INTRODUCTION
Linguistic anthropology has tended to focus on the analysis of narrative, oratory, ritual speech, and other very well bounded and easily identifiable speech genres; however, little has been said about the smaller, scattered pieces of formulaic language – for example, the public words of street signs, graffiti, and political parties, or the popular extracts from radio, film, and the world of advertising. I argue here that tuning into these smaller genres or “minor media” is one productive avenue for beginning an analysis of the linguistic intertextuality of contemporary societies (Spitulnik 1997:166).
OVERVIEW
This article treats a discursive practice among the White Mountain Apache in which people use English-language discourse drawn from television, movies, advertisements, and other forms of commercial media to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation. These names are a form of wordplay that usually involves metaphor or punning, and many residents consider these names to be both funny and clever. Each name requires familiarity with local precedents as well as commercial media discourse in order to “get the joke.” Some have acquired quasi-official status and appear on street signs and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) maps, on local radio stations and in local newspapers. Basso, in his well-known treatment of Apache language place names, makes passing reference to these English-language names:
A visitor to Cibecue today would discover that all of its housing complexes have been given English place-names – fanciful names like Rainbow City, Too Far Away, Desert Storm, and Hollywood – and that each name has a story behind it, amusing and light-hearted, which provides an account of its origin. (Basso 1996:151)
In this article I discuss a corpus of such names that I encountered during field research in the communities of Whiteriver and Eastfork from 1996 to 1999. I am posing two related questions about these names. One concerns how we are to understand the use of English-language media discourse within this Western Apache naming practice. In order to provide an adequate answer for this, I find it necessary to address the question of the relationship between these recently coined names and their more “traditional” counterparts as they have been described in Basso 1990, 1996.
Basso says of the new English language place names:
understandably, the visitor might suppose that the business of naming places is no longer taken seriously by Apaches, that it has fallen by the cultural and linguistic wayside, a casualty of modern times and accelerated exposure to non-Apache ways. (Basso 1996:152)
He goes on to protest that this is not the case, because traditionally styled Apache language place names continue to be coined.
I am making a different sort of argument, one that does not rely on the notion that English and Apache forms necessarily belong to different cultural worlds. I argue that while these English-language names appear to reflect a dramatic departure from the “traditional” Apache names described by Basso, a comparison of the two reveals that they are in fact informed by a common language ideology (Woolard 1998, Kroskrity 2000) concerning indexical contrasts between the Apache and English languages, similar intertextual criteria for what makes a good place name, and similar patterns of use. I further argue that it would be inadequate to interpret the exclusive reliance on English idioms as a simple reflection of the “glamour of English” as the dominant language encountered in mass media, or of language shift from Apache to English. Rather, it represents a symbolic deployment of English media discourse in marked contrast to Apache language place names in order to highlight and comment on the difference between the isolated single-family residential patterns mandated by government housing developments vs. the extended-family multiple dwellings characteristic of more longstanding settlements. The “joke” in each name is often a comment upon the anomalous nature of the new residence patterns and the changes in lifestyle that attend them. I argue that these playful English language place names represent a recently emergent discourse genre (Hanks 1986, Bauman 2004) that draws on some of the expectations already at play in traditional Apache place naming and other established genres of verbal play (e.g., Basso 1979) in its deployment of English-language idioms to comment on ongoing changes in reservation life.
The second question I address with this study concerns the definition of the local reservation community and its relationship to the surrounding dominant society constituted by these place names. An analysis of intertextual relations along two axes – (i) decontextualization from the source discourse in mass media, and (ii) recontextualization in terms of prior texts and prior precedents in the local community (Spitulnik 1993) – reveals these playful place names to be strategic acts of community definition in political engagement with the dominant society. Neighborhood names like Jurassic Park, Bengay, and Life Savers help to create a local experience of community on the reservation that is self-consciously different from that of surrounding non-reservation communities. At the same time, use of these names on road signs and in local media subverts dominant notions of what proper place names should look like, even as their self-consciously innovative quality subverts dominant discourses of what it means to be an authentic (thus implicitly “traditional”) Native American community.
MEDIA, DISCOURSE, AND COMMUNITIES
The literature on Apache place names is particularly rich (see Bourke 1890; Goodwin 1942; Basso 1990, 1996; Samuels 2001). The place names treated here differ from those discussed in previous studies in their exclusive reliance on English idioms and in the fact that they are predominantly drawn from commercial media. This fact raises the question of the nature of the role that mass media plays in contemporary definitions of the reservation community.
Early studies of the effects of mass media stressed the power of the culture industry to penetrate the everyday lives of people in diverse localities, indoctrinating them into prevailing hegemonic norms and assumptions (e.g., Powdermaker 1950). This has sometimes been termed the hypodermic model (Spitulnik 1993) because influence is taken to flow downward from media producers into passive audiences. In this way mass media serve as a tool of established power. Put this in the context of colonialism, and mass media can be described as extending Western hegemony to indigenous peoples around the world. This assumption about the effects of mass media is reflected in much of the literature on language endangerment, in which television and movies, because they extend the hegemony of world languages, are described as playing an important role in the decline of indigenous languages and cultures (see Phillipson 1992; Crystal 2002, 2003; Fishman 2001).
