Junk Spanish, covert racism, and the (leaky) boundary between public and private spheres

To attend to "constructing languages" and "constructing publics" implicates two directions of thought. A constructionist perspective problematizes and de-naturalizes the idea of "language," and suggests how the fragile textuality of our talk is the result as much of ideological processes as of neurobiological constraints. To consider the construction of "publics" draws linguistic anthropology in new directions. While the idea that the arenas in which opinions are formed and decisions are made are the products of social work is not new (cf. Myers and Brenneis 1984), "publics" suggests a particular kind of arena, Flabermas's ([1962] 1991) "public sphere, ... a category of bourgeois society." The concept of "public sphere" exposes a new arena for our attention, distinct from the interactional field of the market or the kin group, where people who live in states speak "as citizens," with reference to public affairs, yet not as agents of the state. Habermas of course argued that the bourgeois public sphere flourished only ephemerally before it was captured by the culture industry with its capacity to manufacture inauthentic "public opinion." Habermas has been much critized for his nostalgic commitment to the freedom and rationality of the bourgeois public sphere, as well as his neglect of the way in which it functioned as much to exclude as to include (cf. papers in Calhoun (ed.) 1992; and Robbins (ed.) 1993). The concept of "public" is, however, productive precisely because it sketches in the broad outlines of an important arena for the reproduction of exclusions in contemporary societies.