Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class.:Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class

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categories by means of personal points of view, and that they use these vantages to create and change categories. Vantage theory further hypothesizes that categories are constructed by analogy to experiences in physical space. Individuals maintain and alter color categories by using an analogy between the abstract processes of categorization and the actual spatial and temporal world. The theory also maintains that people do not use analogies to construct categories because they engage in social learning with friends and teachers; rather, it claims that people use analogies to construct categories by means of their specialized, innate knowledge. MacLaury's data and analyses provide powerful evidence for his vantage theory. The account of his theory presented above is a mere outline that does not convey the elaborate details and structures that MacLaury has built into his model. The vantage model is represented in technical formalisms and is a sophisticated mechanism for the analysis of color categorization. The model has advanced understanding of the construction of color categories discussed here, and it has also explained numerous aspects of categories not mentioned here, mostly problems in complex categorization. Non-color vantage theory applications have also appeared recently (see, for example, Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World, John R.

Taylor and Robert E. MacLaury, eds., Mouton de Gruyter, 1995). MacLaury's explanations of complex arguments are clear, precise, and easy to follow, and his writing is succinct and easy to read. His knowledge of the literature of color ethnography is enormous. The bibliography he developed for this book includes virtually all the known sources of color research in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and visual science. Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica is easily the most important book published about color terms and color categorization alone since Berlin and Kay's Basic Color Terms (1969).

Exposing Prejudice: Puerto Rican Experiences of Language, Race, and Class. Bonnie Urduoli. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. xiv, 222 pp. RICHARD J. PARMENTIER Brandeis University

Bonnie Urciuoli's Exposing Prejudice is a timely and insightful study of the "semiotics of exclusion" (p. 1), based on extensive ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork among working-class New York Puerto Ricans from 1978 to 1991. By examining the complex relationship between language as strategic, context-bound social action ("pragmatics") and language as the typified object of decontextualized reflection ("ideology"), Urciuoli is able to chart new ground in applying the methodology of linguistic anthropology in a bilingual urban setting. Urciuoli establishes two broad social ideologies about Others in the United States: "racializing" discourse that posits the marked Other as a naturally constituted, negatively valued category, and "ethnicizing" discourse that constructs a relational bridge between the positively valued, though still marked, Other and the unmarked, normative White category. The connection between racialization and ethnicization is dynamic, in several respects: (1) historically, some immigrant groups (e.g., Europeans, Asians) are able to shift from being objectified through racial classification to being objectified through ethnic identity, while other groups

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(e.g., African Americans, Puerto Ricans) continue to be racially stereotyped and stigmatized; (2) the two types of marked objectihcation are themselves contextually applied: Spanish spoken during an ethnic pride parade is positively valued as a safe expression of group identity, while hostile reaction to Spanish language usage in the public sphere (education, business, law, etc.) follows from racializing logic; and (3) the successful transformation to ethnic objectihcation can never be the road to genuine equality, since ethnicizing discourse still operates on markedness principles, so that the power to set the terms of categorization and the power to identify one's own community as standard rests with the dominant White community. Languages fit easily into this set of social objectihcations, not only as systems of codes (grammar, lexicon) but as sets of pragmatic or indexical signs that signal information about speakers, hearers, and the contexts of their interaction. Urciuoli's investigation of English-Spanish codeswitching, a perfect example of the pragmatic manipulation of codes, is organized by an analytic distinction between the "inner frame" of interaction, that is, the informal, intimate, and familial use of Spanish and English, and the "outer frame," that is, formal, public, and official communication contexts in which the boundary between the two codes is controlled by the socially dominant participants. Inner-frame events reveal a playful sensitivity to the pragmatic and metapragmatic dimensions of language and a performative creativity in establishing group solidarity by assuming the ability to decode rhetorical innovation. Outer-frame events, on the other hand, stress standardized codes and asymmetrical power relations; the fear of being judged for grammatical "mistakes" and the self-consciousness of speaking with a nonstandard accent work to build a rigid boundary between English and Spanish. In order to explore more deeply the structure and pragmatics of the linguistic ideology that informs speakers' reports of their bilingual linguistic interactions, Urciuoli carried out a qualitative experiment in which bilingual informants were asked to evaluate edited pieces of taped discourse (all discussing the New York transit system) from 17 diverse English speakers. Her informants were quick to note features more or less like "us," but were also able to identify indexes of "symbolic capital" such as standard accent, correct grammar, and sophisticated lexicon that point to unmarked racial/ethnic origin, high level of education, or socioeconomic mobility. Although this decontextualized experiment cannot by itself provide proof of the claim, Urciuoli argues that speaking correct forms does not directly generate the valuation of having symbolic capital, since other signs of racial categorization can work in the opposite direction and since the linguistic context itself is characterized by a presupposed asymmetry in the power to judge the attainment of capital. When the rich harvest of metapragmatic data generated by this experiment is related to the inner/outer-frame dynamic analyzed previously, the conclusion parallels exactly the more general markedness problematic of race and ethnicity: skill in applying the "correctness ideology" that motivates the sense of symbolic capital does nothing to erase the boundary between inner and outer frames. As Urciuoli concludes, "If.. .the correctness model can be avoided only by staying within the inner sphere, then it really cannot be avoided at all. The outer sphere fences in one's life" (p. 133). Although, as she points out, contextual matters such as the indexical aspects of speech events and the structure of participant roles are not themselves part of the ideology of language in the United States, her bilingual informants demonstrate a complex and diverse ethnometapragmatic sense of their language experience. One informant, for example, explained that the importance of language marking decreases as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder: "If you become rich then there is no longer a language barrier" (p. 143). Another pointed out that bilingual speakers who master standard English do so at the risk of their