An emergent field of scholarship in the anthropology of media draws on the strengths of the ethnographic method to complicate the “hypodermic model.” This literature attends to the role played by audiences in determining the local reception and uptake of mass media, particularly in the context of postcolonialism (Abul Lighod 1995, Mankekar 1999, Askew & Wilk 2002). Within this broader trend, a number of works in the ethnography of communication lend insight into how local audiences reconfigure the media discourse that they encounter to suit their own discursive practices and concerns (e.g., Kulick & Wilson 1994, Hahn 1994, Spitulnik 1997, Samuels 2004). The present study approaches the use of media discourse on the White Mountain Apache reservation through the rubric of intertextuality (Bakhtin 1981, Silverstein & Urban 1996, Bauman 2004, Bauman & Briggs 1990). In this respect it builds on the work of Debra Spitulnik (1993, 1997) who examines intertextual relationships established by the recycling of pieces of media discourse in everyday talk in Zambia. She argues that people in this new and internally diverse nation use media discourse as a reservoir of common reference points that can be readily recontextualized in the ongoing discourse of daily interactions. She suggests that recirculating words and catch phrases from radio shows is a means by which people create an imagined community, a national identity that extends beyond localities. The present study extends this model by examining a practice in which the recycling of mass media discourse by a local community is self-consciously different from that of surrounding communities. Thus, while using media discourse does index participation in the wider society, the (often sardonic) way in which that discourse is applied to local scenes and people simultaneously creates a sense of the reservation as an interpretive community distinct from its neighbors.
PLACE, DISCOURSE, COMMUNITY
Scholarship in the linguistic anthropology of place draws attention to the fact that places are not mere backdrops for the activities of culture, but are socially constructed, and that this construction takes place in large part through language. Established work on the anthropology of place focused on the terms in which place is made meaningful by a particular social group (Basso & Feld 1996, Weiner 1991, Johnstone 1990). More recent scholarship focuses on the dialectic interplay between the constitution of place and the definition (often multiple or contested) of community. Places are subject to the defining acts of everyday discourse, and as such serve as resources in the constitution of community and individual identities. This scholarship stresses the contested nature of place and investigates the terms in which differently positioned actors struggle to define the nature of their communities, including who belongs and who does not (Gupta & Ferguson 1992, Modan 2006, Roth-Gordon 2002). This work brings our attention to the fact that any given place is likely to be constituted in multiple ways from different positions and according to different strategies (see also Samuels 2001).
The present study contributes to that literature by treating a previously unexplored place-naming strategy that exists alongside two others that have already been treated in the Western Apache literature (Basso 1996 and Samuels 2001). As Samuels 2001 points out, Apache place names, whether they evoke the idea of an authentic indigenous practice still robust in the face of encroachment (as is the case for Basso 1996) or whether they take officially imposed names and subvert them with Apache reinterpretations (as in Samuels 2001), are inevitably a strategic engagement with the problem of domination by the surrounding society. The place names considered here are yet a third strategy. In this case playful, often media-derived place names are applied to newly constructed government housing developments. New developments are constructed by the tribe every couple of years to provide housing for the reservation's growing population. The housing developments are built outside the more established residential areas and are characterized by denser concentrations of houses where families unrelated through kinship or previous co-residence are packed together side by side. The place names described here are one means by which reservation residents make these new neighborhoods meaningful – and in so doing, define the contemporary reservation as a community.
The imagined community (Anderson 1991) these names evoke is one that is self-consciously engaged with while also remaining interpretively distinct from the dominant society. They do this by appropriating media discourse for the naming of these neighborhoods but according to criteria established through local genres of naming, joking, and wordplay. Further, this practice creates a sense of community that is modeled on preferences for establishing sociality through knowledge and familiarity (see T. Nevins 2005). That is, the place names evoke an image of the reservation community, not as a group of people bound by a social contract, commonly adhering to a set of rules and precepts, but as people with overlapping experiences of place, who can know and empathize with one another by sharing a joke.
In the next two sections I describe two other place-naming strategies that have been identified in the existing literature: Apache language place names described primarily by Basso, and subversive bilingual Apache-English place naming described by Samuels. I do this to situate the media-derived names considered here within other related discourses of place and place names on the reservation.
APACHE LANGUAGE PLACE NAMES, NARRATIVES, PEOPLE
Following Hanks 1986 and Bauman 2004, I take genre to be a set of conventional orientations and expectations for the production and reception of discourse. Summarizing Basso's (1996) account of Apache-language place names provides a sketch of the expectations members of the White Mountain Apache speech community hold for the creation and use of what is today a self-consciously traditional sort of name. Later I will argue that the English-language place names treated here represent an emergent genre; and that in coining, interpreting, and using these new place names, reservation residents draw on precedents established in the reservation community, including the Apache-language names described by Basso. Below I outline three qualities expected of Apache-language place names that are salient for understanding the new media derived place names.
Place names are associated with narratives
Each place name is associated with a well-known narrative about past (distant and recent) events that happened at that place. For example, a place named Tséé Hadigaiyé, which Basso translates as ‘Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out’, is associated with a story about a girl who failed to heed her grandmother's warnings and suffered frightening consequences. In the story, a young girl was collecting firewood and, against her maternal grandmother's admonitions, took a short-cut home through a rocky canyon. She slipped on the rocks and fell, dispersing firewood all around. As she picked up the firewood, a snake bit her hand. She returned to her grandmother frightened and contrite, with a painfully swollen arm. A curing ceremony was performed over her and she recovered. She realized her mistake, became determined to respect what her grandmother told her, and as a result knew better how to live. Basso (1996:94) reports that stories such as this, and the place names associated with them, are told repeatedly, particularly to young people.
