard University

Discussant(s)

• Webb Keane

  George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor
  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Rusty Barrett

  Associate Professor
  University of Kentucky

Presenter(s)

• Rihan Yeh

  Colegio de Michoacan

• Norma Mendoza-Denton

  Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

• Erin Debenport

  Assistant Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

• Nicholas Harkness

  Harvard University

• Luis Manuel Olguin

  University of California - Los Angeles

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Discussion
  Webb Keane – University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Discussion
  Rusty Barrett – University of Kentucky
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Risky Business: Risk and its manipulation in the discourse of and about President Donald Trump
  Norma Mendoza-Denton – University of California, Los Angeles
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Entertaining Ethics: Risk, Stigma, and Hollywood Call-out Genres
  Erin K. Debenport – University of California, Los Angeles
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM

  Tongues at Risk: Anxieties over Exposure in South Korean Glossolalia
  Nicholas H. Harkness – Harvard University
• 6:00 PM - 6:15 PM

  Signs of Corruption: Transparency and The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Peru
  Luis Manuel Olguin – University of California - Los Angeles