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personal identity: "speaking White" then serves as a negative mark within the Spanish-speaking community. Given the focus on the multiplex intersection of "language, race, and class/' this book should be of interest to readers beyond the confines of the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology. Having used the book as a textbook in a course for advanced undergraduate anthropology students, I can report that the analytical framework, which combines social theory, linguistics, and semiotics, is carefully laid out and that the generous amount of linguistic data reported (with Spanish and English transcripts provided), much of which is eloquent and emotionally charged, stimulates wide-ranging discussion.

Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Johannes Fabian. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1996.348 pp. JAN BLOMMAERT University of Ghent

Johannes Fabian's Remembering the Present adds another masterpiece to his already voluminous oeuvre on colonial history, language, and popular culture in Shaba (Congo-Kinshasa). Picking up threads from some of his older work on popular painting, and adding insights gathered from HistoryfromBelow (John Benjamins, 1990) and Power and Performance (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), Fabian sets out on a richly documented analysis of a fascinating ethnographic object: a series of 101 paintings he acquired from the celebrated Congolese artist Tshibumba during fieldwork in the 1970s. Fabian had commissioned Tshibumba to paint the history of the Congo—a project which Tshibumba himself had long been contemplating. The book starts from the moment Tshibumba delivers the paintings and explains them to Fabian, that is, provides historical, metahistorical, artistic, and meta-artistic narratives to the inquisitive ethnographer, and he does this in the format of conversations. (As usual in Fabian's work, the autobiographic dimension of ethnography is strongly emphasized). Remembering the Present discusses the paintings, the narratives, and the ethnographer-painter dialogue on the paintings as one object: together, they create history through performance. Paintings, narratives, and conversations are three different records in which Tshibumba's version of history exists. Hence, the larger part of the book (part 1, pp. 3-184) is taken by a presentation of the paintings accompanied by edited parts of Tshibumba's narratives and conversations about the paintings. As in HistoryfromBelow (where a printed booklet on the history of Lubumbashi was reproduced, translated, and commented upon) and Power and Performance (where the text[s] of a popular theater play filled most of the pages), Fabian again invests heavily in the representation of the ethnographic "text" or "record," trying to make clear how discourse and other signs coexist and cooperate in specific instances of performance (which, in turn, construct history, culture, and power), as well as how the ethnographic perception and treatment of such texts is a critical knowledge product rather than just the input for analysis. To Fabian, the presentation of the texts (read: the performances delivered in ethnographer-painter interaction) is the work of ethnography.