Many names describe physical attributes of a place
Most of the place names discussed by Basso contain a physical description of the place that they designate. Examples of such place names include
Yaahighaiyé, which Basso translates as ‘Whiteness Spreads Out Descending to Water’, and the example above, Tséé Hadigaiyé, ‘Line of White Rocks Extends Up and Out’ (Basso 1996:93–96). Of course, not every place is named. It is important to note that although most of the names he treats describe points on the landscape, the impetus for naming a particular place is not motivated by the physical qualities of place alone, but by the fact that something of note happened there. In this way, naming and storying are part of the same speech act. Some names in Basso's corpus do not describe physical aspects of spaces but refer to aspects of a narrative said to have taken place in that space. Examples include Kolah Dahch'ewoołé ‘She Carries Her Brother on Her Back’,
Sidáhá ‘She Became Old Sitting’, and Naagosch'id Tóó Hayigeedé ‘Badger Scoops Up Water’ (Basso 1996:141). However, most of the names in Basso's accounts do describe some aspect of the physical space, and so there seems to be a preference for names that evoke pictures of the places they designate.
Names are applied to people and used as interpretive frames
Basso describes a practice he calls speaking with names, in which place names are spoken to suggest indirectly how to interpret behaviors or events as they unfold. To illustrate this he recounts how the place name Tséé Hadigaiyé was used in a conversation in which a woman shared her worries with her friends about a nephew who had breached a traditionally mandated boundary and was now suffering a severe physical malady. By speaking the name Tséé Hadigaiyé her interlocutors applied the story of the girl who disregarded her grandmother to the woman's nephew's situation. Thus they were able to suggest without stating it explicitly that her nephew's current pains were a result of his disrespectful actions, and were, like the girl's snakebite in the story, frightening but reparable. Basso also describes how places and their associated stories can become identified with particular individuals, stalking them, and causing them to view their own actions through the associated story. Thus, part of the conventional expectations of the place-naming genre described by Basso involves a productive overlaying of stories, places, and people in which people creatively apply names in order to suggest metaphorical links with the behaviors of those around them and to events as these unfold.
A related use of Apache-language place names has been described in the earlier literature on the White Mountain Apache by Goodwin 1942 and even earlier by Bourke 1890. These are names for what Goodwin terms “clans,” and Bourke terms “gentes,” referring to relationships of commonality between families who represent themselves as sharing maternal relatives (being of the same clan), or relationships of difference between families who represent themselves as not sharing maternal relatives (being of different clans). In Apache this kind of relationship between families is usually expressed with a verbal construction that includes: hat'i'í, literally ha- ‘upward’ + -t'i- ‘moving as a long extension from a source’ + -í nominalizing enclitic, ‘that which’. Bourke and Goodwin pointed out that individual clan names are predominantly toponyms, often suffixed with an enclitic -ń to designate that a person or people are being referenced, or -é, which indicates a name of longstanding use. Examples are Nádots'osń,1
These names as given are taken from Goodwin 1942. Because he was not always consistent in his transcriptions, and some of the names he reports are no longer in use, I have opted to preserve his forms (and let others interpret them as they may) rather than replace them with my own transcriptions.
For an example of the continuing currency of these ideas, when I was visiting a family on the San Carlos reservation for a gift exchange prior to a Sunrise Ceremony, one of the family members introduced himself to me as Deschiidń, and explained that while he lives in Phoenix and his other family lives on a flat plain in San Carlos, their clan name meant that their family once lived in a valley with lots of red rock.
Importantly, clan names, like place names, are also storied. That is, they are associated with narratives that recount how a particular clan originated, or became associated with its particular place name, and its history of relationships with other clans.3
Thanks to Charles Kaut for suggesting the applicability of this argument to clan names.
About seven hundred yards north of my camp, up the creek [Cibecue Creek], on a little bluff called Dleecehilk'id (“white paint hill”), a great many people were camped long ago. Bit by bit they moved away to other places, until only one lot was left. The old camp was infested with flies, so the remaining people became the Dóócd-'é. Many alders grew at the place where the upper settlement is now, so that place was called K'isdjint'i'é … Thus these people are related to the Dóócd-'é. Then some of the Dóócd-'é were witches. They washed these bad people and purified them, so they became T'anásgizn. They are still related to us Dóócd-'é. (Goodwin 1942:606)
Thus, clan names share many of the qualities that Basso describes for place names. They often describe the outward appearance of a place. They are associated with human events in the recent or distant past. And they are used to evoke interpretive frames for understanding ongoing relationships among people. A consideration of clan names places Basso's discussion of place names within a broader semiotic practice in which ongoing and emergent relations between people are constituted through stories linked to places.
In summary, the Apache-language place names described by Basso and others pair reference to physical space with a narrative context that is mobilized through speaking to create interpretive frameworks for people's actions and for events as they unfold. Below I will argue that the exclusively English-language place names I describe below, while apparently at odds with their more traditional counterparts, in fact share with the latter common criteria for what makes a good place name, and represent the appropriation of media discourse within a local naming practice. However, while their means for constituting community are similar, the orientation is different. Apache-language place names constitute a community grounded in the surrounding landscape, in ancestors and in those who best know the how to apply the stories: those elder members of the community who are credited with possessing traditional knowledge. With these names, community is realized through imaginative application of an ancestral past on the landscape to everyday people and events. Samuels points out that this is in fact an assertion of indigenous autonomy in relation to the dominant society. It does this while also playing to the expectations of the dominant society, because Native American self-representations cast in terms of the traditional coincide with dominant ideological models of what it means to be Native American.
APACHE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL PLACE NAMING
Samuels 2001 describes a different kind of place-naming strategy in his treatment of San Carlos Apache place names. It should be noted that San Carlos is immediately adjacent to the White Mountain Apache reservation and its residents share many of the same place names and naming practices. Samuels describes a number of strategies his consultants employed for subverting imposed English-language place names. Perhaps the most common is to use Apache-language place names alternately alongside imposed English forms. He terms these “translation pairs.” The Apache name within each pair is a well-formed place name along the model described by Basso. Its English counterpart is the official English-language name that appears on maps and street signs, and that most non-Apaches are likely to use. He argues that the effect of alternately using the two members of such a translation pair is to destabilize the air of naturalized reference accorded to the official name, and to flash between meanings and associations accorded to such places from alternate positions in the region's history of colonial imposition.
There are also many examples of such translation pairs on the White Mountain Apache reservation. In fact, most of the longstanding residential areas (discussed below) have corresponding English and Apache names that are alternated in everyday conversation. While most maps of the reservation display the English-language names, people in casual conversation readily used Apache-language names interchangeably with their English counterparts for the same places.
Samuels discusses a related place-naming strategy involving punning reinterpretations of official place names so that these are pronounced and interpreted with an Apache-language meaning. For example, Tucson is interpreted as an Apache phrase: tóó nzaad ‘water is far away’. I encountered the same strategy in my own field data. For instance, an abandoned settlement called Seneca on maps and street signs was interpreted as the Apache phrase saan nakih ‘two old women’.
What is important about the place-naming strategies described by Samuels, and what distinguishes them from both the names considered by Basso and the media-derived names considered here, is that they predominantly target officially imposed names and destabilize their meaning. In so doing they create an imagination of community that grows in the cracks opened up through everyday unravelings of imposed meanings.
The media-derived English-language place names I am examining here contribute to the destabilization of official place names by posing an alternative cut from an entirely different cloth. They name a new kind of space: new housing developments. Most are obviously and deliberately jokes about these places “made up” by local community members. They utilize English phrases and idioms like Jurassic Park, Bengay, or Lonesome Dove to name local spaces in a way that is markedly different from surrounding non-Apache communities. And while most of these newly coined names are circulated by word of mouth, some are also institutionalized in maps, local news reports, and street signs. These quasi-institutionalizations are playful acts, but acts that also underscore reservation residents' abilities to author their own social landscape within new contexts and for their own purposes.
CONTRASTING NEIGHBORHOODS ON THE RESERVATION
Media-derived names are not used for established residential communities on the reservation but are applied only to newly constructed housing developments. In this section I sketch the differences between established and newly constructed neighborhoods and suggest that part of the motivation for the new place names is a comment on these differences.
Longstanding settlements
Within the more longstanding settlements on the reservation, such as East Fork, Diamond Creek, or Cedar Creek, residence patterns are organized into units, which are called
‘household’ and gotaah ‘extended family compound’, respectively. These are defined in terms of Apache principles of sociality, described as k'íí and loosely translated as ‘family’. These neighborhoods often have overlapping Apache and English-language names,
4Almost none of these corresponding English and Apache names are direct translations, or calques, of one another (see Webster 2000).
,
5A pamphlet published through the White Mountain Apache Culture Center gives the name Hawóó
‘Dove's salt’, and this is repeated in a regular radio segment in which traditional neighborhood place names are listed. Residents of Eastfork when questioned about the name as written were perplexed about the meaning of ‘salt’. Some have suggested that whoever wrote the name down mistook ‘
’ ‘cry’ for ‘
’ ‘salt’. I've opted for the ‘Dove's cry’ version. There are also several traditional stories that make reference to doves' cries.
New housing developments
In contrast with the more longstanding residential areas with their multi-generational extended family compounds, new tribally managed housing developments are age-segregated communities, comprised of small lots with single-family dwellings. They are often less sought after than spots in more established neighborhoods because different families are forced into close proximity without regard for kinship or other established forms of social relationship. For example, during my research period there was a recently built housing development that was persistently sparsely occupied despite being apparently ready for tenants. The absence of children running around and other bustle lent the development an air of bareness. In part this was because it was built in the middle of a flat juniper brush plain not far from the timber mill but very far away from any other housing. Because of these characteristics the development was called Lonesome Dove, after the famous Western film. This name also contrastively indexes Hawóó
, mentioned above. In fact, it was only a mile or so away from that more traditional neighborhood.
Another example is a housing complex within the town of Whiteriver reserved for senior citizens (the contrast with extended family residence patterns here is striking). At some point people began calling this neighborhood Bengay for the ointment that many older people use to ease arthritic joints, and the name stuck. Another neighborhood in Whiteriver was notable for the fact that each house was painted a different color to differentiate a row of otherwise identical houses. This became Rainbow City. When a new row of houses was constructed just above this one on the lower sloping end of a butte, this neighborhood became Over the Rainbow. Another, built right against the butte so that it stands in shadow most of the day, is named Dark Shadows after the campy soap opera of the same name. A housing development built in the early 1980s and occupied primarily by young couples was called Knott's Landing. People explained to me that this is because the complex is poised on a hillside with sloping driveways similar to those of the television show, and because it was occupied primarily by young couples whose lives suggested comparison to that of characters in the prime-time soap opera.
Similarly, Chinatown is so named because for some reason that no one has been able to assess, when the tribe built the houses they neglected to cover their lower levels. So the houses all look like they are raised up from the ground as if expecting a flood, despite the fact that the river close by flows through a deep canyon and the houses are situated on a slope many hundreds of feet above possible water contact. The name Chinatown indexes both the fact that the houses look like they could be found by the waterfront – similar to images of waterfront houses in Southeast Asia encountered through television, and the fact that urban Chinatown in movies and television shows is associated with gangs and gang violence, a problem also associated with this housing development. Many of the Chinatown residents whom we knew described living there as a temporary measure, financially necessary until they can find a house in one of the more longstanding, safer neighborhoods where they had family connections.
NEW PLACES, NEW NAMES
These English-language names are coined anonymously and circulated by word of mouth. There are similar names for housing developments all over the reservation (for an example from Cibecue, see Basso 1996:151–52) and on the neighboring San Carlos Apache reservation (Samuels 2004), but the names for new developments within the main town of Whiteriver achieve the widest circulation. Some, as in the case of Knott's Landing and Bengay, can last for decades. These humorous names have become an expected accompaniment to new housing developments. Whenever a new development is built, people wait to hear “what they are calling it,” and knowing and getting the joke behind these names is part of contemporary communicative competence (Hymes 1972, 1973) in the reservation speech community. In fact, these place names are more than just jokes; they have become texts that are referenced in everyday conversation, on the tribe's radio station, and in the tribal newspaper. Some appear on street signs, as well as on BIA maps.
Let me summarize what I take to be some of the salient qualities of these names, particularly in relationship to other, more longstanding place names, such as those described by Basso 1996 and Samuels 2001:
(a) All represent English-language idioms – but not English-language place name idioms.
(b) All refer to government housing projects built by the tribe in which a concentrated cluster of homes are constructed together and then allocated to individual occupants based on criteria other than kinship, and so contrast with more longstanding or traditional residential areas of the reservation.
(c) Unlike names discussed by Samuels 2001, for each there is no parallel Apache language alternative in circulation.
(d) Like the place names described by Basso, many are associated with narrative contexts; but these narratives are encountered not on the land, but in movies, television, or commercials.
(e) Like the place names described by Basso, and like clan names, each has multiple points of comparison with the neighborhood with which it is associated. Most index some aspect of the physical shape of the neighborhood, or its contiguity to other named spaces, as well as a quality of the people living there.
A summary of the names that I am aware of is presented in Table 1.
6Thanks are due particularly to extended family of Eva Lupe, who have acquired knowledge of many of these places by living in or near to them, and also to Charles Kaut and Phillip Greenfeld for willingness to share comments and knowledge of these places.
. Many of the residents there are the sons and daughters of families of longstanding residence in surrounding neighborhoods. In this case the idiomatic English phrase Corn on the Cob is chosen less for its contrast with Apache than for the aptness of fit between the phrase and the fact that the hill was already called Cobb Hill, and the houses are all lined up alongside the road, resembling rows of corn kernels. I hope to show below that even these names that diverge in one way or another from the details of my argument with regard to mass media still conform to my more general argument that these English-language names, although superficially different from traditional Apache-language place names, are formulated to fulfill many of the same expectations established in the genre of Apache-language place names.
English-language neighborhood names and their attributes. (Note: “U” indicates contiguity of families who do not regard one another as kin.)
COMMONALTIES BETWEEN APACHE-LANGUAGE AND ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PLACE NAMES
In both cases place names are associated with narrative contexts
As is the case with Apache-language place names and clan names, each of the English-language place names is associated with a narrative context, usually drawn from mass media. Many, like Lonesome Dove, Jurassic Park, Knott's Landing, and Dark Shadows, are names of television shows or movies, or, like Over the Rainbow, the name of a song associated with a movie. Others, like Smurfville and Chinatown, are names for places within television shows or movies. Others are products like Bengay or Life Savers that are associated with narratives from commercials, or from common scenarios surrounding their use. Like the ancestors living in the past on the surrounding landscape, these narrative contexts are generally known but fall outside the realm of gossip, because they concern people, scenes, and events that exist at a remove from the people and contexts of everyday life.
Most of the place names describe physical attributes of a neighborhood
It is striking that most of the place names evoke some aspect of the physical profile of the place that they name, or spatial relationships between housing developments. In some cases the particular media source discourse is chosen because there is a resemblance between places depicted in that narrative context and the neighborhood in question. These include Knott's Landing and Chinatown. In the majority of cases, however, indexing of place is accomplished through word play. Examples include Rainbow City and Life Savers for neighborhoods where each house is painted a different color, Over the Rainbow for a neighborhood located above Rainbow City, Corn on the Cob for rows of houses built on a hill that used to be occupied by a family named Cobb.
Names are applied to people and used as interpretive frames
In Apache-language place names and those English-language names considered here, naming is a symbolic act that often links aspects of the outward physical form of a place with persons and a markedly narrative context. In both “traditional” and media-engaged cases this narrative context is imminently recontextualizable: In the case of narratives associated with Apache-language place names, the narrative is associated with a past event on the land and is used in conversation to create new interpretations of persons in ongoing situations. In the case of clan names, the narrative context and place are also devices by which to comment upon ongoing interpersonal and interfamilial relationships. In the English-language names coined to describe newly constructed neighborhoods, naming similarly links aspects of the outward physical form of a place with persons and with a narrative context. The difference is that in the English-language place names the narrative is usually decontextualized from mass media discourse rather than from stories imagined to have originally taken place on the surrounding landscape.
There are also key similarities in patterns of use. In Basso's account, a place name can be deployed to suggest an apt fit between the story with which it is associated and an unfolding situation, particularly the behavior of someone under question. When the fit is perceived, a metaphoric relationship is established between the situation at hand and the events in the story. The story then proceeds to become the means by which current situations are interpreted. Again, in this respect the difference between “traditional” Apache place names and the English-language names discussed here is primarily one of language and narrative source, not of motivating ideas and overriding patterns of use.
The new names for housing developments are similarly used to elicit moral interpretations of situations as they are unfolding, except that in this case the situation interpreted through the narrative is one of the contrasting lifestyles brought about by the housing development itself. While the English place names are more self-consciously humorous and the Apache names seem to carry more somber pedagogical purposes, both concern the creation of evaluative frames, particularly with respect to unfolding situations that are anomalous, or contrary to commonly held values.
In sum, both “traditional” Apache-language place names and English-language media-derived place names involve active metaphoric associations of narratives from a removed context, either the mythic or recent past on the land or from mass media, with situations, places, and people closer at hand. The productive creation of these associations to suggest interpretations of situations as they unfold is the driving force behind both naming practices. Both are informed by a common set of ideas about place names and their use: that these evoke both the physical features of a place and a narrative context. Both are also informed by an aesthetic preference for creative acts of naming, or speaking to a situation in which one compact act of speaking creates a striking fit between a given situation and a narrative context.
By tracing the similarities between Apache-language and English-language place names I am not suggesting that they are identical, only that precedents established by the former play an important role in shaping the latter, and they in fact represent the appropriation of media discourse to some of the same purposes and practices that are implicated in the use of Apache-language place names.
WHY ENGLISH?
The significant difference between the Apache-language place names described by Basso and the English-language place names considered here is primarily a difference in language choice and orientation to place. In Basso's account, the landscape is mapped with place names and with myriad stories that people utilize to frame interpretations of ongoing events and situations. Government-constructed housing developments are similarly storied by means of their names, but the reservoir of common texts that people draw on are associated not with an ancestral past on the land, but with stories circulated well beyond the local landscape through television, movies, and other English-language commercial media. This raises the question of what the exclusive reliance on English for these names reflects about the dynamics between Apache and English languages in the constitution of community on the reservation.
Initially, this difference in choice of language appears to reflect a broader pattern of language shift from Apache to English, one that is widely commented on by all residents on the reservation. While most adults in their mid-twenties and older are bilingual in Apache and English,7
In fact, most conversations among younger and older adults are conducted primarily in Apache, and references to these neighborhoods in the course of conversation stand out as isolated chunks of English within an otherwise Apache flow of speech.
I have argued that the English-language idioms used for these names are symbolically deployed to highlight the contrast between these settlements and more longstanding neighborhood areas. English language and media contexts are also stylistic devices for suggesting not only a very funny, apt identification between a housing development and a narrative context from commercial media, but in many cases they lend a sardonic quality to the comparison. The contrastive tension between English and Apache has been commented on by others, including Basso 1979, Farrer 1979, and Samuels 2001. Farrer describes a Mescalero Apache girl's puberty ceremony in which the only English that appears is written on the body of one of the “sacred clowns” in the ceremony: Łibayé ‘The Gray one’, who is also a sort of trickster figure. On his body the words Way to go Lynn! are painted, in reference to the fact that the girl undergoing the ceremony had just won a beauty competition. According to Farrer, the English words made an evaluative comment on Lynn's participation in a beauty pageant in a way that highlighted the conflicting values of womanhood between that context and the Apache puberty ceremony (Farrer 1979:4).
Using English media discourse for the new housing developments highlights their difference from more “traditional” residence patterns. It serves as a vehicle for comment on the relative anomaly of the new residential patterns and the attendant lifestyles of the inhabitants. Just like the performative use of English by Apaches to create joking portraits of “The Whiteman” that foreground ways that Anglos were perceived to flout ethnical norms in their spoken behavior (Basso 1979), the use of English media discourse contributes to a playful, sometimes sardonic comment on perceived changes and contrasts in contemporary Apache social life. In each case, the contrast with established ethical norms contributes to the humor.
In sum, I argue that while English-language names for new housing developments among the Western Apache reflect and celebrate familiarity with broadcast media discourse, these place names are nonetheless shaped by the same language ideology concerning contrasting indexical associations between Apache and English languages that inform joking portraits of “The Whiteman” and the same precedents in narrative practice that inform “traditional” Apache-language place names. So, rather than representing assimilation, this represents appropriation of media discourse for local purposes and meanings. The use of English rather than Apache in these names is not informed by passive acquiescence to the glamour of English and the media or general patterns of language shift, but is motivated by the symbolic contrast with Apache values and practices that is mapped onto the contrast between English and Apache languages.
WHY MASS MEDIA DISCOURSE?
Media, joking and wordplay
Televisions, radios, and video players are ubiquitous in reservation households, far more common than telephones. Television shows are watched by groups of family members and friends, often with copious running commentary in Apache. Place names are not the only instances in which mass media are called into the service of verbal play. Familiar names from soap operas, sitcoms, daytime television, sports teams, and movies were frequently used to jokingly characterize people close at hand. For example, we worked most closely with the family of Eva Lupe, who was 65 years old at the time of our fieldwork. Mrs. Lupe spent many days with Gussie Edwards and Leona White, two women who lived nearby and who had been friends since childhood. All three women wore their hair in long braids and dressed exclusively in colorful and voluminous home-sewn dresses called “camp-dresses.” These and many other aspects of their comportment marked them off as traditional Apache women. All were widowed and would spend days together cooking outside for their grandchildren, gossiping and joking with one another. On more than one occasion, particularly at family gatherings, Eva Lupe's eldest daughter could reliably start a group laughing by making the following comment: Eva, Gussie, and Leona ‘Golden Girls’ at'ee! (where at'ee is a form of Apache copula). What made the comment funny was that it simultaneously foregrounds similarities between the two groups of women (older single women friends) and differences (traditional Apache women vs. mainstream Anglo women). Here the difference between media worlds and everyday life is a productive one. The former are not emulated so much as utilized in the ongoing project of making playful metaphors between narrative contexts that exist at a remove and the people and scenes of everyday life.
In the course of my three years of fieldwork, Eva Lupe enjoyed using media discourse in a joking way, often to confound expectations (my own and her grandchildren's) of how a traditional Apache woman speaks. One day, after chiding me for saying “goodbye” and coaching me on how to properly take my leave in Apache, Eva brought me up short as I left her busy house by yelling a phrase we had encountered watching a body lotion advertisement on television: “See you later alligator!” she yelled and laughed at the surprise of all those around her. What made this funny was not the phrase itself, but that it was her, breaking with her ostensible role as Apache elder and language teacher, saying it. The point here is that the difference posed by media discourse, both as a representation of and by non-Apaches, and as a world narrated at a remove from everyday life, is vital to its use by reservation residents in word play.
Media discourse also serves to index markedly non-Apache, or ndah, ways of doing things. In contemporary reservation discourse the prototypical ndah are white people. When I made the more than occasional etiquette gaffe, my ndah status was highlighted and I was often teased with comparisons to characters on television shows who behaved in ways my consultants judged to be nonsensical. This association between media discourse and ndah, or white people, is an important factor in the new place names. The use of media discourse, like the use of English, is a symbolic choice that casts these names as comments on contrasts between ways of doing things embodied in the new housing developments as opposed to more longstanding traditional settlements.
Media discourse provides shared points of reference
Because of the widespread presence of television, radio, and other media in Apache households, media discourse provides reservation residents who may not interact with one another directly with shared points of reference. The place names and other Apache uses of media discourse are relevant to a model, developed by Spitulnik (1997:161), concerning the role played by media discourse in the construction and integration of large-scale communities. In her study of nationally broadcast radio shows in the new state of Zambia, she argues that mass media can serve as “both reservoirs and reference points for the circulation of words, phrases, and discourse styles” that act to integrate large-scale societies not only vertically through acts of direct media consumption, but also laterally through the social circulation of media discourse outside contexts of direct consumption. The questions she poses are: (i) What is the process by which speech forms are transported from one context (mass media) to another (local use between persons); and (ii) what conditions enable their decontextualization from the source context and recontextualization in everyday speech? The latter she characterizes as intrinsically heteroglossic (Bakhtin 1981), because recontextualization in everyday speech will vary according to the relevant repertoires and positions of speakers and the contexts in which it occurs. While lateral social circulation of media discourse leads to heteroglossic uses and interpretations of that discourse, she stresses that these diverse uses are bound to one another through common reference to mass media discourse. This integration through common points of reference, she argues, is one of the enabling conditions for the imagination of a shared Zambian community.
This framework is in many respects particularly appropriate to Spitulnik's research site. The problem confronting this relatively new and ethnically diverse state of Zambia is how, given obvious diversity, do people share a sense of a common Zambian nation? The problem of relationship between one's own locality and surrounding social groups is posed differently to Native American reservation communities in the United States. Faced with the political and economic necessity of participating and exerting agency within encompassing political and economic structures, the question confronting contemporary Apaches is how to become full participants in state, national, and international arenas while also remaining Apache, or “Indian.” Attention to local discursive processes on the White Mountain Apache reservation prompts a different research question: How do local language ideologies, discursive practices, and genres inform the ways that media discourse is taken up (decontextualized) and reworked (recontextualized), and what sort of community is constituted through these recontextualizations?
Once these questions are given serious attention, they suggest that further theoretical and methodological issues be brought to bear on research into the circulation of media discourse. Spitulnik focuses her analysis on the media form itself – specifically, how message forms in mass media facilitate social circulation. She suggests that certain kinds of message forms have “inherent reproducibility and transportability” and are more likely to be detached from their original context in media discourse and recentered in everyday speech. For Radio Zambia she identifies metapragmatic discourse as the most readily recirculated kind of media discourse. In her sample these include routines such as channel monitoring, dyadic turn-taking routines, and contextualization cues such as title announcements. Of these, title announcements are the most relevant to the Apache English-language place names treated here.
Following Silverstein 1976, 1981, Spitulnik suggests three reasons metapragmatic discourse is particularly amenable to recirculation. One is that metapragmatic discourse has greater “transparency of form and function” than other forms of discourse; and tends to be more subject to awareness and manipulation. A second reason is the general applicability of metapragmatic discourse. Because it is discourse about discourse, it is more readily applicable to analogous functions in contexts of everyday speaking. And finally, the prominence of the medium itself, and a phrase's frequent repetition and association with celebrated characters and moments of drama, can enhance its detachability and repeatability outside media contexts. In the latter cases, she argues, a phrase is driven by the specific connotations that it bears in the original context.
In the Western Apache examples considered here, the media discourse that is taken up and recentered in local speech consists of titles. These include titles of movies (Jurassic Park, Lonesome Dove) and television shows (Knott's Landing, Dark Shadows), names of places in movies or associated with movies or television (Smurfville, Beverly Hills), parts of the title of a song from a movie (Over the Rainbow), and names of commercial products (Bengay, Life Savers). As Spitulnik suggests, names for places, products, and movies do have a certain transparency of form and function that suggests their separability from surrounding discourse and facilitates repetition and recontextualization. This principle drives advertising and brand names generally. And certainly, their prominence and recognizability make them more viable candidates for recontextualization as new neighborhood place names than if the reference were obscure.
However, I argue that Spitulnik's analysis gives disproportionate explanatory weight to the message form as it appears in the source (mass media) discourse over and above selection criteria attributable to local genres and speech practices. If we consider the media-saturated environment of the contemporary United States, of which Apaches are fully a part, then it becomes clear that there are countless thousands of other such titles, names, or other metapragmatic discourses from which to choose. The criteria for selection is at best minimally set by its message form in the media. If we are to identify the key criteria for selection, it is necessary to attend carefully to local cultural criteria, including language ideology, circulation of prominent genres and discourse forms (whether or not these include media discourse) within the local community, the play of metaphor and other poetic principles already established in the community, and other local precedents. Media discourse provides common points of reference, but the uses to which these are put are defined locally.
Media discourse fulfills place name genre expectations
Media discourse is utilized for these place names because it fulfills existing criteria for naming already evident in traditional place names and clan names. Television, movie and product titles come already attached to elaborate narrative and (depicted) spatial contexts that are generally familiar to most reservation residents. It is also important that the imagined media world exists at a remove from the people and events of everyday life, which makes it viable material for the creation of instances of metaphoric “apt fit” between a human context closer to hand and a more distant context in such a way as to create lasting evaluative (and often humorous) frames upon the former. The key factors in selection and use of media discourse in this case are located squarely in the local speech community's discursive practices.
The shaping influence of local genre orientations on the appropriation of media discourse in this case has implications for understanding how media discourse functions in the mediation of communities. In the case considered here, while the use of media discourse does index some kind of participation in a larger-scale imagined community, the use to which media discourse is put also functions to differentiate a local reservation speech community from the surrounding society. Apache people who talked to me about the names were all conscious of the fact that the surrounding, predominantly Anglo towns and communities do not name their neighborhoods in this fashion. And it is impossible for outsiders, otherwise familiar with the same media contexts, to “get” what the names mean without being initiated by someone familiar with local practices and precedents. Markedly contemporary rather than traditional, these names become part of the local imagining of the reservation as participating in national and international arenas, but in a way that is clearly distinct from surrounding, non-Apache communities.
A border zone encounter I witnessed is helpful here. During our fieldwork period our car, which was over 10 years old, was constantly in and out of the shop. The best local mechanic was located on the outskirts of the town of Pinetop-Lakeside, within a mile of the reservation boundary. Most residents of Pinetop-Lakeside are non-Apache, but there is dense commerce between Pinetop-Lakeside and the reservation. Apaches are frequently in Pinetop-Lakeside to shop at Wal-Mart, go to the movies, and for other services. Pinetop-Lakeside residents make frequent trips to the reservation for fishing, hiking, camping, and to enjoy the tribe's restaurant, entertainment and casino complex. So this auto mechanic's shop, staffed entirely by Anglos, was located on a constantly trafficked border. While I was sitting in the waiting room for the mechanic to finish replacing a CV joint, an Apache man unknown to me walked in and said his car had broken down and he would like to see about having it towed to this garage from his home in Whiteriver. The man at the desk asked where his house was located. The Apache man said:8
This interchange is reconstructed from my memory. What I present here is not a verbatim transcript of the conversation, but my best attempt to render that conversation faithfully.
In this example, despite that fact that both the men most likely knew the common reference to “Over the Rainbow” as a song associated with a famous movie – that is, although they shared a common media reference point – the application of this in local usage was not immediately accessible (or not acknowledged as understandable) to the Pinetop resident. Nor would it be accessible to anyone who was not privy to, or did not care to identify themselves as, participants in reservation semiotics. In this case, circulation of media discourse worked to differentiate the reservation community from surrounding towns and from the larger-scale society and polity surrounding them, even as it indexes familiarity with common media reference points. Media discourse is used as new material in the service of local poetics, and it is this engagement of mass media and other introduced discourse forms with local language ideologies, genres. and discursive practices that must be attended to in order to render an accurate picture of the processes by which media discourse is circulated and how this bears on the constitution of communities.
Appropriations of media discourse are political acts
As Bauman & Briggs explicate the relationship between recontextualization and power:
To decontextualize and recontextualize a text is … an act of control, and in regard to the differential exercise of such control the issue of social power arises…. we may recognize differential access to texts, differential legitimacy in claims to and use of texts, differential competence in the use of texts, and differential values attaching to various types of texts. (Bauman & Briggs 1990:76)
With English-language media discourse-derived place names, residents of the reservation community exert control over English-language idioms and media discourse by recontextualizing these in terms of a local place-naming genre. In so doing they create differentials of competence between themselves and surrounding communities while also defining themselves as comparable players on the modern or postmodern landscape. The playful nature of these place names, combined with sporadically applied officializing strategies (Hanks 1986) such as placement on street signs and maps, is a powerful assertion of self-definition, confounding mainstream presuppositions concerning what makes legitimate place names as well as what qualities should be attached to authentic Native American identities.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, English-language place names taken from media discourse and applied to recently constructed housing developments represent one of at least three place-naming strategies deployed by residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation. These new place names represent an emergent genre that relies on precedents and expectations established by Apache-language place names and clan names. It also makes use of a local language ideology in which the distinction between Apache and English languages can be used to index Apache vs. white ways of enacting social relationships. Also informing this genre are existing genres of word play that utilize distinctions between Apache and English, including distinctions between local scenes and those portrayed in English-language media discourse. As such, despite the fact that these names are often recirculations of English-language media discourse, they do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the reconfiguration of media discourse to locally defined standards and purposes. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant society in the definition of place and community, these names celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Knowledge of the names defines an interpretive community in which participation and belonging relies on “getting” the same joke – where “getting the joke” implies engagement with ongoing commentaries, critiques, and interpretations of changes in contemporary social life as these unfold.
